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Part 1

HEPHÆSTUS

The Soul of the Machine

BY E. E. FOURNIER D’ALBE _Author of “Quo Vadimus,” etc._

[Illustration]

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE

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PREFACE

The purpose of this little book is to show that one, at least, of the gods of Hellas has survived the flood which swept away the most entertaining company of gods and goddesses ever created by man’s imagination. As I propose to set him in the august place vacated by the death of Zeus, a few biographical details may not be out of place.

Hephæstus was the son of Hera (Juno), but not of Zeus (Jupiter). How his mother put him into the world is not precisely known. Neither Zeus nor any other male god had anything to do with it. Yet it would be inappropriate in the case of such a confirmed matron as Hera to speak of parthenogenesis. Some extraordinary event had to take place before the great home-goddess could be driven to spite her lord and master by producing a son without his co-operation. And such an event had indeed occurred, for Zeus had suddenly reverted to one of the oldest forms of propagation known to biology, _viz._, propagation by budding. A fully-armed young goddess, severe of countenance and lithe of limb, had sprung forth from his head, thenceforth and for ever to lead and dominate the world of thought. It was up to Hera to match Pallas Athene by some equally important contribution to the evolution of gods, and so by some mysterious process, into which Greek historians did not care to pry, she produced Hephæstus, whom the Romans called Vulcan, now the only surviving representative of that lively and enterprising clan which once ruled the world from the summit of Mount Olympus.

Like many another product of inspiration, Hephæstus was at first regarded as a failure. He was undersized and weak-chested, and Hera had to suffer much from the gibes of her peers and peeresses. So one day she dropped him down the slope of the mountain and he fell into the sea. He was picked up by two of those charming and motherly sea-goddesses which at that time abounded in sea-water, and was brought up in a grotto under the ocean. In return for their kindnesses he made them pretty ornaments of coral and mother-of-pearl.

At the age of ten, or thereabouts, he set out to find his mother. It was some time before Hera recognized in the lame boy, with the spinal curvature and the swarthy but pleasant face, the child she had so mercilessly cast off. But a spark of mother-instinct revived under the flame of the child’s filial devotion, and they soon became lasting friends and allies.

Hephæstus, naturally, owed no allegiance to Zeus, and in the frequent marital disputes between him and Hera he invariably took his mother’s part, and so successfully that the redoubtable Father of the Gods took him by his lame leg and flung him into space. He fell for a whole day[1] and eventually alighted, like a meteorite, on the island of Lemnos, where he was worshipped as many a meteorite has been worshipped before and since. He put up with this for a while, but the blood of the Olympians asserted itself, and he painfully climbed home once more. This time he succeeded in planting his unequal feet firmly on his native rock, and he soon became a favourite among his divine relations. He undertook the reconstruction of the Olympian dwellings, and for this purpose established a wonderful workshop with a huge anvil and twenty bellows, all of which would work at his mere behest. The workshop was made of fire-proof materials, and shone “like a star in the night.”

[1] This must be a mistake, as it would put the summit of Olympus somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon.

He solved the housing question by building a separate palace for each of the gods and goddesses, replete with all the comforts and refinements of civilization. Nor did his amiability end there. Sometimes, at their daily assemblies, he would give Ganymede a day off and would himself hand round the nectar, producing roars of laughter by the contrast between his hobbling gait and the deportment of the graceful young cup-bearer.

He became so popular that at last he was able to marry Aphrodite herself, the goddess of Love and Beauty, whom the Romans called Venus, and who was born of the foam of the sea somewhere off Cyprus. But this union of Beauty and the Beast was far from being a happy one. Venus was not satisfied with a “lame mechanic” as she called him, and hankered after the dashing Ares, alias Mars, the god of war. Having been warned by Helios, the sun-god, of the progress of the intrigue――after it had already reached its climax――Hephæstus lay in wait for the guilty pair with an invisible net, and having caught them, dragged them before the other gods amid Homeric laughter produced by their struggles in the invisible meshes. And when a daughter was born, whom they miscalled Harmonia, Hephæstus had his revenge by presenting her with a necklace which brought disaster to her and all its later possessors until it was finally laid to rest in the temple of Athene.

Meanwhile, the fame of his works spread far and wide. King Aetes of Colchis ordered the construction of two bronze bulls capable of breathing fire through their nostrils, and when Achilles, the Greek champion before Troy, decided to kill Hector and avenge his friend Patroclus, he went to Hephæstus with an introduction from Thetis, the sea-goddess, and prevailed upon him to make him a marvellous shield on which all heaven and earth were figured in bronze, and which was quite impervious to mortal spear and battle-axe.

