III
... The liquid Ore he dreind
Into fit moulds prepar’d; from which he form’d
First his own Tooles; then, what might be wrought
Fusil or grav’n in mettle.
At the time when the first man decided to go forth into the world provided with weapons not furnished by nature (in other words, “unnatural”) the lines of development adopted by nature had ended in an impasse. Mere size had been found ineffective, and the giant Reptilians had disappeared from the earth. The Mammoth and the great Rorqual Whale were the largest animals then in existence, and nature had retraced her steps somewhat as shipbuilding did in the nineteenth century after the building of the Great Eastern. Of the countless forms of animal and vegetable life, many had disappeared entirely, being no longer suited to climatic or other changes of environment. There was no prospect of higher development unless an entirely new path could be found. We may put the situation in another way by paraphrasing an ancient tribal account of the origin of things:
“In the Beginning there was the Sun and the Earth.
“And the Sun and the Earth said: Let there be Life. And the Earth covered itself with a living coat of green, fed by the Sun.
“And the Earth said: Let there be Moving Life. And Life began to Move about, fed by the Life that was green and stood still.
“And the Earth said: Let there be Man, and let him be fed by the Green Life and the Moving Life, and let him subdue all Life, and let him subdue Me and serve Me and make Me great in the Heavens.”
And so the Earth brought forth Man, her latest and greatest Experiment. For a long time he was a rather inferior animal, but when he began to throw stones and spears he launched out on his true career, a career destined to culminate in the complete mastery of his native planet and the apotheosis of the Earth.
The pre-human Animal had already learned to use the world of plants for purposes of nutrition, and to use the mineral world for dwelling purposes. Improving upon the methods of his predecessors, man made the land and sea his province, and drew from it not only nourishment but the means of extending his dominion. “He that hath, to him shall be given.” And this extension became more and more rapid. Living, as we do, in an age of continually accelerated progress, we find it difficult to realize its rapidity.
We are caught in a flood. From day to day things are changing. What we write to-day is obsolete to-morrow. The clock ticks on the mantelpiece as it did twenty years ago, but outside in the road is the roar of motor traffic. The clip-clop of the horses’ hooves is no longer heard. Hephæstus has put his fires into the interior of the motor engine, and found yet another way of using sunlight accumulated in the earth millions of years ago, instead of relying upon the solar energy stored in the grass eaten by the horse.
Fire has made all things new. We are surrounded by its gifts. My pen has passed through many fires before it reached my hand. All round me are traces of machinery and mechanism. The paper on which I write is calendered in the paper mills. I am aware that it is not as lasting as “hand-made” paper, and that it will not survive centuries of use like Gutenberg’s bibles. But what matter? If there is anything worthy of survival in what I write it will survive, even though it may require to be cast in bronze. If it is good it will be aere perennius.
Mankind may be likened to a vast army on the march. It is preceded by:
(1) Pathfinders, called explorers, inventors, and discoverers, whose business it is to find new avenues of development and achievement.
Then come the
(2) Commanders with their staff of Organizers. These direct and co-ordinate the movements of the masses in directions judged to be for the general welfare. They are followed by
(3) The Rank and File, consisting of those who live and work along accepted and well-established lines in all grades of society, taking no risks and making no changes.
(4) The Stragglers, or those who work for themselves alone, without reference to the needs and prospects of the community. Among these must be classed the squatters and backwoodsmen, and small crofters and peasants who grow their own food and weave their own cloth. They do not belong to civilized society, though they do no harm to it and cannot quite escape its influence.
(5) The Campfollowers and Vultures, who have no regard for the welfare of the community, but prey upon it for their own ends.
Classes (1) and (2) are by far the most important and valuable constituents of the human race. They are the growing element, the “cambium,” the grey matter of the brain. Whoever has sufficient originality to strike out an original course, combined with loyalty to humanity at large or to a smaller community; whoever is capable of leadership, whether in war or peace, art or commerce, industry or politics; whoever can lead others forward and inspire them with courage to face difficulties—he belongs to the élite of mankind, to whatever grade of society he may belong. Far behind his class come the rank and file of commonplace drudges, who work in a rut and submit to being led like sheep. They may be clerks, domestic servants, trade union operatives, pensioners, or small investors. They form the large, undistinguished, but useful mass of humanity. Many kings have belonged to this class.
