Part 7
If the raw materials grow out of the holy earth, then a man should have pride in producing them, and also in handling them. As a man thinketh of his materials, so doth he profit in the use of them. He builds them into himself. There is a wide-spread feeling that in some way these materials reflect themselves in a man's bearing. One type of man grows out of the handling of rocks, another out of the handling of fishes, another out of the growing of the products from the good earth. All irreverence in the handling of these materials that come out of the earth's bounty, and all waste and poor workmanship, make for a low spiritual expression.
The farmer specially should be proud of his materials, he is so close to the sources and so hard against the backgrounds. Moreover, he cannot conceal his materials. He cannot lock up his farm or disguise his crops. He lives on his farm, and visibly with his products. The architect does not live in the houses and temples he builds. The engineer does not live on his bridge. The miner does not live in his mine. Even the sailor has his home away from his ship. But the farmer cannot separate himself from his works. Every bushel of buckwheat and every barrel of apples and every bale of cotton bears his name; the beef that he takes to market, the sheep that he herds on his pastures, the horse that he drives,--these are his products and they carry his name. He should have the same pride in these--his productions--as another who builds a machine, or another who writes a book about them. The admiration of a field of hay, of a cow producing milk, of a shapely and fragrant head of cabbage, is a great force for good.
It would mean much if we could celebrate the raw materials and the products. Particularly is it good to celebrate the yearly bounty. The Puritans recognized their immediate dependence on the products of the ground, and their celebration was connected with religion. I should be sorry if our celebrations were to be wholly secular.
We have been much given to the display of fabricated materials,--of the products of looms, lathes, foundries, and many factories of skill. We also exhibit the agricultural produce, but largely in a crass and rude way to display bulk and to win prizes. We now begin to arrange our exhibitions for color effect, comparison, and educational influence. But we do not justly understand the natural products when we confine them to formal exhibitions. They must be incorporated into many celebrations, expressing therein the earth's bounty and our appreciation of it. The usual and common products, domesticated and wild, should be gathered in these occasions, and not for competition or for prize awards or even for display, but for their intrinsic qualities. An apple day or an apple sabbath would teach the people to express their gratitude for apples. The moral obligation to grow good apples, to handle them honestly, to treat the soil and the trees fairly and reverently, could be developed as a living practical philosophy into the working-days of an apple-growing people. The technical knowledge we now possess requires the moral support of a stimulated public appreciation to make it a thoroughly effective force.
Many of the products and crops lend themselves well to this kind of admiration, and all of them should awaken gratitude and reverence. Sermons and teaching may issue from them. Nor is it necessary that this gratitude be expressed only in collected materials, or that all preaching and all teaching shall be indoors. The best understanding of our relations to the earth will be possible when we learn how to apply our devotions in the open places.
_The keeping of the beautiful earth_
The proper care-taking of the earth lies not alone in maintaining its fertility or in safeguarding its products. The lines of beauty that appeal to the eye and the charm that satisfies the five senses are in our keeping.
The natural landscape is always interesting and it is satisfying. The physical universe is the source of art. We know no other form and color than that which we see in nature or derive from it. If art is true to its theme, it is one expression of morals. If it is a moral obligation to express the art-sense in painting and sculpture and literature and music, so is it an equal obligation to express it in good landscape.
Of the first importance is it that the race keep its artistic backgrounds, and not alone for the few who may travel far and near and who may pause deliberately, but also for those more numerous folk who must remain with the daily toil and catch the far look only as they labor. To put the best expression of any landscape into the consciousness of one's day's work is more to be desired than much riches. When we complete our conquest, there will be no unseemly landscapes.
The abundance of violated landscapes is proof that we have not yet mastered. The farmer does not have full command of his situation until the landscape is a part of his farming. Farms may be units in well-developed and pleasing landscapes, beautiful in their combinations with other farms and appropriate to their setting as well as attractive in themselves.
No one has a moral right to contribute unsightly factory premises or a forbidding commercial establishment to any community. The lines of utility and efficiency ought also to be the lines of beauty; and it is due every worker to have a good landscape to look upon, even though its area be very constricted. To produce bushels of wheat and marvels of machinery, to maintain devastating military establishments, do not comprise the sum of conquest. The backgrounds must be kept.
