Machine-Made Human Beings
BEYOND a handful of born leaders to whom being “ different ” has ever spelt distinction rather than disgrace, and a yet smaller group who find no prohibitive effort in the repulsive act of thinking, from time out of mind the mass of mankind has instinctively gravitated toward uniformity. Like the nineteen million logical descendants from Darwin’s original pair of elephants, this tendency has hitherto been kept within bounds by time, space, and a few other natural enemies which we complacently accepted as permanent limits to human enterprise. Within the past quarter of a century, however, science applied to every-day life has practically nullified those barriers. We all vaguely remember what happened when the multiplying propensity of rabbits struck a too favorable environment. In the long run these catastrophes evolve their own remedies, — I forget how Australia was rescued, probably the small boy followed the rabbit, — but the mills of the gods grind slowly, and at our present stage of adjustment they seem to be grinding out a new and peculiarly insufferable product, —the machine-made human being.
It is true that Frankenstein once succeeded in manufacturing a man, but, working in an amateurish way, this inventor failed to provide a mate, and the machine-made race perished. A century later, human intellect in triumphant progress has perfected cheap production, reproduction, and distribution. These improvements straightway facilitated diffusion of knowledge and culture as imparted in public schools; likewise they have developed the department store (as a social and intellectual factor), the up-todate newspaper and inexpensive, genteel magazine. These in turn, instead of temporarily animating one lay figure, are successfully putting upon the world myriads of human beings who enter life with almost no handicap upon their passion for resembling one another.
Of course common tendencies have always existed, — witness that mystic recrudescence on a certain unspringlike February day of whip tops, which have long lain neglected in toy shop windows. No mild January sun had power to lure them forth, but when the sap began to rise, every urchin vibrated to racial promptings and hastened to buy a top. In the same way, vernal prickings instigate every woman to procure Spring headgear; that law is also cosmic. But here creeps in a difference, the note of a changed era. Owing to improved processes, she not only wants it, but she gets it. The new hat is at once generated for rich and poor alike. Syndicate newspapers, five and ten cent magazines carry the glad tidings to remote country villages. Nowhere will you find a maiden so mean-spirited as to wear the castoff finery of her wealthier sister. Crowns were high last year, this year they are non-existent. Traveling salesmen see that demand is duly met. The same pace being set for every department of modern life, the influence wielded by modes is really unprecedented, although from the beginning of things dress, education, amusements, morals, and behavior have been swayed by irresponsible glacial movement.
To speak flippantly, even the Crusades might be classed as fads, — even those strange, heart-rending children’s pilgrimages of the Middle Ages. Many religious movements, however genuine their inspiration, have a touch of the same hysterical taint. Coming to lesser instances, it was a fad of Marie Antoinette to milk her cows. Fine ladies were induced by fashion to learn maternal instincts from a crabbed bachelor, not himself the best of fathers. The fainting, gaming, and ready tears of eighteenthcentury heroines, duels about nothing in the early nineteenth, “Frazzling,” that idiotic raveling of gold thread so piteously described by poor Caroline Bauer as the exasperating occupation of her morganatic spouse, — all of these were far sillier fashions than any which beset the present generation, not excepting Christian Science, or heavy masonry pergolas in small back yards. The point is that fashions to-day have gained a distinctly new and baleful authority simply because the most efficient contemporary effort is applied to stimulating them and to hastening their diffusion. Addison wrote, in 1711, “A man who takes a journey into the country is as much surprised as one who walks into a gallery of old family pictures, and finds as great a variety of garbs and habits in the persons he converses with.” The Spectator goes on to tell how “a fashion makes its progress much slower into Cumberland than Cornwall. I have heard that the Steenkirk (a military cravat dating from the battle nineteen years before) arrived but two months ago at Newcastle.” In sober truth, it took longer for Edinburgh to hear the news of Waterloo than it now does for Freeland, Pennsylvania, to learn that white was worn at the Grand Prix. After that Freeland also wore white till an English duchess came out in scarlet, upon which, by some magic tour de force in the dry goods trade, Freeland immediately turned geranium color. Formerly, even in great cities, a fashion required some time to permeate the masses; now afresh mode strikes the whole continent broadside, reaching all classes simultaneously. The Plaza, Madison Avenue, the Tenderloin and Rivington Street all wear the same costume at Easter, varying only in fineness of material, not a whit in general effect. The cunningest Héloïse or Annette in her Fifth Avenue “Petit Paris,” strive as she may, cannot keep her one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar “confection” one little move ahead of apparel marked “Four ninety - eight ” in Fourteenth Street, and “One ninety - eight ” on the Bowery. Nor does it stop there. In the department stores of small fresh-water towns, the ready-made “gown” of April, 1904, revealed fully as much beribboned underwear through its curtain lace transparencies as the gayest “smart little frock” in a Twenty-Third Street window. And those frocks, without the slightest regard for becomingness, or heed for the disastrous state of their filmy textures after a few Sunday trolley trips or Saturday afternoon picnics, swept the continent like prairie fire.
