t see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of
that machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not
worthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a
better religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every
town or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,
one hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for
more than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.
The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other
great believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are
surrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the
steeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the
people. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of
chimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are
saying to the people.

They will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.

They will say it better.

In the meantime they are not listening.

Religion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with
their ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By
all poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading
before them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that
reaches across the age.

RAILROAD CROSSING
LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!

PART II.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES

I

AS GOOD AS OURS

One is always hearing it said that if a thing is to be called poetic
it must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them.
The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection
that, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not look
it." The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it
stands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language of
the average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it is
actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is often
absurd. It is a rare machine which, when one looks for poetry in it,
does not make itself ridiculous.

The only answer that can be made to this objection is that a
steam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as well
as the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We
live in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything
in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the univ