The Human Machine written by E. Arnold Bennett
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E. Arnold Bennett >> The Human Machine
THE HUMAN MACHINE
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
_First Published November 1908
Second Edition September 1910
Third Edition April 1911
Fourth Edition August 1912
Fifth Edition January 1913
Sixth Edition August 1913_
CONTENTS
I
TAKING ONESELF FOR GRANTED
II
AMATEURS IN THE ART OF LIVING
III
THE BRAIN AS A GENTLEMAN-AT-LARGE
IV
THE FIRST PRACTICAL STEP
V
HABIT-FORMING BY CONCENTRATION
VI
LORD OVER THE NODDLE
VII
WHAT 'LIVING' CHIEFLY IS
VIII
THE DAILY FRICTION
IX
'FIRE!'
X
MISCHIEVOUSLY OVERWORKING IT
XI
AN INTERLUDE
XII
AN INTEREST IN LIFE
XIII
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
XIV
A MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT
XV
L.S.D.
XVI
REASON, REASON!
I
TAKING ONESELF FOR GRANTED
There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they
can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth. This is not
a sneer meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a statement of
notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction over the
perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their kind. Most
of us have known such men. Yesterday they were constructing motorcars.
But to-day aeroplanes are in the air--or, at any rate, they ought to be,
according to the inventors. Watch the inventors. Invention is not
usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time.
They must invent before breakfast, invent in the Strand between Lyons's
and the office, invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what
ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday,
like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want golf, bridge, limericks,
novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints
about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts,
nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat.
They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings
never drag--are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve
o'clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not in bed! No, in a
shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop fatness) up to
the connecting-rod that is strained, or the wheel that is out of centre.
They are continually interested, nay, enthralled. They have a machine,
and they are perfecting it. They get one part right, and then another
goes wrong; and they get that right, and then another goes wrong, and so
on. When they are quite sure they have reached perfection, forth issues
the machine out of the shed--and in five minutes is smashed up, together
with a limb or so of the inventors, just because they had been quite
sure too soon. Then the whole business starts again. They do not give
up--that particular wreck was, of course, due to a mere oversight; the
whole business starts again. For they have glimpsed perfection; they
have the gleam of perfection in their souls. Thus their lives run away.
'They will never fly!' you remark, cynically. Well, if they don't?
Besides, what about Wright? With all your cynicism, have you never
envied them their machine and their passionate interest in it?
You know, perhaps, the moment when, brushing in front of the glass, you
detected your first grey hair. You stopped brushing; then you resumed
brushing, hastily; you pretended not to be shocked, but you were.
Perhaps you know a more disturbing moment than that, the moment when it
suddenly occurred to you that you had 'arrived' as far as you ever will
arrive; and you had realised as much of your early dream as you ever
will realise, and the realisation was utterly unlike the dream; the
marriage was excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what you
expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and
hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal
tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled
another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble
the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you
understood what all those people were driving at when they wrote such
unconscionably long letters to the _Telegraph_ as to life being worth
living or not worth living; and there was naught to be done but face the
grey, monotonous future, and pretend to be cheerful with the worm of
_ennui_ gnawing at your heart! In a word, the moment when it occurred to
you that yours is 'the common lot.' In that moment have you not
wished--do you not continually wish--for an exhaustless machine, a
machine that you could never get to the end of? Would you not give your
head to be lying on the flat of your back, peering with a candle, dirty,
foiled, catching cold--but absorbed in the pursuit of an object? Have
you not gloomily regretted that you were born without a mechanical turn,
because there is really something about a machine...?
It has never struck you that you do possess a machine! Oh, blind! Oh,
dull! It has never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful
beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of
astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting! That
machine is yourself. 'This fellow is preaching. I won't have it!' you
exclaim resentfully. Dear sir, I am not preaching, and, even if I were,
I think you _would_ have it. I think I can anyhow keep hold of your
button for a while, though you pull hard. I am not preaching. I am
simply bent on calling your attention to a fact which has perhaps wholly
or partially escaped you--namely, that you are the most fascinating bit
of machinery that ever was. You do yourself less than justice. It is
said that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is that, as a
rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves. They
have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is
responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of
the planet.
