men that Mr. Pennell shows us. Nowhere does a man dominate in all these
wonderful pictures. You may argue perhaps that that is untrue to the
essential realities; all this array of machine and workshop, all this
marshalled power and purpose, has been the creation of inventor and
business organiser. But are we not a little too free with that word
"_creation_"? Falstaff was a "creation" perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls;
there we have indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but
did these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain
unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine in a
certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and not that and
that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative of the economy. So
little did they plan their ends that most of these manufacturers speak
with a kind of astonishment of the deadly use to which their works are
put. They find themselves making the new war as a man might wake out of
some drugged condition to find himself strangling his mother.

So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem
altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes and the
like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves or icebergs
or the stars. They are a new aspect of the logic of physical necessity
that made all these older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and
beauty of their dimensions with an entire impartiality. And they are
as impartial. Through all these lithographs runs one present motif, the
motif of the supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and
the world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of
modern science. The pictures are arranged to shape out the life of a
shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of their
history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in action and the
shell-burst. Upon this theme all these great appearances are strung
to-day. But to-morrow they may be strung upon some other and nobler