Both the large capitalist and the trade union boss I should class among the Commanders, and I should assign them a high rank in human progressive elements. The former is often a Pathfinder in commerce and industry, and the latter often points the way to the betterment of manual workers. Both are in a position of great power, but are exposed to the temptation to abuse it. The financier may succeed in restricting the free market in an important human community for his own enrichment and aggrandizement. The trade union boss may make a “corner” in a certain form of labour and so deprive the community of some essential commodity, such as housing accommodation. When this degeneration takes place, both these types must be put into the Vulture class.
The same judgment must be passed on those who use the machinery of the medium of exchange to further objects contrary to the interests of the community, such as usurers, and purveyors of intoxicant drugs. These also are among the Vultures.
When the first armed man transferred a method employed by nature into a new medium, and derived his armour from the outer world instead of growing it in his own organism, he took a step which led to many similar re-interpretations. One of the most important of such steps was Organization. The very word recalls its “organic” origin. The organs of the human body form an interdependent community with a common interest. The organs again are composed of tissues, and the tissues of individual cells having, as many biologists believe, a rudimentary consciousness of their own. All these—some millions of millions of millions—form a vast and closely-organized community consisting of many more distinct individuals than there are human beings on earth. The human race is such an organized community. A swarm of bees is another, but while the latter only deals with “natural” food-supplies and housing materials, the human community, thanks primarily to the use of fire, gathers its resources from realms utterly inaccessible to the ordinary animal, and establishes an unassailable superiority. Thus the human army, consisting of Pathfinders, Organizers, Rank and File, and Stragglers, with a trail of Vultures behind, presses ever forward on its victorious march of progress.
Its general procedure may be represented as follows:
The Pathfinders are in front, seeking out new avenues of advance. They may discover a new coal mine or oil well or mineral deposit; a more economical method of lighting and heating; an improved method of weaving or printing; a new medicine; a new formula for expressing numerical relations; an improved method of transmitting news; or merely a simplified method of mending socks. Whatever it may be, the new discovery is passed on to the organizers, the captains of industry, the capitalists and financiers, and the trade unions. In a well-organized community, the discovery or invention is given every opportunity of proving its value. Where vested interests and monopolies stand in the way, either in the camp of the capitalists and property holders or in the ranks of labour, much opposition may be encountered, and the community may be deprived of the advantages of the new discovery. But if there is no such opposition, the work incidental to the utilization of the discovery is distributed by the organizers among the rank and file, consisting of mechanics, clerks, and small investors. As soon as the industry is successfully established, the Vultures begin to hover round. Some of them seek to drive the industry into a corner where it can only exist by serving the interests of the Vultures. Other Vultures endeavour to corner the labour trained by the pathfinders and pioneers and hold the new industry to ransom. But in a well-organized community these nefarious activities are kept within bounds. The pathfinders, the organizers, and the rank and file are given their due credit and reward, and the community reaps the full benefit of the discovery.
And now let us examine the activities of the Pathfinders. In classical times the most audacious and renowned of these were the Phœnicians, who, armed with their shields and corselets of “oak and triple bronze,” sailed through the Pillars of Hercules out from the tideless Mediterranean into the unknown terrors of the Atlantic. Their ships were seen in the Baltic, trading woven purple garments for amber, and on the British coasts in search of tin. At the request of an Egyptian Pharao, they circumnavigated Africa, and brought back wildly improbable but, nevertheless, true stories about new constellations and the sun culminating in the north.
In Egypt itself explorers and discoverers of another kind were busy. The science of Chemistry was born there, and named after “Chem,” the native name of Egypt. In Greece and its colonies the science of Geometry attained a high standard, while Syracuse stands out as the home of Archimedes, one of the greatest mathematicians, physicists, and inventors of all time. These Pathfinders enriched humanity with priceless gifts. They surveyed the field of possible discovery from a high altitude, and their clear vision traced out the paths to higher achievement, to be trodden by their successors.
Had they lived in better-organized communities, their labours would have been turned to greater advantage, and would have benefited a greater number of their fellow men. But the day of capitalism and mass-production had not yet come. The splendid achievements of an Archimedes only served to benefit a tyrant, and his single-handed scientific fight against the Romans ended in disaster to his beloved city.
In Greek and Roman days, owing to the lop-sided organization of human society, scientific discoveries could only benefit a few powerful people. The downtrodden underlings were unaffected by the work of the Pathfinders. They had to await the dawn of the Industrial Age before they could take part in the progress of the élite. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Hieros, the Medicis, and the greater of the Bourbon and Stuart Kings that they fostered the advancement of science and protected the Pathfinders from the persecution of ecclesiastical and other vultures.
