[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.
IV
Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let
Thy feet, millenniums hence be set