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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Child and Country
+       A Book of the Younger Generation
+
+Author: Will Levington Comfort
+
+Release Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #27793]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD AND COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Barbara Kosker and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHILD AND COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
+
+LOT & COMPANY
+RED FLEECE
+MIDSTREAM
+DOWN AMONG MEN
+FATHERLAND
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Child and Country
+
+ _A Book of the
+ Younger Generation_
+
+
+ BY
+
+ WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
+
+ AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT & COMPANY,"
+ "DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE
+ RIDES ALONE," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+ Copyright, 1916,
+ BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+ TO THOSE
+
+ WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS
+
+ TO THE BUILDERS
+
+ OF THE RISING GENERATION
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all
+detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many
+intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time....
+The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making
+in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture,
+and shore-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house
+or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two.
+Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found
+plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and
+length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to
+laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country
+people and the meshes of possession.
+
+In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the
+Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of
+the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been
+wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and
+weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in
+the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking
+the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children
+in school--the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to
+resist contagions, mental and physical--the whole tendency of the school
+toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop
+the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child.
+
+We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but
+out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at
+hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens
+and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine
+things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming
+generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings
+who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of
+their struggle.
+
+It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain
+builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in
+the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could
+possibly give them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after
+chapter are before me--revelations they have brought--and over all, if
+I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the
+children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the
+title.
+
+Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a
+spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have
+been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see
+the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age
+above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we
+perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of
+America--signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have
+to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our
+children and to every conception of home--not the war itself, but the
+forming of the new social order, the message thrilling for utterance in
+the breasts of the rising generation. For they are the builders who are
+to follow the wreckers of war.
+
+Making a place to live on the lake shore, the development of bluff and
+land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a
+pool of water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer
+walls broken with chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior
+cultivations, the establishment of a visible order that is but a symbol
+of the intenser activity of the natures within.
+
+Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of
+food, a friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the
+casements--these are sane desirable matters to gather together; but the
+fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the
+builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in
+fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised
+receptivity--a conception of its utilities that has come from long need.
+A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a
+curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in
+mating with a woman or fathering a child.
+
+There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why one
+man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along with
+maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will exchange a
+roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster. No
+chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our
+own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual
+re-adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.
+
+The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the
+cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning--a work so
+joyous and productive that I would take any pains to set forth with
+clearness the effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep
+breathing of each mind--a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a
+selfless receptivity on the other. We can only breathe deeply when we
+are at peace. This is true mentally as well as physically, and
+soulfully, so far as one can see. The human fabric is at peace only when
+its faculties are held in rhythm by the task designed for them.
+Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the inspiration of
+to-morrow.
+
+It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal
+ambition here to become identified with education in the accepted sense.
+Those who come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save
+that which they are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing
+that, they belong, indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and
+shall always be; but first and last is the conviction that literature
+and art are but incident to life; that we are here to become masters of
+life--artists, if possible, but in any case, men.
+
+... To-day the glimpse of it all--that this is to be a book of the
+younger generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly
+I planned to relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came
+into their lovely being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to
+me that a man could do little better for his quiet joy than to raise
+roses; that nothing was so perfectly designed to keep romance perennial
+in his soul. Then the truth appeared--greater things that were going on
+here--the cultivation of young and living minds, minds still fluid,
+eager to give their faith and take the story of life; minds that are
+changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if the story is well
+told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it comes to-day
+(an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a man may
+build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an
+intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to
+tell simply and with something of order from the beginning.
+
+WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT.
+
+STONESTUDY, March, 1916.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                              PAGE
+
+ BEES AND BLOOMS                17
+
+ BLUFF AND SHORE                28
+
+ STONESTUDY                     38
+
+ IMAGINATION                    43
+
+ WILD GEESE                     55
+
+ WORKMANSHIP                    65
+
+ THE LITTLE GIRL                78
+
+ THE ABBOT                      90
+
+ THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL          102
+
+ COMPASSION                    113
+
+ THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK        123
+
+ TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT        134
+
+ NATURAL CRUELTY               151
+
+ CHILDREN CHANGE               163
+
+ A MAN'S OWN                   171
+
+ THE PLAN IS ONE               186
+
+ THE IRISH CHAPTER             196
+
+ THE BLEAKEST HOUR             202
+
+ THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER          217
+
+ COMMON CLAY BRICK             222
+
+ THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS       230
+
+ MIRACLES                      248
+
+ MORE ABOUT ORDER              259
+
+ THE FRESH EYE                 270
+
+ THE CHOICE OF THE MANY        279
+
+ THE ROSE CHAPTER              284
+
+ LETTERS                       294
+
+ THE ABBOT DEPARTS             301
+
+ THE DAKOTAN                   313
+
+ THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)     319
+
+ THE HILL ROCKS                330
+
+ ASSEMBLY OF PARTS             339
+
+
+
+
+CHILD AND COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+CHILD AND COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+1
+
+BEES AND BLOOMS
+
+
+In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the
+country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good
+district, but there was no peace there. I felt _forgotten_. I had not
+the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then
+to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it
+was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that
+fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and
+shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of
+necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which
+a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the
+early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned
+the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little
+plot. There was no inner order in my heart--on the contrary, chaos in
+and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and
+gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the
+Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the
+healing of Nature.
+
+So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The
+country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the
+country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always
+felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria.
+I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live,
+for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental
+activity would sink into a bovine rumination.
+
+Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true
+that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more
+subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the
+roads of the many--the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A
+sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the
+devil is the voice of the crowd.
+
+Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged
+city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at
+our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a
+time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of
+the larger issues:
+
+"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more
+essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing
+children into the world. When evolving persons have reached
+individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them,
+they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of
+name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that
+founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red
+Indian _westward_ off the face of the earth.
+
+"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of
+the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of
+that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual
+experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of
+metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is
+that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have
+turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision
+which was their birthright."
+
+It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a
+generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the
+City for the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper
+ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that
+have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures;
+for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the
+strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower
+of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck of
+life.
+
+There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The
+rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working
+long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at
+the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and
+that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it,
+and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a
+certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved
+profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to
+me, and all that the elm-tree meant--hill-cabins and country dusks, bees
+and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and
+aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for
+all that the elm-tree knew--as if I were exiled from the very flesh that
+could bring the good low earth to my senses again.
+
+Could it be that something was changed within--that we were ready at
+last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I
+stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to
+rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen
+minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the
+American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over
+again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the
+smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban cars--one
+that would take us to the Lake St. Claire shore, and another that
+crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along her northern
+indentations for nearly ten miles.
+
+"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.
+
+It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation
+with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by
+one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested
+that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the
+Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet
+and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy--the
+tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came
+running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his
+destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said:
+
+"He can tell you more than I can."
+
+I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it
+was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to
+say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth
+edited. He called men by 'phone--names strange to me then that have
+become household names since--while we sat by smiling and silent in his
+little newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank,
+when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.
+
+Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had
+rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not
+always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor
+people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of
+the car had been rigid among beer-cases.
+
+We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of
+the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East
+in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the
+house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He
+was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages.
+That boy you shall be glad to know.
+
+We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach
+our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He
+would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now
+from where I sit--to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to
+the very edge of a willowed bluff--to the end of the land. Erie brimmed
+before us. It led to a new life, too.
+
+I had always disliked Erie--as one who lived in the Lake Country and
+chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a
+little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie
+heretofore had meant only something to be crossed--something shallow and
+petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light
+darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I
+knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to
+wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars
+from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain
+where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian
+peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the
+Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of
+the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end
+of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think--we are pausing still.
+One must pause to project a dream.
+
+... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we
+hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had
+brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of
+life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the
+cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern
+heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the
+first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep
+gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster
+were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not
+a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year.
+Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and
+brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had
+given. There were days in which we were so happy--that another summer of
+such life would have seemed too much to ask.
+
+I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read
+newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it
+was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully
+every night across the Lake--a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide,
+obscenity and passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like
+the smell of blood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country;
+literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives
+apart from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can
+find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here
+for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants--turning back
+with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants
+that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded space,
+and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other.... One does not say
+what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work
+is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy
+planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be
+free.
+
+The City, intolerable as it is in itself--in its very nature against the
+growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time--is nevertheless
+the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and
+naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to
+avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.
+
+Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of
+spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel
+tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet
+and pass through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which
+brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a passage
+through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole
+is an ascent.
+
+A great leader of men who has never met the crowds face to face is
+inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and
+pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men
+turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of
+us can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure
+continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the
+year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and
+half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the
+City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again
+from the country replenished and refreshed.
+
+The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally
+true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have
+returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the
+last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the
+turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.
+
+Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the
+farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men
+within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every
+year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep
+cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have
+not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the
+long summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the
+heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the
+breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men
+look up more seldom.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Midstream, 1914, George H. Doran Co., New York.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+BLUFF AND SHORE
+
+
+There is no playground like a sandy shore--and this was sheltered from
+the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and
+made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as
+broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore
+with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of
+the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is
+formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer
+and lesser point is like a bit of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys
+of the rain-days with a beauty and power of its own, and the mornings
+flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a structure of idealism
+forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk. The young people
+turn to it often from the classes.
+
+The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely
+been seen so far from the swimming place in front of the rented
+cottages. It was while in the water that I determined to explore. The
+first thing that impressed me when I reached the eminence was the
+silence. It was something to be dreamed of, when the Lake was also
+still. There was no road; a hay field came down to the very edge of the
+bluff, and the shore fifty feet below was narrow and rocky. Very few
+people passed there. That most comfortable little town was lying against
+the rear horizon to the West. I used to come in the evenings and smoke
+as the sun went down. Sometimes the beauty of it was all I could
+bear--the voices of children in the distance and the Pelee light
+flashing every seven seconds far out in the Lake.
+
+I first saw it in dry summer weather and did not know that a bumper crop
+of frogs had been harvested that Spring from the deep, grass-covered
+hollows formed by the removal of clay for a brick-business long ago.
+There was good forage on the mounds, which I did not appreciate at the
+time. The fact is these mounds were formed of pure dark loam, as fine a
+soil as anywhere in the Lake Country.
+
+Those of the dim eyes say that once upon a time an orchard and
+brick-house stood on a bluff in front of the brick-yard, on a natural
+point, but that the Lake had nibbled and nibbled, finally digesting the
+property, fruit-trees, brick-house and all.
+
+I could well believe it when the first storm came. An East wind for
+three days brought steady deluges of high water that wore down the
+shore-line almost visibly. A week later came a West wind that enfiladed,
+so that what remained of the little point was caught in the cross-play
+of the weathers. If some one did not intervene, the brick-yard site
+would follow the orchard--that was clear.
+
+... Three or four times the owner came to see me. We had rejoiced in the
+rented property, rejoiced in owning nothing, yet having it all....
+Thoreau in his daily westward migrations studied it all with the same
+critical delight, and found his abode where others did not care to
+follow. We look twice at the spot we choose to build our house. That
+second look is not so free and innocent.... Yet a man may build his
+house. Thoreau had no little brood coming up, and I have doubted many
+times, even in moments of austere admiration, if he wouldn't have lived
+longer, had there been a woman about to nourish him. She would have
+insisted upon a better roof, at least.... I told the neighbour-man I
+would buy the brick-yard, if he didn't stop pestering me about it. He
+smiled and came once too often.
+
+The day before, standing upon that height of land (not too near the
+edge, for it looked higher in those days) I had gazed across the Lake,
+at one with it all, a friendly voyager of the skies, comrade of the
+yarrow and the daisy. I remember the long grass of the hollows, the
+peculiar soft bloom of it, and what a place it was to lie and dream,
+until one became a part of the solution of sunshine and tinted
+immensity.
+
+So I lost the universe for a bit of bluff on the Lake shore.
+
+When the East wind came, I saw with proprietary alarm the point wearing
+away. That which coloured the Lake was fine rose-clay and it was mine,
+bought by the foot-front.... A man may build his house.
+
+Every one who came along told me how to save the point. For weeks they
+came. Heavy drift-wood was placed in times of peace, so that the sand
+would be trapped in storm. No one failed me in advice, but the East wind
+made match-wood of all arrangements.... The high water would wash and
+weaken the base, and in the heaviness of the rains the bulk of earth
+above would fall--only to be carried out again by the waves. The base
+had to be saved if a natural slope was ever to be secured. Farther down
+the shore I noted one day that a row of boulders placed at right angles
+with the shore had formed a small point, and that a clump of willows
+behind had retained it. This was a bit of advice that had not come so
+authoritatively, but I followed the cue, and began rolling up rocks now
+like an ancient Peruvian. It was a little jetty, that looked like a lot
+of labour to a city man, and it remained as it was for several days.
+
+One morning I came forth in lashing weather--and rubbed my eyes. The
+jetty was not in sight. It was covered with a foot of sand, and the clay
+was dry at the base. A day's work with a team after that in low water,
+snaking the big boulders into line with a chain--a sixty-foot jetty by
+sun-down, built on top of the baby spine I had poked together. No man
+ever spent a few dollars more profitably. Even these stones were covered
+in time, and there was over a yard-deep of sand buttressing the base of
+the clay and thinning out on the slope of shore to the end of the
+stones. Later, when building, I took four hundred yards of sand from the
+east side of the stone jetty, and it was all brought back by the next
+storm....
+
+I read somewhere with deep and ardent sanction that a man isn't worth
+his spiritual salt if he lets a locality hold him, or possessions
+possess him; and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy.
+Whenever you play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand
+to weave you in. It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for
+quiet, and enough depth for a permanent fruit-garden--all for the price
+of a fifty-foot lot in the City; but these things call upon one for a
+certain property-mindedness and desiring, in the usage of which the
+human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the
+thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the
+sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and
+sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to make the dreams come
+true), instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.
+
+But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers
+did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also
+forget it. A few good things--perennials, by all means an elm-tree,
+stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in
+materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have
+passed--these are enough. For a home that does not promote your
+naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.
+
+Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion--through the
+very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The
+man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never
+know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first
+summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a
+surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against
+artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of
+simplicity which permit a man to forget himself--just missing the fact
+that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by
+suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only
+to show us wherein our treasure lies.
+
+The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its
+squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual
+garnering--that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the
+eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he
+permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it.
+It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they
+have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake
+consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be very sure that none will
+escape the complication, for we rise to different dimensions of
+simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all organised
+hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain fixed
+in them--not to rush forth at length from our miserable
+self-consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic
+simplicity is ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man--that
+is ahead.
+
+That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through
+the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I
+expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the
+bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little
+trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From
+one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my
+land--that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they
+have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes
+think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a
+week--there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them
+on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed;
+they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much
+water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too
+cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing--and
+low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without
+help. The temporality of all things--even of the great imperturbable
+trees--is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say
+morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."
+
+There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long
+and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started
+there--dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being
+brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live,
+but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting
+should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant
+hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in
+winter, if their laterals are severed.... I want the birds to come to
+this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the
+plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the
+ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must
+be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....
+
+I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first
+summer that I yearn for again--close to the sand, close to the voices of
+the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones
+have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of
+healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it
+plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.
+
+The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from
+beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below,
+and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty
+degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any
+artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or
+fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes.
+Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths--a trickle of water
+over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines--something of all this
+will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is
+last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this
+Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small
+shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the
+leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to
+plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.
+
+The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun
+to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could
+not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a
+summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a
+fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and
+clearer--a blend of _patio_ and broad hearth--running water and red
+firelight--built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a
+roof of wired glass over a _patio_ paved with brick; the area sunken
+slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the
+sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms,
+urns, ferns and winter plants.
+
+All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it--and as yet, there
+wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop
+to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse
+was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+STONESTUDY
+
+
+Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work.
+This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the
+presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there
+were ancient scars across my back--as if I had helped in that building,
+and under the lash, too.
+
+... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of
+stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated
+to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was
+afraid of short time or flaws of construction--I was watching because it
+satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get
+accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy
+powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is
+a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of
+setting. If you can find a bearing for one stone upon another without
+falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall
+is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with
+stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that
+muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens
+slowly hardens best.
+
+The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that
+there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier
+Fall than that--a full year before the thought of Europe became action.
+I watched the work--as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen,
+so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns
+easily after this.
+
+It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all
+symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of
+order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well--six, eight, and
+eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at,
+his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter
+he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily
+increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a
+great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be
+learning masonry all over again.
+
+"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by
+night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."
+
+There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is
+something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long
+roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I
+asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke
+it.
+
+"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.
+
+Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have
+built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone--fifty years
+of masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their
+stone-hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so.
+They have learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed
+to the Line, and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence
+of their being (I cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly
+integration. There is a nobility from stone-work which the masons put on
+with the years--the tenders have it not; neither have any of the
+indiscriminate labour men. One must have a craft to achieve this. The
+building is not so much. The houses and barns and stores which the elder
+masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands in this
+country--they are but symbols of the building of character within. They
+see _into_ the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another
+all would look the same--the blacks and reds and whites, even the
+amalgans--all grey-brown and weathered outside--but the masons know what
+is within, the colour and grain and beauty.
+
+"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.
+
+"No, that's a black feller."
+
+"And this?"
+
+"Good colour, but he ain't got no grain--all _gnurly_--as the feller
+says."
+
+Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of
+men....
+
+A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney--faced
+stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a
+low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden
+pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of
+firelight in the stone cave--a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to
+the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake--to the suspense of
+distance and Southern constellations.
+
+I laugh at this--it sounds so pompous and costly--but it is the shop of
+a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more
+than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and
+nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin--indeed,
+it had to. That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put
+out--a few six-inch trunks, brought with their own earth frozen to
+them--a specimen of oak, walnut, hickory (so hard to move)--but an elm
+over-tone was the plan, and a clump of priestly pines near the stable.
+These are still in the revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to
+be. Time brings that, as it will smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work
+in vines, establish the roses and wistaria on the Southern exposure,
+slope and mellow and put the bloom over all.
+
+We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In
+the meantime the three children--a girl of ten and two younger boys--had
+almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of
+that then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from
+April on in the small town school until the summer vacation. This was
+tried for a few weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward
+the task of teaching our own.
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+IMAGINATION
+
+
+Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first
+time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter
+in our house, and I was associating a good deal with a group of teachers
+in town, some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid
+forms of modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall
+especially a talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught
+thirty years, given herself freely to three generations--her own and
+mine and to another since then. She had administered to me a thing
+called _rhetoric_ in another age, and she looked just the same, having
+kept her mind wide open to new and challenging matters of literature and
+life and religious thought.
+
+I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to
+her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She
+still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest
+human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's
+weaknesses--as the Master established His church upon the weakest link
+of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:
+
+"I find them ready, _when they ask_. In the old occult schools there is
+a saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the
+student must also come half-way----"
+
+"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is
+so. There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five classes
+a day--twenty-five to fifty students each--but so much falls upon stony
+ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds----"
+
+"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated.
+"If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question
+itself proves that the soil is somehow ready----"
+
+"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions.
+The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but
+prepare the soil, too."
+
+"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the
+imagination--to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has
+to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry
+him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of
+abundance."
+
+The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.
+
+"... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that
+surely interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all----"
+
+"Nature?"
+
+"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her--what
+pictures _mean_ Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature
+is a kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a
+God-mother--to kittens and trees and butterflies and roses and children.
+She is mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her
+about it. Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet--shelf
+after shelf full of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told
+her about the Sun as the Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her.
+She held to that. Always now when we fall into talk _naturally_--it is
+about the old Mother and the brilliant Father who pours his strength
+upon all concerned--Mother Nature's mate."
+
+The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's
+quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do
+that----"
+
+We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days--of the handful of
+days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of
+thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam;
+beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when
+all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....
+
+"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out
+of that, really. A teacher who hasn't--kills it in the child; at least,
+all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the
+child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery--but the lack
+of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the
+wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so
+terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle
+and repress their real impulses and rush for things to hold in their
+hands for a little time. If they had imagination they would see that the
+things they hold in their hands are disintegrating _now_ as everything
+in Nature is; that the hand itself weakens and loses its power. Why,
+here we are upstanding--half-gods asleep within us. Imagination
+alone--the seeing of the spirit of things--that can awaken us."
+
+I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old
+debatable ground--but the secret was out. It was the essence of my
+forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of
+everything else--all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.
+
+"... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life
+prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children
+see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by
+scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I
+like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things
+prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A
+big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned
+to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through
+twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than
+from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his
+children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I
+happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should
+fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.
+
+"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in
+building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage
+has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that
+these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner
+are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the
+connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at
+once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without
+it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh
+beneath, I talked of writing--something of what writing means to me.
+When I stopped, he said:
+
+"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing
+matter----' and opened the subject again....
+
+"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his
+view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is
+asked from the many in the great plan of things--but I like madness
+better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies
+are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in
+things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-god that sleeps
+within--at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a
+devil, perhaps I can beat him."
+
+"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said,
+"----seeing the spirit of things."
+
+"I hadn't thought of it as a definition--but it expresses what the real
+part of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs,
+knowing nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their
+wheel of things; what their neighbour is going to say next, from the
+routine of the day's events. After a little of that, I have to run
+away--to a book, to a task, to an awakened imagination. Only those who
+are in a measure like us can liberate us. That's the key to our
+friendships, our affections and loves. We seek those who set us
+free--they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give--a
+surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin--our dynamics
+is doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way----"
+
+The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she
+said.
+
+"... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her
+sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was
+filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root
+systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She
+read one of Henry Ward Beecher's _Star Papers_ and verified many of its
+fine parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The
+Shore is ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain
+is sweet; even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She
+looks every morning, as I do, at the Other Shore. We know the state of
+the air by that. And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how
+full the days are."
+
+"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.
+
+"No--that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she
+wanted to be."
+
+"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.
+
+"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her
+music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her
+deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her
+little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the
+highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and
+the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it
+work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of
+processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by
+intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one
+of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only
+expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."
+
+The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.
+
+"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression
+of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the
+left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we
+receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving
+formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know
+the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of
+that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was
+amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have,
+who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an
+arsenal of laws and fears."
+
+"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"
+
+"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as
+instruction even."
+
+"And spelling?"
+
+"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she
+is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading.
+These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather
+completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the
+real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page
+manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that
+being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose
+God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world
+with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection
+to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from
+children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his
+neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different
+and higher organs."
+
+"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.
+
+"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh
+to me," I said.
+
+"The little girl is ten, you say?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me
+to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"
+
+"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.
+
+"Still you are taking her away from us."
+
+I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as
+much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.
+
+"What do you mean--taking her away?"
+
+"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal
+with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work.
+Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I
+believe you have established the point that one can learn best from
+within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost
+between her and her generation--as represented by my five classes each
+day."
+
+I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me
+straight to the crossing--and with very few words. I realised now that
+more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to
+possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced
+to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep
+open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and
+flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines
+around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination--it is
+all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of
+her--lifting her apart from the many?
+
+There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on,
+the job would be done more and more completely.
+
+"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will
+happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin
+searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find--not to be
+found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams--but the many will
+not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know
+who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were
+Solitaries--that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not
+have one stay with the many--just to avoid the loneliness and the
+heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world
+that is loved and remembered--every life lived with beauty and
+productiveness to the many--has come from the Solitaries. _Quest_, that
+is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on
+the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves--that which
+we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are
+fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more
+poignant suffering--but that is an honour----"
+
+The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that
+all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential
+imagination?"
+
+"But children have it," I said.
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+WILD GEESE
+
+
+I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of
+hard work, night-classes and furnace air--imagination would work to the
+extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some
+days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold
+mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come
+forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now
+sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken
+only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of
+geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest
+farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't
+occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is
+one of the tragedies of being city-bred.
+
+Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force
+and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with
+the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of
+their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his
+second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the
+V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice
+as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined,
+because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in
+passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece
+by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings.
+Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.
+
+It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of
+ducks--darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions
+sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and
+canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the
+distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders
+with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a
+suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.
+
+Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the
+wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments
+of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time
+into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the
+self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist
+before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the
+presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to
+common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the
+spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory,
+they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or
+crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the
+flight of geese gave me--a throb from the ancient and perennial romance
+of the soul.
+
+Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge
+is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many
+think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of
+the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a
+derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old
+fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after
+that--galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some
+time _really_ to go to sea.
+
+Sing the song of steam--the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet.
+Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking
+its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven
+hydroplanes--some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back
+on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old
+steamer--emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart
+memory--will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will
+be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only
+become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a
+magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the
+stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose
+yesterdays are lives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I
+mentioned the flying wedge.
+
+"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the
+waiting-room.
+
+I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt--the cut-up of the
+place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the
+District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any
+business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the
+wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the
+farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June
+afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular
+once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside
+for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay,
+and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese
+are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they
+fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black
+powder.
+
+Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would
+have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks
+afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack
+Miner's farm--within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.
+
+Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in--a patch
+of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of
+geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A
+farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of
+_wanderlust_ when he observed the geese that he kept on going without
+return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:
+
+"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back
+mabe. Steve."
+
+Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little
+nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't
+come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople
+from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the
+farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect
+that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and
+get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the critical
+month of April.
+
+Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving
+much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The
+geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year
+or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty
+drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser
+heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding
+fields. That was the second beginning.
+
+The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this
+order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six
+hundred--in five years. The geese never land all at once in the
+artificial pond--some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot,
+others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five
+bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.
+
+"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor
+man to feed six hundred."
+
+He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to
+help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it
+evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An
+automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of
+his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing
+his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the
+States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk
+who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying
+overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on
+the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for
+strange dreaming--we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack
+Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse
+blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.
+
+Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as
+corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table
+from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't
+know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has
+time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one
+seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect
+him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.
+
+"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen
+them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an
+eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're
+drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any
+outsider. Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've never yet seen
+them do anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the
+wild goose on the back of the Canadian flag!"
+
+I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.
+
+It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper
+impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not
+come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural
+mysteries--at first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand--a
+spectacle of beauty and speed not to be forgotten. They are built long
+and clean. Unlike the larger fliers as a whole, they need little or no
+run to rise; it is enough to say that they rise from the water. You can
+calculate from that the marvellous strength of pinion. And they are
+continental wing-rangers that know the little roads of men, as they know
+the great lakes and waterways and mountain chains--Jack Miner's
+door-yard and Hudson's Bay.
+
+"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.
+
+"You don't have to. Come on."
+
+He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.
+
+"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was
+heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have
+some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came
+home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine,
+but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to
+be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain;
+anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he
+healed."
+
+The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at
+me--something liquid and venomous in the sound--the long black beak as
+fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the
+core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die--perhaps he felt out
+of the law because of that.
+
+"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it
+out."
+
+I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the
+past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy
+which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.
+
+An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind
+was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself
+clean--its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back
+to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining
+to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full
+of feathers.
+
+And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental
+flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration--lean and long,
+powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing--an admirable adversary,
+an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for
+captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird
+and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard--the rise
+and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire--the
+rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in
+the mocking ruins of plenty....
+
+Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came
+back from the chores.
+
+
+
+
+6
+
+WORKMANSHIP
+
+
+As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The
+hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building
+the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string
+of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of
+asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply
+of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and
+goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came.
+Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a
+shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of
+a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in
+a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and
+tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire
+piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad
+day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.
+
+"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will
+make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next
+corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."
+
+That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.
+
+I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of
+red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my
+thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing
+something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that
+word "efficiency," be reminded that the good old word originally had to
+do with workmanship and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded
+with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad
+workmanship, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A
+man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the
+stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.
+
+... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked
+for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear.
+Toward the end of the week following I passed him in the lane that leads
+down to the Lake--a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his
+back against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.
+
+"I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese,"
+he explained, as I came up.
+
+It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like
+the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The
+geese ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep
+listening to their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them
+fly overland before sunset, which was two hours away at the time I
+passed up the lane. I do not know how long Monte had been sitting there.
+
+Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his
+not working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus
+first-handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to
+the board of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman.
+I wanted a knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover,
+I knew the man who would make it for me.
+
+At the head of the lane, still on the way, I met a farmer, who had not
+missed the figure propped between the stone and the poplar tree. He said
+that the last time Monte had borrowed his gun, he had brought it back
+fouled. That was all he said.
+
+I passed Monte's house, which is the shocking depression of a prosperous
+community. There were many children--a stilled and staring lot. They
+sat in dust upon the ground. They were not waiting for goose. Their
+father had never inspired them with expectancy of any sort; their mother
+would have spoiled a goose, had it been brought by a neighbour. She came
+to the door as I passed, spilled kitchen refuse over the edge of the
+door-stone, and vanished. The children seemed waiting for death. The
+virtue of fatherhood is not to be measured numerically.... April was
+nearly over, but the unsightly heaps that the snows had covered were not
+yet cleared away. Humped, they were, among the children. This is a
+world-old picture--one that need not be finished.