The invention of gunpowder laid low the chivalry of the Middle Ages. The Hobbling God triumphed over the mail-clad monopolist on horseback. The Sudden Fire armed the foot-soldier with a winged shaft of death. The stone-thrower had became the unerring sharp-shooter. The range of human power increased apace. The glass-blower with his fiery furnace produced cunning contrivances of glass which increased the range of the human eye twenty or thirty-fold. A free philosopher like Spinoza could discourse of the fundamental substance without fear or favour, since the grinding of optical glasses assured him an independent livelihood. Then came the French Revolution with its clarion call to a wider organization of humanity, which was eventually brought about, not by speeches and pamphlets, but by the harnessing of coal to inaugurate the Mechanical Age.
The nineteenth century saw the fulfilment of the dream of an organized Humanity, a human world unified, not by the spread of humanitarian philosophies, but by the material bonds of progress.
Some of my critics have ridiculed my “robust” belief in the reality of progress through invention and the use of machinery. I see no reason to modify my view. A generation ago, Ruskin deplored the spread of railways which scored their lines through “bleeding landscapes.” To me a railway line is a thing of beauty, wherever it may be found. It is a symbol of a higher will and of a purpose transcending the puny sphere of the individual. To see the rails is as if the sinews and muscles of some supernatural being were made visible and accessible to me. And who shall say that I am wrong in that feeling? A railway is an organization superior to man. “Societies,” says Edward Carpenter,[3] “not only of bees (as Maeterlinck has shown), but of all creatures up to man, have, qua societies, a life of their own, inclusive of and superadded to that of their individual members.” And so a railway appears to me as an individual of a higher order, closely organized and endowed with a life of its own. Its mental equipment is its personnel, its directors, clerks, drivers, guards and porters. Its body consists of rails, bridges, tunnels, stations and rolling stock. It has a soul and a living purpose. It has a power of self-maintenance and self-preservation and a rudimentary memory.
[3] The Art of Creation.
I heartily sympathize with the child who adores a locomotive engine. To him, nothing could be more lavishly fraught with beauty. I saw a little while ago a powerful engine at Waterloo Station at the head of an express train for Bournemouth. It was a thing of perfect and satisfying beauty. Its lines suggested calmness and strength and speed. The wisp of steam about its safety valve spoke of well-controlled powers within its massive frame. The driver, a clear-eyed man with trusty hands and sturdy body, was a noble representative of Hephæstus. One felt that the load of health-seeking humanity behind him was in safe hands, that his nerves and muscles would work as perfectly as the engine he regarded with such loving attention, and that the 108 miles of the non-stop journey would be accomplished without a hitch. The beneficent monster lay there in the morning sun, ready to spring forward on its swift trajectory across the “bleeding landscape”! And there are people who can look upon the eager children in the train, armed with their spades and buckets for playing in the health-giving southern sunshine, and deny the progressiveness of the Mechanical Age!
They will probably argue, of course, that if it were not for the smoke of the city, due to the “fires of Hephæstus,” there would be no necessity to have trains to carry the children to the seaside. But the smoke of cities is due mainly to incomplete combustion in domestic hearths, and the remedy lies not in the discouragement of mechanical invention but in its further extension until it provides us with a smokeless city.
The fires of Hephæstus are fashioning a new world. They are welding humanity into a coherent mass. All the metals, all the ninety chemical elements, are being pressed into service. Whose service? The service of a race whose destiny we can as yet only dimly appreciate. Already we command temperatures varying from a region within a few degrees of the absolute zero to within a few hundred degrees of the heat of the sun. The sight of our eyes has been supplemented to such an extent that we can appreciate and deal with some fifteen octaves of visible and invisible light instead of the single octave “naturally” accessible to our sight. We command pressures of tons per square millimetre and degrees of vacuum down to a hundred-millionth of an atmosphere. We can photograph the track of a single atom tearing its way through moist air. We can print 500,000 copies of a paper of 150,000 words daily and sell it for a penny. We have banished bears and wolves from our home countries and have learnt to wage war against invisible germs of disease. We have acquired the power of bringing beautiful music into the homes of our humblest citizens. The luxuries of our forbears are the common possessions of our own generation. If we are not happier than our ancestors, the fault lies in ourselves, in our ingratitude and lack of imagination. Or must we conclude that happiness is a negligible thing in the great scheme of progress, and that that scheme does not concern itself with our individual feelings?
I for one believe that happiness is on the up-grade, too. Hephæstus is not only a strong and a clever god, but a god with a sense of humour and a very lovable character.