A man will wake up in the middle of the night (usually owing to some
form of delightful excess), and his brain will be very active indeed for
a space ere he can go to sleep again. In that candid hour, after the
exaltation of the evening and before the hope of the dawn, he will see
everything in its true colours--except himself. There is nothing like a
sleepless couch for a clear vision of one's environment. He will see all
his wife's faults and the hopelessness of trying to cure them. He will
momentarily see, though with less sharpness of outline, his own faults.
He will probably decide that the anxieties of children outweigh the joys
connected with children. He will admit all the shortcomings of
existence, will face them like a man, grimly, sourly, in a sturdy
despair. He will mutter: 'Of course I'm angry! Who wouldn't be? Of
course I'm disappointed! Did I expect this twenty years ago? Yes, we
ought to save more. But we don't, so there you are! I'm bound to worry!
I know I should be better if I didn't smoke so much. I know there's
absolutely no sense at all in taking liqueurs. Absurd to be ruffled with
her when she's in one of her moods. I don't have enough exercise. Can't
be regular, somehow. Not the slightest use hoping that things will be
different, because I know they won't. Queer world! Never really what you
may call happy, you know. Now, if things were different ...' He loses
consciousness.
Observe: he has taken himself for granted, just glancing at his faults
and looking away again. It is his environment that has occupied his
attention, and his environment--'things'--that he would wish to have
'different,' did he not know, out of the fulness of experience, that it
is futile to desire such a change? What he wants is a pipe that won't
put itself into his mouth, a glass that won't leap of its own accord to
his lips, money that won't slip untouched out of his pocket, legs that
without asking will carry him certain miles every day in the open air,
habits that practise themselves, a wife that will expand and contract
according to his humours, like a Wernicke bookcase, always complete but
never finished. Wise man, he perceives at once that he can't have these
things. And so he resigns himself to the universe, and settles down to a
permanent, restrained discontent. No one shall say he is unreasonable.
You see, he has given no attention to the machine. Let us not call it a
flying-machine. Let us call it simply an automobile. There it is on the
road, jolting, screeching, rattling, perfuming. And there he is, saying:
'This road ought to be as smooth as velvet. That hill in front is
ridiculous, and the descent on the other side positively dangerous. And
it's all turns--I can't see a hundred yards in front.' He has a wild
idea of trying to force the County Council to sand-paper the road, or of
employing the new Territorial Army to remove the hill. But he dismisses
that idea--he is so reasonable. He accepts all. He sits clothed in
reasonableness on the machine, and accepts all. 'Ass!' you exclaim. 'Why
doesn't he get down and inflate that tyre, for one thing? Anyone can see
the sparking apparatus is wrong, and it's perfectly certain the gear-box
wants oil.
Why doesn't he--?' I will tell you why he doesn't. Just because he isn't
aware that he is on a machine at all. He has never examined what he is
on. And at the back of his consciousness is a dim idea that he is
perched on a piece of solid, immutable rock that runs on castors.
II
AMATEURS IN THE ART OF LIVING
Considering that we have to spend the whole of our lives in this human
machine, considering that it is our sole means of contact and compromise
with the rest of the world, we really do devote to it very little
attention. When I say 'we,' I mean our inmost spirits, the instinctive
part, the mystery within that exists. And when I say 'the human machine'
I mean the brain and the body--and chiefly the brain. The expression of
the soul by means of the brain and body is what we call the art of
'living.' We certainly do not learn this art at school to any
appreciable extent. At school we are taught that it is necessary to
fling our arms and legs to and fro for so many hours per diem. We are
also shown, practically, that our brains are capable of performing
certain useful tricks, and that if we do not compel our brains to
perform those tricks we shall suffer. Thus one day we run home and
proclaim to our delighted parents that eleven twelves are 132. A feat of
the brain! So it goes on until our parents begin to look up to us
because we can chatter of cosines or sketch the foreign policy of Louis
XIV. Good! But not a word about the principles of the art of living yet!
Only a few detached rules from our parents, to be blindly followed when
particular crises supervene. And, indeed, it would be absurd to talk to
a schoolboy about the expression of his soul. He would probably mutter a
monosyllable which is not 'mice.'
