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In society or the man-machine, if it is to work, men are individuals. Society is organically, irrevocably dependent upon each man, and upon what each man chooses according to his own nature to do himself.
And in his two major works, "Petruchka" and "Le Sacre du printemps," Strawinsky makes the machine represent his own person. For the actions of machinery woke first in the human organism, and Strawinsky intensifies consciousness of the body by referring these motions to their origin. "Petruchka" is the man-machine seen from without, seen unsympathetically, in its comic aspect.
We have overlooked the difference in the nature of the materials in machines of iron and machines of men. A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine is one that has to be reproduced by somebody else. In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each man can be allowed to be the father of his own children and the author of his own acts.
But it was too late: the storm was up, and force was on her to give way to it; for now the man-machine, strongly worked upon by the sensual passion, felt so manfully his advantages and superiority, felt withal the sting of pleasure so intolerable, that maddening with it, his joys began to assume a character of furiousness, which made me tremble for the too tender Louisa.
How is not the very conception of morality entirely obliterated in the false philosophy that would fain persuade man that because he is in the world he must needs be of it, and because the tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon, that his actions are fixed and controlled by influences utterly beyond his power? We have no room for the "man-machine" in the beautiful school of Immanuel Kant.
"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of "Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions, in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness.
On every subject that comes up, in every line of thought, I will go to the city of implacable exceptions. All the inventors flock there the man with the one bicycle which flies, the one great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the man the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket like strings and nails and knives, they are all there.
The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy.
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