+
+Monte was not a good shot, not a good workman, not a good father--a
+burden and bad odour everywhere, a tainter of the town and the blood of
+the human race. That, which was gathered about him was as pitifully bred
+as reared. Monte's one value lay in his horrible exemplarship. He was a
+complete slum microcosm, without which no civilisation has yet arrived.
+Monte has given me more to think about than any of the happier people.
+In his own mute way, he reminds each man of the depths, furnishes the
+low mark of the human sweep, and keeps us from forgetting the world as
+it is, the myriads of bad workmen of which the leaning cities are made.
+
+Sitting there by the rock, letting the hours go by--and in his own weak
+heart, my neighbour knew that he wouldn't "hit one of them geese." All
+his life he had failed. Nature had long since ceased trying to tempt him
+into real production. Even his series of natural accidents was doubtless
+exhausted. That is the pace that kills--that sitting.
+
+I went on to the forge of the workman. We talked together. I sat by
+while he made the thing I wanted, which was not an ornament simply. He
+will always be identified there in the oak, an excellent influence; just
+as I think of him when I save the wood in the open fireplace, because of
+the perfect damper he made for the stone chimney. Monte was still there
+when I went back. The problem of him returned to mind after the
+freshening of the forge.
+
+He belongs to us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did
+not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the
+weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the
+impoverishment of his line. We are not finding their work for his
+children. We have sent them home from school because they were not
+clean. We complain that they waste what we give them; that they are
+harder on the shoes we furnish, than are our own children. We do not
+inquire with wisdom into their life, to learn on which side of the human
+meridian they stand--whether their disease is decadence and senility of
+spiritual life, or whether their spines are but freshly lifted from the
+animal levels.
+
+As a purely physical aggregate--if our civilisation be that--our
+business is quickly to exterminate Monte and his whole breed. He
+embarrasses us, as sleeker individuals of the herd and hive. He is
+tolerated to the diseases with which he infects us, because we have
+weakened our resistance with cleanliness. But by the authority of our
+better understanding, by our sacred writings and the intuitions of our
+souls, we are men and no longer an animal aggregate. As men, our
+business is to lift Monte from his lowly condition, and hold him there;
+to make him and his children well first, and then to make workmen of
+them. _There are workmen in the world for this very task of lifting
+Monte and his brood._ We do not use them, because the national instinct
+of Fatherhood is not yet profoundly developed. We are not yet brothers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the recent winter months in the city it came to me that I had certain
+things to tell a group of young men. The class was arranged. In the
+beginning I warned them not to expect literary matters; that I meant to
+offer no plan to reach the short-story markets (a game always rather
+deep for me); that the things which I wanted to tell were those which
+had helped me toward being a man, not an artist. Fifteen young men were
+gathered--all strangers to me. When we were really acquainted, weeks
+afterward, I discovered that seven of the fifteen had been writing for
+months or years--that there was certain stuff in the seven that would
+write or die.
+
+They had not come for what I meant to give. As a whole they were
+indifferent at first to my idea of the inner life. They had come for the
+gleanings I would drop, because I could not help it, having spent twenty
+years learning how to learn to write. The name that had called them from
+the different parts of the city was identified for good or bad in their
+minds with the work they meant to do. And what I did for them was done
+as a workman--that was my authority--a workman, a little older, a little
+farther along in the craft that called.
+
+And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know,
+not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a
+store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why,
+to the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more
+than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself,
+because the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had
+told them austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do;
+but I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not
+elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned
+to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do
+just that for a larger class, and in this effort I stumbled upon the
+very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal--for they
+are one and the same.
+
+A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to
+him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most
+hours each day--that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth
+the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions
+and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure
+instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it--that
+man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts.
+It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are
+not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug
+and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very
+long in coming to the end of their fineness.
+
+They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is
+exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each
+workman finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He
+is an illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he
+is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self.
+Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is
+on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service of
+humanity.
+
+... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is
+caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it.
+He feels for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens
+to the forge that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his
+bench, but in his mind--in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk
+to my daughter. She knows about these things," he says. "I must go....
+Yes, it is a fine day."
+
+It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him
+so long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has
+perfected his task. The world laughs at its betters with the same
+facility that it laughs at the half-men. Our national and municipal
+fathers should teach us first that the man who has found his work is one
+of the kings of the earth. Children should be taught to know a workman
+anywhere. All excellence in human affairs should be judged by the
+workmanship and not by the profits.
+
+We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some
+strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came
+at last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is
+nervous and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at
+that; asks himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of
+laughter, for he cannot forget the grinding and the rending of the early
+years--when there were days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps
+his has been a divided house all these years; it may be that he has lost
+even Her for his work.
+
+The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the
+shop again. A man's work lives with him to the end--and beyond--that is
+the eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all
+doubts sink into the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life
+is awake; the heart of reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to
+an identity which cannot grow old.
+
+He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come to
+him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his
+lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below:
+That nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship;
+that the world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money
+for a life's task. The workman can only be paid in kind.
+
+It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They
+may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross
+seas and continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did
+it. His bench was just there--his house over yonder. Here is where he
+stood, and there he hung his coat." But these are only refinements of
+irony.... They may say, "This is his grandson." But that will only
+handicap or ruin the child, if he find not _his_ work. A thousand lesser
+workmen may improve his product, lighten it, accelerate its potency,
+adapt it to freight rates--but that is no concern of the dream.
+
+The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman
+finds himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has
+lost the love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness
+of the source of his being. He does not need to state it
+philosophically, for he lived it. He found the secret of blessedness, if
+not of happiness. At his bench, he integrated the life that lasts. He
+could have told you in the early years, if the world had not laughed. He
+would have learned himself more swiftly, had he been encouraged to tell,
+as he toiled--if the world had not shamed away the few who were drawn to
+his bench.
+
+But alone, he got it all at last--the passion and power of the spiritual
+workman which sustains him now, though his body has lain under the hill
+for fifty years. His shop is the place of a greater transaction than his
+task. The breadth and essence of it that lingers makes it a sacred place
+to the few who would take off their shoes to enter--were it not for the
+misunderstanding of the world.
+
+Out of the artificial he became natural; out of the workman, he emerged
+a man, a living soul.
+
+I would support every plan or dream of education, and none other, that
+seeks to find for the youth his life work. I would call upon every
+workman personally to help; and urge for every community, the goodness
+of its products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the
+world's premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit;
+and a stiff pressure upon the multiplication of these products by
+mechanical means, for we have too many common things, and so few fine
+things. I would inculcate in the educational ideal, first of all, that
+in every man there is a dream, just as there is a soul, and that _to
+express the dream of the soul in matter_ is the perfect individual
+performance. I would impress upon the youth that in all arts and crafts,
+the dream fades and the spirit of the product dies away, when many are
+made in the original likeness. Nature does not make duplicates; her
+creative hallmark is upon every leaf and bee; upon every cliff and cloud
+and star.
+
+I would not endow the young workman while he is learning his trade or
+art; but I would have the State intensely watchful of him, and
+impassioned with parental conviction that her greatness is inseparable
+with his possibilities of achievement. I would not make his ways short,
+but despise and crush all evidences of facility. I would keep him plain
+and lean and fit, and make him earn his peace. All fine work comes from
+the cultivation of the self, not from cultivated environment.... I
+dreamed for twenty years of a silent room and an open wood fire. I shall
+never cease to wonder at the marvel of it, now that it has come. It is
+so to-night alone in the stillness. The years of struggle to produce in
+the midst of din and distraction, while they wore as much as the work
+itself, were helpful to bring the concentration which every decent task
+demands; and in the thrill of which a man grows in reality, and not
+otherwise.
+
+
+
+
+7
+
+THE LITTLE GIRL
+
+
+It was determined that the children should try the country-town school
+that Spring from April to June. This school was said to be of
+exceptional quality, and I talked with the master, a good man. In fact,
+there was none but the general causes for criticism in this
+establishment--the same things I found amiss in city schools. The
+children accepted the situation with a philosophy of obedience which
+should have taught the race many things it does not yet know. The
+journey was considerable for them twice daily in warming weather; and
+from little things I heard from time to time, words dropped with no idea
+of rebellion, I was reminded of the dark drama of my own "Education,"
+written explicitly enough elsewhere and which I am glad to forget.
+
+The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the
+improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems
+are not structurally changed--facility and convenience, speed of
+transit, mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain,
+but more obvious, the science of covering ground....
+
+I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual
+child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from
+fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of
+whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how
+the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men
+cared to litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of
+additional assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the
+child had been taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about
+it (the book being designed to show the way to others) that struck me as
+avarice of the most violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for
+money and baronial holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the
+flesh are innocent compared to the sins of mind. This book and the
+tragic child form to my idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient
+and the obscene.
+
+The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the long
+past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:
+
+One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact
+from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.
+
+I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage
+aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and
+immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague
+failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of
+puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife,
+designed to smother that which was real in the heart.
+
+Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very
+sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it
+appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers
+among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their
+calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called
+upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children,
+having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the
+loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut
+the loaf evenly--to every one his equal part. The first crime was
+favoritism....
+
+I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in
+age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a
+boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically
+opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the
+mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely
+sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be
+bright; and yet, I found her all caught in rigidities of the brain,
+tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production
+was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place;
+the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding
+expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It
+was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a
+tithe of its tissue.
+
+The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.
+
+The boy next had not done well in school. The word _dreamer_ was
+designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me--the
+mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly
+told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if
+anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of
+almost phenomenal reproduction--and yet he had listened sleepily. Of
+course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this
+display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner
+voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to
+repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will
+come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show
+how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual,
+in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded
+schools.
+
+I had been one who thought my own work most important--to the exclusion
+even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is
+affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be
+disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on
+without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old
+Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and
+the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At
+meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and
+things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere--tension
+wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had
+he only known it.
+
+The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so
+well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined
+him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the
+time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was
+accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands,
+regard the bow of shore-line from the East window--the Other Shore--for
+a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the
+continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of
+production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard
+lessons resulting from breaking the point of the day's work before
+sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much
+breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.
+
+However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who
+wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what
+ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The
+answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the
+front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this
+Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood--the backward
+and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere--in
+short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all
+life--vibration. He arose and started up the bank.
+
+"Don't go yet," the little girl called.
+
+"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."
+
+There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was
+still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness
+of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was
+Summer. The smell of the land was there--the perfume of the Old Mother
+herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose--the blend of all that
+springs into being.
+
+"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she
+smells like a tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant,
+but the breath of all--as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you
+winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like
+mignonette--not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but
+when the wind brings it."
+
+He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought
+about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality
+of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed
+is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for
+years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his
+faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here
+was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming
+clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly
+glorified in her morning veil.
+
+"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen
+and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not
+yours until you express them. And the things _you_ express, as I
+expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the
+things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can
+do it."
+
+She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.
+
+The Old Man forgot her in a moment.
+
+That was the real beginning.
+
+Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again)
+had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a
+distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other,
+but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference,
+however. I had no fewer _good_ mornings than formerly; and yet, any
+heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and
+intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her
+happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged
+there.
+
+She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently
+with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation
+of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:
+
+"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves
+as below. It might happen that in a few years--this relation might be
+changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us
+now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come
+in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than
+I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one.
+I sit in the midst of you--telling you from day to day of the things I
+have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan.
+My first years here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently
+the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When
+you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much
+I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days,
+for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must
+reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of
+Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow
+filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with
+the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old
+become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate
+matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in
+relation to the long life--the importance only of one bead on the
+endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us
+that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight
+moment--that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the
+lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned
+to tell."
+
+I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I
+believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the
+more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to
+bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent
+generations did not possess, and from the absence of which much
+deformity and sorrow has come to be.
+
+The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her
+own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to
+one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the
+organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it
+never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be
+at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture
+of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in
+the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter
+a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the
+thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face--a mistake
+of meaning impossible.
+
+Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail
+purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting
+her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I
+wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul--if the expression
+can be forgiven.
+
+I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not
+find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a
+sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to
+our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in
+relation to one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression
+in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human
+conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant
+within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties
+of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this
+giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis,
+and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house
+closes upon the growing child--that more and more as the years draw on,
+the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of
+men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are
+given to utter remains unexpressed.
+
+I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be
+prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager
+to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles
+and the words of even a child significant.
+
+I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but
+must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved
+for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening
+genius is the thing that has made immortal--shoemakers, blacksmiths and
+the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from the
+past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of
+life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but
+a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.
+
+
+
+
+8
+
+THE ABBOT
+
+
+He was a still boy--the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on
+the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him
+without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the
+affairs of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued
+me from his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with
+another lad during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew
+no nearer to acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the
+evening I would see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the
+sense that his regard was somehow different, I believe, did impress me
+vaguely. It all happened in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I
+remember his "hello," cheerful but contained, as I would ride by. He was
+always still as a gull, and seemed natural with the dusk upon him....
+One day his father said to me:
+
+"I have to buy everything you write for him."
+
+"Well, well," said I.
+
+I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only
+fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward,
+because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I
+heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him
+over to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all
+that I had and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he
+was seven or eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort
+that awakened him. He had it read to him several times, but his own
+reading picked up at that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study
+does under driving interest. Presently he was out after the star books
+on his own hook. He suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and
+that night I got my first look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It
+was like some magnetic hand upon my breast. I could not speak. Every
+time I shut my eyes afterward I saw that bright gold jewel afar in the
+dark. We talked.... Presently I heard that he hated school, but this did
+not come from him. The fact is, I heard little or nothing from him.
+
+This generation behind us--at least, the few I have met and loved--is
+not made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to
+wait. It is most convincing, to have events clean up a fact which you
+misunderstood; to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any
+glibness, but leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He
+did not come to the Study unless called for. The little girl brought in
+word from him from time to time, and the little girl's mother, and the
+boy's father--a very worthy man. I heard again that he was not doing
+well in school. I knew he was significant, very much so, having met the
+real boy on star-matters. I knew that the trouble was they were making
+him look down at school, when he wanted to look up. His parents came
+over to dinner one day, and I said:
+
+"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."
+
+It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at
+that time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little
+girl's education on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me
+even then that my own time was rather well filled. Neither his father
+nor mother enthused, and I heard no more from the subject for many days.
+Meeting The Abbot finally, I asked him what of school.
+
+"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."
+
+"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said--about you coming to me
+for a time?"
+
+"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know
+what it would cost."
+
+I told him it wouldn't cost anything. There was a chance to talk with
+his father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still
+suffering weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the
+Study. It seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it
+after an hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of
+weather and country.
+
+"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner
+each day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to
+deal with so many."
+
+"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.
+
+It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man
+whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.
+
+"That's why I want him," said I.
+
+"But the thing is, we don't want him--a----"
+
+"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come
+true--even if they are little ones----"
+
+"Yes."
+
+I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations,
+without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to
+follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his
+relatives. Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only
+touched me on terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived
+in my heart, and those who were searching my books to find out were in
+the main only the more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by
+not asking for anything in the way of money.
+
+However, the thing came to be.
+
+My first idea was to take him alone--the little girl coming in the
+morning with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had
+been accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both.
+I sat down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there
+was no sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his
+eyes sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at
+first some sort of recognition that I was talking--but none came,
+neither nod of acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They
+said as he passed the house farther along the Shore after leaving the
+Study, that his head was bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with
+years.
+
+I tried afresh each day--feared that I was not reaching him. I told him
+the things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some
+of the things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I
+known enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but
+couldn't get a visible result. He was writing little things for me at
+this time and, though I detected something in the work more than he
+showed me, sitting opposite in the Study, his writing was turgid and
+unlit--like one playing on an instrument he did not understand; indeed,
+it was like a man talking in his sleep. At the end of one of the talks
+within the first week, at wit's end as to what I was accomplishing, I
+said:
+
+"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."
+
+I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me--it came back like a
+phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own
+understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from
+members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in
+Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the
+pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a
+colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of
+the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to
+me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days
+later--just to be sure. The result was the same.
+
+I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical
+memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in
+every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if
+your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his
+belongings, when called upon to do something with his hands for
+another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind.
+One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all
+values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that
+the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if
+this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from
+which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he
+is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of
+these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces
+them.
+
+However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the
+lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to
+tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to
+read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little,
+the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did
+that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving--that he could
+grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the
+ground--that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far
+more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if
+permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant,
+however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters
+of fact and technicality.
+
+Finding that he listened so well--that it was merely one of the
+inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me--I, of
+course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to
+overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should
+say to him until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first,
+but that passed. Presently it occurred to me that things were happening
+in the Study with the boy, that the little girl could ill afford to
+miss; and also that he would feel more at ease if I could divide my
+attention upon him with another, so I rearranged her plans somewhat, and
+there were two.
+
+As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I related
+certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from
+scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely
+from a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak
+authoritatively, merely as one adding certain phases I had found
+interesting of an illimitable subject. The next day he slipped in alone
+and a bit early, his "hello" hushed. I looked up and he said, almost
+trembling:
+
+"I had a wonderful night."
+
+The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst
+of great happenings.
+
+"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.
+
+"It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.
+
+His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called
+his paper--
+
+     A VOICE THROUGH A LENS
+
+     Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the
+     day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had
+     last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream.
+     I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was
+     reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy
+     containing the nebular theory, and another that told about
+     the planetary chain.
+
+     The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory,
+     but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into
+     the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical
+     form but in another--the first time I have ever lost my
+     physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes
+     still on.
+
+     As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I
+     heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The
+     Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly
+     drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could
+     drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...
+
+     I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an
+     observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold.
+     As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large
+     telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was
+     upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory
+     like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great
+     telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the
+     eye-piece. As I looked around the heavens to find the great
+     spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a
+     voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the
+     way. Follow me."
+
+     I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of
+     planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not
+     making any indication of steps, but the close connection of
+     the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a
+     screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until
+     it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This
+     no doubt is a complicated affair to you."
+
+     "Yes."
+
+     "Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any
+     clearer."
+
+     I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large
+     globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all
+     rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly
+     mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail
+     of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there
+     was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there
+     were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one
+     gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was
+     covered with animals of every description--a mass, a chaos of
+     animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in
+     battle, the next two showed the development of these
+     men--gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did
+     not see.
+
+     I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I
+     heard the voice again:
+
+     "I suppose you are still amazed."
+
+     "Yes."
+
+     "Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The
+     great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in
+     the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a
+     second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes
+     you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the
+     evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and
+     melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things
+     emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew
+     and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower
+     globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle
+     of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes
+     life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another
+     seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps
+     progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may
+     look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."
+
+     When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful
+     globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery
+     of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a
+     roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills,
+     also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook
+     which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It
+     seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped
+     over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the
+     sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose
+     limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear
+     like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I
+     heard the voice again:
+
+     "You must go now, tell the people what you saw, and some
+     other night you will see the globe of spirituality more
+     closely."
+
+     I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my
+     room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to
+     see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked
+     out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with
+     the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here
+     and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic
+     voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be
+     able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about
+     the seventh globe some time again.
+
+
+
+
+9
+
+THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL
+
+
+The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:
+
+"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the
+girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it.
+She's the noblest girl I know."
+
+That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to
+me at the time and set me to thinking.
+
+"How old is she?"
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"What is she interested in?"
+
+"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."
+
+"You might ask her to come."
+
+I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the
+end of a week he remarked:
+
+"She is coming."
+
+It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the
+lane together.... She took a seat by the door--she takes it still, the
+same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a
+sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in
+justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's
+and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called
+her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She
+had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell
+back upon the theme of all themes to me--a man's work, the meaning of
+it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this
+was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said
+something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered
+the ultimate heresy--that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for
+the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot
+long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken
+his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any
+other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the
+straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and
+blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that
+it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and
+religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one reaches the top,
+the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are
+one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense
+of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and
+integrating the life that lasts.
+
+I have said this before in this book--in other books. I may say it
+again. It is the truth to me--truth that the world is in need of. I am
+sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is
+production. Handling the production of others in some cases is
+production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural
+synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true
+in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.
+
+The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own
+early essay classes. Old friends were here again--Introduction,
+Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where
+they would make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her
+work was spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the
+teachers, that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for
+their ideas to authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change
+the entire order and impulse of their craft.
+
+She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not
+penetrated it. I was afraid to open the throttle anywhere, lest she
+break and drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment
+after she was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.
+
+"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.
+
+Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty.
+We had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to
+expect and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness
+and impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he
+returned it to me.
+
+"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."
+
+When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal
+impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken
+the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger."
+There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but
+partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the
+principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I
+could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The
+Valley-Road Girl's discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful
+sense.
+
+The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about
+Fichte. The old German is greatly loved and revered in this Study. He
+set us free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a
+portion of one of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the
+Universe." The next day I read her paper--and there was a beam in it.
+
+I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get
+away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set
+me clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their
+work, in the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two
+papers--held the substance of the whole matter--stumbled upon as usual.
+We had a grand time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his
+positions, writing to his countrymen--a wanderer, an awakened soul. And
+this brought us the hosts of great ones--the Burned Ones and their
+exaltations--George Fox and the Maid of Domremy--the everlasting spirit
+behind and above mortal affairs--the poor impotency of wood-fire to
+quench such immortality. Her eyes gleamed--and all our hearts burned.
+
+"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to
+deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the
+skies. All things that are done--let them alone. The undone things
+challenge us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions
+which have not yet found substance--is already prepared for the workmen
+of to-day to bring into matter--all great poems and inventions for the
+good of the world. They must gleam into being through our minds. The
+mind of some workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened
+as yet; the sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake.
+Inertia is always of matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the
+light. When the shutters of the mind are opened and the grey appears, he
+will arise and, looking forth, will discover his work.
+
+"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the
+great, _the impossible_ tasks. But the mind must be entered by the
+Light--the heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."
+
+That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was
+not an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that
+my task with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with
+The Abbot--that he was dynamic within and required only the developed
+instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with
+obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally
+splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real
+self through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we
+all deeply missed her presence from the Study.
+
+Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she
+brought me the following which told the story in her own words of
+something she had met:
+
+     WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN
+
+     Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can
+     you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing
+     made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with
+     me the things I am struggling to explain.
+
+     I like to look back at those times when everything to me was
+     new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very
+     own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick
+     raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me
+     that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to
+     indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for
+     each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to
+     school.
+
+     There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its
+     head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul.
+     The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man
+     must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not
+     keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop
+     and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came
+     to learn.
+
+     At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I
+     had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was
+     accused of copying; that was the first wound. How I would
+     have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is
+     trusted.
+
+     At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One
+     of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have
+     some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was
+     intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation
+     for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged
+     competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more
+     studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well
+     as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school
+     friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our
+     hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's
+     misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends.
+     Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school
+     we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I
+     have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my
+     school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child
+     filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his
+     egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is
+     hard for such a one to love his neighbour.
+
+     The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is
+     the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the
+     miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.
+
+     The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me
+     how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own
+     eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work
+     all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing
+     well that the teacher would praise his perfect reflection.
+     Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut
+     that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.
+
+     Unless the school can trust children, show them that they
+     should also be interested in their less fortunate
+     school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular
+     work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A
+     child had much better remain at home, a simple but
+     whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and
+     wise books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes.
+This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender
+and wise:
+
+     MAY EVENING
+
+     A spirit of restlessness ruled me. Each night I retired with
+     the hope that the morning would find it gone. It disturbed my
+     sleep. It was not the constant discontent I had hitherto felt
+     with the world. This was a new disquietude.
+
+     One May evening I followed our little river down to the place
+     it flows into the Lake. Slowly the light of day faded. From
+     my seat upon the green bank of a stream, a wonderful picture
+     stretched before me. The small stream and the surrounding
+     country were walled in by dense green trees. To the west the
+     cool, dark depths parted only wide enough for the creek to
+     disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in
+     the southern wall, I caught glimpses of the summer cottages
+     on the sandy shore. To the north stretched the pasture-lands
+     with shade-trees happy to hide their nakedness with thick
+     foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace. To
+     the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty
+     outline of trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the
+     western sky. Two men paddled a boat out into the light and
+     disappeared under the bridge. Nothing disturbed the peace of
+     the stream save the dip of the paddles, and the fish rising
+     to the surface for food. A circle on the surface meant that
+     an insect had lain at its centre; a fish had risen and
+     devoured it. Circles of this kind were continually being cut
+     by the circumferences of other circles.... A dark speck moved
+     down the stream. A turtle was voyaging.
+
+     Now, far in the shadows, I saw a man sitting on the bank
+     fishing. His patience and persistence were remarkable, for he
+     had been there all the time. But the fish were at play. The
+     occasional splash of the carp, mingling with the perpetual
+     song of the birds and the distant roar of the waves breaking
+     on the shore to the south, formed one grand over-tone.
+
+     A feeling of awe came over me. I felt my insignificance. I
+     saw the hand of God. My relation to my surroundings was very
+     clear. My soul bowed to the God-ness in all things natural.
+     The God-ness in me was calling to be released. It was useless
+     to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It
+     must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an
+     echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought
+     becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was
+     readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be applied
+     and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by
+     inward feelings. This was my soul's complaint.
+
+     No tree was exactly like one of its neighbours. Each
+     fulfilled its purpose in its particular way. Yet all
+     proclaimed the One Source. Performing its function, it was
+     fit to censure me and I took the cup.
+
+     ... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the
+     little stream; heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was
+     weeping tears of sympathy for one so short-sighted and drawn
+     to failure.
+
+
+
+
+10
+
+COMPASSION
+
+
+I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the
+difference between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two
+of fourteen and seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be
+herself. She has never been patronised; and in the last year or more has
+been actively encouraged to express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as
+stated, she has no particular talent for writing. She is the one who
+wants to be a mother. Not in the least precocious, her charm is quite
+equal for little girls or her elders. Her favourite companions until
+recently were those of her own age.
+
+On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they
+want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the
+passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
+matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech
+and reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected
+thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of
+existence--had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old
+artist, are the very passages of power.
+
+"... Except that ye become as little children----" that is the
+beginning of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in
+religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the
+world, or most of them, and all have told the same story--look to Rodin,
+Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of
+the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied
+men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior
+purpose, confronted the lie with the realities of their own nature, and
+fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is so often the
+unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched open, as
+they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and more like
+little children at the end.
+
+The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must
+have the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality
+of the modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation,
+because the old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our
+hearts.... I was promising an untold something for a future lesson to
+the little girl yesterday, just as she was getting to work. The
+anticipation disturbed the present moment, and she said:
+
+"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek----"
+
+Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a
+song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the
+perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me--in the sunlight and
+elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it
+was so near--every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the
+pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I
+was already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song
+was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the
+Old Mother--that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was
+gone--a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this
+sentence in the room:
+
+"... _sang four songs and flew away._"
+
+It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of
+course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression.
+However, no after explanations will help--if the art of the thing is not
+apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman
+said--"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."
+
+And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a
+Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights
+are at half-mast."
+
+She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child
+in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her
+reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all
+within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get
+it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as
+much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to
+express that which he has seen--which is so small compared to the big
+colour and atmosphere."
+
+I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a
+picture.
+
+A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a
+story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked
+as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."
+
+Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment _to get
+started_, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end
+of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it
+slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays
+upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded
+white----"
+
+Or:
+
+"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring
+beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little
+woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering
+at their little legs, I felt a part----"
+
+I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to
+write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,--at
+least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction
+that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could
+get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something
+very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner
+pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do
+that--to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression.
+The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has
+emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a
+life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his
+deepest inner listening--in which the trained mind-instrument is
+quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater
+source within.
+
+The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me,
+among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I
+find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her
+expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I
+administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening
+out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart
+Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his
+work--honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's
+ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You
+will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept
+the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the
+doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's
+"Walking"--there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to
+Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer.
+The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It
+was not that I wanted her to _get_ Mill or Burke, but that the mental
+exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or
+masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams,
+playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.
+
+Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child
+becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
+Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the
+mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they
+are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith
+without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best
+developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes
+from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.
+
+In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the
+case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even
+to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly
+inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road
+Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the
+first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have
+related something of the process.
+
+The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of
+intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is
+only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational
+systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual
+potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of
+which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from
+within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an
+heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in
+the present scheme of things.
+
+Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly
+various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount
+to, are all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the
+calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the
+world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five
+consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot
+get through to the world except through the brain.
+
+In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe
+that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of
+the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is naïve, not
+to have explained before, that from the view these things are written
+the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression--most superb and
+admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a
+listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the
+machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without
+but within.
