arth, I will fall asleep.

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK

PART ONE

I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient
rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies
and songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century.
"If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill."

II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven
to his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are
getting their living out of machines, or putting their living into
them, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down
under the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves
him standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except
by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of
communing with his kind.

III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul
or the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little
while--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A
little while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to
feel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems
at first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in
machines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the
machine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame
that minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a
machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be
anything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas.
All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take
the stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be
connected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued
existence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for
modern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the
crowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,
and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.

IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary men
who know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them,
the inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about the
poetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of
interpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead of
being a literary or aesthetic problem is a social one.