I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and free than he has had before.

A few minutes ago, here where I am writing, an engine all in bright, soft, lit-up green with little lines of yellow on it and flashing silver feet, like a vision, swept past—­through my still glass window, through the quiet green fields—­like a great, swift, gleaming whisper of London.  And now, all in six seconds, this great quiet air about me is waked to vast vibrations of the mighty city.  Out over the red pines, the lonely gorse fields, I have seen passing the spirit of the Strand.  I have seen the great flocking bridges and the roar about St. Paul’s in communion with the treetops and with the hedgerows and with the little brooks, all in six seconds, when an engine, with its vision like a cloud of glory swept past.

And yet there are people in Oxford who tell me that an engine when it is in the very act of expressing such stupendous and boundless thoughts, of making such mighty and beautiful things happen, is not beautiful, that it has nothing to do with art.  They can but watch the machines, the earth black with them, going about everywhere mowing down great nations and rolling under the souls of men.

I cannot see it so.  I see a thousand thousand engines carrying dew and green fields to the stones of London.  I see the desires of the earth hastening.  The ships and the wireless telegraph beckon the wills of cities on the seas and on the sky.  With the machines I have taken a whole planet to me for my feet and for my hands.  I gesture with the earth.  I hand up oceans to my God.

CHAPTER IV

DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL!

There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful, and cannot make for beauty, because machines are dead.

I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead.

I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of Man like nails, like vast antennae—­a kind of enormous, more unconscious sub-body.  They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue than tongues or eyes or flesh; and like all bones they do not renew, of course, as often or as rapidly as flesh.  But the difference between live and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the difference between live and dead men.  The generally accepted idea a live thing is, that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to the intelligence that created it and that keeps re-creating it.  I have known thousands of factories; and every factory I have known that is really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its old self.  All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month by month are being renewed and shedding themselves.  Any live factory can always be seen moulting year after year.  A live spirit goes all through the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of invention, of thought.