+
+If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison,
+having been forced to turn their eyes within--you will find a hint to
+the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom
+solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the
+time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior
+promptings for their mental activity--the passage entirely closed
+between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary
+confinement makes madmen of such--if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.
+
+The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the
+current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward,
+or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed
+only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to
+be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you
+powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his
+disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of
+equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed
+intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not
+ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.
+
+A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten
+proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take
+his place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own
+individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any
+sense of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a
+man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the
+sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham
+and a delusion.
+
+Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the
+Unity of all Existing Things (which is literally brooding upon this
+planet in these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of
+the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy.
+Time has made the greatest of the _sheer_ intellects of the past appear
+apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each
+racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of
+remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the
+conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire,
+Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.
+
+Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything
+fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant
+within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this
+awakening is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of
+this greater day, in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion,
+the Unity of All Things is descried.
+
+
+
+
+11
+
+THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK
+
+
+"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have
+done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of
+China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to
+read."
+
+So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future
+work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him
+with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries,
+even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the
+setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the
+monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the
+psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event,
+the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.
+
+The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent
+along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her
+lap--and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:
+
+"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and
+now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so
+good."
+
+"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write
+until you begin to dream as you write--until you forget hand and paper
+and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain
+interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."
+
+In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will
+get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an
+idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy
+back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who
+come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these
+papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a
+ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more
+cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the
+quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:
+
+     Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build
+     his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere--in Germany,
+     in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen
+     with her in the wild places.
+
+     In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the
+     Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted
+     to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and
+     square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than
+     others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees,
+     such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve
+     their branches without the thought of being cut down for a
+     sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings.
+     Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at
+     the feet of these trees and ask questions that _disgraced_
+     Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower
+     fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple
+     little stones.
+
+     Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds
+     like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century
+     instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up.
+     The thing I _really_ wanted to write about this morning was
+     the goodness of being alive here in winter.
+
+After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows
+and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes
+up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow,
+all through the sky.
+
+Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look
+like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.
+
+Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last
+shades of night pass out of the sky.
+
+Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot
+look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam--just enough to make you feel
+like work.
+
+A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening
+the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of
+our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A
+wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many
+lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are
+killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous
+and vulgar ways--maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end.
+Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year
+these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them
+and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition
+is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies
+and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of
+higher Nature, which men should know.
+
+In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes
+going about their work--I mean their _own_ work and affairs. To me it
+seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't
+got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering:
+"Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."
+
+I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see
+the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery
+capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all
+this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are
+small, but too big _for them_, and make a little clatter as they go over
+the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or
+somewhere that I do not know of.
+
+The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The
+trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp
+from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh
+and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but
+if one moves quickly they all run away.
+
+I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old
+gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There
+were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must
+have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready.
+Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a
+friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and
+spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with
+me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn
+much more about them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low
+street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was
+something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might
+think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep,
+but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped
+short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me
+something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of
+the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told
+her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:
+
+     "... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one
+     thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me
+     something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or
+     tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can
+     get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because
+     after the voice stops these three things run through my mind,
+     just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought
+     which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and
+     the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to
+     be connected with Mother in some way; something she said
+     many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and
+     she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I
+     asked for."
+
+I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest
+things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for
+fulfilments at once.
+
+"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not
+be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every
+day, and perhaps something will come."
+
+These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on
+Roses:
+
+     If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old
+     Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot
+     express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at
+     them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to
+     pull me right out of the body and out into another world
+     where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose
+     the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real
+     tea roses.
+
+     I took three roses into a house--a red one, a white one, very
+     much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that
+     takes me into the other world--the kind of yellow rose that
+     sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room
+     every day.
+
+     A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.
+
+     "Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that
+     is!"
+
+     "Which one do you like best?" I asked.
+
+     "The red one, of course," the girl answered.
+
+     "Why, the other two are much----" I began.
+
+     "No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one
+     likes them red ones best?"
+
+     I walked away. I believe that city people who never see
+     Nature, know her better from their reading than country
+     people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk
+     on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country
+     people like red roses because they are like them. The red
+     roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow
+     teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow
+     bigger. They are not ashamed.
+
+     A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put
+     into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it
+     is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down
+     under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose
+     spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have
+     been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is
+     fine enough for them, and it has come--and others. Months
+     afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses
+     come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all
+     wonderful?
+
+I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey
+Day:
+
+     Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan
+     shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little
+     wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the
+     crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of
+     wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the
+     harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday
+     scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had
+     begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the
+     window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I
+     could not finish that essay; I had to write something about
+     the grey happy day.
+
+     On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always
+     so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was
+     on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made
+     us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water,
+     cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and
+     pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see
+     that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only
+     one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if
+     they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you,
+     they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander
+     through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the
+     sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many
+     different faces, different and strange lands and people.
+     Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and
+     everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge
+     dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away.
+     The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new
+     ones come.
+
+
+A TALK
+
+What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole
+lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time
+spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I
+have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to
+the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short
+talk from one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes
+the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally
+wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from
+going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.
+
+At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the
+angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard,
+flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange,
+wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little
+brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the
+fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so
+to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a
+whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the
+green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just
+go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of
+brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves
+are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their
+hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love
+them. But that is all, for they are working hard.
+
+If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be
+able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together,
+and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And
+one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any _old_ thing.
+
+What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has
+stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all
+the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking
+up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that
+woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy
+by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches
+would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many
+other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.
+
+
+
+
+12
+
+TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT
+
+
+It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable,
+the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I
+concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a
+house--in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been
+seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles
+of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:
+
+"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take
+another look at your little stone study."
+
+I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him
+that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He
+found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped
+some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father
+fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine
+stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass,
+the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he
+was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the
+picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff,
+casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work,
+even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.
+
+"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I
+can frame it up for you."
+
+When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it
+was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came
+from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty,
+and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward
+there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the
+afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested
+to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so
+positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the
+contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the
+lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a
+bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.
+
+This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my
+well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in
+his own cellar:
+
+"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let
+me."
+
+He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and
+spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.
+
+"And it's all paid for?" I asked.
+
+He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."
+
+"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for
+it?"
+
+"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."
+
+That was not to be forgotten.
+
+So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand
+under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the
+foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house,
+because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer
+sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When
+they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had
+pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.
+
+As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down
+upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had
+ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had
+learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors,
+merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores
+or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social
+system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.
+
+There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have
+fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in
+the village still, but different.
+
+Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a
+small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched
+their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted
+upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields
+for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of
+enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one
+evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a
+kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of
+the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An
+old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap
+out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky
+patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted
+the paddle.
+
+There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening
+and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to
+my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from
+the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw
+the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it.
+The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and
+the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.
+
+The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made
+the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like
+a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us
+the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of
+a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No
+word.
+
+The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed
+him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went
+back. It was _all_ uninteresting night to me now--beauty,
+picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't
+even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night
+the Canadian said:
+
+"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to
+camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends--young and old,
+even the young married people. They point--back and upward--as if one
+pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's
+tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring
+anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to
+the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them,
+sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring,
+the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the
+race is passing. They do not resist--they do not care to live
+differently."
+
+Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's
+nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it
+would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have
+amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town,
+when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups
+of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build
+the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another
+incident:
+
+... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so
+well--had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his
+bare flesh--that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how
+well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the
+water on the Sabbath (from their homes back on the automobile routes and
+the interurban lines), and for what they do not get of the natural
+beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However, they didn't
+miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.
+
+They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was
+shameless.
+
+Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in
+most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious
+of itself--and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either
+shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the
+trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent
+these shores.
+
+The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that
+is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth--and vision
+requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive,
+scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they
+are prone to sink.
+
+It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
+have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations.
+We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women
+with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not
+come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to
+satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of
+human reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards,
+and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work,
+that subject.
+
+In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have
+debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not
+beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this
+heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of
+this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.
+
+The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
+thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to
+educate the countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not
+appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would
+frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one
+may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin
+white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting
+mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while
+each day on his own grass-plot without shocking the natives or losing
+his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to
+express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in
+the case of the countryside which complained.
+
+They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without
+knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face
+to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is
+above the level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all
+the living lights--the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not
+glorify them, as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to
+Questing--man's real and most significant business. They do not know
+that which is good or evil in food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in
+houses, lands or faith. They live in a low, lazy rhythm and attract unto
+themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes
+this in their children, in their schools and most pathetically in their
+churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with
+tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the
+hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low established forces, and
+only the more splendid of these young people have the integrity of
+spirit to rise above the resistance.
+
+As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly
+naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find
+some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a
+descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where
+the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian
+rather than individual. The year around, these people wear
+clothing,--woollen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron,
+touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering
+quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.
+
+They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with
+as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and
+legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh
+and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a
+price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen
+pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love
+is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with
+the sense of possession.
+
+They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
+good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret
+of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of
+the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be
+conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work
+is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may
+the where-with to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and
+the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold
+the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and
+half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men,
+static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering
+from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them
+the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be
+erect in other than bone and sinew.
+
+They cover their bodies--but they do not cover their faces nor their
+minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed!_
+They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds
+without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint
+of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to
+reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the
+world-crowd, whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and
+motion-photography.
+
+The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our
+ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is
+ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask
+of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each
+other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is
+deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a
+community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is
+merely an unlettered thing.
+
+No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one
+who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind
+that has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's
+treasures from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive
+in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously
+furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have
+found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of
+appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor
+generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will
+hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.
+
+All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The
+essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and
+understanding--and these are qualities that come from evolution of the
+soul just as every other fine thing comes.
+
+We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening--love and
+life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter....
+But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness
+is designed to smother an awakened soul. You have to bring God to him in
+his own terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that
+he is serving his God. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his
+sons and daughters quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of
+fear or curses them for straying.
+
+I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos
+and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review of
+life as I had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact
+that one little contract for certain interior installations was strung
+over five months, and surprised me with the possibilities of
+inefficiency and untruth, is long since forgotten. The water runs. Ten
+days after peace was established here, all my wounds were healing by
+first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at work on a new contract
+the day after they left me, the pity that surged through my breast was
+strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct of their days was a
+drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of materials, an arriving
+at something like order against the grittiest odds, and they must do it
+again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the evening--but
+the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is knowledge.
+
+I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the
+world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve,
+but it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead.
+The paths behind do not contain them; the simplicity of peasants and
+lowly communities is not merely unlettered. One does not need to deal
+with one small town; it is everywhere. The ways of the crowds are small
+ways. We wrong ourselves and bring imperfection to our tasks when we
+forget that. We love the Indian crossing the stream in the great and
+gracious night--but God pity the Indian's dog. We must look close at
+life, and not lie to ourselves, because our ways are cushioning a
+little.
+
+All idealism that turns back must suffer the fate of mere sentiments. We
+must know the stuff the crowds are made of, if we have a hand in
+bringing in the order and beauty. You have heard men exclaim:
+
+"How noble are the simple-minded--how sweet the people of the
+Countryside--how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As
+a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the
+voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth;
+and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in
+politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the
+people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any
+dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.
+
+The rising workman in any art or craft learns by suffering that all good
+is ahead and not elsewhere; that he must dare to be himself even if
+forced to go hungry for that honour; that he must not lose his love for
+men, though he must lose his illusions. Sooner or later, when he is
+ready, one brilliant little fact rises in his consciousness--one that
+comes to stay, and around which all future thinking must build itself.
+It is this:
+
+When one lifts the mask from any crowd, commonness is disclosed in
+every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds
+of common people are the soil of the future, a splendid mass
+potentially, the womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.
+
+All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the
+people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First
+the dreamer dreams--and then the people make it action....
+
+What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture,
+the back of the tapestry.
+
+To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every
+force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many;
+he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from
+the thing done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to
+give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise
+for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as
+absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.
+
+The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man
+who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade
+intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked
+for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The
+personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of
+three kinds: He may desert his vision entirely and return to operate
+among the infinite small doors of the many--which is cowardice and the
+grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few
+who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful
+devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not
+heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who
+revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its
+wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The
+grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman.
+He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....
+
+The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world.
+Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision--all good
+comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely,
+which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater
+failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he
+may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings
+beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in
+this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary
+victory.
+
+The real workman then--vibrating between compassion and contempt--his
+body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his
+task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to
+have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic
+levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown
+here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.
+
+
+
+
+13
+
+NATURAL CRUELTY
+
+
+In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first
+things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and
+the grown man all the states of evolution are vaguely reviewed, as they
+are, in fact, in that more rapid and mysterious passage between
+conception and birth. Young nations pass through the same phases, and
+some of them are abominable. The sense of power is a dangerous thing.
+The child feels it in his hands, and the nation feels it in its first
+victory.... In the Chapel during a period of several days we talked
+about the wonder of animals (the little boys of the house present) and
+the results were so interesting that I put together some of the things
+discussed in the following form, calling the paper Adventures in
+Cruelty:
+
+     As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain
+     matters of charity as we used to regard them are vulgar now.
+     I remember when a great sign, THE HOME OF THE
+     FRIENDLESS, used to stare obscenely at thousands of city
+     school children, as we passed daily through a certain street.
+     Though it is gone now, something of the curse of it is still
+     upon the premises. I always think of what a certain observer
+     said:
+
+     "You would not think the Christ had ever come to a world,
+     where men could give such a name to a house of love-babies."
+
+     I remember, too, when there formerly appeared from time to
+     time on the streets, during the long summers, _different_
+     green-blue wagons. The drivers were different, too--I recall
+     one was a hunchback. These outfits formed one of the
+     fascinating horrors of our bringing-up--the fork, the noose,
+     the stray dog tossed into a maddened pulp of stray dogs, the
+     door slammed, and no word at all from the driver--nothing we
+     could build on, or learn his character by. He was a part of
+     the law, and we were taught then that the law was
+     everlastingly right, that we must grind our characters
+     against it.... But the green-blue wagons are gone, and the
+     Law has come to conform a bit with the character of youth.
+
+     The time is not long since when we met our adventures in
+     cruelty alone--no concert of enlightened citizens on these
+     subjects--and only the very few had found the flaw in the
+     gospel that God had made the animals, and all the little
+     animals, for delectation and service of man. Possibly there
+     is a bit of galvanic life still in the teaching, but it
+     cannot be said to belong to the New Age.
+
+     Economic efficiency has altered many styles for the better.
+     Formerly western drovers used to drive their herds into the
+     brush for the winters. The few that the winter and the wolves
+     didn't get were supposed to be hardy enough to demand a
+     price. It was found, however, that wintering-out cost the
+     beasts more in vitality than they would spend in seven years
+     of labour; that the result was decrepit colts and stringy
+     dwarfs for the beef market. Also there was agitation on the
+     subject, and the custom passed. City men who owned horses in
+     large numbers found their _efficiency_ brought to a higher
+     notch at the sacrifice of a little more air and food, warmth
+     and rest. There is a far-drive to this appeal, and there are
+     those who believe that it will see us through to the
+     millennium.
+
+     A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country
+     there was an old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red
+     and white like Stevenson's cow that ate the meadow flowers.
+     Her name was Mary--Mr. Devlin's Mary. The Devlin children
+     played with us, and they were like other children in every
+     way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves
+     disappeared annually (one of the mysteries) and the Devlin
+     children were brought up on Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they
+     said, but pure cream. We came to know Mary, because she was
+     always on the roadside--no remote back-pastures for her. She
+     loved the children and had to know what passed. We used to
+     deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting
+     the last circlet fastened, old Mary would tire of the game
+     and walk sedately out of the ring--just as she would when a
+     baby calf had enough or some novice had been milking too
+     long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus
+     think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we
+     passed her--to and from school. It was said that she could
+     negotiate any gate or lock.
+
+     "Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin
+     house, we saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they
+     were tying Mary behind. She was led forth. I remember the
+     whites of her eyes and her twisted head. Only that, in a kind
+     of sickening and pervading blackness. The calf cried to her,
+     and Mary answered, and thus they passed.... 'But she is old.
+     She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin
+     children said.
+
+     "Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke
+     to certain grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy
+     that was mine. No one criticised Devlin. It was the custom,
+     they said.... Even the butcher had heard of old Mary.... You
+     see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a
+     child--but you never can know what it showed me of the world.
+     None of us who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have
+     not since. I cannot."
+
+Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had
+been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and
+beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I
+wanted butter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted
+a front-yard cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady
+that had eyes the children would see fairies in----
+
+"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of
+yours----"
+
+"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"
+
+"Yes, sound as a trivet."
+
+"A good yielder?"
+
+"All of that."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the
+milktime, there isn't much left for beef----"
+
+"But I don't want to eat her."
+
+"But as an investment--you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down--they
+don't weigh much at the butcher's."
+
+The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good
+economy so prevalent as to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's
+exactly why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related
+the episode to a man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:
+
+"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's
+abominations in a city street yesterday--cart with crate, new calf
+inside, old moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter--a very
+interesting tumbril, but she hadn't conspired against the government.
+For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little
+bewildered bit of veal--and now we were to eat what was left of her....
+Also I passed through a certain railway yard of a big city last
+holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live
+chickens were piled there awaiting shipment--crushed into eight-inch
+crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an
+atrocious horror like that--a man being held in a torture-cell in such a
+position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve,
+to say nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this
+thing before--yet never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A
+man must see a thing like that just right, in full meaning, and then
+tell it again and again--until enough others see, to make it dangerous
+to ship that way. I got the idea then, 'Suppose a man would make it his
+life-work to change those crates--to make those crates such a stench and
+abomination, that poultry butchers would not dare use them. What a
+worthy life work that would be!...' And then I thought, 'Why leave it
+for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is everything," he
+concluded.
+
+There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about
+his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task
+came to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see
+the big thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then
+very often a man sets out to find a passage to India and gets a New
+World. In any case, to put four inches on the chicken-crates of America
+is very much a man's job, when one considers the relation of tariff to
+bulk in freight and express.
+
+Yet there is _efficiency_ even to that added expenditure--a very
+thrilling one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have
+ever felt the heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and
+suffered the lassitude and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for
+you to believe the demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is
+another; and the breaking down of tissue as a result of continued
+torture is caused by still another poison. The point is that we consume
+these poisons. The government is very active in preventing certain
+diseased meats from reaching our tables, but these of fear, rage,
+blood-madness and last-days-of-agony are subtler diseases which have so
+far had little elucidation.
+
+Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed
+to forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged
+in slaughtering--nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of
+an opera cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and
+bloom. It went around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in
+the wild to-day because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles
+change--but there is much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time
+the Messiah of the lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens
+found theirs in the city yards.
+
+The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression
+of cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether
+clear the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace,
+merely because cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped
+to spare the helpless creatures a tithe of their suffering, but that
+will not suffice now. A clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work
+to bring it about.
+
+Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his
+beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough
+for us to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver,
+but it has been found that more is required. You may threaten him with
+the police, even with lynching; you may frighten him away from his
+manhandling for the moment--but in some alley, he is alone with his
+horse afterward. His rage has only been flamed by resistance met. It is
+he who puts the poor creature to bed.
+
+The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime,
+for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters
+the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely
+physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively
+intense, the higher they are carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of
+knowing things; it is the coarseness of fibre which resists all the
+fairer and finer bits of human reality. Just so long as men fail to
+master the animals of which they are composed, the poor beasts about
+them will be harrowingly treated.
+
+So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied
+for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general
+education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting
+the human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.
+
+On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one
+of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be
+freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these
+were not valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious
+fashion. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed--with a few
+days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the
+fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above
+the price of the hide--to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big
+city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts
+to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would
+have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for
+the shipment.
+
+The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought
+all that was stopped long ago----"
+
+Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that
+is to run a blockade, if the premium is right--so will a certain element
+of trade take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of
+people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't
+being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of
+manhood proper.
+
+The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the
+mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the
+lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The
+remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the
+stimulus to come from without instead of from within.
+
+Custom is a formidable enemy--that herd instinct of a people which
+causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day
+everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out
+the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one
+expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students
+when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are
+children to do when their parents shout _mad-dog_ and run for clubs and
+pitch-forks at the passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster
+when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot?
+Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.
+
+The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences--upon
+astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology--are the results of flashes
+of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof
+against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its
+burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and
+cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing
+to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up
+into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.
+
+Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready
+to change--that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile,
+receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so
+ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our
+relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready
+for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be
+closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the
+problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that
+much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often
+again we set out to discover the passage to India and reach the shores
+of a New World.
+
+
+
+
+14
+
+CHILDREN CHANGE
+
+
+The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction
+which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated,
+having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief
+interest at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he
+alleged to have found in my work. After that he intimated that he
+aspired to write. The second young man came from Dakota, also a
+college-bred. A teacher there wrote to me about him. I looked at some of
+his work, and I found in it potentialities of illimitable promise. I was
+not so excited as I would have been had I not met this discovery in
+other cases from the generation behind us. Their fleets are upon every
+sea.
+
+The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a while
+in the evening on short manuscript matters. In fact, the dollar-end has
+not pinched so far; and they help a while in the garden in the
+afternoons, designating the period, Track, as they named the little
+class after mid-day, Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they
+really belonged to the class. It was primarily designed for the younger
+minds--and I was unwilling to change that.
+
+You would think it rather difficult--I know I did--to bring the work in
+one class for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the
+young men:
+
+"Of course it is _their_ hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you
+like. Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As
+for me--the young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two
+classes."
+
+They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It
+happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.
+
+"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.
+
+They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I
+heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been
+unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making
+inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went out
+into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:
+
+"Chapel is the best hour of the day----"
+
+He said more, and it surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This
+younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is
+not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever
+befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot
+brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of
+mis-technicality--an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him
+to task--lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of
+_staying down_ a little each day--or the world would never hear his
+voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the
+others in the room--that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like
+a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did.
+The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any
+competitive ideal. They were one--and there's something immortal about
+that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There
+is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even
+from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses
+all things--and we rise together--a gold light in the room that will
+come to all the world.
+
+It is worth dwelling upon--this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has
+since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the
+reconstruction write to the Study from time to time--from different
+parts of the world. I read the class a letter recently from a young
+woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from
+the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the
+Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and
+another group from Washington. All these are placed before the Chapel
+kindred for inspiration and aliment.
+
+"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time
+shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves
+from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You
+will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius--at the time
+of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of
+the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the
+end of the bleakest and most terrible age--the breaking down at last of
+an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental
+battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called
+afterward."
+
+... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it
+has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give....
+We watch the world tearing down--from this quietude. We have no country
+but God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and
+madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New
+Age--just children.
+
+... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed--draining,
+under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be
+developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the
+fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants
+are set. The roses answered--almost wonderfully. They brought me the old
+romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This
+point was touched upon in the Foreword--how in the joy of the roses that
+answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred
+what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.
+
+The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop
+of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the
+thoughts I have forgotten--fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They
+are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and
+again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes,
+that for centuries the world has been maiming its children--that only
+those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as
+men.
+
+Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds
+and they are not the same the next day.
+
+... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to
+congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little
+questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers
+and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they
+love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression
+and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be
+self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in the city. We
+met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration.
+For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we
+met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in
+their different conventions--world ways, the obvious and the temporal,
+as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great
+lessons to me--to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think
+the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance
+of the Catholic priests' saying--"Give us your child until he is seven
+only----"
+
+In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change--to
+watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes
+like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in
+the world.
+
+We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best
+innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground
+upon and master. We are held and refined between the two
+attractions--one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We
+believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul,
+the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception
+must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that
+man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now;
+that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the
+farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of
+tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to
+reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard
+them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten
+adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand--they
+are not. The littlest ones have it--the two small boys of seven and nine,
+who have not regularly entered the Chapel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and
+without title:
+
+     The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to
+     listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And
+     if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he
+     has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in
+     past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept
+     in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people
+     that played around him and told him queer things when he was
+     first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in
+     his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the
+     world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's
+     wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can
+     write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to
+     get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you
+     know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will
+     find it.
+
+     The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can
+     only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the _brain_
+     which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was
+     going wrong and that _he_ should fix it by telling them the
+     right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people
+     not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.
+
+     It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly,
+     and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these
+     will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.
+     After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther
+     ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
+     baby.
+
+     The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps
+     lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you,
+     unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand
+     all that you earn or achieve."
+
+
+
+
+15
+
+A MAN'S OWN
+
+
+The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of
+educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting
+the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could
+not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic
+impossibility.
+
+The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that
+the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and
+imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has
+been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to
+place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these
+and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.
+
+... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the
+study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the
+places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a
+dining-table--the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the
+question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each
+week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way,
+like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely,
+shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The
+little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would
+never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.
+
+"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And
+then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just
+now. It is seeing us through these hard days."
+
+But _I_ missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is,
+my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the
+days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about
+as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me
+a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I
+had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I
+didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the
+writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught
+me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest
+again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the
+first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first
+objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work,
+published in the book called _Midstream_.
+
+"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a
+transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain
+manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our
+hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate
+a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man
+who has found his work--and the splendid discovery invariably follows,
+that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not
+first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising;
+because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks
+deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.
+
+"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too
+lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work.
+No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation
+of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.
+
+"_I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and
+fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the
+schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his
+daily task--and watching for his own among them._
+
+"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal
+of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the
+hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness
+for buying cheap and selling dear--if as a race we were lifted into our
+own work.
+
+"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of
+his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one
+important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his
+work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the
+lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to
+distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager
+and tender.
+
+"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the
+answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the
+Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something
+sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I
+had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full,
+eager and honest, the answer came--the work of specialists which had
+moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in
+that--for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.
+
+"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of
+his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive
+not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the
+temperament to choose a work because it is easy.
+
+"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument,
+the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height
+and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.
+That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities--whether
+tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods
+with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such
+a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.
+
+"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and
+brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer
+receptivity--and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here
+and there in the cohering line.
+
+"... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long
+hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is
+ended, the finished forces turn _outward_ in service. According to the
+measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance
+of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the
+instrument in pure listening--long forenoons passing, without a single
+instant of self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even
+awareness of the body....
+
+"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher
+life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world
+for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor
+and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely
+from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has
+mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the
+mind, its multitude of experiences and unreckonable possessions--are
+given over to the creative and universal force--the same force that is
+lustrous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human
+heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.
+
+"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He,
+first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the
+power of the superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm;
+this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two
+instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the
+rock; and though we achieve the very sanctity of self-command, our
+inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for
+money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's
+standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable
+he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman
+for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to
+others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and
+Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the
+big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand.
+Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line
+of his life will become more clearly established.
+
+_A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has
+already answered._ Browning stood amazed before a man who had met
+Shelley and was not different afterward--a man who could idly announce
+that he had met the poet Shelley and not accept it as the big event of a
+period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of
+finding the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps
+men had made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been
+enacted on that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of
+earth there, the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was
+just on that spot that he found an eagle's feather.
+
+I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago--was speechless and outraged
+that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather about
+afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he
+spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in
+water.... There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are
+called to the same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts
+know each other; the mystics of the arts know each other.
+
+The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the breasts
+of the children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man
+holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a
+child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good
+workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as
+no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story--of a
+certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all
+energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal
+signified. Mostly the "great man" did not know what he had done for the
+boy.... I would have the great man know. I would have him seek to
+perform this miracle every day.
+
+There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying,
+"There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does
+not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to
+bring him to you--but he would not come. I think he did not dare."
+
+Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom
+brought the thing about. A man should say, "_Lead me to him now_!..."
+Those who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put
+stamps upon letters they write. God knows they are not ashamed to come
+and ask for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their
+structure of desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail
+the letter he has written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out,
+full of terror and torture before you--take him to your breast for he is
+your own. Children you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he....
+Do you want a slave, a worshipper--seek out your own. You want nothing
+of the sort, but you alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate
+his worship to the task. He can learn from you in a week what it would
+take years of misery in the world to teach him. You have done in a way
+the thing he wants to do--that's the whole magic. You have fitted
+somehow to action the dream that already tortures his heart. There is
+nothing so pure as work in the world. There is something sacred about a
+man's work that is not elsewhere in matter. Teaching is a mutual
+service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but because he has
+reverence, he is potentially great.
+
+The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a
+worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all
+kinds of workmen; these things are not alone for the artists and the
+craftsmen and the professions. There is one boy to linger about the
+forge of an artisan, after the others have gone. I would have the
+artisan forget the thing he is doing, to look into the eyes of that
+boy--and the chemist, the electrician, the florist.
+
+It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written
+words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The
+work here would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us
+for several days. She was so still that I did not know what was
+happening in her mind. My experience with the others had prevailed to
+make me go slowly, and not to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be
+glad that she had come. I asked no expression from her for several days.