And so he dwelt and worked on Olympus for three thousand years or so, establishing branch works on Lipari and in Sicily which kept working at full blast until Paul of Tarsus came with his claim to have found the Unknown God who was to establish a new Roman dominion to take the place of the mighty Empire of the Cæsars, and was incidentally to sweep away the gods of Rome and Greece alike and establish the worship of a tripartite God who never smiled.

So the light-hearted company of Mount Olympus died, all but Hephæstus, who hobbled through many lands seeking a place where he might work and set his bellows blowing once more. For centuries he wandered, despised and jeered at by monks, hermits, and anchorites. But his courage never failed him. It survived the desolation of the Olympian palaces as it had survived his two falls from the summit.

And now he has come back into his own, and his power is spreading like a conflagration. The God of Fire is the supreme master of the earth. His furnaces are roaring. He has dispelled the clouds of Asiatic mysticism which obscured his native mountain. He has girdled the world with hoops of steel. He has found strength

“To break this sorry scheme of things entire, And mould it nearer to the heart’s desire.”

And his victorious progress is only beginning to take effect. How it has come about, and what will be the eventual result of his domination of our planet, it is the purpose of what follows to elucidate.

HEPHÆSTUS

Ethnologists believe that the metamorphosis from beast-like savage to cultured civilian may be proximately explained as the result of accumulated changes that found their initial impulses in a half-a-dozen or so of practical inventions.

An Irish poet, disconsolately walking along Fleet Street one day, bethought himself of a small island in an Irish lake, where he could escape from the noise and bustle of the London streets. He wrote a lovely poem embodying that thought, a poem expressing the longing of every sensitive soul to retire within itself for a time and reconstruct its world from within instead of having it impressed from without.

Needless to say, he did not content himself with planting nine beans in a row, as he had longed to do in his fit of depression. On the contrary. He became an Irish statesman and Senator. He dwelt in surroundings far removed from the Stone Age. The very chair on which he sat down to write owed its existence to many factories and mechanical processes. Its wood was derived from planks cut in the saw mills. Its French polish, although put on by hand, was made of constituents――shellac, methylated spirit, whitening and what not――drawn from many sources, each involving a number of ingenious inventions. The coal which made his fire had been brought across the sea by a steamer――a miracle of complicated mechanism――and the shovel with which he put it on had been mined in Belgium, smelted in Germany, rolled in Sheffield, and shaped and finished in Birmingham.

Not that “Inishfree” was but an idle dream. There are many such islands in Ireland, peopled by men and women and children, living in one-roomed mud hovels on potatoes and stewed tea, infested with vermin and ravaged by tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, people who, if they cannot emigrate, suffer their fate with a stolid and pathetic resignation relieved by the hope of heavenly compensation hereafter.

Such is Inishfree, stripped of its glamour and shown in its naked reality.

Savagery does not mean simplicity but complexity, not peace but constant dread, not health but hopeless disease and premature death. The South American Indian suffers acutely from constipation, which is about the last disease we should expect him to suffer from. The negro in his native Africa is often horribly deformed through neglect at birth, neglected injuries, or the ravages of insect pests.

It has taken mankind ten thousand years to emerge from savagery into barbarism, and from barbarism into civilization. Nor is the process yet completed. The mass of mankind is still grossly ignorant. But the leaven of knowledge is steadily working and pervading the mass, and the rate of progress is constantly rising.

Let us trace this wonderful process of civilization to its origins and probe its essential nature.

Starting somewhere in the tropics as a diminutive “sport” allied to the arboreal ape, man learned to use tools and weapons. This was the first step taken towards the conquest of the animal world, his natural enemies.

We do not know how many ages elapsed before the rough stone hammer evolved into the axe of polished flint. In any case, the rough stone, even if only used for throwing at his enemy or killing his prey, was an essentially new departure in evolution, and sounded the keynote to all that followed down to our own times.

Tools and weapons had been evolved by other animals, but they were always organically connected with their bodies. The tiger’s claws and teeth, the tusks of the elephant and the wild boar, the beak of the eagle were all formidable weapons and useful tools, but they could neither be detached, nor replaced, nor exchanged for other tools more suitable to the occasion. Those “natural” tools and weapons had all been produced by “evolution,” in other words, by a mysterious agency which some call God, some Adaptation, and some the Urge of Life.

