War & Peace Quote by Wyndham Lewis

A temple to “Machinery in the abstract” is Lewis at his most barbed: a parody of modernity’s religious impulse, and a warning about what happens when a culture replaces messy human judgment with the clean certainty of systems. He’s not praising machines so much as mocking the craving to sanctify them. “In the abstract” is the tell. Abstract machinery is a fetish-object, a gleaming idea of efficiency and progress detached from the actual social consequences of mechanization - the factory discipline, the standardization of taste, the downgrade of people into inputs.

Then comes the deliberately backhanded promise: if we just worship the Machine properly, artists will be “honored” and left “in complete peace” to make decorative offerings. It sounds utopian; it’s a nightmare. Lewis sketches an arrangement where art survives as a kind of sanctioned craft, safely cordoned off from power, politics, and friction. The painter and sculptor get commissions, yes, but on the condition that they stop being disruptive. “Without further trouble” reads like an authoritarian sigh: the artist as a potential problem, neutralized by patronage.

Context matters. Lewis, a Vorticist and combative modernist, wrote amid early-20th-century Europe’s love affair with industrial speed and its growing attraction to mass movements and technocratic thinking. The line anticipates how modern societies aestheticize their machinery - literally in monuments and architecture, figuratively in the way “innovation” becomes moral cover. Lewis’s wit works because it flatters the reader with a “perfect” world, then reveals what that perfection costs: a culture that prefers polished idols to argumentative humans.