+When I finally suggested something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror
+in the room. Her expression came in a very brief form, and it showed me
+the bewilderment with which she had encountered the new points of view
+in the Chapel. I learned afresh that one must not hurry; that my first
+work was to put to rest her fears of being called upon. I impressed upon
+the class the next day that we have all the time there is; that we want
+nothing; that our work is to establish in due time the natural
+expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in particular, I said
+that when she felt like it she could write again.
+
+Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl
+to see if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All
+I ever got from that afternoon was this sentence:
+
+"... She is going to be a nurse."
+
+I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I
+allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting
+her surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must
+have nurses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... And then the Columbia young man--a big fellow and a soul. I had
+talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room class in the city. He
+took a cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel
+began; then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening,
+I had good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his
+mind and heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible
+integrity, a natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the
+world's bestowal--but Inertia.
+
+Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do
+not mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that
+it is of necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the
+valuable inner life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual
+energy came forth to intensify the vibrations of the race, to say
+nothing of their own poundage. It is less a matter of weight after all
+than texture; still their fat was a handicap.
+
+These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and men;
+all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression
+of the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit
+bring about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required
+to express itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one
+hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression
+of the spiritual life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a
+whole, the great servers of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole
+in every fabrication of man and nature--the finer the work, the finer
+the instrument.
+
+The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and
+continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.
+
+The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought
+forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of
+a dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of
+pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The
+texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You
+must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the
+light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live
+either for appetites or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit,
+in its passionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the
+cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and
+emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.
+
+The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very
+nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of
+countless ages to produce the form that we see--the gracious beauties of
+the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a
+Clovelly rose is beautiful.
+
+The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding
+mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in
+your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's
+button; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in
+human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand--and all
+about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand,
+and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered
+itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget
+that inner ardency--the virgin unfolding to the sun--born of some great
+passion that seemed poised between earth and heaven--and expectant of
+its own great passion's maturity.
+
+I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who
+would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song
+of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things.
+I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings--the ecstasy of the little
+old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in
+the world.
+
+I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose
+marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose
+corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the
+shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a
+thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but
+the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The
+first had great foliages of coarse mane and tail; the other, a splendid
+beast that would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.
+
+We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future
+in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour
+idealism. Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and lustrous we
+become, according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It
+is the quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto
+itself the excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for
+his size, longer-lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural
+elasticity, capable of infinitely greater physical, mental, and moral
+tasks, than the tightly compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere
+painter's flourish which adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there
+if we see clearly. If the sanctity is radiant, the glow is intense
+enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow, to be photographed, even
+caught with the physical eye.
+
+
+
+
+16
+
+THE PLAN IS ONE
+
+
+I was relating the experience of the Columbian. In his case there had
+been much time, so there could be no mistake. He had devoted himself to
+making and keeping a rather magnificent set of muscles which manifested
+even through white man's clothing. He did this with long days of sailing
+and swimming, cultivating his body with the assiduity of a
+convalescent.... I told him in various ways he was not getting himself
+out of his work; explained that true preparation is a tearing off of
+husks one after another; that he was a fine creation in husk, but that
+he must get down to the quick before he could taste or feel or see with
+that sensitiveness which would make any observation of his valuable.
+With all this body-building, he was in reality only covering himself the
+thicker. If a man does this sort of thing for a woman's eye, he can only
+attract a creature of blood and iron whose ideal is a policeman--a very
+popular ideal....
+
+For two or three days he would work terrifically, then, his weight
+besetting, he would placate himself with long tissue-feeding sports. I
+told him that he had everything to build upon; that true strength really
+begins where physical strength ends; that all that he had in equipment
+must be set in order and integrated with his own intrinsic powers, it
+being valueless otherwise. I pointed out that he was but a collector of
+things he could not understand, because he did not use them; that the
+great doers of the world had toiled for years upon years, as he did not
+toil for one week's days successively.... It would not do, except for
+short intervals, and it came to me that my best service was to get out
+from under. I told him so, and the manliness of his acceptance choked
+me. I told him to go away, but to come again later if he mastered
+Inertia in part.... It was not all his fault. From somewhere, an income
+reached him regularly, a most complete and commanding curse for any boy.
+
+... I do not believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play
+for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the
+end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation
+period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most
+dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent because the body
+becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the
+fitness of faculty can manifest.
+
+If one's body is ill from overexertion, it must rest; if one's mind is
+ill from nervousness, stimulation, or from excessive brain activity, it
+must rest; but if one's soul is ill, and this is the difference, nothing
+but activity will help it, and this activity can only be expressed
+through the body and mind. Surplus rest of body or mind is a process of
+over-feeding, which is a coarsening and thickening of tissue, which in
+its turn causes Inertia, and this word I continually capitalise, for it
+is the first devil of the soul.
+
+Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be
+overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the
+world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their
+lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their
+sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat
+heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times _a great calm_,
+another dimension of calm entirely from that which has to do with animal
+peace and repletion. It is the peace of intensive production--and the
+spectacle of it is best seen when you lift the super from a hive of
+bees, the spirit of which animates every moving creature to one
+constructive end. That which emanates from this intensity of action is
+calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does not have to sink into
+a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest have more to do
+with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of tissue one tears
+down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done. Absolutely this
+is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work a man
+loves replenishes.
+
+Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying
+than to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm
+of his task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so
+continually tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold
+this rhythm, we could not die.
+
+This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full
+exercise--soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self
+does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a
+song from it--that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have
+heard from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all
+selfless productivity.
+
+One cannot play until one has worked--that is the whole truth. Ask that
+restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to
+polish the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless
+cleanliness in a room. Hold the picture of what you want in mind and
+detail it to him, saying that you will come again and inspect his work.
+Watch, if you care, the mystery of it. There will be silence until the
+thing begins to unfold for him--until the polish comes to wood or metal,
+until the thing begins to answer and the picture of completion bursts
+upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a hum, and nothing will break
+his theme until the end.
+
+The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls
+differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean
+things; that the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested
+when one enters a clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't
+the room, after all, that gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle
+or the hum comes from harmony within.
+
+A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he "climbed
+out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up
+when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the
+order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away
+the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep
+on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field
+clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where
+bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and
+decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from
+softening and cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose
+occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned
+loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He
+sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture
+comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon
+showing his work.
+
+Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in
+athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being
+inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for
+bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of
+the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world
+expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have
+been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed
+training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a
+body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and
+dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as
+life-quests--except for the few consummately adapted players whose
+little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized
+rectangle--the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed,
+and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.
+
+A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with
+it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he
+loves best to do--constructive play--giving play to his powers,
+bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and
+timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and
+garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until
+supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan,
+yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one
+speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake;
+the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the
+stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is
+all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper,
+the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One
+has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as
+sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass
+above--that fallow lands are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out
+like a wine, and decide there is something in it.
+
+There is something in everything.
+
+The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to
+bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we
+don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and
+that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts
+to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We
+recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get
+this--if it ever comes to us--and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he
+_heard_ his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral
+pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them
+seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to
+bring out.
+
+We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat
+is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come
+to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order
+begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of
+surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has
+come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon
+in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better
+for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and
+strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She
+must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own--for
+wheat partakes of the _alkahest_. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.
+
+The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the
+northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a
+bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat,
+thereafter--but that would be sacrilege.
+
+Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw
+at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered
+there--that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia--so that there is a
+nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course,
+then, that all the aristocrats of Nature--rose and wheat and olives and
+bees and alabaster and grapes--must all have their part of the harmony,
+for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in
+the face of a far-come child--the brute earth-bound lines of self
+gone--the theme of life, Service.
+
+I am at the end of Capitals now.
+
+One afternoon we talked about corn--from the fields where the passionate
+mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we
+found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the
+nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in
+everything.
+
+Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after
+all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first
+wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.
+
+There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every
+movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is
+mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no
+detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story--that
+the plan is one.
+
+
+
+
+17
+
+THE IRISH CHAPTER
+
+
+There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars--the
+Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old
+man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to
+tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true
+Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake
+received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.
+
+"It isn't--it's listening."
+
+It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata,
+called _Appassionata_. There is one here who plays that, and because it
+tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the
+others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems
+to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never
+tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a
+woman--of love and life and death. She wants the earth in her love--but
+her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth.
+The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her--her love a
+perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not
+be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her
+re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.
+
+The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's _Departure_--to us the most
+magic of all the great little poems. But in _Departure_ it is the woman
+who is called.
+
+... Again and again in the _Appassionata_, the word comes to the woman,
+saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will
+not hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty--all the wonder that
+Mother Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have
+told her that it must be, but she does not obey--and then the Master
+comes down.
+
+It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone.
+The _chelas_ have spoken and have not availed. Now the _Guru_ speaks.
+Out of vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out
+of the deeps and heights of compassion, the _Guru_ speaks--and suddenly
+the woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is
+expressed in the treble--a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a
+cup held forth--or palms held upward. The _Guru_ speaks. His will is
+done.
+
+And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was
+listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked
+of Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always
+brings; or it may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just
+been slaughtered in a cause that had far less significance to Ireland
+than our child talk by the fire; or it may have been the South Wind that
+brought us closer to the fairy Isle, for it is the Irish peasants who
+say to a loved guest at parting:
+
+"May you meet the South Wind."
+
+"... There isn't really an Ireland any more--just a few old men and a
+few old, haunting mothers. Ireland is here in America, and the last and
+stiffest of her young blood is afield for England. Her sons have always
+taken the field--that is their way--and the mothers have brought in more
+sons born of sorrow--magic-eyed sons from the wombs of sorrow. Elder
+brothers afield--fathers gone down overseas--only the fairies left by
+the hearth for the younger sons to play with.... So they have sung
+strange songs and seen strange lights and moved in rhythms unknown to
+many men. It is these younger sons who are Ireland now. Not a place, but
+a passion; not a country, but a romance.... They are in the love stories
+of the world, and they are always looking for their old companions, the
+fairies. They find the fairies in the foreign woodlands; they bring the
+fairies to the new countries. They are in the songs that hush the heart;
+they are in the mysticism that is moving the sodden world. Because they
+played with fairies, they were taught to look past and beyond the flesh
+of faces--past metals and meals and miles. Of the reds and greys and
+moving golds which they see, the soul of the world loves to listen, for
+the greatest songs and stories of all are from the Unseen----"
+
+It was the old man dreaming aloud.
+
+"Ireland isn't a place any more. It is a passion infused through the
+world," he added.
+
+"But the fairies are still there," the little girl said.
+
+"Some are left with the old mothers--yes, some are left. But many have
+taken the field, and not for the wars."
+
+A four-day moon was dropping fast in the low west. Jupiter was climbing
+the east in imperial purple--as if to take command.... The littlest boy
+stirred in the arms of the Dakotan and began to speak, staring at the
+fire. We all turned and bent to listen--and it was that very thing that
+spoiled it--for the sentence faltered and flew away.
+
+We all wanted to know what had been born in that long silence, for the
+firelight was bright in two eyes that were very wide and wise--but the
+brain was only seven.... I left the circle and went up the cliff to
+find a book in the study--a well-used book, an American book. Returning,
+I read this from it, holding the page close to the fire:
+
+     OLD IRELAND
+
+ Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
+ Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother,
+ Once a queen--now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground,
+ Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders;
+ Long silent--she too long silent--mourning her shrouded hope and heir;
+ Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.
+
+ Yet a word, ancient mother;
+ You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with forehead between
+   your knees;
+ O you need not sit there, veil'd in your old white hair, so dishevel'd;
+ For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave;
+ It was an illusion--the heir, the son you love, was not really dead;
+ The Lord is not dead--he is risen, young and strong, in another country;
+ Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the grave,
+ What you wept for, was translated, pass'd from the grave,
+ The winds favoured and the sea sail'd it,
+ And now with rosy and new blood,
+ Moves to-day in a new country.
+
+One by one they dropped off asleep, the little ones first, as the moon
+went down--their thoughts so full of stars, asking so dauntlessly all
+questions of world and sky. What I could, I answered, but I felt as
+young as any. It seemed their dreams were fresher than mine, and their
+closeness to God.... The little girl touched me, as we drifted away----
+
+"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.
+
+
+
+
+18
+
+THE BLEAKEST HOUR
+
+
+It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are,
+a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without
+penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may
+become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle
+fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find
+certain friends and sterling enemies--and either lose or win,
+ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.
+
+Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may
+reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are
+wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He
+sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing
+earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the
+dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed.
+He blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet--at least,
+a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning
+over of the whole afterward.
+
+Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the
+bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are
+moving about our business of house and country and world in a most
+stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine
+of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open
+and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men,
+indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the
+only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to
+the nostrils.
+
+But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the
+world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving--but
+with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of
+self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which
+has not remotely to do with an erect spine.
+
+Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is
+no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them
+along, find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may
+be said that wars have brought great benefits to the race; that
+materialism has taught us our place here below as no other passion
+could; that trade has wrought its incomparable good to the races of
+men; that Fear has been the veritable mother of our evolution, its dark
+shadow forever inciting us, breaking our Inertia, bringing swiftness and
+strength first to the body, then to brain. Even desire for self, on the
+long road behind, has been the good angel of our passage, for we had to
+become splendid beasts before the dimension of man could be builded....
+All good; mistakes nowhere in the plan.
+
+But the trouble is, the passage of the many from grade to grade is
+intolerably slow. We had thought the many had finished with war. The few
+already are many grades ahead of that; the few have seen the virtues die
+out of patriotism and trade; they have watched the desire for self turn
+reptile, and hearkened to this truth which is beginning to reverberate
+around the world: _What is good for beasts is not of necessity good for
+men_.... One recent caller here, male, middle-aged, smilingly discussed
+all things from the philosophical point of view. I was saying:
+
+"From the nursery to world-clutched retirement from public affairs, a
+man nowadays is taught more and more to keep his heart-principle
+locked----"
+
+He smiled: "We have all the time there is. It will all come out right.
+You fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others
+of us think them over quietly by our fires. That is the whole
+difference. Scratch off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of
+God-yearning animal underneath."
+
+Few sayings ever have hit me harder.
+
+I studied the years' offerings from this man--to his house, to his
+acquaintances, to the world in general. An irony filled the room, and so
+intense was it that it seemed to have a colour, a kind of green and
+yellow vapour. It emanated from the centre of his face. I think the
+point that animated me especially was that he was in the habit of
+talking to young men. He had no children of his own. I changed the
+subject and opened the door--not to hasten his departure but because the
+air was close.
+
+By every law which makes us hold fast to the memory of saviours and
+great men, the finest fabric of any race is its pioneers. We are living
+and putting into action now the dreams of brave spirits who have gone
+before. Philosophically, even they may have found that the plan is good,
+but that did not prevent them from giving their lives to lift the
+soddenness and accelerate the Inertia of the crowds. They took their joy
+in the great goodness of the plan--only after they had done their best
+to bring the race more swiftly into its higher destiny. A man does not
+sit back and allow his children to spend years in learning that which he
+can explain in a moment from his own experience.... I did not answer the
+philosopher, but many things that occurred from that little talk were
+brought out in Chapel during the days which followed--matters that had
+to do with America and literary workmanship in particular. Certain of
+the matters we discussed have been written down for expression here:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If some one announced that there lived in the Quattuor Islands a man who
+knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
+action of _brotherhood_ and _fatherland_, there would be some call for
+maps and steamship passages. If the Quattuor Islands were not already on
+the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the first pilgrims
+had set out. And if some one should add that all expression of the arts
+so far in the world is addled and unsightly compared to that which is
+about to be, if a certain formula is followed, and that this man in the
+Quattuor group has the formula--many more would start on the quest, or
+send their most trusted secretaries.
+
+And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again
+and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.
+
+The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
+secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give
+to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander
+said:
+
+"It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
+That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and
+live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it
+will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for
+possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you
+before you can adequately receive----"
+
+You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It _is_ old, older
+than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the
+law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts.
+There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good
+for the part; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for
+the first thought, not self-good, but the general good. One nation, so
+established in this conviction that its actions are automatically
+founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true
+world-fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established
+begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of
+life.
+
+Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is
+beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a
+patriot. It is not _my country_ that is of interest, but humankind.
+America's political interests, her trade, all her localisations as a
+separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new
+social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American
+predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while
+supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening
+confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for
+the outright demoralisation of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting
+to-day the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
+invariably follows the thought.
+
+Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
+religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
+change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation
+of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
+
+The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
+enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
+movement. Within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration
+have recently been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the
+most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau and Lanier took
+pen in hand, forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a
+peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds as a result of
+the very act of getting out from under European influence.
+
+England and France and Germany have fallen into mere national voices.
+The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble, against the basic rumble
+of war. War in this century is a confession, as suicide is a
+confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the
+triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you received letters from
+friends in England or Germany or France during the war--friends whom
+formerly you admired for their culture and acumen--you were struck by
+the dulness and misery of the communications, the uncentred points of
+view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and
+blackness of life there; if, indeed, you read the newspapers and
+periodicals of those countries, you required no further proof of the
+fact--that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all
+driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and
+fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.
+
+Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and
+the unclean. The new social order does not recognise the rights and
+desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically _one_ in meaning,
+in aim and in destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the
+sun's rays and in character of country, environment, race, colour and
+structure of mind--these are primal values, the very values that will
+sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and
+nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments
+of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony
+is one.
+
+The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic
+whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a
+pattern of it in matter--to make the dream come true in flesh, each man
+and each nation bringing his labour.
+
+If a certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by
+intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring
+parasite, or formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow.
+In good time there is war to the death.
+
+In a doctor's office in Canada, I saw the picture of a bull-dog standing
+large against the background of the accepted flag, and beneath was this
+line:
+
+"What we have, we'll hold."
+
+I found that the picture had a national popularity. Yet a child stopping
+to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material
+things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a
+man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the
+effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a
+hornet stung him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a conviction held here that the darkest period of American
+materialism came to its end with the beginning of the war. The
+generation of literary producers in manifestation at that time was
+responsible for the bleakest products which America will ever have the
+shame of showing to future generations.
+
+It was not so devoid of genius as would appear; the first cause was the
+difficulty in getting the best work "through." This again was not
+because the public was not ready for the good, but because the public
+taste was brutalised by men who stood between the public and the
+producers. These middlemen insisted, by the right of more direct
+contact, that the public should have what they fancied the public desire
+to be.
+
+I sat in Union Square recently with a beggar who studied me, because it
+appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was
+a great story--sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance
+of life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from
+him. Rather he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was
+a whine in it. He chose to act, and he was not a good actor. His
+offering hurt, not because he was filthy and a failure, but because he
+lied to himself and to me, because he did not dare to be himself, though
+the facts were upon him, eye and brow and mouth. So I did not get his
+story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in
+American letters--I, being the public; the truth of his story
+representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was
+ready for, being the middleman's part.
+
+All workmen of the last generation--all who would listen--were taught to
+bring forth their products with an intervening lie between the truth and
+their expression--the age of advertising heavy in all production.
+
+I recall from those days what was to me a significant talk with an
+American novelist who wanted sales, who was willing to sacrifice all but
+the core of his character to get sales, and who found himself at that
+time in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:
+
+"Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the
+woman's soul wakes up."
+
+"A woman's novel?" I asked.
+
+"Meant to be," said he. "Study of a woman all through. Begins as a
+little girl--different, you know--sensitive, does a whole lot of
+thinking that her family doesn't follow. Tries to tell 'em at first, but
+finds herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years--putting on power and
+beauty in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She's pure
+white fire presently--body and brain and something else asleep. She
+wants to be a mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of
+her sisters to this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as
+the world conducts it----"
+
+"I follow you," said I.
+
+"Well, I'm not going to do the novel here for you," he added. "You
+wouldn't think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of
+telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in
+telling a story, can't do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at
+the same time----"
+
+"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.
+
+"Well, she wanted a little baby--was ready to die for it, but had her
+own ideas of what the Father should be. A million women--mostly having
+been married and failed, have thought the same thing here in
+America--pricked the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover,
+they're the best women we've got. There are----"
+
+He purposely shook the hat from his head--back into the seat--at this
+point.
+
+"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America--God
+bless 'em--who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for the
+Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did.
+He was a young man doing his own kind of work--doctoring among the poor,
+let us say, mainly for nothing--killing himself among men and women and
+babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of
+madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They
+were two to make one--and a third. She knew. There was a gold light
+about his head which she saw--and some of the poverty-folk saw--but
+which he didn't know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.
+
+"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying
+anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it
+came to me was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall
+down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm
+not going to tell you what happened. Only this: a little
+afterward--along about page two hundred of the copy--the woman's soul
+woke up."
+
+"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.
+
+He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead when his car is
+pressing the limit.
+
+"Ever have a book fail?" he asked.
+
+"Seven," said I.
+
+He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes:
+
+"They tell me at my publishers' that I slowed up my last book badly--by
+taking a woman's soul out for an airing--just a little invalid kind of a
+soul, too. Souls don't wake up in American novels any more. You can't do
+much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas--I mean _movie_
+canvas. You can paint _soul_ but you can't photograph it--that's the
+point. The movies have put imagination to death. We have to compete. You
+can't see a soul without imagination--or some sort of madness--and the
+good people who want imagination in their novels don't buy 'em. They
+rent or borrow. It's the crowds that go to the movies that have
+bright-coloured strings of American novels as the product runs--on their
+shelves--little shiny varnished shelves--red carpets--painted birds on
+the lamp-shades and callers in the evenings."
+
+There was a good silence.
+
+"Do you know," he added presently, "I've about come to the conclusion
+that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd.
+Look at the big movie pictures--the actors make love like painted
+animals.... I'm not humorous or ironical. It's a big problem to me----"
+
+"Why, you can't touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until
+you are off the sensuous," I offered. "The quest only begins there. I'm
+not averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings--in part.
+But I am averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a
+romance when a woman's soul wakes up. There's a hotter fire than that
+which burns blood-red----"
+
+"I know," he said quickly. "I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest
+thing in the world.... I'm sure of this story until her soul wakes up.
+She stirs in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead--the kind of a woman
+who could whistle to me or to you--and we'd follow her out--dazed by the
+draw of her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up--but I can
+feel the public dropping off every page after two hundred--like chilled
+bees--dropping off page by page--and the old familiar battle ahead for
+me. I can feel that tight look of poverty about the eyes again----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?" I asked, as we turned
+again into the crowd.
+
+I wasn't the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and
+something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen--how easy it
+is to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise--when
+the very passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.
+
+"She's beautiful--even asleep," he said. "I'm afraid I'll have to give
+her something. I'm building a house. She's in the comprehension of the
+little varnished shelves--asleep."
+
+"Doesn't a tight look come about the eyes--from much use of that sort of
+anæsthetic?" I asked.
+
+"Let's get a drink," he answered.
+
+
+
+
+19
+
+THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER
+
+
+But the stroke of death has fallen upon such pandering, and the war put
+it there. The big names of the last generation are now magazine and
+movie men; all save the few whose sutures have not entirely closed, and
+they are making their last frenzied turn to meet the new social order,
+as they met the floating vogues and whims so long. But this is a
+difficult turn for panderers and caterers, because it does not have to
+do with the surface matter, nothing to do with dance and dress and
+appetite, but with the depths of the human spirit, quickened to
+animation afresh by the agony of the world.
+
+Only the rarest few of the greatest names of England and Europe have
+escaped the fatal partisanship. They have become little national voices,
+and in the coming years this will be remembered against them bitterly.
+The truly liberated soul does not fall into lying attempts at national
+exoneration. The truly liberated soul is no longer a nationalist. A few
+of the young men have escaped this curse, but the older had their
+training, as has been told, in the blackest age of man. Men have been
+diminished in more spacious times than these by becoming laureates; they
+cannot but be degraded by becoming nationalists in these abandoned
+hours.
+
+Genius, in the last generation, met a destructive force in the material
+world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by
+Copernicus. The voices of very few heralds were even heard, but there is
+a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great
+service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the
+liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of
+work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in
+spirit and truth; they will bring in their children unaccursed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... There's always a squeaking when a wagon climbs out of a rut, which
+is another way of saying that a time of transition is a time of pain.
+
+This is a notable and constructive generation now beginning its work in
+America, and joining hands with the few remaining Undefiled of Europe.
+They are not advertisers, nor self-servers. They do not believe in
+intellect alone. Their genius is _intuitionally_ driven, not
+intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitations as a
+force, and is being superseded by electricity (the limitations of which
+have not yet been sensed so far even by the most audacious), so the
+intellect, as a producing medium, has had its period--a period of
+style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, of
+parading, of surface-show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the
+world.
+
+For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
+blood, a temporal heat. Intuition is driven from the fountain-head of
+spiritual energy. Its great conception is the unity of all nature. The
+intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from
+sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
+
+In all times, second-class artists have dealt in the form and matter of
+the age, talked of its effects and paraded its styles. Only the very
+greatest above them have realised that the true story of the thing, as
+any given man sees it, is the one important thing in the world for him
+to produce; that the nearness of the expression to the thought is the
+measure of his success; in a word, that his thought must be put into
+words (or tones or paint or stone) without an intervening lie from the
+medium.
+
+The race of men and women in their twenties, now at work in America, are
+doing these things. Especially in the new poetry is the fine
+consummation apparent. These are the leaders of the new social order.
+Before the war, such as had developed a voice had to shout through shut
+doors. The war has beaten down the doors. A comparable race of young
+workmen (more men than women there; more women than men here) has
+appeared in Russia and raised its voice. It is not altogether a dream
+that a unifying span will stretch across the pillars raised by these two
+groups of builders.
+
+In America this rising generation shall return to us the prestige which
+Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Lanier so superbly attracted. Indeed,
+Whitman is the master of the new poetry; his free verse lives in every
+line of the modern production, a point that would not be significant if
+it were alone of manner; but his broad human spirit, the infusing
+brotherhood which was his passion, and the same universal toleration,
+are the inspiring energies of the new workmanship.
+
+What is the vision of this new social order?
+
+These workmen recognise that no saint's blood, nor the power of any God,
+is going to interfere before a heavenly throne to save sinners who have
+wasted their lives in predatory accomplishment, instead of saving
+themselves;
+
+That the re-distribution of the world's wealth will not bring about the
+new order and beauty of life; that the rich man is to be pitied as much
+as the poor (God knows that intrinsically he is to be pitied more,
+because his shell is thicker) that the time is at hand when the
+vulgarity of being rich in material wealth will be a sense of the common
+mind; That women are not golden fleeces, nor clinging vines, but human
+adults with separate principles from men, which make them equally
+valuable in the social scheme; that women should be their own law in all
+matters of mating and reproduction, because the male has not the mental
+organism to cope authoritatively with these affairs;
+
+That heretofore as educators, as fathers, mothers and bringers-forth of
+children, humankind, in the large, has shown itself less than the
+animals, inasmuch as it does not fulfil its possibilities as animals do;
+
+That the time is past for cults and creeds, for separate interests and
+national boundaries, for patriotism and all the other _isms_; that we
+are all one in the basic meaning of existence; that there is an
+adjustment founded upon the principles of liberty and brotherhood, in
+which that which is good for the one is good for all; that this
+adjustment can only be attained by a reversal of the old form,
+personally and nationally--of thinking not of the self first in all
+things, but of the general good;
+
+Finally, the new social order of workmen, having come up through the
+blear and sickness of lies, has arrived at the high vantage which
+reveals that there is nothing so potent as a straight statement of fact,
+nothing so strategically the masterstroke.
+
+
+
+
+20
+
+COMMON CLAY BRICK
+
+
+Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a
+walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon
+we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A
+gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a
+half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the
+waves.... It had a fine gleam--a vivid wet red against the gravel greys.
+Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought
+of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.
+
+... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing
+of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had
+once seen on a winter's day--a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a
+narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet,
+alone, and now that it was dry--this was just a brick-red. It needed
+the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason
+for its appeal to our sense of beauty.
+
+There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no
+machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the
+age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in
+itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative
+strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient
+things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us
+as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them
+before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain
+thrilling familiarity--the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional
+passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.
+
+We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases
+and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the
+scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so
+that we repeat in wonder--"And this is the first time----" Something
+deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the
+profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and
+that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.
+
+For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of
+red from the pervading greys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other
+Shore--a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its
+point--and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a
+fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales
+for all this nearer stretch of shore, but its beauty is completed by the
+peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and
+the completing vine.
+
+Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which
+complete each other and suggest a third--the union of two to make one.
+Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the
+stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the
+trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace,
+the very quest of life.
+
+There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union
+of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of
+completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.
+
+We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter
+and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing
+third.
+
+Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its
+haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate
+green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought
+forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous paintings.
+Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or
+the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running
+water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human
+spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the
+lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in
+fatness)--but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the
+promise of the fruit. It was the globe again--the union of the strong
+and the fragile for a finer dimension of power--bow and cord, ship and
+sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine--yes, and that which
+surprised me at the beginning--that gleam of red in the wash of water
+upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the
+cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of
+beauty in a wet, worn brick.
