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 climb up into the cab.

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

First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame engines.  Then the other poets.

In the meantime, the less we hear about nightingales and poppies and dells and love and above, the better.

Poetry must make a few iron-handed, 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.

CHAPTER II

BELLS AND WHEELS

We are living in a day of the great rebellion of the machines.  Out of a thousand thousand roundhouses and factories, vast cities and nations of machines on the land and on the sea have risen before the soul of man and said, “We have served you; now, you serve us.”

A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them everywhere; they wave their arms at us around the world, they puff their white breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up in a row before the great cities, before the mighty-hearted nations, and say it again and again, all in chorus, "We have served you, now, you serve us!"

It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives.

But why should we serve them?

I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands.

And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be serious.

And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky, beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid.  Every now and then perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and run back again.  Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself, tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of gentlemanly disappointment.

And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious.

When Oxford with its hundred spires, its little beautiful boy choirs of professors, draws me one side from the Great Western Railway Station, and intones in those still, solemn, lonely spaces the great truth in my ears, that machines and ideals cannot go together, that the only way to deal with ideals is to keep them away from machines, my only reply is that ideals that are so tired that they are merely devoted to defending themselves, ideals that will not and cannot go forth and be the breath of the machines, ideals that cannot and will not master the machines, that will not ride the machines as the wind, overrun matter, and conquer the earth, are not ideals for gentlemen.

At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford gentleman.