Of course, school is merely a preparation for living; unless one goes to
a university, in which case it is a preparation for university. One is
supposed to turn one's attention to living when these preliminaries are
over--say at the age of about twenty. Assuredly one lives then; there
is, however, nothing new in that, for one has been living all the time,
in a fashion; all the time one has been using the machine without
understanding it. But does one, school and college being over, enter
upon a study of the machine? Not a bit. The question then becomes, not
how to live, but how to obtain and retain a position in which one will
be able to live; how to get minute portions of dead animals and plants
which one can swallow, in order not to die of hunger; how to acquire and
constantly renew a stock of other portions of dead animals and plants in
which one can envelop oneself in order not to die of cold; how to
procure the exclusive right of entry into certain huts where one may
sleep and eat without being rained upon by the clouds of heaven. And so
forth. And when one has realised this ambition, there comes the desire
to be able to double the operation and do it, not for oneself alone, but
for oneself and another. Marriage! But no scientific sustained attention
is yet given to the real business of living, of smooth intercourse, of
self-expression, of conscious adaptation to environment--in brief, to
the study of the machine. At thirty the chances are that a man will
understand better the draught of a chimney than his own respiratory
apparatus--to name one of the simple, obvious things--and as for
understanding the working of his own brain--what an idea! As for the
skill to avoid the waste of power involved by friction in the business
of living, do we give an hour to it in a month? Do we ever at all
examine it save in an amateurish and clumsy fashion? A young lady
produces a water-colour drawing. 'Very nice!' we say, and add, to
ourselves, 'For an amateur.' But our living is more amateurish than that
young lady's drawing; though surely we ought every one of us to be
professionals at living!
When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about
fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off. Up till this
period our reason for not having scientifically studied the art of
living--the perfecting and use of the finer parts of the machine--is not
that we have lacked leisure (most of us have enormous heaps of leisure),
but that we have simply been too absorbed in the preliminaries, have, in
fact, treated the preliminaries to the business as the business itself.
Then at fifty-five we ought at last to begin to live our lives with
professional skill, as a professional painter paints pictures. Yes, but
we can't. It is too late then. Neither painters, nor acrobats, nor any
professionals can be formed at the age of fifty-five. Thus we finish
our lives amateurishly, as we have begun them. And when the machine
creaks and sets our teeth on edge, or refuses to obey the steering-wheel
and deposits us in the ditch, we say: 'Can't be helped!' or 'Doesn't
matter! It will be all the same a hundred years hence!' or: 'I must make
the best of things.' And we try to believe that in accepting the _status
quo_ we have justified the _status quo_, and all the time we feel our
insincerity.
You exclaim that I exaggerate. I do. To force into prominence an aspect
of affairs usually overlooked, it is absolutely necessary to exaggerate.
Poetic licence is one name for this kind of exaggeration. But I
exaggerate very little indeed, much less than perhaps you think. I know
that you are going to point out to me that vast numbers of people
regularly spend a considerable portion of their leisure in striving
after self-improvement. Granted! And I am glad of it. But I should be
gladder if their strivings bore more closely upon the daily business of
living, of self-expression without friction and without futile desires.
See this man who regularly studies every evening of his life! He has
genuinely understood the nature of poetry, and his taste is admirable.
He recites verse with true feeling, and may be said to be highly
cultivated. Poetry is a continual source of pleasure to him. True! But
why is he always complaining about not receiving his deserts in the
office? Why is he worried about finance? Why does he so often sulk with
his wife? Why does he persist in eating more than his digestion will
tolerate? It was not written in the book of fate that he should complain
and worry and sulk and suffer. And if he was a professional at living he
would not do these things. There is no reason why he should do them,
except the reason that he has never learnt his business, never studied
the human machine as a whole, never really thought rationally about
living. Supposing you encountered an automobilist who was swerving and
grinding all over the road, and you stopped to ask what was the matter,
and he replied: 'Never mind what's the matter. Just look at my lovely
acetylene lamps, how they shine, and how I've polished them!' You would
not regard him as a Clifford-Earp, or even as an entirely sane man. So
with our student of poetry. It is indubitable that a large amount of
what is known as self-improvement is simply self-indulgence--a form of
pleasure which only incidentally improves a particular part of the
machine, and even that to the neglect of far more important parts.