+
+Firelight in a room is just the same thing--a grey stone fireplace with
+red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been
+a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a
+brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....
+
+Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative
+of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always
+occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is
+invariably safe and replete. There are a thousand analogies for every
+event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul.
+The plan is one.
+
+The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say,
+without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is
+the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and
+character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the
+faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit
+outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls
+to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of
+the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can
+arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy
+heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made
+clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It
+is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines
+the value of their expression of it.
+
+Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the
+real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression,
+but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training
+for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the
+ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of
+those who listen. When one awakens a soul interest, you may rely upon
+it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of
+uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to
+lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character
+of man or woman.
+
+The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure
+of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el
+dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational
+ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and
+bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient
+facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl--the rest is but
+following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic,
+only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago
+had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread
+along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys
+brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about
+constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out
+and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey
+pebble walk.
+
+We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling,
+setting the frames and laying the concrete foundation. The finishing
+was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk,
+but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand.
+The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind;
+moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.
+
+The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of
+shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches
+of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white.
+It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep,
+sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from
+the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement.
+To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops
+were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the
+least mark of the trowel.
+
+The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique
+round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening
+mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of
+the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed
+without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its
+length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain--all frames and shingles
+removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soil softening the border--the
+red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey--a walk
+that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces
+seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the
+thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite
+the same after that afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+21
+
+THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS
+
+
+One day at Chapel, neither the Abbot nor the Dakotan appeared. The
+Columbian had left us. I looked up to see two young girls and another
+there. One of the papers brought in that day was upon the joining of two
+rivers. Where they came together was a whirlpool, a tremendous vortex
+that hushed all surrounding Nature. In the lowlands that lay about the
+place of that mighty meeting, a deep verdure came, for the winds carried
+the spray from the vortex. Nature loved the sounds of that pouring
+together. From the whirlpool, where two met, one great river emerged,
+white-maned with rapids for a way--then broad and pure and still, so
+that only birds and poets could hear the harmony deep as life. From time
+to time it gave forth its tributaries, yet seemingly was undiminished.
+Always on, always one, carrying all, making all pure, through the silent
+places, past the great mountains--to the sea.
+
+It was not until I had read of this mating of waters that I realised the
+slightly different conditions in the Chapel, the young men not being
+there.
+
+... The strangest humility stole over me. It had become the
+life-theme--to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to
+the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how
+anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never
+been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a
+matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how
+women can accept the man-idea of things.
+
+The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have
+accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately
+responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the
+limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when
+man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have
+fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best
+the processes that have been brought to bear upon women--from the
+establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into
+Egypt.
+
+It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been
+allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted
+to be pleased according to his idea--and women, in accepting that, have
+prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring
+forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is
+possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to
+make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once
+betrays the first law of the growth to greatness--that of being true to
+one's self.
+
+The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred
+lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the
+very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of
+keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this
+conception.
+
+Would you like to know where man's ideas--man's plan of Conception--is
+most utterly outraged? _In the coming of Messiahs._ The Josephs are
+mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do
+neither with heights nor depths.
+
+One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a
+wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the
+sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would
+suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while
+directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has
+been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries
+has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of the miracles
+that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement
+and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the
+transition is on....
+
+The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of
+serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within
+her--submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are
+neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly
+submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream--indeed,
+the fruits of these dreams have come to be--but more often the heart is
+filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but
+the fire they burn with is red and not white.
+
+Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a
+roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of
+motherhood--and his words were wise and pure enough--that not one of the
+women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would
+have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many
+young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen,
+and to answer the dream....
+
+I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine
+elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When
+I thought that some time they would be mothers, it came with a rush of
+emotion--that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to
+make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years
+I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these;
+dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could
+not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great
+outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the
+things said that day are written here without quotations:
+
+... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the
+outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the
+orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and
+women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity--the
+handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl
+to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment
+upon the many--the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have
+not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have
+waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts
+knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.
+
+The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in
+aspiration--the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services
+of Romance. As a race we have only touched our lips to the cup of its
+beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what
+culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own
+great being--rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first
+beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of
+animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?
+
+I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with
+which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and
+heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of
+Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of
+the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world....
+And then we see the great stony fields of humanity--the potential mass
+in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are
+makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer
+world turns its eyes.
+
+... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking
+your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You
+know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of
+the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each
+other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the
+street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought was
+easily to be comprehended--that it had but to be spoken to be
+embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we
+were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and
+we were strong to answer any call.
+
+It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me
+so often and so strangely in your coming--but those mysteries within,
+those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all
+systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in
+aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch
+these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together--all
+her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of
+air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of
+unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for
+every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive
+principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because
+individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the
+day in Europe of late--the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have
+followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish
+these losses.
+
+Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature.
+This physical being of ours which the Old Mother has raised from the
+earth that a God might be built within it--even the beauty of this is
+not yet fulfilled--much less the powers of the mind which we have
+touched--much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest
+moments together so memorable.
+
+... You would be mothers--that is the highest of the arts. The making of
+books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men--that
+is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we
+labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts
+and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly
+at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us;
+suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their
+inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we
+have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails.
+Again and again we fail--that is the splendid unifying force, working
+upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods.
+Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to
+welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that
+the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind
+for any noble action--that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer
+any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In the
+summit of our strength, the voice begins to speak--the _Guru's_ voice.
+
+We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening
+surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely
+made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no
+part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in
+God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere
+bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little
+season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away.
+But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.
+
+... You would not do less than this to bring forth men--you who have the
+call.... You must learn the world--be well grounded in the world. You
+need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay--but you must have
+the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother--yet it is
+only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It
+is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose,
+the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His
+quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of
+makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.
+
+There is a _different_ love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface
+ecstasies--that the Old Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and
+colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if
+making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has
+touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the
+Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean
+is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous
+bewilderment of sex-opposites--different from all save the immortal
+romances.
+
+I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a
+suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have
+felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the
+weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening
+spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities
+of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a
+sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a
+thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the
+sepulchre rolled away.
+
+I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found
+the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind
+straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and
+lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and
+it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no respiration of
+the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me
+from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on
+that fairy slope.
+
+The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own
+receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not
+require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken
+us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here--in the deep
+gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light
+of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and
+pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed
+upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse
+and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not
+stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our
+physical sight.
+
+Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of
+burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or
+your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the
+cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up
+their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like
+the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in
+beautiful deeds?
+
+The willow burns with quiet meagre warmth, like a lamb led to slaughter,
+but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The
+oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in
+building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled
+hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not
+believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I
+lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I
+shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...."
+Each with its fragrance--the elm, the silentest and sweetest of all. The
+elm has forgotten her body in spreading her grace to the stars; the elm
+for aspiration, loving the starlight so well that she will not hide it
+from the ground; most beautiful of all, save the beech in winter, a
+swift and saintly passing of a noble life. The maple warms you in spite
+of herself, giving up her secrets which are not all clean--a lover of
+fatness, her shade too dense, a hater of winter, because she is bare,
+and the secret of all ugliness in her nudity. (The true tree-lover is
+never a stranger to the winter woods.)
+
+And the mothering beech, with her soft incense, her heart filling the
+room with warmth and light, her will to warm the world; the mothering
+beech, a healer and a shelterer, a lover like that Magdalen whose sin
+was loving much. She gives her body to Gods and men--and most sweetly to
+the fire, her passing naked and unashamed.
+
+The different love of Nature that the child knows instinctively; that
+young men and maidens forget in the heat of themselves--but that comes
+again to us if we grow decently older; in rock and thicket, in the
+voices of running water, in every recess of woodland and arch of
+shore--not the Pipes of Pan, but the mysteries of God, not sensuousness,
+but the awakening of a spirit that has slumbered--the illumination,
+sudden and splendid, _that all is One_--that Nature is the plane of
+manifestation for the infinite and perfect story of God; that Nature is
+the table which God has filled to overflowing--this is a suggestion, a
+beginning of the lifted love of Nature....
+
+If they beckon to you, the trees on the horizon (and God be with you if
+there are none); if they seem to be calling to you, do not fail them, do
+not wait too long. For surely that time will come when they will cease
+to call to your heart. They will not have changed, but you will have
+gone too far back among the spectres and illusions of detached things to
+know that they are calling. And be very sure you will never find the
+love of God in the eyes of passing men--if you have forgotten our
+Mother.
+
+... Yet Nature alone is but the lowliest of the three caskets. I would
+not have you miss a breath of her beauty--but upon and within it, I
+would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's
+House. The Coming to you.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that
+Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pass to the unprepared
+houses. They are mute--suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their
+faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature
+who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.
+
+... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a
+Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your
+heart is listening--unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest--the
+little things of life silenced, the passions of the self put away.
+
+There is beauty in the wilderness--the beauty of the Old Mother is there
+in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great
+passion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not
+integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be
+destroyed by the lustre of that which descends to you? Would you be a
+potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands--when you
+may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?
+
+Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her
+arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you
+know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?
+
+Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to
+add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom
+comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives
+you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he
+comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in
+his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know
+the world--so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in
+the brown study of Pan.
+
+This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will
+try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand
+between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is
+very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a
+God still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the
+shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover
+that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan
+is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which
+dares to be mother of souls.
+
+Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the
+haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
+many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
+eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and
+level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise--too wise for that.
+He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as
+the lusts of the flesh.
+
+You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives
+away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look
+again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as
+before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all
+the pull of the ground tells you that your _very thought of falling_ is
+a breath from the old shames--your dead, but as yet unburied heritage,
+from generations that learned the lie to self.
+
+You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
+Nature--a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
+cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such
+soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he
+says: "All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have
+dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and
+the throb of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must
+fall far, when you let go.
+
+... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you
+because you _dare_.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn
+down the ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood,
+the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious
+generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so
+surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it
+is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by,
+before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature,
+whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the
+purity of the saints.
+
+... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he
+is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all
+lessons--to wait. You must pass by all others who are not true to the
+dream. You must integrate your ideal of him--as you dream of the Shining
+One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the
+laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the
+dream, pass on--for though you travel together for years, at the end you
+will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no
+dreams--the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom
+another is waiting.
+
+... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you.
+There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness
+is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low
+earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration.
+... A whirlpool, a vortex--this is but the beginning of ecstasy.
+
+This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from
+the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative
+light. This is the highest mystery of Nature--all hitherto is background
+for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings
+through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the
+sun--such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains--and
+beyond them is the ocean of time and space.
+
+
+
+
+22
+
+MIRACLES
+
+
+From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on
+the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing
+in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia
+to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like
+the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the
+world can show is a battlefield of human beings.
+
+Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of
+force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to
+appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his
+powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is
+both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental
+matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature.
+Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos.
+The word _Cosmos_ means order, as stated once before.
+
+One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in
+building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on
+this bit of Lake-front three years ago--the frog-hollows, tiling, the
+wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded
+perversely--the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still
+sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this
+book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a
+house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I
+sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the
+approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a
+hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and
+possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came
+for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part.
+With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer
+him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different
+contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and
+look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light.
+After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with
+theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with
+another man's money,--standing alone, tormented with the thought of how
+little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank
+them for going away.
+
+In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into
+the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around
+the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent
+night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that
+gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found
+myself turning in pleasure to it--the thought would come that it wasn't
+really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used
+to go from the building and grounds then--cutting myself clear from it,
+as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled
+him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.
+
+I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members
+of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the
+future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went.
+I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living--and for pennies the
+hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation--one
+house after another through life--to accept money and call their work
+paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry--every stone is
+different--but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it
+from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid--nor the house
+paid for....
+
+One evening I went through the structure when all but the final
+finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it
+as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name;
+yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the
+fireplaces--finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by
+which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am
+unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length
+to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a
+stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake
+shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still--and
+presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what
+he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never
+hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house--a week or two more
+from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.
+
+The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that
+verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a
+human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I
+remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there
+by the fountain one night--mantilla, dark eyes and falling water. It
+was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the
+_patio_....
+
+And here was its northern replica--sunken area paved with gold-brown
+brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you
+could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and
+front doors. I wanted it so--a house to see through like an honest face.
+Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted
+it so.
+
+"When we move in----" one of the children began.
+
+I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't
+move in, we would....
+
+A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside
+his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build
+another (if he ever _had_ to do it again) without raising his voice;
+without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or
+the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if
+they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved
+in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my
+back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I
+arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite
+generations rather than build again.
+
+There is the order of the small man--a baneful thing in its way,
+sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which
+has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then
+there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling
+duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let
+that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.
+
+The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to
+the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon--the
+eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken
+the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a
+superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation.
+"The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and
+up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress.
+There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer.
+Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of
+disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]
+
+Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the
+following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case
+exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road
+to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must
+keep his mind clean; third, that he must begin to put his spiritual
+house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove
+faithful in the small things, first.
+
+I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here
+in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain,
+balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were
+large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine
+instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not
+seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were
+at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without
+apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing
+large quantities of work every day--for boys. Yet daily in their work, I
+was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but
+an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their
+minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a
+million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation
+of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and
+youth. This driving force is spiritual.
+
+In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is
+man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart
+six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships
+God best in his work. His work suffers if he misses worship one day in
+seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of
+devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality,
+as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the
+world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God,
+or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.
+
+I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the
+schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow
+before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all
+separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter
+as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something
+greater than himself--that he has said or sung or written or painted
+something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of
+training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it
+again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe
+and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have
+but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our
+use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and
+inimitable; that its expression _through us_ cannot be exactly
+reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become
+instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other
+can play.
+
+That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the
+pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after
+the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object
+is held in the hand. There is a higher vision--and the word
+_imagination_ expresses it almost as well as any other--by which the
+thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the
+whole.
+
+There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your
+utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give
+yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board.
+Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up
+from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.
+
+You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has
+ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone....
+You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of
+creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the
+poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain
+conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the
+finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre
+of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the
+beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy
+which gives life to all men and things.
+
+Every object and every man tells the same story with its different
+texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven
+in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The
+farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy;
+that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and
+pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and
+heart--the one great love story of the universe.
+
+Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the
+higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently--rising to
+superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired.
+Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training
+could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period--or
+in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.
+
+Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who
+show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be
+callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that
+they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and
+cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through
+them. I am in awe before them many times. The child that can see
+fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable
+Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] From _Midstream_.
+
+
+
+
+23
+
+MORE ABOUT ORDER
+
+
+The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself.
+In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the
+resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error
+lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the
+existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult
+life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.
+
+The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man
+lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last
+two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain
+and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no
+help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look
+at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will
+observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally
+inert--the ones who have to surmount themselves as well as their tasks,
+and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.
+
+In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour
+hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is
+allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours
+presents a picture of the purest tragedy.
+
+Two of the primary causes of human misery are competitive education of
+children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by
+mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I
+have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one
+whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error.
+All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to
+cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one entity, as
+it were.
+
+The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and
+again--from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired
+disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been
+a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor
+Aurelius--and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call
+Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more
+clearly and perfectly than any.
+
+A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast over night, but it requires
+thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We
+look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its
+worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are
+watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and
+in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the
+strife--immersed themselves again in the long night of war.
+
+But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are
+more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must
+still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest.
+The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands
+of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto
+ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good
+for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is
+in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.
+
+Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a competitive
+plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity.
+I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by
+heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in
+the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered
+this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind
+us--every day, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this
+baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars.
+The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can
+and giving only what he must--against every call, every fragrance, every
+flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring
+us nearer home as a race.
+
+Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied
+things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in
+material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the
+lie that we prosper by adding _things_ unto ourselves.... A certain
+automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within
+a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the
+maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a
+commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means,
+the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual
+lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of
+children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear--to
+say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built
+nothing.
+
+There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot,
+or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others
+screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and
+pluck it forth--eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have
+a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do
+again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of
+the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages
+could pay for these hells of routine.
+
+Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his
+individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And
+for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a
+marvel for efficiency.
+
+The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage
+here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down
+another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes
+who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since
+they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property--but
+the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than
+mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is
+never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task
+well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own
+centres of being, puts his enduring self in it--a self said to be
+fashioned not of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind.
+You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or
+friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes
+to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price--matter yields unto
+you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or
+the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You
+possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.
+
+I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought--and he
+didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but
+bark and green, shade and sun--a kind of twilight curtain dropped before
+his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.
+
+"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why, they're just stones----"
+
+I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his
+landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the
+bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance--that it was a
+challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient
+presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal
+with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction--the rest of
+his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a
+septic-tank where air and light must be excluded.... This man had
+another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I
+would point out merely that he did not truly own them.
+
+Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion
+with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any
+beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.
+
+I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of
+two distinct emotions--the first a wearing tension lest some one should
+come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I
+had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely
+evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that
+money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius
+for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent
+years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as
+life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it
+all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more
+designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I
+found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes
+for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing
+he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many
+decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that
+charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the
+making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by
+men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they
+were fine; then they received.
+
+It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when
+the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he
+realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand.
+Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a
+spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation
+of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the
+whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe
+and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing
+but jingle and tinkle and din.
+
+I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain
+slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the
+instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in
+every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and
+exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the
+genius of the machine. It answered, not in _tempo_ and volume alone, but
+in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young
+musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch
+the _Waldstein_ or the _Emperor_, and that I had now merely to
+punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....
+
+A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor
+cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not
+true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured
+objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by
+methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the
+motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played
+upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one
+hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to
+the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of
+manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and
+mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and
+more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and
+selling.
+
+Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness,
+break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices
+through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and
+acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable
+in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue
+for such productions, which is advertising.
+
+You will say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A
+people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and
+sated with inferior objects. The whole _art of life_ is identified with
+our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses
+and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current
+style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of
+stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the
+cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true
+appreciations--in clothing, house-building and furnishing--following the
+heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.
+
+We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the
+real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows
+that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily
+spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his
+name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter
+inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming
+an incentive of the many.
+
+There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful
+character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the
+man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our
+national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of
+each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the
+many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple
+theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling
+dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes,
+and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of
+the eternal things--just so long will we have war and governmental
+stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.
+
+
+
+
+24
+
+THE FRESH EYE
+
+
+Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as
+possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs
+our neighbours sing--this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that
+we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness
+to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as
+true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each
+man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit
+of pioneers to come into his own.
+
+A few years ago I passed for a square or two along the main avenue of a
+large city--a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the
+hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most
+hideous shades--the reds of blood and lust and decadence.
+
+"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.
+
+A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft. I saw something about
+America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't
+know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the
+season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans
+was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence
+of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to
+ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking
+and horror-bound peoples--bloody as the Balkans--because Trade had
+brought them in.
+
+These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain
+colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye
+that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not
+know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short
+steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a
+street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood.
+I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy
+with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency
+of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be
+there.
+
+He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a
+certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying
+set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward
+to the shoulders of the motorman; and from his figure my mind wandered
+to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon
+the _juice_ and upon the passing force of steam--through tunnels and
+trestles at this moment--driving trains and cars and ships around the
+world.
+
+It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this
+motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving
+passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each
+day--his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his
+faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos
+again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this
+motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The
+average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not
+too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the
+roads of production to those who are ready.
+
+Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding
+his trousers.
+
+They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual
+every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear
+white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that
+change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the
+more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer
+clothing winter and summer for months at a stretch. One must accept
+this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not
+want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its
+threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.
+
+... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the
+cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wide _W_ that a
+child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I
+suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and
+conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these
+things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the
+Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for
+us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we
+seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had
+we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the
+debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this
+good man should be shamed so.
+
+And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the
+tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season,
+widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the
+abdomen as from a tightened stem the next--these are the real
+obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is
+frank and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human
+beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If
+I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me
+do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the
+bringing up of children _not to revolt_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall
+man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he
+loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before
+your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be _alone_ is
+to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and
+warm.
+
+It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their
+freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see
+things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as
+they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker
+who brings up anything worthy, has done just this--reproduced the thing
+more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or
+because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute
+need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him.
+It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's
+work in the Chapel.
+
+Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of
+character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect
+of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time
+of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an
+important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play
+or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This
+is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial
+settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth--_white_ because
+it contains all colour--is not dominant and flaring enough for the
+wearied and plethoric eye.
+
+We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A
+writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the
+story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character,
+the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of
+fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes
+through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These
+forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our
+own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as
+it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion
+that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no
+matter how consummate we become as artists.
+
+It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his
+study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under
+London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk
+for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary
+grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a
+more perfect expression in words.
+
+In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all
+observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the
+work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of
+acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of
+character portrayal--the facility with which we are able to lose
+ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known
+delight when some one said, "You must _be_ that person when you are
+writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer
+through a book and presently begins _to do himself_. After that one goes
+over the early part of the book during which the character is being
+learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished
+conception."
+
+It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a
+shiftiness which must pass.
+
+The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is
+cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The
+expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near
+a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The
+instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because
+it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by
+actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells
+us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit
+of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the
+truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par
+with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal
+is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love
+of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle,
+Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the
+fiction sense--that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to
+enflesh their literary efforts in story form.
+
+This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors
+above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were
+interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the
+years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own
+minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the
+whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and
+more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind
+draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its
+expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and
+fictioning of any form is impossible.
+
+Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that
+charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to
+encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its
+centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and
+the actual.
+
+The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their
+inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely
+mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become
+more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form
+their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of
+the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task
+of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.
+
+I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way
+is first--all the great companions have taken that way at first.
+Solitude--that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism.
+The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of
+God--then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two
+worlds--that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings--and a time for
+great migratory flights.
+
+
+
+
+25
+
+THE CHOICE OF THE MANY
+
+
+A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it
+had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation--a patriotic
+meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be
+ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national
+integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new
+civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems
+divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly
+bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in
+themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material
+vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe
+gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their
+spines touched with death.
+
+The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and
+the like. It has been a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the
+larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it--as if they had
+been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and
+understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and
+conception _for them_, they find it mainly out of accord with things as
+they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build
+forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.
+
+This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us,
+the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their
+distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation
+is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his
+spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many
+or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to
+understand him better than their fathers.
+
+I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect
+significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as
+mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you--new
+thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic
+age.
+
+You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you
+long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it is here
+and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever
+divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the
+three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein
+the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset,
+are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no
+universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer
+you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you
+will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the
+lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a
+lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may
+live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that
+which is static is dead.
+
+There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of
+the time. Three-score-and-ten--that is but an evening camp in a vast
+continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour,
+but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone.
+Art--those who talk art in the temporal--have not begun to work. If they
+only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose
+lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived
+beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the
+illusion of one life being all.
+
+There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and
+science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks
+loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the
+universe. That thing known as _psychology_ taught to-day in colleges
+will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the
+preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can
+become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually
+changed into new forms.
+
+Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not
+change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as
+you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on
+the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing
+machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh
+is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and
+changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in
+your heart--that sleeping one--is dynamic with all that you have been.
+Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an
+immortal being. You may be workers in magic.
+
+Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does
+not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its
+dictates and learned its wants--its taste will change and leave you
+nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of
+the many is not the voice of God--it is the voice of the temporal and
+its destiny is swift mutation.
+
+Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that
+is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to
+see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us
+sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who
+have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country--have walked
+with God alone against the crowd--until they were given the power to
+master their way into authority.
+
+The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its
+choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.
+
+
+
+
+26
+
+THE ROSE CHAPTER
+
+
+I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became
+irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and
+old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a
+tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature--a white lid that had been on quite
+long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her
+talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot
+began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though
+outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of
+other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs
+and woodland places--of the gardens we would make presently.
+
+"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man,
+"I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and
+little beside--vines, of course. I know men who fall like this into the
+iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will
+have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in
+his front yard with unvarying resolution--oh, for many years. He knows
+just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with
+the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies.
+They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad--the single ones, dry and
+thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed
+place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful--born of evil
+thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear
+innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative
+effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him,
+and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.
+
+"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than
+the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care.
+Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that
+forgets to bloom--like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human.
+Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see
+deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."
+
+Which remarks were accepted without comment.
+
+"Again," the old man added, "some of the accepted things are not so far
+along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see
+it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were
+to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen
+anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is
+raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the
+whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in
+their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an
+exhalation that is like a love-potion--earthy things that ask so little,
+do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the
+bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance
+is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage
+is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency
+goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."
+
+"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.
+
+"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the
+voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their
+odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot
+express his gratitude for--like the mignonette. Their colouring and form
+warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each
+year--not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the
+way. Then I may betray a weakness of my own--and I am glad to--but I
+love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the
+white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of
+its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown
+like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has
+never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the
+lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can
+only be endured in my case from a distance."
+
+"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.
+
+"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me
+that people raise so many _just roses_. Here is a world by itself. There
+is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and
+saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and
+sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are
+roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are
+delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human
+heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for
+Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that
+one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so
+far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women
+of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, as thousands of
+other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past
+against which to measure their romances.
+
+"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and
+woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world--of
+all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at
+length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be
+veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits
+for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all
+great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since
+greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through
+expression. A great romance will out--through a child or a book or some
+mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One
+looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest
+deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of
+woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's
+arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his
+actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her
+energy that quickens his conceiving....
+
+"Roses--how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and
+women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of
+themselves? Do you think that the actual _hurt_ of their beauty--the
+restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their
+silent leaning over the rim of a vase--is nothing more than a product of
+soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as
+moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist
+before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has
+come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think
+as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like,
+that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic
+influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening--something that makes a
+flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.
+
+"... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have
+reached roses--have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they
+linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses.
+In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which
+has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the
+white to the pink roses--and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the
+search ever more passionate--until we begin to discover that which our
+hearts are searching for--not upon any plant but in ideal.
+
+"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about
+producing the flower--as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of
+the thought. At least we think so--as the universe is evolving to
+fulfil at last the full thought of God....
+
+"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes,
+until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy
+Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste
+as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him,
+and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his
+listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news
+of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the
+performance of the lesser ones.... But roses--so many by-paths, because
+roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell
+is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.
+
+"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens
+which are at the bottom. There are good greens--the green of young elms
+and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of
+yellow may be--and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The
+greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging--the
+water-colours--the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature
+brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the
+rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like
+ninety degrees of evolution--the full quarter of the circle that is
+similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect
+spine of man.
+
+"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or
+less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are
+laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These
+improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for
+instance, to represent all stages--roses that are specialising in their
+present growth, one might say, in form _or_ colour _or_ texture; but in
+the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our
+window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this
+distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but
+when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in
+little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of
+evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body,
+then a mind, then a soul--and growth in the dimension of soul unifies
+and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who
+see--that the plan is one....
+
+"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved
+according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper
+reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the
+path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture,
+the sun began to paint a new beauty upon them--not the pink that is a
+diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl.
+The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a
+white base.
+
+"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral.
+We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is
+steadily upward--always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our
+valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a
+transition--an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.
+
+"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The
+greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose
+with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it.
+There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this
+particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have
+fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that
+have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort
+of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland
+maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and
+colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost
+in the same illusion....
+
+"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a
+few spots of red on the outer petals--like the persistent adhering
+taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys--they are the
+best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty.
+Like some saintly lives--they seem to have come all but the last of the
+ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the
+flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in
+due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have
+turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas
+is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of
+all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products.
+In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they
+are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in
+their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own
+heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the
+Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the
+nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the
+inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the _fragrance itself_ to
+our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the
+fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose,
+on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a
+rain."
+
+
+
+
+27
+
+LETTERS
+
+
+Outside, as I have said, it was cracking cold. We talked thirstily by
+the big fire, discussed the perfect yellows in Nature--symbols of purest
+aspiration--and the honest browns that come to the sunlight-gold from
+service and wear--the yellow-brown of clustered honey bees, of the
+Sannysin robe, of the purple martin's breast. We were thirsting for
+Spring before the fire. The heart of man swells and buds like a tree. He
+waits for Spring like all living things. The first months of winter are
+full of zest and joy, but the last becomes intolerable. The little girl
+had not let us forget at all, and so we were yearning a full month too
+soon.
+
+"I know a bit of woods," said the Abbot. "It is only two miles away. A
+creek runs through it, and there are hills all 'round--lots of hickory
+and elm and beech. There's one beech woods off by itself. Maples and
+chestnuts are there, too, and many little cedars. There is a log house
+in the centre, and right near it a Spring----"
+
+He was talking like an old saint would talk of the Promised Land.
+
+"You are breaking our hearts," I said.
