Aha, you Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison—you heroes of my Industrial Age, you men who have been the gods of the men of my day—is your day over so soon? “In the end,” I am telling myself, “all of your triumphs come to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of say a clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, half forgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. The Virgin too, will be remembered after you are forgotten. Would it not be amusing if Chartres continued to stand after you are forgotten?”
Is it not absurd? Because I do not want to work in a warehouse and roll kegs, because I do not want to work in a factory anywhere I must needs go getting gaudy and magnificent and try to blow all factories away with a breath of my fancy. My fancy climbs up and up.
Democracy shall spread itself out thinner and thinner, it shall come to nothing but empty mouthings in the end. Everywhere, all over the earth, shall be the dreary commercial and material success of, say the later Byzantine Empire. In the West and after the great dukes, the kings and the popes, the commoners—who were not commoners after all but only stole the name—are having their day. The shrewd little money-getters with the cry “democracy” on their lips shall rule for a time and then the real commoners shall come—and that shall be the worst time of all. Oh, the futile little vanity of the workers who have forgotten the cunning of hands, who have long let machines take the place of the cunning of hands!
And the tired men of the arts. Oh, the cunning smart little men of the arts of New York and Chicago! Painters making advertising designs for soap, painters making portraits of bankers’ wives, story-tellers striving wearily to “make” the Saturday Evening Post or to be revolutionists in the arts. Artists everywhere striving for what?
Respectability perhaps—to call attention to themselves perhaps.
They will get—a Ford. On holidays they may go see the great automobile races on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for them freedom, laughter. For them machines.
Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hell of a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What a fool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories of men’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? I might have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortable mold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of a proper training.
In the next room to the one in which I am lying two men are talking.
FIRST VOICE. “He took straw, ground it, put it into some kind of rubber composition. The whole was mixed up together and subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. It came out a tough kind of composition that can be made to look like wood. It can be grained like wood. He will get rich. I tell you he is one of the great minds of the age.”
SECOND VOICE. “We shall have prohibition after a while and then you’ll see how it will turn out. You can’t down the American mind. Some fellow will make a drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to make. Perhaps it can be made out of crude oil like gasoline and then the Standard will take him up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be put down, I’ll tell you that.”