My aim is to direct a man's attention to himself as a whole, considered
as a machine, complex and capable of quite extraordinary efficiency,
for travelling through this world smoothly, in any desired manner, with
satisfaction not only to himself but to the people he meets _en route_,
and the people who are overtaking him and whom he is overtaking. My aim
is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and
sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as
distinguished from the preliminaries to living.
III
THE BRAIN AS A GENTLEMAN-AT-LARGE
It is not as if, in this business of daily living, we were seriously
hampered by ignorance either as to the results which we ought to obtain,
or as to the general means which we must employ in order to obtain them.
With all our absorption in the mere preliminaries to living, and all our
carelessness about living itself, we arrive pretty soon at a fairly
accurate notion of what satisfactory living is, and we perceive with
some clearness the methods necessary to success. I have pictured the man
who wakes up in the middle of the night and sees the horrid semi-fiasco
of his life. But let me picture the man who wakes up refreshed early on
a fine summer morning and looks into his mind with the eyes of hope and
experience, not experience and despair. That man will pass a delightful
half-hour in thinking upon the scheme of the universe as it affects
himself. He is quite clear that contentment depends on his own acts, and
that no power can prevent him from performing those acts. He plans
everything out, and before he gets up he knows precisely what he must
and will do in certain foreseen crises and junctures. He sincerely
desires to live efficiently--who would wish to make a daily mess of
existence?--and he knows the way to realise the desire.
And yet, mark me! That man will not have been an hour on his feet on
this difficult earth before the machine has unmistakably gone wrong: the
machine which was designed to do this work of living, which is capable
of doing it thoroughly well, but which has not been put into order!
What is the use of consulting the map of life and tracing the itinerary,
and getting the machine out of the shed, and making a start, if half the
nuts are loose, or the steering pillar is twisted, or there is no petrol
in the tank? (Having asked this question, I will drop the
mechanico-vehicular comparison, which is too rough and crude for the
delicacy of the subject.) Where has the human machine gone wrong? It has
gone wrong in the brain. What, is he 'wrong in the head'? Most
assuredly, most strictly. He knows--none better--that when his wife
employs a particular tone containing ten grains of asperity, and he
replies in a particular tone containing eleven grains, the consequences
will be explosive. He knows, on the other hand, that if he replies in a
tone containing only one little drop of honey, the consequences may not
be unworthy of two reasonable beings. He knows this. His brain is fully
instructed. And lo! his brain, while arguing that women are really too
absurd (as if that was the point), is sending down orders to the muscles
of the throat and mouth which result in at least eleven grains of
asperity, and conjugal relations are endangered for the day. He didn't
want to do it. His desire was not to do it. He despises himself for
doing it. But his brain was not in working order. His brain ran
away--'raced'--on its own account, against reason, against desire,
against morning resolves--and there he is!
That is just one example, of the simplest and slightest. Examples can be
multiplied. The man may be a young man whose immediate future depends on
his passing an examination--an examination which he is capable of
passing 'on his head,' which nothing can prevent him from passing if
only his brain will not be so absurd as to give orders to his legs to
walk out of the house towards the tennis court instead of sending them
upstairs to the study; if only, having once safely lodged him in the
study, his brain will devote itself to the pages of books instead of
dwelling on the image of a nice girl--not at all like other girls. Or
the man may be an old man who will live in perfect comfort if only his
brain will not interminably run round and round in a circle of
grievances, apprehensions, and fears which no amount of contemplation
can destroy or even ameliorate.
The brain, the brain--that is the seat of trouble! 'Well,' you say, 'of
course it is. We all know that!' We don't act as if we did, anyway.
'Give us more brains, Lord!' ejaculated a great writer. Personally, I
think he would have been wiser if he had asked first for the power to
keep in order such brains as we have. We indubitably possess quite
enough brains, quite as much as we can handle. The supreme muddlers of
living are often people of quite remarkable intellectual faculty, with a
quite remarkable gift of being wise for others. The pity is that our
brains have a way of 'wandering,' as it is politely called.