Uniform dress again merely illustrates a universal condition which has blighted every pursuit and amusement, till by dint of increased facility for doing precisely what our neighbors are doing,— neighbors in California, Bangor, London, Grand Rapids, Vienna, and the Rocky Mountains, — we stand an excellent chance of attaining absolute sameness. It has already come to pass that the inconvenient pariah clinging to an individual taste fares no better than the lonely man whose sole topic was the Prophet Habakkuk. To prove this, only ask at any wellequipped shop for a garden seed, a game, a shade of ribbon, or a book not in actual vogue. In the city of Philadelphia, not famous for pace, you might as well expect to find calashes or loaf sugar as to buy at first or second hand one copy of Robert Elsmere. Following the mode, on the contrary, has grown so easy that, moving in the direction of least resistance, we are fast reaching a complete abdication of individual rights, a sheeplike acceptance of every diversion, form of instruction, or way of life labeled “the latest.” And after all, instead of making us freer, these material advances have ended by creating a power which is relentlessly herding us into flocks and droves, to be led hither and yon without our exercising a spark of independent volition.
It is superfluous to hint at the bearing of this upon our politics. My perception of its effect upon the stage was rendered articulate by a popular continuous performance at one of the showiest theatres in a city whose inhabitants have passed the million.
Stylish, prosperous adults filled the house. There were beautiful picture hats, immaculate ostrich plumes, lace blouses, jewels real, as well as articles de Paris. Men and women sat in well-fed content without apparent wish to lynch the boxoffice man, or otherwise testify their sense of having been buncoed. A magician came first. After watching attentively to the end of his turn, I was at a loss to decide whether his exhibition was meant to puzzle, or to lay bare the whole mystery of parlor magic. Hearty applause! Next, a ventriloquist. The skill of this artist rose to the level of a fair Punch and Judy show. It might have imposed upon an average child under ten. The stage was peopled with clumsy manikins, not even marionettes; the ventriloquist slapped these quite often, and they replied with facetious repartee. His jokes were stale beyond belief, but a thoroughly docile audience greeted every sally with approval. The ventriloquist then wound up by dancing a cakewalk with a lifesized black doll which he carried in his arms. The audience seemed greatly pleased. Enter six young ladies dressed like a mill girl’s vision of luxury, one pretty, five decidedly plain. With the aid of six dreary youths they sang, or rather squeaked, the most banal, tuneless ditty in voices both thin and flat. At the fifth encore I left, although an acrobat, an entertainer, and eleven other acts were still to come.