If moral strength comes from good and sufficient scenery, so does the preservation of it become a social duty. It is much more than a civic obligation. But the resources of the earth must be available to man for his use and this necessarily means a modification of the original scenery. Some pieces and kinds of scenery are above all economic use and should be kept wholly in the natural state. Much of it may yield to modification if he takes good care to preserve its essential features. Unfortunately, the engineer seems not often to be trained in the values of scenery and he is likely to despoil a landscape or at least to leave it raw and unfinished.
On the other hand, there is unfortunately a feeling abroad that any modification of a striking landscape is violation and despoliation; and unwarranted opposition, in some cases amounting almost to prudery, follows any needful work of utilization. Undoubtedly the farmer and builder and promoter have been too unmindful of the effect of their interference on scenery, and particularly in taking little care in the disposition of wastes and in the healing of wounds; but a work either of farming or of construction may add interest and even lines of beauty to a landscape and endow it with the suggestion of human interest. If care were taken in the construction of public and semi-public work to reshape the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, to care for, to plant, to erect structures of good proportions whether they cost much or little, and to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the communities, most of the present agitation against interference with natural scenery would disappear. One has only to visit the factory districts, the vacation resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of streams and gorges, to look at the faces of cliffs and at many engineering enterprises and at numberless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard of men for the materials that they handle. It is as much our obligation to hold the scenery reverently as to handle the products reverently. Man found the earth looking well. Humanity began in a garden.
The keeping of the good earth depends on preservation rather than on destruction. The office of the farmer and the planter is to produce rather than to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that they may produce more abundantly; these persons are therefore natural care-takers. If to this office we add the habit of good housekeeping, we shall have more than one-third of our population at once directly partaking in keeping the earth. It is one of the bitter ironies that farmers should ever have been taken out of their place to wreak vengeance on the earth by means of military devastation. In the past, this ravage has been small in amount because the engines of destruction were weak, but with the perfecting of the modern enginery the havoc is awful and brutal. While we have to our credit the improvement of agriculture and other agencies of conservation, it is yet a fact that man has never been so destructive as now. He is able to turn the skill of his discovery to destructive ends (a subject that we have already approached from another point of view). The keeping of the earth is therefore involved in the organization of society. Military power heads toward destructiveness. Civil power heads toward conservation. The military power may be constructive in times of peace, but its end, if it uses the tools it invents, is devastation and the inflicting of injury. When the civil power is subjugated to the military power, society is headed toward calamity.
To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not only are we able to despoil the earth by sheer lust of ravage and by blighting the fields with caverns of human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible supplies of copper and petroleum and other unrenewable materials that by every right and equity belong to our successors; and, moreover, we are to make these successors pay for the destruction of their heritage. Day by day we are mortgaging the future, depriving it of supplies that it may need, burdening the shoulders of generations yet unborn.
Merely to make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its products, is the special prerogative of a good agriculture and a good citizenry founded thereon; this may seem at the moment to be small and ineffective as against mad impersonal and limitless havoc, but it carries the final healing; and while the land worker will bear much of the burden on his back he will also redeem the earth.
_The tones of industry_
One of the clearest notes of our time is the recognition of the holiness of industry and the attempt to formulate the morals of it. We accept this fact indirectly by the modern endeavor to give the laboring man his due.
The handworker is more or less elemental, dealing directly with the materials. We begin to recognize these industries in literature, in sculpture, and in painting; but we do not yet very consciously or effectively translate them into music.
It is to be recognized, of course, that melody is emotional and dynamic not imitative, that its power lies in suggestion rather than in direct representation, and that its language is general; with all this I have nothing to do. Meunier has done much with his chisel to interpret the spirit of constructive labor and to develop its higher significance. His art is indeed concrete and static, and sculpture and music are not to be compared; yet it raises the question whether there may be other bold extensions of art.
The primitive industries must have been mostly silent, when there were no iron tools, when fire felled the forest tree and hollowed the canoe, when the parts in construction were secured by thongs, and when the game was caught in silent traps or by the swift noiseless arrow and spear. Even at the Stone Age the rude implements and the materials must have been mostly devoid of resonance. But now industry has become universal and complex, and it has also become noisy,--so noisy that we organize to protect ourselves from becoming distraught.
