II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of everything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show off. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it, is not seeing it. The poetry is under water.
III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for poetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for old-fashioned poetry—the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch windmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern man. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its language is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in proportion as a machine or anything else is expressive—in the modern language, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machines the more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric. Electricity is the modern man’s prophet. It sums up his world. It has the modern man’s temperament—the passion of being invisible and irresistible.
IV. Poetry and religion consist—at bottom, in being proud of God. Most men to-day are worshipping God—at least in secret, not merely because of this great Machine that He has made, running softly above us—moonlight and starlight … but because He has made a Machine that can make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of the earth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron and say “Go ye now,—depths of the earth, heights of heaven—serve ye me! Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder—the spirit that is in thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!”
V. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning the language. The language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely know whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I only know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my soul to it, and in some way—I know not how, while it sings to me, I grow strong and glad.
PART THREE
THE MACHINES AS POETS
I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul of man—of a whole world of men.
It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of the individual man who creates the Machine—the inventor, and the man who lives with the machine—the engineer.
It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of God who can make men who can make machines.
III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man’s soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have—the man’s sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not merely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it is making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear the machines, I hear Man saying, “God and I.”