Who was that audacious man who first took upon himself the divine privilege of making tools and weapons for himself, instead of waiting for “nature” to provide them for him?

Perhaps he was a puny boy, lame from birth and unable to escape from the boar who was pursuing him. In the extremity of his terror he took up a heavy stone from the ground and flung it at the boar with all his might. The boar, we may well imagine, was dazed and probably terrified by this unusual method of defence, and slunk away from his feeble but resourceful antagonist. The story of that deliverance may, for all we know, have been sung for many generations in the tribe, and who knows but that the boy grew up into a great red-haired man, as great an adept at stone-throwing as the street-urchins in Belfast, and formed the prototype of the God Thor, whose hammer, when thrown, returned to his hand of its own accord.

But the essential step was taken. The lad had no teeth or claws which could match the solid tusks wielded by his mighty antagonist. So he “invented” a new weapon. He did not grow it in his own organism, as the squid grows its ink, to be used on one occasion and then gradually renewed. He took a piece of the outside world and made it temporarily a part of his person, a part which could be detached and resumed at a moment’s notice, a temporary attachment or extension of his body which required no blood-vessels to keep it in repair and which, if broken or injured, would inflict no pain upon himself.

This great innovation may have been aided by some analogies in the animal world. A bird had to collect twigs and leaves in order to build a nest, and had thus to put a portion of the “outside world” to its own uses. Besides, the very process of eating involved the apprehension of outside objects, an apprehension which, in the case of the lowest form of animal life, is to this day accomplished by pouring its jelly-like body round the object to be consumed.

But the next invention, the discovery of the use of fire, was a departure without a parallel to anything in the kingdoms of Nature. It placed mankind by a single act in a position of god-like authority over the living world. It is not surprising that the discovery of fire is surrounded by countless legends. In Greek mythology the first use of fire is attributed to Prometheus, the Fore-Thinker, the man who thinks ahead. He stole it from the heavens, and was punished by Zeus with terrible torment for having dared to endow mankind with a divine privilege.

How great the privilege was we cannot even yet realize. For the uses of fire are by no means exhausted, and are multiplying from day to day. But the essential element of the change was that something came into the hands of man which did not exist in “Nature” at all, not, at least, in a manner ordinarily accessible to organic being. It was quite “unnatural” to use fire. Fire represented a state in which no organism could survive, in which all its functions were ruthlessly stopped, and its living tissues destroyed. No animal except man has ever attained to the use of fire. Its use represents the transcendence of man from the ordinary scheme of Nature and his ascent into a sort of supernatural, or at least super-organic realm.

From this step there has been no retreat, and there can be no retreat until the sun itself grows cold. Whatever our “back-to-Nature” cranks may say, mankind cannot repudiate and renounce its most precious acquisition and all that it involves in the present and the future. We may dislike the smoke of blast-furnaces, but the remedy is not to do away with them, but to stop their smoking. The bellows of Hephæstus are blowing and his fires are burning. The age of machinery, begun in far-off Palæolithic days, but only established within the last hundred years or so, has now gripped us in a scheme from which none may escape.

Taken in its narrower sense, the word “machine” means a contrivance for increasing the force we can bring to bear upon objects until it exceeds the limits imposed upon the tension of our muscles. As most of the 400 voluntary muscles of the human body are attached to the bones in a manner which diminishes the force exerted below the actual tension of the muscles, the adoption of machinery constitutes a reversal of the “natural” use of the system of levers which we call our skeleton. The Lever, the Inclined Plane, the Wedge, the Pulley, the Wheel and Axle, and the Screw, are all contrivances for slowing down the rate of work until the force required to perform it comes within the compass of our muscles. Our bones, on the other hand, are mostly levers “of the third order,” in which the force is applied between the fulcrum and the object to be moved. Thus it happens that in order to lift a weight of one pound, our muscles are strained by a force which may amount to as much as six pounds.

We are hardly justified in ascribing this uneconomic arrangement to the “stupidity” of Nature. Any other arrangement, such as the use of levers of the “second order,” would have involved a much bulkier and clumsier build of the muscular system. Nor can we conceive of the adoption by man of the Six Machines as a deliberate imitation of Nature, or an improvement upon observed natural processes.

The Six Machines are obviously the crude results of long-continued experience, and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that their real significance in the system of mechanics was recognized.