And yet a workshop, particularly if it works in metal, is replete with tones that are essentially musical. Workmen respond readily to unison. There are melodies that arise from certain kinds of labor. Much of our labor is rhythmic. In any factory driven by power, there is a fundamental rhythm and motion, tying all things together. I have often thought, standing at the threshold of a mill, that it might be possible somewhere by careful forethought to eliminate the clatter and so to organize the work as to develop a better expression in labor. Very much do we need to make industry vocal.
It is worth considering, also, whether it is possible to take over into music any of these sounds of industry in a new way, that they may be given meanings they do not now possess.
At all events, the poetic element in industry is capable of great development and of progressive interpretation; and poetry is scarcely to be dissociated from sound. All good work well done is essentially poetic to the sensitive mind; and when the work is the rhythm of many men acting in unison, the poetry has voice.
The striking of the rivet The purr of a drill The crash of a steam-shovel The plunge of a dredge The buzz of a saw The roll of belts and chains The whirl of spindles The hiss of steam The tip-tap of valves The undertone rumble of a mill The silence intent of men at work The talk of men going to their homes,-- These are all the notes of great symphonies.
Nor should I stop with the industries of commerce and manufacture. There are many possibilities in the sounds and voices that are known of fisherfolk and campers and foresters and farmers. Somehow we should be able to individualize these voices and to give them an artistic expression in some kind of human composition. There are rich suggestions in the voices of the farmyard, the calls of wild creatures, the tones of farm implements and machinery, the sounds of the elements, and particularly in the relations of all these to the pauses, the silences, and the distances beyond.
Whether it is possible to utilize any of these tones and voices artistically is not for a layman to say; but the layman may express the need that he feels.
_The threatened literature_
A fear seems to be abroad that the inquisitiveness and exactness of science will deprive literature of imagination and sympathy and will destroy artistic expression; and it is said that we are in danger of losing the devotional element in literature. If these apprehensions are well founded, then do we have cause for alarm, seeing that literature is an immeasurable resource.
Great literature may be relatively independent of time and place, and this is beyond discussion here; but if the standards of interpretative literature are lowering it must be because the standards of life are lowering, for the attainment and the outlook of a people are bound to be displayed in its letters.
Perhaps our difficulty lies in a change in methods and standards rather than in essential qualities. We constantly acquire new material for literary use. The riches of life are vaster and deeper than ever before. It would be strange indeed if the new experience of the planet did not express itself in new literary form.
We are led astray by the fatal habit of making comparisons, contrasting one epoch with another. There may be inflexible souls among the investigators who see little or nothing beyond the set of facts in a little field, but surely the greater number of scientific men are persons of keen imagination and of broad interest in all conquests. Indeed, a lively imagination is indispensable in persons of the best attainments in science; it is necessary only that the imagination be regulated and trained. Never has it been so true that fact is stranger than fiction. Never have the flights of the poets been so evenly matched by the flights of science. All great engineers, chemists, physiologists, physicists work in the realm of imagination, of imagination that projects the unknown from the known. Almost do we think that the Roentgen ray, the wireless telegraphy, the analysis of the light of the stars, the serum control of disease are the product of what we might call pure fancy. The very utilities and conquests of modern society are the results of better imagination than the world has yet known. If it is true that the desire to measure and to analyze is now an established trait, equally is it true that it directs the mind into far and untried reaches; and if we have not yet found this range of inspiration in what is called artistic literature, it must be because literary criticism has not accepted the imagery of the modern world and is still looking for its art to the models of the past.
The models of the past are properly the standards for the performances of their time, but this does not constitute them the standards of all time or of the present time. Perhaps the writing of language for the sake of writing it is losing its hold; but a new, clear, and forceful literature appears. This new literature has its own criteria. It would be violence to judge it only by standards of criticism founded on Elizabethan writings. We do not descend into crude materialism because we describe the materials of the cosmos; we do not eliminate imagination because we desire that it shall have meaning; we do not strip literature of artistic quality because it is true to the facts and the outlook of our own time.
