GASOLENE 45 



The acquisition of external energy, as in employment 

 of gasolene, means an augmentation of the individual. 

 The management of a machine gives one a sense of 

 personal power, much like that of the consciousness of 

 controlling other human beings but less harmful in its 

 reflex effect on the possessor of the power. This sense 

 of power is doubtless one of the chief reasons for the 

 fondness for fast driving. The best expression of this 

 feeling that I have found in literature is the following 

 passage in Maurice Maeterlinck's essay on the automo- 

 bile in "The Double Garden": 



The pace grows faster and faster, the delirious wheels cry aloud in 

 their gladness. And at first the road comes moving towards me, 

 like a bride waving palms, rhythmically keeping time to some joy- 

 ous melody. But soon it grows frantic, springs forward, and throws 

 itself madly upon me, rushing under the car like a furious torrent, 

 whose foam lashes my face; it drowns me beneath its waves, it 

 blinds me with its breath! . . . Now the road drops sheer into 

 the abyss, and the magical carriage rushes ahead of it. The trees, 

 that for so many slow-moving years have serenely dwelt on its 

 borders, shrink back in dread of disaster. They seem to be hasten- 

 ing one to the other to approach their green heads, and in startled 

 groups to debate how to bar the way of the strange apparition. 

 But as this rushes onward, they take panic, and scatter and fly, 

 each one seeking its own habitual place; and as I pass they bend 

 tumultuously forward, and their myriad leaves, quick to the mad 

 joy of the force that is chanting its hymn, murmur in my ears the 

 voluble psalm of Space, acclaiming and greeting the enemy that 

 hitherto has always been conquered but now at last triumphs: 

 Speed. . . . Space and Time, its invisible brother, are perhaps 

 the two great enemies of mankind. Could we conquer these, we 

 should be as the gods. 



When I told M. Maeterlinck how much I admired it 

 he laughed heartily and said that the inspiration of the 

 rhapsody was one of the primitive five-horse-power 