Such a spectacle must leave any thoughtful person wondering why grown men and women liked so tame and worthless a hotchpotch. Decent it was, but no domestic evening with the Halma board under Bernard Shaw’s family lamp could possibly have been duller. Liked it! There lies the crux. Had they ever stopped to consider whether they liked it or not? Was one spectator capable of independently liking anything so abstract as a show ? The women would as readily dream of questioning the fashion in coiffure, or of rebelling against the prevailing outline for head, foot— or midriff! Conrespondingly, that part of them which is not body (neither mind nor soul seems an exact definition) submits with equal docility to the prevailing amusement. Nor were the escorts more impatient or discriminating, although, judged by the splendor of their womankind, many of them must have been shrewd business men. But here, once more, the machine rules. Carried along by mechanical contrivances and the elaborate organization of commerce, a man is now compelled to move rapidly, but in grooves. He depends upon a stenographer with a manifolding typewriter. He remembers with a mimeograph; he exists by grace of system and card catalogues. Over-specialized along one line and totally undeveloped in every other direction, taken off his own ground, at a play for instance,he is all abroad. Yet any ordinarily sensible merchant or broker should be qualified by mere living to reach some opinion of his own about the doings of fellow creatures, even upon the stage. But away from his office, our merchant can only flounder. Send him to 33 West FiftySixth Street, and his trained mind directs him to the exact spot; but caught out of town, he could steer no approximate course by the points of the compass. Apart from business, he takes all of life on faith, guided by the sign, “Standing Room Only.”
Next to clothes and recreation, nothing, not even education, is more subject to fashion than literature. Listen in any public library: something like this is bound to happen several times an hour.
Customer. Lady Rose’s Daughter, please.
Librarian. Not a copy in. What would you like instead ?
Customer. Well, I don’t much care. Pigs in Clover and the Simple Life, or any of the new books.
Librarian. None in. Did you ever read Mrs. Ward’s Eleanor?
Customer. No, I missed that.
Librarian. Six copies are in now, shall I —
Customer (justly incensed, as if plied with stale eggs or ancient oysters). . . . That! Me read a last year’s book!
I who write saw one and the same damsel, after demanding the Wings of a Dove and Dorothy Vernon (books of the year), roundly snub the librarian for suggesting the Awkward Age and When Knighthood was in Flower (unread works of the same authors), and finally depart in content with Gorky’s “latest,” Mrs. Wiggs, and the Valley of Decision. To that girl books were as little a matter of choice as the weather, as evanescent as omelette soufflé; and owing to accelerated facilities for distribution, every visit to the library only intensified her conception of literature.
Again, I confess, there is nothing new in this but the pace. Hand-made processes took a little time, time enough for an individual here and there to find personal satisfaction ministered to in one direction, thwarted in another. There was leisure for palates to register a flavor. Our brisker methods have now brought about a grotesque condition. They have moulded a populace much alike in mass, but whose separate development utterly lacks homogeneity. The rabbis of old held up as an aim in life “unending variations of mind and the difference of facial expression.” We, on the other hand, positively glory in an attrition which can only make for odious regularity. At the same time, our advanced educational institutions are laboriously teaching children how to be individual, if you please! And pages of magazines are devoted to formulas for achieving originality. Set down in cold print, these twro statements savor of satirical invention. Would they were not literal fact!