It may be admitted that present literature is inadequate, and that we are still obliged to go to the former compositions for our highest artistic expressions. Very good. Let us hope that we shall never cease to want these older literatures. Let us hope that we shall never be severed from our past. But perhaps the good judge in a coming generation, when the slow process of elimination has perfected its criticism, will discover something very noble and even very artistic in the abundant writing of our day. Certainly he will note the recovery from the first excess of reaction against the older orders, and he will be aware that at this epoch man began anew to express his social sense in a large way, as a result of all his painstaking studies in science. Even if he should not discover the highest forms of literary expression, he might find that here was the large promise of a new order. Possibly he would discover major compositions of the excellence of which we ourselves are not aware.
It is less than forty years since Darwin and less than fifty years since Agassiz. It is only twenty years since Pasteur. It is only a century and a quarter since Franklin, fifty years since Faraday, less than twenty-five since Tyndall. It is sixty years since Humboldt glorified the earth with the range of his imagination. It is not so very far even if we go back to Newton and to Kepler. Within the span of a century we count name after name of prophets who have set us on a new course. So complete has been the revolution that we lost our old bearings before we had found the new. We have not yet worked out the new relationships, nor put into practice their moral obligations, nor have we grasped the fulness of our privileges. We have not yet made the new knowledge consciously into a philosophy of life or incorporated it completely into working attitudes of social equity. Therefore, not even now are we ripe for the new literature.
We have gone far enough, however, to know that science is not unsympathetic and that it is not contemptuous of the unknown. By lens and prism and balance and line we measure minutely whatever we can sense; then with bared heads we look out to the great unknown and we cast our lines beyond the stars. There are no realms beyond which the prophecy of science would not go. It resolves the atom and it weighs the planets.
Among the science men I have found as many poetic souls as among the literary men, although they may not know so much poetry, and they are not equally trained in literary expression; being free of the restraint of conventional criticism, they are likely to have a peculiarly keen and sympathetic projection. Close dissection long continued may not lead to free artistic literary expression; this is as true of literary anatomy as of biological anatomy: but this does not destroy the freedom of other souls, and it may afford good material for the artist.
Two kinds of popular writing are confused in the public mind, for there are two classes that express the findings of scientific inquiry. The prevailing product is that which issues from establishments and institutions. This is supervised, edited, and made to conform; it is the product of our perfected organizations and has all the hardness of its origin. The other literature is of a different breed. It is the expression of personality. The one is a useful and necessary public literature of record and advice; the other is a literature of outlook and inspiration. The latter is not to be expected from the institutions, for it is naturally the literature of freedom.
My reader now knows my line of approach to the charge that literature is in danger of losing its element of devotion, and hereby lies the main reason for introducing this discussion into my little book. We may be losing the old literary piety and the technical theology, because we are losing the old theocratic outlook on creation. We also know that the final control of human welfare will not be governmental or military, and we shall some day learn that it will not be economic as we now prevailingly use the word. We have long since forgotten that once it was patriarchal. We shall know the creator in the creation. We shall derive more of our solaces from the creation and in the consciousness of our right relations to it. We shall be more fully aware that righteousness inheres in honest occupation. We shall find some bold and free way in which the human spirit may express itself.
_The separate soul_
Many times in this journey have we come against the importance of the individual. We are to develop the man's social feeling at the same time that we allow him to remain separate. We are to accomplish certain social results otherwise than by the process of thronging, which is so much a part of the philosophy of this anxious epoch; and therefore we may pursue the subject still a little further.
Any close and worth-while contact with the earth tends to make one original or at least detached in one's judgments and independent of group control. In proportion as society becomes organized and involved, do we need the separate spirit and persons who are responsible beings on their own account. The independent judgment should be much furthered by studies in the sciences that are founded on observation of native forms and conditions. And yet the gains of scientific study become so rigidly organized into great enterprises that the individual is likely to be lost in them.
As an example of what I mean, I mention John Muir, who has recently passed away, and who stood for a definite contribution to his generation. He could hardly have made this contribution if he had been attached to any of the great institutions or organizations or to big business. He has left a personal impression and a remarkable literature that has been very little influenced by group psychology. He is the interpreter of mountains, forests, and glaciers.