Brain-wandering is indeed now recognised as a specific disease. I wonder
what you, O business man with an office in Ludgate Circus, would say to
your office-boy, whom you had dispatched on an urgent message to
Westminster, and whom you found larking around Euston Station when you
rushed to catch your week-end train. 'Please, sir, I started to go to
Westminster, but there's something funny in my limbs that makes me go up
all manner of streets. I can't help it, sir!' 'Can't you?' you would
say. 'Well, you had better go and be somebody else's office-boy.' Your
brain is something worse than that office-boy, something more
insidiously potent for evil.
I conceive the brain of the average well-intentioned man as possessing
the tricks and manners of one of those gentlemen-at-large who, having
nothing very urgent to do, stroll along and offer their services gratis
to some shorthanded work of philanthropy. They will commonly demoralise
and disorganise the business conduct of an affair in about a fortnight.
They come when they like; they go when they like. Sometimes they are
exceedingly industrious and obedient, but then there is an even chance
that they will shirk and follow their own sweet will. And they mustn't
be spoken to, or pulled up--for have they not kindly volunteered, and
are they not giving their days for naught! These persons are the bane of
the enterprises in which they condescend to meddle. Now, there is a vast
deal too much of the gentleman-at-large about one's brain. One's brain
has no right whatever to behave as a gentleman-at-large: but it in fact
does. It forgets; it flatly ignores orders; at the critical moment when
pressure is highest, it simply lights a cigarette and goes out for a
walk. And we meekly sit down under this behaviour! 'I didn't feel like
stewing,' says the young man who, against his wish, will fail in his
examination. 'The words were out of my mouth before I knew it,' says the
husband whose wife is a woman. 'I couldn't get any inspiration to-day,'
says the artist. 'I can't resist Stilton,' says the fellow who is dying
of greed. 'One can't help one's thoughts,' says the old worrier. And
this last really voices the secret excuse of all five.
And you all say to me: 'My brain is myself. How can I alter myself? I
was born like that.' In the first place you were not born 'like that,'
you have lapsed to that. And in the second place your brain is not
yourself. It is only a part of yourself, and not the highest seat of
authority. Do you love your mother, wife, or children with your brain?
Do you desire with your brain? Do you, in a word, ultimately and
essentially _live_ with your brain? No. Your brain is an instrument. The
proof that it is an instrument lies in the fact that, when extreme
necessity urges, _you_ can command your brain to do certain things, and
it does them. The first of the two great principles which underlie the
efficiency of the human machine is this: _The brain is a servant,
exterior to the central force of the Ego_. If it is out of control the
reason is not that it is uncontrollable, but merely that its discipline
has been neglected. The brain can be trained, as the hand and eye can be
trained; it can be made as obedient as a sporting dog, and by similar
methods. In the meantime the indispensable preparation for brain
discipline is to form the habit of regarding one's brain as an
instrument exterior to one's self, like a tongue or a foot.
IV
THE FIRST PRACTICAL STEP
The brain is a highly quaint organism. Let me say at once, lest I should
be cannonaded by physiologists, psychologists, or metaphysicians, that
by the 'brain' I mean the faculty which reasons and which gives orders
to the muscles. I mean exactly what the plain man means by the brain.
The brain is the diplomatist which arranges relations between our
instinctive self and the universe, and it fulfils its mission when it
provides for the maximum of freedom to the instincts with the minimum of
friction. It argues with the instincts. It takes them on one side and
points out the unwisdom of certain performances. It catches them by the
coat-tails when they are about to make fools of themselves. 'Don't
drink all that iced champagne at a draught,' it says to one instinct;
'we may die of it.' 'Don't catch that rude fellow one in the eye,' it
says to another instinct; 'he is more powerful than us.' It is, in fact,
a majestic spectacle of common sense. And yet it has the most
extraordinary lapses. It is just like that man--we all know him and
consult him--who is a continual fount of excellent, sagacious advice on
everything, but who somehow cannot bring his sagacity to bear on his own
personal career.