The real importance of these contrivances lies in the fact that they increase the power of the human body without any further evolution of the human organism. The adoption of mechanism was a turning point in evolution, and an event the significance of which can only be classed with such far-reaching innovations as the birth of life itself or that adoption of locomotion as an aid to nutrition which gave rise to the animal kingdom.

The most widely useful of the Six Machines was undoubtedly the Wedge. Its use was usually accompanied by that of the projected stone. The latter, after being swung by muscular force, was a reservoir of energy, which is the power of performing work. If brought to rest within a shorter distance than the curve of the swing, it required a correspondingly greater force to stop it. And that force could be still further increased by applying it to the end of a wedge whose sides bore upon the object to be split. The combination of mass and wedge is represented by the spear, the arrow, and the sword, while the hammer and the club acted as crushers rather than cutters.

Observe, then, this puny but formidable creature emerging from his tropical forest. In his hand he carried the means of annihilating that continuity of the organism which is essential to its existence. He was able to drive a powerful and irresistible wedge into the body of his antagonist and thus end the co-ordination of its natural functions. It was thus that, later in history, the Macedonian phalanx split up the armies of the Persian kings. By a different but essentially similar process the 15-inch naval gun drives a wedge clean through the armour of its opponent, in the shape of a shell which does not explode until it is right inside the enemy ship.

Man’s war of conquest against the animal world had begun. He brought to them a death more sudden than had existed up to his time. For he had the power of driving his wedge into the most vulnerable and essential part of his enemy’s body. A clean cut inflicted at the appropriate point would mean his final end. Man was not long in discovering his enemy’s weaknesses. And when his enemy was a human one, he made assurance complete by bringing home his head.[2]

[2] It is curious in this connection that among the legends of the Saints there is no record of a decapitated person being brought back to life. The angels or departed saints who came to heal the torn breasts of martyred Christian virgins were unable to put heads back on bleeding trunks, even though the tongues in some of those heads were empowered to testify for some time after they would, in the ordinary course of things, have become silent for ever.

If we examine the connection between man and his weapon we find that the latter differs from an eagle’s beak or a tiger’s claw in but one essential point: it is no longer an integral part of the organism. It can be detached at will, and replaced by another weapon. Its separation or destruction does not imply an injury to the organism. Man is not put out of action by losing his weapon. He is only reduced to his original position with respect to his antagonist. And even that is no irreparable loss so long as he has other weapons at his command. Thus the same step which vastly increased his offensive power also made him comparatively immune to attack.

Now, a weapon in a man’s hand, so long as it is in active use as a weapon, is a part of the man himself. It is true that he can lose it without perishing himself, but he can also lose an arm or a leg and still survive. The mere fact that the man’s blood circulates in his natural leg and not in a wooden leg he may substitute for it makes no essential difference. He may kick with either. And we know that a man’s leg, like all the cells of his body, is largely compound of inert matter such as food products and waste products, besides being nine-tenths water――an inorganic substance. A wooden leg, or any weapon which a man may use, may therefore be regarded as a limb of the man’s body, so long, that is, as it is in active use. And if a “soul” animates that man’s body and drives it to perform deeds of valour, the same soul will animate his weapon. The soul of the weapon is the soul of the man who uses it.

There is an increasing tendency in modern thought to abolish the distinction between soul and body and to regard them as one and indivisible. Adopting that view, we may assert that the use of a weapon means the enlargement of a man’s body and the simultaneous expansion of his soul. Every weapon, every tool, every machine is the embodiment of a human thought and purpose. The user adopts that thought and purpose, and behold――the machine has found its soul!

Man is an animal who laughs and cooks.

When Prometheus had caught some sparks from the chariot of the sun and brought them safely to earth, hidden in a tube, there was consternation on Mount Olympus. The Conservative Government of that privileged stronghold trembled for its celestial prerogatives. It was all very well, they said, for Hephæstus to blow his bellows in his workshop and produce beautiful things for Olympians, so long as he did it under proper supervision. But fire, once brought to earth, would set the whole world ablaze and consume them in their palaces.

Hephæstus himself was not perturbed. Remembering the kindness he met with on Lemnos after his brutal expulsion from the company of the gods, he secretly sympathized with Prometheus and his race, and planned a closer co-operation with mankind. His Sicilian workshops saw him oftener than before, hobbling about among his furnaces and experimenting with every kind of ore and ingot. Wherever he went, whether among gods or men, his kindness and his merry humour made him a general favourite.