+
+"The hills are dry, so you can go early," he went on. "The cattle have
+been there in season, as long as I can remember, so there are little
+open meadows like lawns. The creek is never dry, and the Spring near the
+log house never runs dry. I could go there now----"
+
+"So could I," said the little girl.
+
+They almost trapped me. I stirred in the chair, and remembered there was
+but an hour or two of daylight left in the afternoon.... Besides there
+was a desk covered with letters.... People ask problems of their own,
+having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the
+writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never
+descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the
+work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who
+said, "I have written you several letters, but never mailed them."
+
+"Why?" I would ask.
+
+Answers to this question summed into the reason that they found
+themselves saying such personal things that they were afraid I would
+smile or be bored.... Letters are regarded as a shining profit now, a
+fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has
+shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters
+that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too
+fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest
+to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who
+have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their
+minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike
+aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons
+disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man
+is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied
+with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism,
+the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not
+criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do
+not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers
+they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.
+
+There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things
+so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean
+autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to
+make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have _habits_. There seems
+to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money,
+and who ask such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a
+publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?"
+"Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a
+first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"
+
+I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of
+producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of
+meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet,
+again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much
+money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in
+fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and
+written books that brought much money.
+
+But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the
+driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to
+one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a
+letter on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big
+finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably
+restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all
+truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as
+well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered
+world called Society--winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain
+and shore. They were very miserable and they seemed to sense the
+existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there
+work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world
+existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the
+final page or two--that most winning quality of the younger generation.
+
+... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world.
+Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is
+not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all
+that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being
+established against American materialism along the Western coast. There
+is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art
+and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a
+conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in
+the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand
+of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.
+
+All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is
+becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of
+tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the
+entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that
+is _living spirit_ is being driven westward before gross Matter--westward
+as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.
+
+The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In
+California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be
+builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and
+splendid idealisation.
+
+But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes
+lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter
+day, was a communication from San Francisco--the last to me of several
+documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The
+documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They
+reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above
+flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the
+brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society
+reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from
+a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a
+purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one
+approach the super-mental area by the force of mentality alone.
+
+But I found _the turning_ in these documents with alarm; that the
+purpose divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black
+business--known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black
+before the Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism.
+I recalled that psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this
+letter:
+
+"I have received some of your early papers and plans, and thank you. I
+want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse
+running through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read--to
+play to commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough
+without bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces.
+They will work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin
+will result. For these forces which you show in operation are the real
+vitalities of man, which used other than in the higher schemes of
+life--call in the bigger devils for man to cope with. When one begins to
+use the dimension of the inner life, before the lower phases of the self
+are mastered, he becomes a peril to himself and to others. I feel that I
+do not need to be explicit to psychologists. I want to be on record as
+strongly urging you to be sure that the animal is caged before you loose
+the angel. Also that I have a conviction that there are ten times too
+many tradesmen in the world now; and that office-efficiency is not the
+kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I know you are in the way
+of real work, and that's why I venture to show my point of view; and
+please believe me energetic only toward the final good of the receptive
+surface you have set out to impress."
+
+
+
+
+28
+
+THE ABBOT DEPARTS
+
+
+One day in March, the Abbot said:
+
+"You know that woods I was telling you about?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, my father bought it the other day."
+
+... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that
+had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the
+Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was
+natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was
+cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and
+beech--clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men--with thorn and dogwood
+growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane.
+The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft
+and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven
+their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a
+half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would
+have named an estate after--or a province.
+
+Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men
+and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I
+turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either
+side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too
+much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was
+there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest
+impression. God bless the fodder--but what a price to pay. They had
+burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under
+that sacred cattle-path.
+
+Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of
+cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and
+hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and
+the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The _story_ of the
+struggle for life on Mars came to me--how the only water that remains in
+that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the
+canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply
+for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.
+
+It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer
+of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I
+hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.
+
+"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.
+
+"Use it for a pasture."
+
+"Isn't going to cut it--any of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's _No_ and
+_Yes_. I took hope.
+
+"Is it thin enough to pasture?"
+
+"The main piece is. Better come and see."
+
+A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the
+wan light of March outside.
+
+"There's everything there--a virgin beech wood--a few acres of
+second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers--then the stream
+and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."
+
+"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.
+
+"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have
+thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw
+the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."
+
+There was a healing in that _never_.... The Abbot was not the kind to
+ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and
+had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father
+had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that
+we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the
+rubber-boots.
+
+"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the
+far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."
+
+He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey,
+clouds yellowish-grey and watery.
+
+We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a
+stream running across--a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still
+held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not
+get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an
+oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to
+punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for
+thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain
+and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers.
+For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with
+melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the
+afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters,
+presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at
+times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first
+time I saw the Amphitheatre.
+
+We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and
+looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream
+winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of
+the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire
+bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed
+and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside
+me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent
+branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like
+kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a
+sisterhood--the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and
+through the naked branches, a log cabin.
+
+An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had
+made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the
+cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched
+it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a
+fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the
+moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many
+decades--built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and
+floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded
+upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the
+north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new
+roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming
+there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a
+forest.
+
+"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.
+
+"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.
+
+"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there
+it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of
+woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in
+your hand----"
+
+We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about
+the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different
+angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main
+timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and
+ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the
+Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.
+
+"It won't be so another Spring," he said.
+
+Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the
+future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were
+torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.
+
+"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I
+repeated.
+
+"No."
+
+There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling
+dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town
+came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every
+odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what
+the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said
+to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it
+was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white
+man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment,
+but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do
+not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must
+depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting
+glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high.
+The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though
+chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for
+the edge of the Lake where we belonged.
+
+... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We
+were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their
+highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their
+orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes.
+I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on
+choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day,
+and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown,
+formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the
+highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have
+forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its
+demands and making its values known, having long since called unto
+itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high
+northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths
+of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches
+gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too
+slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women
+of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no
+holier place than a beech-wood....
+
+The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us--put in the fireplace and
+the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent
+there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days
+of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost
+intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a
+place some day for many of the great little books of all time--the place
+for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The
+Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream,
+too.
+
+... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only
+temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to
+me quite coldly:
+
+"They have decided to make me go back to school----"
+
+"Sit down," I answered.
+
+As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of
+sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at
+first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic;
+full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the
+worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you
+somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount.
+He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the
+moment all its ravishing greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One
+sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse
+takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced,
+but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not
+slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.
+
+The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand
+on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white
+breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others.
+The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once--and away.... He is but
+fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful
+things have happened to him.
+
+They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early
+and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from
+habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is
+new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he
+was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal
+of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never
+runs.
+
+But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former
+teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I
+asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they
+did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The
+appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was
+for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the
+story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I
+would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he
+was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable
+him to get himself out.
+
+My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop
+an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told
+them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and
+steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of
+order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one
+of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and
+ordered plane.
+
+The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I
+used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely
+answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples
+that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of
+Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted
+one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he
+shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and
+must try once more.
+
+It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy,
+believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against
+his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the
+next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I
+cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a
+kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked
+hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was
+really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly
+afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured
+me:
+
+"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm
+in your Study."
+
+There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up
+in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth
+from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the
+books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should
+really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to
+the Abbot:
+
+"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into
+competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through
+the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come.
+You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy--live
+it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an
+honour--a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready.
+Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might.
+Feel us behind you--rooting strong--and hurry back."
+
+
+
+
+29
+
+THE DAKOTAN
+
+
+It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large
+bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he
+had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over
+grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's
+shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns
+that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use.
+Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the
+joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about
+finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The
+Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit.
+He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two,
+or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.
+
+But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too
+fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them
+until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a
+desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot
+touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it
+with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly
+over the writer's words.
+
+The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless
+gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few
+pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left
+the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there.
+I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he
+looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for
+days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like
+Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the
+fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the
+rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of
+the master of Walden in his work.
+
+The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original
+thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the
+big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness
+that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent
+the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the
+sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to
+this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the
+companions of hardship and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the
+last summer he has moved about field and wood and shore, between hours
+of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have
+found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons
+together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs
+follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:
+
+     "Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its
+     energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and
+     light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness
+     and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and
+     soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the
+     first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of
+     Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our
+     wildest imagination.
+
+     "Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things.
+     As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on
+     the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in
+     higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most
+     marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as
+     yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over _telepathy_ is
+     merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.
+
+     "It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we
+     know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and
+     scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that
+     is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a
+     thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to
+     higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of
+     shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among
+     fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in
+     proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration.
+     Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to
+     give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of
+     his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth
+     of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling
+     chatter. It is only those few who have come _to know_,
+     through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and
+     draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that
+     become gifted with all-knowing counsels.
+
+     "There is a sound born from every thought, action, or
+     aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound
+     not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive
+     enough to receive the impression. From the collective,
+     intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or
+     working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which
+     is to be _felt_ as a fine singing tingle by all in the
+     vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an
+     exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be
+     felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all
+     lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the
+     voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and
+     known before it is uttered; all minds are one.
+
+     "... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing,
+     conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves
+     a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is
+     something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet
+     the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy
+     notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are
+     impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic,
+     spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they
+     can to the vibrations of peace and harmony--to the _Sounds_,
+     which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious
+     of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide
+     that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and
+     study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate
+     from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case
+     has not to do with intellect and reason, but with
+     sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire
+     intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness,
+     and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless
+     and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.
+
+     "Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening,
+     inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has
+     anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into
+     the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?
+
+     "... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are
+     low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one
+     strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to
+     the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the
+     West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of
+     sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the
+     magic pronunciation of _Aum_, _Amitabha_, _Allah_, of certain
+     chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws
+     a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the
+     injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are
+     surrounded by....
+
+     "Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken
+     rhythm, would call the _Vina_, that Oriental harp-string of
+     the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But _Vina's_ magic cry
+     at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The
+     voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of
+     thunder, the wind in the pines--these are sounds that bring
+     one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of
+     the Universe. These are the voice of _kung_, 'the great tone'
+     in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle
+     note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern
+     China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening
+     raptly to _kung_, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho
+     rushing by.' One longs to be the intimate of such
+     meditations."
+
+
+
+
+30
+
+THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)
+
+
+I first heard of the Dakotan[3] at a time when I was not quite so
+interested in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country
+wrote me, and sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially,
+though the work was good. She tried again, and I took the later
+manuscript to bed with me, one night when I was "lifted out," as the
+mason said. It did not work as designed. Instead of dropping off on the
+first page, I tossed for hours, and a letter asking him to come to
+Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the morning.
+
+He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was
+established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since
+he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a
+childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants
+the popular market; the quality of his _bent_ precludes that for the
+present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America
+spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight
+line between the thought and the utterance.
+
+A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the
+sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a
+man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and
+the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the
+run of thought, the better the work.
+
+One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a
+continual changing and refining production about our truest friends--the
+same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest--that quickens
+us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we
+must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must
+always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and
+do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in
+our breast--it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have
+_arrived somewhere_--in profession, in trade, in world-standing--know
+that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is
+dissolute.
+
+I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you
+to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you
+to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for
+continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the
+thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well
+already--arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we
+did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is
+meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It
+may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I
+may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the
+land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with
+many voices."
+
+Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I
+think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought
+me:
+
+     "This is the latest and most complete of many under-water
+     dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I
+     learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine
+     are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way
+     back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has
+     been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in
+     consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to
+     tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked
+     fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to
+     Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to
+     this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at
+     the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the
+     explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.
+
+     "Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the
+     condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and
+     memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our
+     bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into
+     certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or
+     soul--conditions that are invoking to great reaches of
+     consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too
+     thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present
+     physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to
+     interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually
+     embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has
+     not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner
+     man is ever a hushed whisper.
+
+     "The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the
+     immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I
+     brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself
+     into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost
+     akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in
+     consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is
+     wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the
+     blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and
+     hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the
+     ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may
+     be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red
+     corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.
+
+     "It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A
+     bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every
+     recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I
+     used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain.
+     It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing
+     away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state
+     of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of,
+     as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind,
+     and the rain beating upon the roof....
+
+     "There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail
+     stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it
+     upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed....
+     It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low
+     monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving,
+     lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro.
+     It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank,
+     lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The
+     manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a
+     consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I
+     merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact,
+     during the dream I had hardly a sense of _being_, except
+     through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were
+     horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark,
+     a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion
+     from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I
+     seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do,
+     since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of
+     consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of
+     the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of
+     self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent,
+     except when a larger form instilled me with fear.
+
+     "My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings,
+     in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and
+     instinct--everything--so that I actually lived, in infinitely
+     dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.
+
+     "All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life
+     that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering;
+     I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the
+     unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a
+     dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem
+     to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through
+     the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan
+     filter of grey. It was light shining through water, a light
+     which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was
+     intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were
+     sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob,
+     boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what
+     it was to cringe.
+
+     "And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream
+     exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write
+     I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our
+     greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain,
+     these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's
+     waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it
+     appears to me from this distance:
+
+     "As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into
+     the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing,
+     undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed,
+     beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the
+     depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay
+     there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a
+     torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon
+     me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to
+     move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the
+     dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect
+     hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of
+     temperature and vibration to feel the need even of
+     nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was
+     a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to
+     move again had not extraneous influences affected me after
+     seeming ages had passed.
+
+     "The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about
+     me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of
+     grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it,
+     or rather feel it--a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings
+     of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were
+     festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed
+     out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of
+     whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the
+     bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe
+     and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and
+     contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey
+     manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with
+     hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing
+     the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.
+
+     "Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly
+     phosphorescent lights, which winked on and off at intervals
+     as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an
+     instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up
+     the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they
+     feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the
+     bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain
+     permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at
+     intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of
+     many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of
+     blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in
+     the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders
+     that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths
+     and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They
+     were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams without the
+     searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first
+     felt, and they did not bother me.
+
+     "... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept
+     me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by
+     one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the
+     long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the
+     whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey
+     world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the
+     gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low
+     life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not
+     been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of
+     Fear. I shall never forget it--the Fear of the Black Bottoms.
+
+     "There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and
+     the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with
+     it. In the midst of a kind of freezing paralysis, the
+     struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of
+     locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then
+     there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre
+     against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital
+     part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment,
+     so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow.
+     The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the
+     terror to escape.
+
+     "Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of
+     Danger I had started _forward_. There had been no forward nor
+     backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a
+     dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was
+     thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away
+     from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre
+     of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking
+     forward and always pointed away from the danger--protected to
+     the last.
+
+     "As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body
+     sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as
+     possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the
+     bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of
+     organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect,
+     protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear
+     increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the
+     same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and
+     easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon
+     the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the
+     dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that
+     the rudiments of organs of locomotion were begun. And they
+     came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side
+     was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition,
+     reasoning power--everything--was generated and fostered by
+     Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our
+     first overcoming of Inertia.
+
+     "I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray;
+     and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was
+     clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was
+     gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appetite, body
+     bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me,
+     the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but
+     literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their
+     bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often
+     the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....
+
+     "There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born
+     of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive
+     surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born
+     from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall
+     always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and
+     rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower
+     pitch.
+
+     "Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a
+     stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the
+     bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows,
+     sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky
+     bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and
+     instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that
+     passed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on
+     and on forever. Repletion would never have come to the
+     Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.
+
+     "I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths.
+     About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were
+     extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the
+     ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began
+     the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It
+     was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible--the winking and waving
+     of the blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless
+     prey, a sudden extinguishing of the light, devouring--then
+     the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason
+     existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless
+     things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a
+     thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.
+
+     "... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all
+     unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement
+     takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then
+     there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life
+     is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement
+     is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the
+     Law of life.
+
+     "I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining
+     In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of
+     water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about
+     my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold
+     consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest
+     of that day and for long afterward."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] H. A. Sturtzel.
+
+
+
+
+31
+
+THE HILL ROCKS
+
+
+Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was
+thinking this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over
+the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and
+explainers--back to the sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there
+that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme,
+Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Fröbel, Swedenborg. We delight in the few great
+and isolated names of Greece and Rome that are above style. We turn
+continually to the perpetual fountains of India, but seldom to Egypt.
+
+We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at
+every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are
+stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and
+precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the
+strange splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its chief
+significance is that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a
+Master.
+
+The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has
+been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the
+misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh,
+instead of refuting many of them--yet the New Testament stands highest
+above all hands pointing heavenward.
+
+In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that
+accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove
+him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and
+the Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier
+Arrival, that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage
+and the passion of Jesus.
+
+Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical
+generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the
+novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us
+that the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as
+Luther's. Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and
+penetrative gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise
+to declare that it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus.
+Still the man matters less than his influence. His story is emphatically
+in the world; the spirit of it lives above all dogma and vulgarity,
+even above nationalism. It is the breath of Brotherhood and Compassion.
+It is nearer to us and less complex than the story of the Buddha.
+
+Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world.
+The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of
+first importance in the education of children is the institution of an
+ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. Children
+become starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake
+ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in
+our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these
+things:
+
+"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."
+
+When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at
+once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest,
+one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a
+reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to
+clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the
+reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of
+one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.
+
+We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter,
+and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about
+the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had
+poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were
+always different from other children. They suffered more than the others
+about them, because they were more sensitive.
+
+They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child--misunderstanding;
+often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they
+could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew
+apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think
+of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect
+analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with
+vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the
+maiden who sustained France--her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It
+was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies
+that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little
+while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden
+did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the
+centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when
+the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly
+enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the
+road to Emmaus--the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and
+finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He
+had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us
+by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"
+
+... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found
+work to do--work that people could not understand. The people invariably
+thought there must be a trick about the giving--that the eager one
+wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious
+workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and
+invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often
+they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.
+
+First of all, they were honest--that was the hill-rock. Such men come to
+make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves.
+They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they
+stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand
+that they had something good to give--those closest to them, not always
+seeing it first....
+
+You couldn't buy them--that was first established; then they turned the
+energies of their lives outward instead of in. The _something_ immortal
+about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found
+their particular _something_ to do. They found their work--the one thing
+that tested their own inimitable powers--and that, of course, proved
+the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not
+memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The
+world-man wants to give something to his people--the best he has from
+his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction--the most important
+in any life--to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old
+formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely
+new--the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.
+
+Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can
+happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The
+best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The
+man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea
+of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally
+valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally
+realises _its own religion_. The greatest wrong that has been done us by
+past generations is the detachment of work and religion--setting off the
+Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days
+for the progress of the animal.
+
+All good work is happiness--ask any man who has found his work. He is at
+peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire.
+Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be
+well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full
+powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving
+forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe
+inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper
+source of things----not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A
+man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the
+tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.
+
+Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that
+drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse _in_ to self,
+he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source,
+nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle
+and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward,
+he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their
+energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying
+capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the
+work he does.
+
+A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full
+before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according
+to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the
+vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.
+
+There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments,
+but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned
+it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The
+handle of an axe is a poem.
+
+We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as
+men, found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother
+Earth who turns to her God for light and power, and from that pure
+impregnation, brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all
+destruction and greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values
+of woods and coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would
+perceive that they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is
+service; that they have no relation to great individual fortunes. These
+are the free gifts from our Mother. As good workmen we would realise
+that greed and competition pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all
+that is insane within us.
+
+The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in
+Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat,
+and sometimes brings the smart to the eyes--is the quality of men who
+have found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the
+conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow
+their thoughts in action afterward, as water follows the curve of a
+basin. They go after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter
+passages to India; they sense the new power in the world; their faces
+are turned to the East for the rising of new stars. Often they die to
+make us see, but others spring to finish their work. Our hearts burn
+within us when we speak of their work.
+
+
+
+
+32
+
+ASSEMBLY OF PARTS
+
+
+Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must
+close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book--each
+a different book. Fascination attends the work. I assure you a teacher
+gets more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every
+professional man should call for his own. A man's work in the world
+should be judged by his constructive contacts with the young minds about
+him. A man should learn the inspiration which comes in service for the
+great Abstraction, the many, from which there is no answer; but he can
+only become powerful and unerring by trying out the results of his
+offerings face to face with his own group. It should be as natural for a
+matured man to gather his mental and spiritual familiars about him as it
+is for him to become the head of a domestic establishment.
+
+There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a little from ledger and
+margin, to the faces of the young about them--those who have come for
+the wages of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on
+stone, as great givers to the public. The public will not take these
+things personally; the public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who
+have nothing but money to give away cannot hope to receive other than
+calculating looks and laughter that rings with derision.
+
+The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted
+nationally and municipally. The business of man is to produce something.
+The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's
+goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a
+man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is
+the same with a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing
+transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a
+proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and
+a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he
+conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a
+church every seventh day.
+
+The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story;
+the figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular
+story if done well.
+
+The time is not far off, except to those whose eyes are dim, when
+countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense--in the sense of
+realising that the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not
+even electrified matter, but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure
+of the Fatherland. The development of youth is the first work of man;
+the highest ideal may be answered first hand. Also through the
+development of the young, the father best puts on his own wisdom and
+rectitude.
+
+The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is
+pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming
+in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten
+in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to
+supply a great variety of attractions. There is that _hum_ in the room.
+It is not dissonance. The child is encouraged to be himself and express
+himself; never to impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose
+himself in the objects that draw him most deeply.
+
+I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who
+worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a
+hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the
+education of man. I have not read this of Fröbel's work. I wanted to do
+these studies my own way, but I know from what I have seen of
+kindergartens, and what teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the
+work is true--that "The Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it
+have lived a hundred years otherwise.
+
+The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught.
+The process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the
+deeper powers, their organisation and direction. At the end of the year,
+the child is sent into the first grade, where the barbaric process of
+competitive education and brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as
+it was in Fröbel's time.... A kindergarten teacher told me in that low
+intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:
+
+"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently
+by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are
+wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast.
+Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand
+the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed
+children. The little dreamers--the sensitive ones--are hurt and altered
+for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You
+do not know how we have suffered."
+
+Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten
+teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because
+they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very
+little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great
+ideal that is carried out through their first year were continued
+through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with
+serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer
+place to be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in
+Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something
+of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I
+am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest
+way to write anything is as you would tell it:
+
+"... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The
+world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to
+the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the
+Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy--philosophers have called it
+by many names, but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in
+Spirit, since God is spirit.
+
+"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed,
+but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world
+is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one--that
+the parts of matter must be assembled into a whole--that a replica must
+be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men
+are identified with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth,
+a pulling apart instead of together.
+
+"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This
+is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present
+planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves
+with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars--all have to do with
+the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do
+with the assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is
+good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the
+many--_the instant_ we leave the part and conceive the whole.
+
+"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that
+the plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers--voices of
+men in every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and
+meaning, that the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music
+in place--but the players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own
+little parts. The baton of the leader is lifted, but they do not hear.
+In their self-promulgation they have not yet turned as one to the
+conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its highest, yet the hour has
+struck for the lift of harmony.
+
+"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual
+plan all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to
+be, is there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has
+touched and taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the
+parts into matter, making his dream come true. Thus have come into the
+world our treasures. We preserve them--every gift from a spiritual
+source. Often we preserve them (until they are fully understood) against
+our will. The mere matter-models break down and are lost, for matter
+changes endlessly until it is immortalised, as our bodies must be
+through the refinement of spiritual union.
+
+"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have
+made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished
+plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see--step by step--the
+song into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and
+the saints have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the
+pictures of the dream somehow in matter--and their own bodies often to
+martyrdom....
+
+"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest
+disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an
+inspiration to every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts;
+above, the plan as a whole and the missing parts. Man stands
+between--the first creature to realise that there is an above, as well
+as a below. All creatures beneath man are driven; they look down. Man
+alone has looked up; man has raised himself erect and may take what he
+will from the spiritual source to electrify his progress. Man becomes
+significant the moment he realises that the plan is not for self, but
+for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.
+
+"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more.
+There are endless analogies. Thousands before me have written and sung
+and told the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in
+these wrecking days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And
+what has this to do with education?
+
+"Everything. The brain sees but the part. The development of brain will
+never bring to child or man the conception of the spiritual plan. There
+is a man to come for every missing part. Each man, as he develops, is
+more and more a specialist. These missing parts shall be taken down from
+spirit and put into matter by men whose intrinsic gifts are developed to
+contact them. Thus have come the great poems and inventions so far, the
+splendid sacrifices of men, and all renunciation for the healing of the
+nations.
+
+"I would first find the work for the child. The finer the child the
+easier this part of the task. Then I would develop the child to turn to
+a spiritual source for his inspiration--his expectation to a spiritual
+source for every good and perfect thing. The dream is there; the other
+half of the circle is to produce the dream in matter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Education is thus religion--but not the man-idea of religion. It has
+nothing to do with creeds or cults, with affirmations or observances. It
+has to do with establishing connection with the sources of power, and
+bringing the energy down into the performance of constructive work in
+matter. Religion isn't a feeling of piety or devoutness; it is action.
+Spirituality is intellect inspired.
+
+"The mountain is broad at the base only. There are many paths upward.
+These paths are far apart only at the base. On the shoulder of the
+mountain we hear the voices of those who have taken the other paths.
+Still higher, we meet. The Apex is a point; the plan is one.
+
+"I would teach the young mind to find his own voice, his own part, his
+own message. It is there above him. True training is the refinement, the
+preparing of a surface fine enough to receive his part. That is the
+inspiration. The out-breath--the right hand of the process--is action,
+making a model in matter of the thing received.
+
+"All training that does not encourage the child to look into the Unseen
+for his power, not only holds, but draws him to the commonness of the
+herds.
+
+"... Many men to-day can believe in angels who cannot believe in
+fairies; but the child who sees the changes of light in the lowliest
+shadows, whose fancy is filled with little figures of the conservers and
+colourers of nature, shall in good time see the angels--and one of that
+host shall come forward (which is more important and to the point)
+bringing a task for the child to do.
+
+"I say to the children here: 'I do not see the things you do, and in
+that I am your inferior. They shut the doors upon me when I was little,
+not meaning to, but the world always does that. That fineness of seeing
+went out from my eyes, but it is so good a thing that I do not want you
+to lose it. And always I am ready to listen, when you tell me what you
+have seen.'"
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
+
+MIDSTREAM
+
+... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to
+remain in American literature:
+
+_Boston Transcript_: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that
+Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in
+literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that
+will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in
+_Huckleberry Finn_.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced
+its full length. One wonders whether the interest, the skill, the
+general worth of it, the things it has to report of all life, as well as
+the one life, do not entitle _Midstream_ to the very long life that is
+enjoyed only by the very best of books.
+
+
+_San Francisco Argonaut_: Read the book. It is autobiography in its
+perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of
+god and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.
+
+
+_Springfield Republican_: It is difficult to think of any other young
+American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the
+"market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own
+terms of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation,
+_Midstream_, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story
+of regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will
+he go?
+
+
+Mary Fanton Roberts in _The Craftsman_: Beside the stature of this book,
+the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with
+a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude.
+There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a
+draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and
+bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep,
+penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's
+words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a
+language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a
+quickened life.
+
+
+Ida Gilbert Myers in _Washington Star_: Courage backs this revelation.
+The gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr.
+Comfort's rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is
+a tremendous thing--the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.
+
+
+George Soule in _The Little Review_: Here is a man's life laid
+absolutely bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has
+done it before--this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made
+uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more
+important than truth--these will not read _Midstream_ through, but
+others will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility
+of Mr. Comfort's frankness.
+
+
+Edwin Markham in _Hearst's Magazine_: Will Levington Comfort, a novelist
+of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with
+passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over
+words. He has been a wandering foot--familiar with many strands; he has
+known shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He
+tells it all without vaunt, relating his experience to the large
+meanings of life for all men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of
+which we come, to whose great deep we return.
+
+
+ _12mo., Net, $1.25_
+
+
+
+
+    +-------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                             |
+    |                                                 |
+    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:     |
+    |                                                 |
+    | Page  59  Ile changed to He                     |
+    | Page  81  quiesence changed to quiescence       |
+    | Page 132  blurr changed to blur                 |
+    | Page 161  unforgetable changed to unforgettable |
+    | Page 243  became changed to become              |
+    | Page 261  spirtual changed to spiritual         |
+    | Page 262  posessions changed to possessions     |
+    | Page 285  apear changed to appear               |
+    | Page 287  blossome changed to blossoms          |
+    | Page 288  enviroment changed to environment     |
+    +-------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Child and Country
+       A Book of the Younger Generation
+
+Author: Will Levington Comfort
+
+Release Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #27793]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD AND COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Barbara Kosker and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<h1>CHILD AND COUNTRY</h1>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT</h4>
+<h4>Lot &amp; Company<br />
+Red Fleece<br />
+Midstream<br />
+Down Among Men<br />
+Fatherland</h4>
+<h4>GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY<br />
+NEW YORK</h4>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h1> Child and Country</h1>
+
+<h3><i>A Book of the
+ Younger Generation</i></h3>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4> BY</h4>
+
+<h2>WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT</h2>
+
+<h4>AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT &amp; COMPANY,"<br />
+ "DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE
+ RIDES ALONE," ETC., ETC.</h4>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<h5>NEW YORK<br />
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</h5>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5>Copyright, 1916,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By George H. Doran Company</span></h5>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<h3>TO THOSE
+<br />
+WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS
+<br />
+TO THE BUILDERS
+<br />
+OF THE RISING GENERATION</h3>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>
+<h2>FOREWORD</h2>
+
+
+<p>... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all
+detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many
+intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time....