There can be no more pertinent example of this unequal development than the faultlessly elegant appearance of those young ladies who abound in suburban trains, at matinées, and wateringplaces. Since the human nail was popularized by the discovery of manicuring in the early eighties, their well-kept hands carry out the deception of their faultless attire. In a few instances, owing to a wide acquaintance with the uniform elocution now practiced upon the stage, their voices are dropping from the nose to the chest register. It is true that predigested pedagogy has fostered youth’s inborn dislike to mental effort to the point of leaving their ordinary speech at least — shaky — in grammar; but a liberal range of general culture is supplied by daily advertisements which keep them posted in anniversaries of important events, while Mr. David Belasco, Mrs. Leslie Carter, and other educators constantly open up over-grown historical vistas. (Is there a saleslady on the Atlantic slope unfamiliar with the touching story of Madame Du Barry?) The pianola tribe, along with vaudeville and department store concerts, keep them in touch with the musical world. Thanks to an observation trained in Nature Study courses, they can foretell the approach of Christmas by holly-decked bulk windows. From their outer shell it is a pardonable error to suppose them civilized, yet if their actual grade of Bildung were expressed in clothes, these seeming princesses could be with difficulty told from avowed barbarians. Yet these future mothers of our nation have ideals of their own, and are spiritedly sincere in the pursuit of them, and, unfortunately, they are entirely successful in acquiring an impermeable veneer which effectually protects the amazing rawness within from any ripening gleam of genuine development. Consequently our public unprotestingly accepts upholstery drama, costume novels, machine-made music, high feather ruffs one summer, openwork lace collars the next winter, in a mood of machine-made content, till the whimsical paradox is reached. Collectively, they rush after whatever is labeled new; as units they balk at anything not approved by their fellows. The New may be as hoary as the “continuous” jokes; the Old as little known as the wit of Charles Lamb or Sidney Smith.
Of course, we may comfort ourselves with platitudes: “ It is never wise to attempt swimming upstream.” This current which bears us along with distracting haste may ultimately serve some good purpose. Indeed, one true point of light here and there struggles to be seen, but the magnificent machine-made organization of our society hurries to snuff it out.
Among the barely tolerated immigrants who complicate our social condition, there come backward folk from the Old World, with backward, hand-made tastes and traditions. A “Dago” woman of the first generation is contemptibly indifferent to fashion. Strict sumptuary laws would in no way infringe upon her personal liberty. Thickset and comfortable, she wears a short, full skirt, while the slim, sophisticated “American” lady on the next floor draggles a yard of sinuous train. But that sturdy peasant woman knows strange and graceful choric figures, far superior to the ugly, indecorous cakewalk and high kicking which to her daughter will represent the worship of Terpsichore. Her husband, too, can tune a violin and play on it charming strains brought from his native land. Italians still love Funiculi Funicula, at least — a contemporary of Whoa Emma ! and far older than Ta Ra Ra Boum De Aye ! both of which, after the merciful habit of American and English topical songs, failed to weather their second summer.
When families named Malatesta or Ricciotti go to a theatre, instead of passively enduring jerky and unmeaning vaudeville, they follow with consecutive attention stories of Charlemagne and his Paladins, finding nothing tiresome or ridiculous in the words “Morire pro Patria, Morire pro Honore.”
The Hun also brings his fiddle, and if you know where to seek it, you may sit on a huge duvet and listen while Mr. Ondrecek or Mr. Lipscak reels off, not ragtime, but czardas, music, real music! And neighbors, gathering outside in the dusk, also listen with enjoyment, drifting at last into a national dance, till little Rosie, who attends public school and is “learning,” scornfully remarks, “That old back number! Can’t he give us Mr. Dooley ?”
With the Italians again, in camps of berry pickers where whole communities rough it for the harvest weeks, you will find groups of men lying on the earth after their day’s work, clustering about a fat pine fire, eagerly following the classic narrative of an improvisator.
In the Bowery, a Yiddish company lately gave — Monna Vanna! Not because manager or players thought it a paying piece, but from an abstract ambition to keep abreast with the best contemporary art. And while in this case the audience were not entirely in sympathy (giving only six recalls after the curtain), as a rule, the Eastern Jew — Russian, Pole, Roumanian — brings to the theatre a serious appreciation for serious drama, a toleration for mental effort, a willingness to exercise individual judgment in his amusements.
Until assimilated by our civilization, all these “inferior” peoples have power of attention, capacity for interest in interesting things. This is the wail of an avowed pessimist. I see no way to stem the tide of hateful similarity, unless, indeed, some optimist can devise a check by which fragments of a precious inheritance may be preserved to our uses, before the hoarded tradition of centuries is ground up and dispersed by the baneful leveler of our comfortable, flavorless, machine-made existence.