+The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making
+in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture,
+and shore-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house
+or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two.
+Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found
+plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and
+length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to
+laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country
+people and the meshes of possession.</p>
+
+<p>In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the
+Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>of
+the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been
+wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and
+weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in
+the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking
+the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children
+in school&mdash;the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to
+resist contagions, mental and physical&mdash;the whole tendency of the school
+toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop
+the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child.</p>
+
+<p>We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but
+out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at
+hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens
+and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine
+things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming
+generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings
+who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of
+their struggle.</p>
+
+<p>It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain
+builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in
+the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could
+possibly give them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span>chapter are before me&mdash;revelations they have brought&mdash;and over all, if
+I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the
+children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the
+title.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a
+spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have
+been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see
+the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age
+above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we
+perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of
+America&mdash;signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have
+to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our
+children and to every conception of home&mdash;not the war itself, but the
+forming of the new social order, the message thrilling for utterance in
+the breasts of the rising generation. For they are the builders who are
+to follow the wreckers of war.</p>
+
+<p>Making a place to live on the lake shore, the development of bluff and
+land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a
+pool of water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer
+walls broken with chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior
+cultivations, the establishment of a visible order that is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span>but a symbol
+of the intenser activity of the natures within.</p>
+
+<p>Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of
+food, a friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the
+casements&mdash;these are sane desirable matters to gather together; but the
+fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the
+builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in
+fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised
+receptivity&mdash;a conception of its utilities that has come from long need.
+A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a
+curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in
+mating with a woman or fathering a child.</p>
+
+<p>There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why one
+man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along with
+maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will exchange a
+roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster. No
+chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our
+own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual
+re-adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.</p>
+
+<p>The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the
+cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning&mdash;a work so
+joyous and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span>productive that I would take any pains to set forth with
+clearness the effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep
+breathing of each mind&mdash;a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a
+selfless receptivity on the other. We can only breathe deeply when we
+are at peace. This is true mentally as well as physically, and
+soulfully, so far as one can see. The human fabric is at peace only when
+its faculties are held in rhythm by the task designed for them.
+Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the inspiration of
+to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal
+ambition here to become identified with education in the accepted sense.
+Those who come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save
+that which they are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing
+that, they belong, indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and
+shall always be; but first and last is the conviction that literature
+and art are but incident to life; that we are here to become masters of
+life&mdash;artists, if possible, but in any case, men.</p>
+
+<p>... To-day the glimpse of it all&mdash;that this is to be a book of the
+younger generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly
+I planned to relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came
+into their lovely being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to
+me that a man could do little better for his quiet joy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>than to raise
+roses; that nothing was so perfectly designed to keep romance perennial
+in his soul. Then the truth appeared&mdash;greater things that were going on
+here&mdash;the cultivation of young and living minds, minds still fluid,
+eager to give their faith and take the story of life; minds that are
+changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if the story is well
+told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it comes to-day
+(an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a man may
+build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an
+intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to
+tell simply and with something of order from the beginning.</p>
+
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Will Levington Comfort.</span></p>
+<p style="margin-left: 0.5em;"><span class="smcap">Stonestudy</span>, March, 1916.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" width="60%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl" width="85%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="15%"><span style="font-size: 80%;">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Bees and Blooms</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P17">17</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Bluff and Shore</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P28">28</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Stonestudy</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P38">38</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Imagination</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P43">43</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Wild Geese</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P55">55</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Workmanship</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P65">65</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Little Girl</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P78">78</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Abbot</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P90">90</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Valley-Road Girl</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P102">102</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Compassion</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P113">113</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Little Girl's Work</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P123">123</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Tearing-Down Sentiment</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P134">134</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Natural Cruelty</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P151">151</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Children Change</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P163">163</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Man's Own</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P171">171</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Plan is One</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P186">186</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Irish Chapter</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P196">196</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Bleakest Hour</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P202">202</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The New Social Order</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P217">217</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Common Clay Brick</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P222">222</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Highest of the Arts</span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P230">230</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Miracles</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P248">248</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">More About Order</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P259">259</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Fresh Eye</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P270">270</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Choice of the Many</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P279">279</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Rose Chapter</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P284">284</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Letters</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P294">294</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Abbot Departs</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P301">301</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Dakotan</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P313">313</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Dakotan</span> (<i>Continued</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P319">319</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Hill Rocks</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P330">330</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Assembly of Parts</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#P339">339</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHILD AND COUNTRY</h2>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr style="width: 20%;" /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>CHILD AND COUNTRY</h2>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P17" id="P17"></a>
+
+
+<hr />
+<br />
+<h2>1</h2>
+
+<h2>BEES AND BLOOMS</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In another place,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> I have touched upon our first adventure in the
+country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good
+district, but there was no peace there. I felt <i>forgotten</i>. I had not
+the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then
+to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it
+was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that
+fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and
+shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of
+necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which
+a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the
+early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>poisoned
+the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little
+plot. There was no inner order in my heart&mdash;on the contrary, chaos in
+and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and
+gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the
+Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the
+healing of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The
+country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the
+country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always
+felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria.
+I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live,
+for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental
+activity would sink into a bovine rumination.</p>
+
+<p>Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true
+that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more
+subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the
+roads of the many&mdash;the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A
+sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the
+devil is the voice of the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged
+city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a
+time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of
+the larger issues:</p>
+
+<p>"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more
+essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing
+children into the world. When evolving persons have reached
+individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them,
+they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of
+name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that
+founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red
+Indian <i>westward</i> off the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of
+the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of
+that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual
+experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of
+metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is
+that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have
+turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision
+which was their birthright."</p>
+
+<p>It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a
+generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the
+City for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper
+ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that
+have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures;
+for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the
+strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower
+of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The
+rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working
+long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at
+the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and
+that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it,
+and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a
+certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved
+profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to
+me, and all that the elm-tree meant&mdash;hill-cabins and country dusks, bees
+and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and
+aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for
+all that the elm-tree knew&mdash;as if I were exiled from the very flesh that
+could bring the good low earth to my senses again.</p>
+
+<p>Could it be that something was changed within&mdash;that we were ready at
+last? One of those <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I
+stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to
+rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen
+minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the
+American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over
+again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the
+smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban cars&mdash;one
+that would take us to the Lake St. Claire shore, and another that
+crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along her northern
+indentations for nearly ten miles.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.</p>
+
+<p>It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation
+with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by
+one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested
+that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the
+Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet
+and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy&mdash;the
+tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came
+running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his
+destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said:</p>
+
+<p>"He can tell you more than I can."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it
+was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to
+say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth
+edited. He called men by 'phone&mdash;names strange to me then that have
+become household names since&mdash;while we sat by smiling and silent in his
+little newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank,
+when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.</p>
+
+<p>Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had
+rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not
+always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor
+people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of
+the car had been rigid among beer-cases.</p>
+
+<p>We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of
+the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East
+in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the
+house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He
+was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages.
+That boy you shall be glad to know.</p>
+
+<p>We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach
+our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now
+from where I sit&mdash;to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to
+the very edge of a willowed bluff&mdash;to the end of the land. Erie brimmed
+before us. It led to a new life, too.</p>
+
+<p>I had always disliked Erie&mdash;as one who lived in the Lake Country and
+chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a
+little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie
+heretofore had meant only something to be crossed&mdash;something shallow and
+petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light
+darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I
+knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to
+wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars
+from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain
+where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian
+peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the
+Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of
+the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end
+of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think&mdash;we are pausing still.
+One must pause to project a dream.</p>
+
+<p>... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we
+hardly ventured to speak <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>of it. We had expected so little, and had
+brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of
+life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the
+cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern
+heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the
+first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep
+gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster
+were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not
+a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year.
+Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and
+brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had
+given. There were days in which we were so happy&mdash;that another summer of
+such life would have seemed too much to ask.</p>
+
+<p>I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read
+newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it
+was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully
+every night across the Lake&mdash;a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide,
+obscenity and passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like
+the smell of blood.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country;
+literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives
+apart <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can
+find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here
+for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants&mdash;turning back
+with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants
+that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded space,
+and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other.... One does not say
+what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work
+is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy
+planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be
+free.</p>
+
+<p>The City, intolerable as it is in itself&mdash;in its very nature against the
+growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time&mdash;is nevertheless
+the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and
+naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to
+avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.</p>
+
+<p>Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of
+spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel
+tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet
+and pass through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which
+brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a passage
+through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole
+is an ascent.</p>
+
+<p>A great leader of men who has never met the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>crowds face to face is
+inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and
+pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men
+turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of
+us can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure
+continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the
+year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and
+half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the
+City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again
+from the country replenished and refreshed.</p>
+
+<p>The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally
+true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have
+returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the
+last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the
+turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.</p>
+
+<p>Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the
+farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men
+within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every
+year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep
+cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have
+not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the
+long <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the
+heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the
+breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men
+look up more seldom.</p>
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Midstream, 1914, George H. Doran Co., New York.</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P28" id="P28"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>2</h2>
+
+<h2>BLUFF AND SHORE</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>There is no playground like a sandy shore&mdash;and this was sheltered from
+the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and
+made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as
+broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore
+with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of
+the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is
+formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer
+and lesser point is like a bit of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys
+of the rain-days with a beauty and power of its own, and the mornings
+flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a structure of idealism
+forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk. The young people
+turn to it often from the classes.</p>
+
+<p>The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely
+been seen so far from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>the swimming place in front of the rented
+cottages. It was while in the water that I determined to explore. The
+first thing that impressed me when I reached the eminence was the
+silence. It was something to be dreamed of, when the Lake was also
+still. There was no road; a hay field came down to the very edge of the
+bluff, and the shore fifty feet below was narrow and rocky. Very few
+people passed there. That most comfortable little town was lying against
+the rear horizon to the West. I used to come in the evenings and smoke
+as the sun went down. Sometimes the beauty of it was all I could
+bear&mdash;the voices of children in the distance and the Pelee light
+flashing every seven seconds far out in the Lake.</p>
+
+<p>I first saw it in dry summer weather and did not know that a bumper crop
+of frogs had been harvested that Spring from the deep, grass-covered
+hollows formed by the removal of clay for a brick-business long ago.
+There was good forage on the mounds, which I did not appreciate at the
+time. The fact is these mounds were formed of pure dark loam, as fine a
+soil as anywhere in the Lake Country.</p>
+
+<p>Those of the dim eyes say that once upon a time an orchard and
+brick-house stood on a bluff in front of the brick-yard, on a natural
+point, but that the Lake had nibbled and nibbled, finally digesting the
+property, fruit-trees, brick-house and all.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>I could well believe it when the first storm came. An East wind for
+three days brought steady deluges of high water that wore down the
+shore-line almost visibly. A week later came a West wind that enfiladed,
+so that what remained of the little point was caught in the cross-play
+of the weathers. If some one did not intervene, the brick-yard site
+would follow the orchard&mdash;that was clear.</p>
+
+<p>... Three or four times the owner came to see me. We had rejoiced in the
+rented property, rejoiced in owning nothing, yet having it all....
+Thoreau in his daily westward migrations studied it all with the same
+critical delight, and found his abode where others did not care to
+follow. We look twice at the spot we choose to build our house. That
+second look is not so free and innocent.... Yet a man may build his
+house. Thoreau had no little brood coming up, and I have doubted many
+times, even in moments of austere admiration, if he wouldn't have lived
+longer, had there been a woman about to nourish him. She would have
+insisted upon a better roof, at least.... I told the neighbour-man I
+would buy the brick-yard, if he didn't stop pestering me about it. He
+smiled and came once too often.</p>
+
+<p>The day before, standing upon that height of land (not too near the
+edge, for it looked higher in those days) I had gazed across the Lake,
+at one with it all, a friendly voyager of the skies, comrade of the
+yarrow and the daisy. I remember the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>long grass of the hollows, the
+peculiar soft bloom of it, and what a place it was to lie and dream,
+until one became a part of the solution of sunshine and tinted
+immensity.</p>
+
+<p>So I lost the universe for a bit of bluff on the Lake shore.</p>
+
+<p>When the East wind came, I saw with proprietary alarm the point wearing
+away. That which coloured the Lake was fine rose-clay and it was mine,
+bought by the foot-front.... A man may build his house.</p>
+
+<p>Every one who came along told me how to save the point. For weeks they
+came. Heavy drift-wood was placed in times of peace, so that the sand
+would be trapped in storm. No one failed me in advice, but the East wind
+made match-wood of all arrangements.... The high water would wash and
+weaken the base, and in the heaviness of the rains the bulk of earth
+above would fall&mdash;only to be carried out again by the waves. The base
+had to be saved if a natural slope was ever to be secured. Farther down
+the shore I noted one day that a row of boulders placed at right angles
+with the shore had formed a small point, and that a clump of willows
+behind had retained it. This was a bit of advice that had not come so
+authoritatively, but I followed the cue, and began rolling up rocks now
+like an ancient Peruvian. It was a little jetty, that looked like a lot
+of labour to a city man, and it remained as it was for several days.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>One morning I came forth in lashing weather&mdash;and rubbed my eyes. The
+jetty was not in sight. It was covered with a foot of sand, and the clay
+was dry at the base. A day's work with a team after that in low water,
+snaking the big boulders into line with a chain&mdash;a sixty-foot jetty by
+sun-down, built on top of the baby spine I had poked together. No man
+ever spent a few dollars more profitably. Even these stones were covered
+in time, and there was over a yard-deep of sand buttressing the base of
+the clay and thinning out on the slope of shore to the end of the
+stones. Later, when building, I took four hundred yards of sand from the
+east side of the stone jetty, and it was all brought back by the next
+storm....</p>
+
+<p>I read somewhere with deep and ardent sanction that a man isn't worth
+his spiritual salt if he lets a locality hold him, or possessions
+possess him; and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy.
+Whenever you play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand
+to weave you in. It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for
+quiet, and enough depth for a permanent fruit-garden&mdash;all for the price
+of a fifty-foot lot in the City; but these things call upon one for a
+certain property-mindedness and desiring, in the usage of which the
+human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the
+thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the
+sun-path and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and
+sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to make the dreams come
+true), instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers
+did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also
+forget it. A few good things&mdash;perennials, by all means an elm-tree,
+stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in
+materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have
+passed&mdash;these are enough. For a home that does not promote your
+naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion&mdash;through the
+very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The
+man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never
+know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first
+summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a
+surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against
+artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of
+simplicity which permit a man to forget himself&mdash;just missing the fact
+that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by
+suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only
+to show us wherein our treasure lies.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its
+squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual
+garnering&mdash;that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the
+eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he
+permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it.
+It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they
+have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake
+consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be very sure that none will
+escape the complication, for we rise to different dimensions of
+simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all organised
+hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain fixed
+in them&mdash;not to rush forth at length from our miserable
+self-consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic
+simplicity is ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man&mdash;that
+is ahead.</p>
+
+<p>That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through
+the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I
+expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the
+bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little
+trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From
+one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my
+land&mdash;that insensate motive is pretty well done <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>away with. But they
+have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes
+think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a
+week&mdash;there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them
+on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed;
+they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much
+water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too
+cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing&mdash;and
+low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without
+help. The temporality of all things&mdash;even of the great imperturbable
+trees&mdash;is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say
+morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."</p>
+
+<p>There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long
+and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started
+there&mdash;dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being
+brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live,
+but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting
+should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant
+hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in
+winter, if their laterals are severed.... I want the birds to come to
+this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the
+plan, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the
+ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must
+be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....</p>
+
+<p>I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first
+summer that I yearn for again&mdash;close to the sand, close to the voices of
+the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones
+have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of
+healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it
+plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.</p>
+
+<p>The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from
+beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below,
+and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty
+degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any
+artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or
+fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes.
+Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths&mdash;a trickle of water
+over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines&mdash;something of all this
+will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is
+last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this
+Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small
+shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the
+leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>It is good to
+plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.</p>
+
+<p>The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun
+to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could
+not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a
+summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a
+fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and
+clearer&mdash;a blend of <i>patio</i> and broad hearth&mdash;running water and red
+firelight&mdash;built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a
+roof of wired glass over a <i>patio</i> paved with brick; the area sunken
+slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the
+sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms,
+urns, ferns and winter plants.</p>
+
+<p>All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it&mdash;and as yet, there
+wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop
+to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse
+was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P38" id="P38"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>3</h2>
+
+<h2>STONESTUDY</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work.
+This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the
+presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there
+were ancient scars across my back&mdash;as if I had helped in that building,
+and under the lash, too.</p>
+
+<p>... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of
+stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated
+to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was
+afraid of short time or flaws of construction&mdash;I was watching because it
+satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get
+accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy
+powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is
+a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of
+setting. If you can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>find a bearing for one stone upon another without
+falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall
+is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with
+stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that
+muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens
+slowly hardens best.</p>
+
+<p>The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that
+there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier
+Fall than that&mdash;a full year before the thought of Europe became action.
+I watched the work&mdash;as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen,
+so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns
+easily after this.</p>
+
+<p>It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all
+symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of
+order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well&mdash;six, eight, and
+eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at,
+his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter
+he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily
+increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a
+great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be
+learning masonry all over again.</p>
+
+<p>"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>pretty well lifted out by
+night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."</p>
+
+<p>There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is
+something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long
+roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I
+asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have
+built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone&mdash;fifty years
+of masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their
+stone-hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so.
+They have learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed
+to the Line, and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence
+of their being (I cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly
+integration. There is a nobility from stone-work which the masons put on
+with the years&mdash;the tenders have it not; neither have any of the
+indiscriminate labour men. One must have a craft to achieve this. The
+building is not so much. The houses and barns and stores which the elder
+masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands in this
+country&mdash;they are but symbols of the building of character within. They
+see <i>into</i> the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another
+all would look the same&mdash;the blacks <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>and reds and whites, even the
+amalgans&mdash;all grey-brown and weathered outside&mdash;but the masons know what
+is within, the colour and grain and beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.</p>
+
+<p>"No, that's a black feller."</p>
+
+<p>"And this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good colour, but he ain't got no grain&mdash;all <i>gnurly</i>&mdash;as the feller
+says."</p>
+
+<p>Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of
+men....</p>
+
+<p>A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney&mdash;faced
+stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a
+low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden
+pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of
+firelight in the stone cave&mdash;a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to
+the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake&mdash;to the suspense of
+distance and Southern constellations.</p>
+
+<p>I laugh at this&mdash;it sounds so pompous and costly&mdash;but it is the shop of
+a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more
+than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and
+nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin&mdash;indeed,
+it had to. That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put
+out&mdash;a few six-inch trunks, brought <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>with their own earth frozen to
+them&mdash;a specimen of oak, walnut, hickory (so hard to move)&mdash;but an elm
+over-tone was the plan, and a clump of priestly pines near the stable.
+These are still in the revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to
+be. Time brings that, as it will smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work
+in vines, establish the roses and wistaria on the Southern exposure,
+slope and mellow and put the bloom over all.</p>
+
+<p>We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In
+the meantime the three children&mdash;a girl of ten and two younger boys&mdash;had
+almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of
+that then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from
+April on in the small town school until the summer vacation. This was
+tried for a few weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward
+the task of teaching our own.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P43" id="P43"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>4</h2>
+
+<h2>IMAGINATION</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first
+time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter
+in our house, and I was associating a good deal with a group of teachers
+in town, some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid
+forms of modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall
+especially a talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught
+thirty years, given herself freely to three generations&mdash;her own and
+mine and to another since then. She had administered to me a thing
+called <i>rhetoric</i> in another age, and she looked just the same, having
+kept her mind wide open to new and challenging matters of literature and
+life and religious thought.</p>
+
+<p>I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to
+her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She
+still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>very finest
+human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's
+weaknesses&mdash;as the Master established His church upon the weakest link
+of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:</p>
+
+<p>"I find them ready, <i>when they ask</i>. In the old occult schools there is
+a saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the
+student must also come half-way&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is
+so. There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five classes
+a day&mdash;twenty-five to fifty students each&mdash;but so much falls upon stony
+ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated.
+"If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question
+itself proves that the soil is somehow ready&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions.
+The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but
+prepare the soil, too."</p>
+
+<p>"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the
+imagination&mdash;to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has
+to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry
+him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of
+abundance."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.</p>
+
+<p>" ... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that
+surely interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Nature?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her&mdash;what
+pictures <i>mean</i> Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature
+is a kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a
+God-mother&mdash;to kittens and trees and butterflies and roses and children.
+She is mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her
+about it. Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet&mdash;shelf
+after shelf full of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told
+her about the Sun as the Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her.
+She held to that. Always now when we fall into talk <i>naturally</i>&mdash;it is
+about the old Mother and the brilliant Father who pours his strength
+upon all concerned&mdash;Mother Nature's mate."</p>
+
+<p>The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's
+quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do
+that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days&mdash;of the handful of
+days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of
+thousands of young women now teaching in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>America without the gleam;
+beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when
+all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out
+of that, really. A teacher who hasn't&mdash;kills it in the child; at least,
+all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the
+child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery&mdash;but the lack
+of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the
+wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so
+terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle
+and repress their real impulses and rush for things to hold in their
+hands for a little time. If they had imagination they would see that the
+things they hold in their hands are disintegrating <i>now</i> as everything
+in Nature is; that the hand itself weakens and loses its power. Why,
+here we are upstanding&mdash;half-gods asleep within us. Imagination
+alone&mdash;the seeing of the spirit of things&mdash;that can awaken us."</p>
+
+<p>I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old
+debatable ground&mdash;but the secret was out. It was the essence of my
+forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of
+everything else&mdash;all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.</p>
+
+<p>" ... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>"All nature and life
+prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children
+see it&mdash;and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by
+scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday&mdash;a man I
+like&mdash;a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things
+prospering when fat&mdash;children and churches, purses and politicians. A
+big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned
+to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through
+twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than
+from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his
+children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I
+happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should
+fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.</p>
+
+<p>"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in
+building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage
+has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that
+these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner
+are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the
+connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at
+once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without
+it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh
+beneath, I talked of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>writing&mdash;something of what writing means to me.
+When I stopped, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing
+matter&mdash;&mdash;' and opened the subject again....</p>
+
+<p>"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his
+view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is
+asked from the many in the great plan of things&mdash;but I like madness
+better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies
+are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in
+things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-god that sleeps
+within&mdash;at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a
+devil, perhaps I can beat him."</p>
+
+<p>"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said,
+"&mdash;&mdash;seeing the spirit of things."</p>
+
+<p>"I hadn't thought of it as a definition&mdash;but it expresses what the real
+part of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs,
+knowing nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their
+wheel of things; what their neighbour is going to say next, from the
+routine of the day's events. After a little of that, I have to run
+away&mdash;to a book, to a task, to an awakened imagination. Only those who
+are in a measure like us can liberate us. That's the key to our
+friendships, our affections and loves. We seek <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>those who set us
+free&mdash;they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give&mdash;a
+surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin&mdash;our dynamics
+is doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>" ... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her
+sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was
+filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root
+systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She
+read one of Henry Ward Beecher's <i>Star Papers</i> and verified many of its
+fine parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The
+Shore is ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain
+is sweet; even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She
+looks every morning, as I do, at the Other Shore. We know the state of
+the air by that. And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how
+full the days are."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she
+wanted to be."</p>
+
+<p>"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her
+music. She liked it and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>did well, but it never burned into her
+deeps&mdash;never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her
+little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother&mdash;the
+highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and
+the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it
+work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of
+processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by
+intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one
+of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said&mdash;only
+expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."</p>
+
+<p>The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.</p>
+
+<p>"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression
+of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the
+left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we
+receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving
+formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know
+the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of
+that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was
+amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have,
+who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an
+arsenal of laws and fears."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't&mdash;at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as
+instruction even."</p>
+
+<p>"And spelling?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she
+is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading.
+These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather
+completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the
+real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page
+manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that
+being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose
+God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world
+with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection
+to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from
+children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his
+neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different
+and higher organs."</p>
+
+<p>"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh
+to me," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"The little girl is ten, you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>presently. "It saddens me
+to think of my myriads. But we do our best&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Still you are taking her away from us."</p>
+
+<p>I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as
+much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean&mdash;taking her away?"</p>
+
+<p>"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal
+with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work.
+Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I
+believe you have established the point that one can learn best from
+within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost
+between her and her generation&mdash;as represented by my five classes each
+day."</p>
+
+<p>I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me
+straight to the crossing&mdash;and with very few words. I realised now that
+more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to
+possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced
+to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep
+open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and
+flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines
+around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination&mdash;it is
+all said in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of
+her&mdash;lifting her apart from the many?</p>
+
+<p>There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on,
+the job would be done more and more completely.</p>
+
+<p>"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will
+happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin
+searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find&mdash;not to be
+found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams&mdash;but the many will
+not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know
+who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were
+Solitaries&mdash;that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not
+have one stay with the many&mdash;just to avoid the loneliness and the
+heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world
+that is loved and remembered&mdash;every life lived with beauty and
+productiveness to the many&mdash;has come from the Solitaries. <i>Quest</i>, that
+is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on
+the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves&mdash;that which
+we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are
+fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more
+poignant suffering&mdash;but that is an honour&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>not see," she asked, "that
+all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential
+imagination?"</p>
+
+<p>"But children have it," I said.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P55" id="P55"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>5</h2>
+
+<h2>WILD GEESE</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of
+hard work, night-classes and furnace air&mdash;imagination would work to the
+extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some
+days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold
+mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come
+forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now
+sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken
+only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of
+geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest
+farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't
+occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is
+one of the tragedies of being city-bred.</p>
+
+<p>Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force
+and accuracy. A hundred <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with
+the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of
+their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his
+second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the
+V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice
+as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined,
+because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in
+passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece
+by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings.
+Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.</p>
+
+<p>It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of
+ducks&mdash;darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions
+sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and
+canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the
+distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders
+with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a
+suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the
+wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments
+of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time
+into certain oriental harbours. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>Suddenly we are estranged from the
+self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist
+before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the
+presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to
+common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the
+spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory,
+they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or
+crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the
+flight of geese gave me&mdash;a throb from the ancient and perennial romance
+of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge
+is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many
+think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of
+the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a
+derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old
+fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after
+that&mdash;galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some
+time <i>really</i> to go to sea.</p>
+
+<p>Sing the song of steam&mdash;the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet.
+Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking
+its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven
+hydroplanes&mdash;some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back
+on the crowd, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old
+steamer&mdash;emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart
+memory&mdash;will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will
+be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only
+become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a
+magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the
+stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose
+yesterdays are lives.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I
+mentioned the flying wedge.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the
+waiting-room.</p>
+
+<p>I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt&mdash;the cut-up of the
+place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the
+District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any
+business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the
+wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the
+farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June
+afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular
+once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside
+for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay,
+and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese
+are shot at from the Gulf <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they
+fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black
+powder.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would
+have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks
+afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack
+Miner's farm&mdash;within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.</p>
+
+<p>Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in&mdash;a patch
+of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of
+geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A
+farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of
+<i>wanderlust</i> when he observed the geese that he kept on going without
+return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:</p>
+
+<p>"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back
+mabe. Steve."</p>
+
+<p>Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little
+nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't
+come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople
+from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the
+farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect
+that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and
+get stale; and then it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>does a similar lot for the town in the critical
+month of April.</p>
+
+<p>Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving
+much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The
+geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year
+or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty
+drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser
+heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding
+fields. That was the second beginning.</p>
+
+<p>The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this
+order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six
+hundred&mdash;in five years. The geese never land all at once in the
+artificial pond&mdash;some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot,
+others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five
+bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.</p>
+
+<p>"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor
+man to feed six hundred."</p>
+
+<p>He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to
+help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it
+evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An
+automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of
+his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>is still managing
+his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the
+States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk
+who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying
+overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on
+the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for
+strange dreaming&mdash;we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack
+Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse
+blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as
+corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table
+from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't
+know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has
+time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one
+seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect
+him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.</p>
+
+<p>"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen
+them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an
+eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're
+drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any
+outsider. Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>never yet seen
+them do anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the
+wild goose on the back of the Canadian flag!"</p>
+
+<p>I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.</p>
+
+<p>It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper
+impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not
+come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural
+mysteries&mdash;at first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand&mdash;a
+spectacle of beauty and speed not to be forgotten. They are built long
+and clean. Unlike the larger fliers as a whole, they need little or no
+run to rise; it is enough to say that they rise from the water. You can
+calculate from that the marvellous strength of pinion. And they are
+continental wing-rangers that know the little roads of men, as they know
+the great lakes and waterways and mountain chains&mdash;Jack Miner's
+door-yard and Hudson's Bay.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't have to. Come on."</p>
+
+<p>He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.</p>
+
+<p>"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was
+heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have
+some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came
+home in his trouble. I took <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine,
+but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to
+be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain;
+anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he
+healed."</p>
+
+<p>The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at
+me&mdash;something liquid and venomous in the sound&mdash;the long black beak as
+fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the
+core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die&mdash;perhaps he felt out
+of the law because of that.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it
+out."</p>
+
+<p>I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the
+past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy
+which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.</p>
+
+<p>An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind
+was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself
+clean&mdash;its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back
+to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining
+to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full
+of feathers.</p>
+
+<p>And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental
+flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration&mdash;lean and long,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing&mdash;an admirable adversary,
+an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for
+captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird
+and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard&mdash;the rise
+and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire&mdash;the
+rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in
+the mocking ruins of plenty....</p>
+
+<p>Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came
+back from the chores.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P65" id="P65"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>6</h2>
+
+<h2>WORKMANSHIP</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The
+hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building
+the stone study. We returned in April&mdash;and the bluff was like a string
+of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of
+asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply
+of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and
+goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came.
+Do you know the suction of clay&mdash;the weight of adhering clay to a
+shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of
+a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in
+a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and
+tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire
+piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad
+day for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will
+make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next
+corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."</p>
+
+<p>That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.</p>
+
+<p>I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of
+red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my
+thoughts&mdash;especially the need in every human heart of producing
+something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that
+word "efficiency," be reminded that the good old word originally had to
+do with workmanship and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded
+with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad
+workmanship, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A
+man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the
+stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.</p>
+
+<p>... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked
+for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear.
+Toward the end of the week following I passed him in the lane that leads
+down to the Lake&mdash;a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his
+back against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>"I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese,"
+he explained, as I came up.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like
+the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The
+geese ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep
+listening to their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them
+fly overland before sunset, which was two hours away at the time I
+passed up the lane. I do not know how long Monte had been sitting there.</p>
+
+<p>Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his
+not working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus
+first-handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to
+the board of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman.
+I wanted a knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover,
+I knew the man who would make it for me.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of the lane, still on the way, I met a farmer, who had not
+missed the figure propped between the stone and the poplar tree. He said
+that the last time Monte had borrowed his gun, he had brought it back
+fouled. That was all he said.</p>
+
+<p>I passed Monte's house, which is the shocking depression of a prosperous
+community. There were many children&mdash;a stilled and staring lot. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>They
+sat in dust upon the ground. They were not waiting for goose. Their
+father had never inspired them with expectancy of any sort; their mother
+would have spoiled a goose, had it been brought by a neighbour. She came
+to the door as I passed, spilled kitchen refuse over the edge of the
+door-stone, and vanished. The children seemed waiting for death. The
+virtue of fatherhood is not to be measured numerically.... April was
+nearly over, but the unsightly heaps that the snows had covered were not
+yet cleared away. Humped, they were, among the children. This is a
+world-old picture&mdash;one that need not be finished.</p>
+
+<p>Monte was not a good shot, not a good workman, not a good father&mdash;a
+burden and bad odour everywhere, a tainter of the town and the blood of
+the human race. That, which was gathered about him was as pitifully bred
+as reared. Monte's one value lay in his horrible exemplarship. He was a
+complete slum microcosm, without which no civilisation has yet arrived.
+Monte has given me more to think about than any of the happier people.
+In his own mute way, he reminds each man of the depths, furnishes the
+low mark of the human sweep, and keeps us from forgetting the world as
+it is, the myriads of bad workmen of which the leaning cities are made.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting there by the rock, letting the hours go by&mdash;and in his own weak
+heart, my neighbour knew that he wouldn't "hit one of them geese." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>All
+his life he had failed. Nature had long since ceased trying to tempt him
+into real production. Even his series of natural accidents was doubtless
+exhausted. That is the pace that kills&mdash;that sitting.</p>
+
+<p>I went on to the forge of the workman. We talked together. I sat by
+while he made the thing I wanted, which was not an ornament simply. He
+will always be identified there in the oak, an excellent influence; just
+as I think of him when I save the wood in the open fireplace, because of
+the perfect damper he made for the stone chimney. Monte was still there
+when I went back. The problem of him returned to mind after the
+freshening of the forge.</p>
+
+<p>He belongs to us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did
+not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the
+weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the
+impoverishment of his line. We are not finding their work for his
+children. We have sent them home from school because they were not
+clean. We complain that they waste what we give them; that they are
+harder on the shoes we furnish, than are our own children. We do not
+inquire with wisdom into their life, to learn on which side of the human
+meridian they stand&mdash;whether their disease is decadence and senility of
+spiritual life, or whether their spines are but freshly lifted from the
+animal levels.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>As a purely physical aggregate&mdash;if our civilisation be that&mdash;our
+business is quickly to exterminate Monte and his whole breed. He
+embarrasses us, as sleeker individuals of the herd and hive. He is
+tolerated to the diseases with which he infects us, because we have
+weakened our resistance with cleanliness. But by the authority of our
+better understanding, by our sacred writings and the intuitions of our
+souls, we are men and no longer an animal aggregate. As men, our
+business is to lift Monte from his lowly condition, and hold him there;
+to make him and his children well first, and then to make workmen of
+them. <i>There are workmen in the world for this very task of lifting
+Monte and his brood.</i> We do not use them, because the national instinct
+of Fatherhood is not yet profoundly developed. We are not yet brothers.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the recent winter months in the city it came to me that I had certain
+things to tell a group of young men. The class was arranged. In the
+beginning I warned them not to expect literary matters; that I meant to
+offer no plan to reach the short-story markets (a game always rather
+deep for me); that the things which I wanted to tell were those which
+had helped me toward being a man, not an artist. Fifteen young men were
+gathered&mdash;all strangers to me. When we were really acquainted, weeks
+afterward, I discovered that seven of the fifteen had been writing for
+months <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>or years&mdash;that there was certain stuff in the seven that would
+write or die.</p>
+
+<p>They had not come for what I meant to give. As a whole they were
+indifferent at first to my idea of the inner life. They had come for the
+gleanings I would drop, because I could not help it, having spent twenty
+years learning how to learn to write. The name that had called them from
+the different parts of the city was identified for good or bad in their
+minds with the work they meant to do. And what I did for them was done
+as a workman&mdash;that was my authority&mdash;a workman, a little older, a little
+farther along in the craft that called.</p>
+
+<p>And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know,
+not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a
+store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why,
+to the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more
+than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself,
+because the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had
+told them austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do;
+but I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not
+elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned
+to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do
+just that for a larger class, and in this effort I stumbled <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>upon the
+very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal&mdash;for they
+are one and the same.</p>
+
+<p>A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to
+him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most
+hours each day&mdash;that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth
+the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions
+and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure
+instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it&mdash;that
+man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts.
+It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are
+not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug
+and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very
+long in coming to the end of their fineness.</p>
+
+<p>They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is
+exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each
+workman finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He
+is an illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he
+is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self.
+Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is
+on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service of
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is
+caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it.
+He feels for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens
+to the forge that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his
+bench, but in his mind&mdash;in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk
+to my daughter. She knows about these things," he says. "I must go....
+Yes, it is a fine day."</p>
+
+<p>It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him
+so long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has
+perfected his task. The world laughs at its betters with the same
+facility that it laughs at the half-men. Our national and municipal
+fathers should teach us first that the man who has found his work is one
+of the kings of the earth. Children should be taught to know a workman
+anywhere. All excellence in human affairs should be judged by the
+workmanship and not by the profits.</p>
+
+<p>We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some
+strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came
+at last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is
+nervous and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at
+that; asks himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of
+laughter, for he cannot forget the grinding and the rending of the early
+years&mdash;when <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>there were days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps
+his has been a divided house all these years; it may be that he has lost
+even Her for his work.</p>
+
+<p>The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the
+shop again. A man's work lives with him to the end&mdash;and beyond&mdash;that is
+the eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all
+doubts sink into the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life
+is awake; the heart of reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to
+an identity which cannot grow old.</p>
+
+<p>He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come to
+him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his
+lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below:
+That nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship;
+that the world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money
+for a life's task. The workman can only be paid in kind.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They
+may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross
+seas and continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did
+it. His bench was just there&mdash;his house over yonder. Here is where he
+stood, and there he hung his coat." But these are only refinements of
+irony.... They may say, "This is his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>grandson." But that will only
+handicap or ruin the child, if he find not <i>his</i> work. A thousand lesser
+workmen may improve his product, lighten it, accelerate its potency,
+adapt it to freight rates&mdash;but that is no concern of the dream.</p>
+
+<p>The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman
+finds himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has
+lost the love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness
+of the source of his being. He does not need to state it
+philosophically, for he lived it. He found the secret of blessedness, if
+not of happiness. At his bench, he integrated the life that lasts. He
+could have told you in the early years, if the world had not laughed. He
+would have learned himself more swiftly, had he been encouraged to tell,
+as he toiled&mdash;if the world had not shamed away the few who were drawn to
+his bench.</p>
+
+<p>But alone, he got it all at last&mdash;the passion and power of the spiritual
+workman which sustains him now, though his body has lain under the hill
+for fifty years. His shop is the place of a greater transaction than his
+task. The breadth and essence of it that lingers makes it a sacred place
+to the few who would take off their shoes to enter&mdash;were it not for the
+misunderstanding of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the artificial he became natural; out of the workman, he emerged
+a man, a living soul.</p>
+
+<p>I would support every plan or dream of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>education, and none other, that
+seeks to find for the youth his life work. I would call upon every
+workman personally to help; and urge for every community, the goodness
+of its products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the
+world's premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit;
+and a stiff pressure upon the multiplication of these products by
+mechanical means, for we have too many common things, and so few fine
+things. I would inculcate in the educational ideal, first of all, that
+in every man there is a dream, just as there is a soul, and that <i>to
+express the dream of the soul in matter</i> is the perfect individual
+performance. I would impress upon the youth that in all arts and crafts,
+the dream fades and the spirit of the product dies away, when many are
+made in the original likeness. Nature does not make duplicates; her
+creative hallmark is upon every leaf and bee; upon every cliff and cloud
+and star.</p>
+
+<p>I would not endow the young workman while he is learning his trade or
+art; but I would have the State intensely watchful of him, and
+impassioned with parental conviction that her greatness is inseparable
+with his possibilities of achievement. I would not make his ways short,
+but despise and crush all evidences of facility. I would keep him plain
+and lean and fit, and make him earn his peace. All fine work comes from
+the cultivation of the self, not from cultivated environment.... <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>I
+dreamed for twenty years of a silent room and an open wood fire. I shall
+never cease to wonder at the marvel of it, now that it has come. It is
+so to-night alone in the stillness. The years of struggle to produce in
+the midst of din and distraction, while they wore as much as the work
+itself, were helpful to bring the concentration which every decent task
+demands; and in the thrill of which a man grows in reality, and not
+otherwise.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P78" id="P78"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>7</h2>
+
+<h2>THE LITTLE GIRL</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>It was determined that the children should try the country-town school
+that Spring from April to June. This school was said to be of
+exceptional quality, and I talked with the master, a good man. In fact,
+there was none but the general causes for criticism in this
+establishment&mdash;the same things I found amiss in city schools. The
+children accepted the situation with a philosophy of obedience which
+should have taught the race many things it does not yet know. The
+journey was considerable for them twice daily in warming weather; and
+from little things I heard from time to time, words dropped with no idea
+of rebellion, I was reminded of the dark drama of my own "Education,"
+written explicitly enough elsewhere and which I am glad to forget.</p>
+
+<p>The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the
+improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems
+are not structurally changed&mdash;facility and convenience, speed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>of
+transit, mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain,
+but more obvious, the science of covering ground....</p>
+
+<p>I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual
+child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from
+fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of
+whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how
+the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men
+cared to litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of
+additional assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the
+child had been taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about
+it (the book being designed to show the way to others) that struck me as
+avarice of the most violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for
+money and baronial holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the
+flesh are innocent compared to the sins of mind. This book and the
+tragic child form to my idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient
+and the obscene.</p>
+
+<p>The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the long
+past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:</p>
+
+<p>One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact
+from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.</p>
+
+<p>I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage
+aged sixteen, a cruel young <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>monster filled with rebellion and
+immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague
+failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of
+puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife,
+designed to smother that which was real in the heart.</p>
+
+<p>Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very
+sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it
+appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers
+among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their
+calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called
+upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children,
+having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the
+loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut
+the loaf evenly&mdash;to every one his equal part. The first crime was
+favoritism....</p>
+
+<p>I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in
+age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a
+boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically
+opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the
+mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely
+sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be
+bright; and yet, I found her all caught in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>rigidities of the brain,
+tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production
+was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place;
+the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding
+expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It
+was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a
+tithe of its tissue.</p>
+
+<p>The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.</p>
+
+<p>The boy next had not done well in school. The word <i>dreamer</i> was
+designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me&mdash;the
+mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly
+told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if
+anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of
+almost phenomenal reproduction&mdash;and yet he had listened sleepily. Of
+course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this
+display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner
+voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to
+repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will
+come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show
+how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual,
+in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded
+schools.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>I had been one who thought my own work most important&mdash;to the exclusion
+even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is
+affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be
+disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on
+without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old
+Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and
+the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At
+meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and
+things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere&mdash;tension
+wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had
+he only known it.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so
+well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined
+him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the
+time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was
+accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands,
+regard the bow of shore-line from the East window&mdash;the Other Shore&mdash;for
+a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the
+continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of
+production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard
+lessons resulting from breaking the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>point of the day's work before
+sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much
+breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.</p>
+
+<p>However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who
+wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what
+ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The
+answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the
+front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this
+Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood&mdash;the backward
+and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere&mdash;in
+short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all
+life&mdash;vibration. He arose and started up the bank.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't go yet," the little girl called.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."</p>
+
+<p>There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was
+still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness
+of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was
+Summer. The smell of the land was there&mdash;the perfume of the Old Mother
+herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose&mdash;the blend of all that
+springs into being.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she
+smells like a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant,
+but the breath of all&mdash;as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you
+winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like
+mignonette&mdash;not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but
+when the wind brings it."</p>
+
+<p>He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought
+about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality
+of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed
+is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for
+years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his
+faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here
+was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming
+clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly
+glorified in her morning veil.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen
+and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not
+yours until you express them. And the things <i>you</i> express, as I
+expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the
+things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can
+do it."</p>
+
+<p>She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.</p>
+
+<p>The Old Man forgot her in a moment.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>That was the real beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again)
+had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a
+distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other,
+but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference,
+however. I had no fewer <i>good</i> mornings than formerly; and yet, any
+heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and
+intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her
+happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged
+there.</p>
+
+<p>She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently
+with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation
+of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:</p>
+
+<p>"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves
+as below. It might happen that in a few years&mdash;this relation might be
+changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us
+now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come
+in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than
+I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one.
+I sit in the midst of you&mdash;telling you from day to day of the things I
+have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan.
+My first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>years here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently
+the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When
+you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much
+I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days,
+for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must
+reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of
+Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow
+filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with
+the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old
+become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate
+matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in
+relation to the long life&mdash;the importance only of one bead on the
+endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us
+that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight
+moment&mdash;that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the
+lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned
+to tell."</p>
+
+<p>I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I
+believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the
+more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to
+bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent
+generations did <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>not possess, and from the absence of which much
+deformity and sorrow has come to be.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her
+own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to
+one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the
+organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it
+never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be
+at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture
+of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in
+the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter
+a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the
+thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face&mdash;a mistake
+of meaning impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail
+purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting
+her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I
+wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul&mdash;if the expression
+can be forgiven.</p>
+
+<p>I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not
+find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a
+sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to
+our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in
+relation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>to one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression
+in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human
+conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant
+within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties
+of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this
+giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis,
+and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house
+closes upon the growing child&mdash;that more and more as the years draw on,
+the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of
+men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are
+given to utter remains unexpressed.</p>
+
+<p>I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be
+prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager
+to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles
+and the words of even a child significant.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but
+must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved
+for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening
+genius is the thing that has made immortal&mdash;shoemakers, blacksmiths and
+the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of
+life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but
+a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P90" id="P90"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>8</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ABBOT</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>He was a still boy&mdash;the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on
+the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him
+without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the
+affairs of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued
+me from his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with
+another lad during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew
+no nearer to acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the
+evening I would see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the
+sense that his regard was somehow different, I believe, did impress me
+vaguely. It all happened in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I
+remember his "hello," cheerful but contained, as I would ride by. He was
+always still as a gull, and seemed natural with the dusk upon him....
+One day his father said to me:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>"I have to buy everything you write for him."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well," said I.</p>
+
+<p>I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only
+fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward,
+because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I
+heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him
+over to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all
+that I had and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he
+was seven or eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort
+that awakened him. He had it read to him several times, but his own
+reading picked up at that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study
+does under driving interest. Presently he was out after the star books
+on his own hook. He suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and
+that night I got my first look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It
+was like some magnetic hand upon my breast. I could not speak. Every
+time I shut my eyes afterward I saw that bright gold jewel afar in the
+dark. We talked.... Presently I heard that he hated school, but this did
+not come from him. The fact is, I heard little or nothing from him.</p>
+
+<p>This generation behind us&mdash;at least, the few I have met and loved&mdash;is
+not made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to
+wait. It is most convincing, to have events clean <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>up a fact which you
+misunderstood; to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any
+glibness, but leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He
+did not come to the Study unless called for. The little girl brought in
+word from him from time to time, and the little girl's mother, and the
+boy's father&mdash;a very worthy man. I heard again that he was not doing
+well in school. I knew he was significant, very much so, having met the
+real boy on star-matters. I knew that the trouble was they were making
+him look down at school, when he wanted to look up. His parents came
+over to dinner one day, and I said:</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."</p>
+
+<p>It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at
+that time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little
+girl's education on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me
+even then that my own time was rather well filled. Neither his father
+nor mother enthused, and I heard no more from the subject for many days.
+Meeting The Abbot finally, I asked him what of school.</p>
+
+<p>"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."</p>
+
+<p>"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said&mdash;about you coming to me
+for a time?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know
+what it would cost."</p>
+
+<p>I told him it wouldn't cost anything. There <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>was a chance to talk with
+his father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still
+suffering weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the
+Study. It seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it
+after an hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of
+weather and country.</p>
+
+<p>"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner
+each day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to
+deal with so many."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.</p>
+
+<p>It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man
+whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.</p>
+
+<p>"That's why I want him," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"But the thing is, we don't want him&mdash;a&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come
+true&mdash;even if they are little ones&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations,
+without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to
+follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his
+relatives. Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only
+touched me on terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived
+in my heart, and those who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>were searching my books to find out were in
+the main only the more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by
+not asking for anything in the way of money.</p>
+
+<p>However, the thing came to be.</p>
+
+<p>My first idea was to take him alone&mdash;the little girl coming in the
+morning with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had
+been accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both.
+I sat down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there
+was no sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his
+eyes sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at
+first some sort of recognition that I was talking&mdash;but none came,
+neither nod of acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They
+said as he passed the house farther along the Shore after leaving the
+Study, that his head was bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with
+years.</p>
+
+<p>I tried afresh each day&mdash;feared that I was not reaching him. I told him
+the things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some
+of the things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I
+known enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but
+couldn't get a visible result. He was writing little things for me at
+this time and, though I detected something in the work more than he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>showed me, sitting opposite in the Study, his writing was turgid and
+unlit&mdash;like one playing on an instrument he did not understand; indeed,
+it was like a man talking in his sleep. At the end of one of the talks
+within the first week, at wit's end as to what I was accomplishing, I
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."</p>
+
+<p>I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me&mdash;it came back like a
+phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own
+understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from
+members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in
+Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the
+pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a
+colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of
+the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to
+me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days
+later&mdash;just to be sure. The result was the same.</p>
+
+<p>I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical
+memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in
+every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if
+your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his
+belongings, when called upon to do something <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>with his hands for
+another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind.
+One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all
+values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that
+the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if
+this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from
+which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he
+is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of
+these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces
+them.</p>
+
+<p>However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the
+lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to
+tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to
+read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little,
+the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did
+that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving&mdash;that he could
+grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the
+ground&mdash;that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far
+more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if
+permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant,
+however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters
+of fact and technicality.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Finding that he listened so well&mdash;that it was merely one of the
+inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me&mdash;I, of
+course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to
+overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should
+say to him until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first,
+but that passed. Presently it occurred to me that things were happening
+in the Study with the boy, that the little girl could ill afford to
+miss; and also that he would feel more at ease if I could divide my
+attention upon him with another, so I rearranged her plans somewhat, and
+there were two.</p>
+
+<p>As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I related
+certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from
+scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely
+from a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak
+authoritatively, merely as one adding certain phases I had found
+interesting of an illimitable subject. The next day he slipped in alone
+and a bit early, his "hello" hushed. I looked up and he said, almost
+trembling:</p>
+
+<p>"I had a wonderful night."</p>
+
+<p>The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst
+of great happenings.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.</p>
+
+<p>It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called
+his paper&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="cen">A VOICE THROUGH A LENS</p>
+
+<p>Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the
+day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had
+last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream.
+I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was
+reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy
+containing the nebular theory, and another that told about
+the planetary chain.</p>
+
+<p>The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory,
+but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into
+the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical
+form but in another&mdash;the first time I have ever lost my
+physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes
+still on.</p>
+
+<p>As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I
+heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The
+Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly
+drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could
+drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...</p>
+
+<p>I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an
+observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold.
+As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large
+telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was
+upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory
+like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great
+telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the
+eye-piece. As <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>I looked around the heavens to find the great
+spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a
+voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the
+way. Follow me."</p>
+
+<p>I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of
+planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not
+making any indication of steps, but the close connection of
+the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a
+screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until
+it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This
+no doubt is a complicated affair to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any
+clearer."</p>
+
+<p>I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large
+globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all
+rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly
+mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail
+of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there
+was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there
+were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one
+gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was
+covered with animals of every description&mdash;a mass, a chaos of
+animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in
+battle, the next two showed the development of these
+men&mdash;gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did
+not see.</p>
+
+<p>I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I
+heard the voice again:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you are still amazed."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The
+great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in
+the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a
+second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes
+you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the
+evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and
+melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things
+emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew
+and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower
+globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle
+of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes
+life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another
+seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps
+progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may
+look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."</p>
+
+<p>When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful
+globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery
+of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a
+roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills,
+also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook
+which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It
+seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped
+over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the
+sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose
+limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear
+like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I
+heard the voice again:</p>
+
+<p>"You must go now, tell the people what you <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>saw, and some
+other night you will see the globe of spirituality more
+closely."</p>
+
+<p>I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my
+room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to
+see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked
+out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with
+the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here
+and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic
+voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be
+able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about
+the seventh globe some time again.</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P102" id="P102"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>9</h2>
+
+<h2>THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the
+girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it.
+She's the noblest girl I know."</p>
+
+<p>That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to
+me at the time and set me to thinking.</p>
+
+<p>"How old is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Seventeen."</p>
+
+<p>"What is she interested in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."</p>
+
+<p>"You might ask her to come."</p>
+
+<p>I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the
+end of a week he remarked:</p>
+
+<p>"She is coming."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the
+lane together.... She took a seat by the door&mdash;she takes it still, the
+same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a
+sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in
+justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's
+and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called
+her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She
+had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell
+back upon the theme of all themes to me&mdash;a man's work, the meaning of
+it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this
+was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said
+something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered
+the ultimate heresy&mdash;that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for
+the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot
+long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken
+his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any
+other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the
+straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and
+blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that
+it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and
+religion are the same at the top; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>that the nearer one reaches the top,
+the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are
+one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense
+of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and
+integrating the life that lasts.</p>
+
+<p>I have said this before in this book&mdash;in other books. I may say it
+again. It is the truth to me&mdash;truth that the world is in need of. I am
+sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is
+production. Handling the production of others in some cases is
+production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural
+synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true
+in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.</p>
+
+<p>The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own
+early essay classes. Old friends were here again&mdash;Introduction,
+Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where
+they would make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her
+work was spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the
+teachers, that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for
+their ideas to authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change
+the entire order and impulse of their craft.</p>
+
+<p>She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not
+penetrated it. I was afraid <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>to open the throttle anywhere, lest she
+break and drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment
+after she was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty.
+We had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to
+expect and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness
+and impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he
+returned it to me.</p>
+
+<p>"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."</p>
+
+<p>When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal
+impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken
+the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger."
+There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but
+partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the
+principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I
+could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The
+Valley-Road Girl's discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful
+sense.</p>
+
+<p>The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about
+Fichte. The old German <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>is greatly loved and revered in this Study. He
+set us free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a
+portion of one of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the
+Universe." The next day I read her paper&mdash;and there was a beam in it.</p>
+
+<p>I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get
+away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set
+me clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their
+work, in the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two
+papers&mdash;held the substance of the whole matter&mdash;stumbled upon as usual.
+We had a grand time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his
+positions, writing to his countrymen&mdash;a wanderer, an awakened soul. And
+this brought us the hosts of great ones&mdash;the Burned Ones and their
+exaltations&mdash;George Fox and the Maid of Domremy&mdash;the everlasting spirit
+behind and above mortal affairs&mdash;the poor impotency of wood-fire to
+quench such immortality. Her eyes gleamed&mdash;and all our hearts burned.</p>
+
+<p>"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to
+deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the
+skies. All things that are done&mdash;let them alone. The undone things
+challenge us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions
+which have not yet found substance&mdash;is already <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>prepared for the workmen
+of to-day to bring into matter&mdash;all great poems and inventions for the
+good of the world. They must gleam into being through our minds. The
+mind of some workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened
+as yet; the sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake.
+Inertia is always of matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the
+light. When the shutters of the mind are opened and the grey appears, he
+will arise and, looking forth, will discover his work.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the
+great, <i>the impossible</i> tasks. But the mind must be entered by the
+Light&mdash;the heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."</p>
+
+<p>That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was
+not an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that
+my task with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with
+The Abbot&mdash;that he was dynamic within and required only the developed
+instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with
+obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally
+splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real
+self through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we
+all deeply missed her presence from the Study.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she
+brought me the following which told the story in her own words of
+something she had met:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="cen">WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN</p>
+
+<p>Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can
+you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing
+made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with
+me the things I am struggling to explain.</p>
+
+<p>I like to look back at those times when everything to me was
+new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very
+own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick
+raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me
+that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to
+indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for
+each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to
+school.</p>
+
+<p>There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its
+head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul.
+The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man
+must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not
+keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop
+and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came
+to learn.</p>
+
+<p>At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I
+had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was
+accused of copying; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>that was the first wound. How I would
+have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is
+trusted.</p>
+
+<p>At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One
+of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have
+some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was
+intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation
+for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged
+competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more
+studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well
+as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school
+friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our
+hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's
+misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends.
+Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school
+we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I
+have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my
+school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child
+filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his
+egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is
+hard for such a one to love his neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is
+the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the
+miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.</p>
+
+<p>The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me
+how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own
+eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work
+all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing
+well that the teacher would praise his perfect <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>reflection.
+Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut
+that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.</p>
+
+<p>Unless the school can trust children, show them that they
+should also be interested in their less fortunate
+school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular
+work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A
+child had much better remain at home, a simple but
+whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and
+wise books.</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes.
+This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender
+and wise:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="cen">MAY EVENING</p>
+
+<p>A spirit of restlessness ruled me. Each night I retired with
+the hope that the morning would find it gone. It disturbed my
+sleep. It was not the constant discontent I had hitherto felt
+with the world. This was a new disquietude.</p>
+
+<p>One May evening I followed our little river down to the place
+it flows into the Lake. Slowly the light of day faded. From
+my seat upon the green bank of a stream, a wonderful picture
+stretched before me. The small stream and the surrounding
+country were walled in by dense green trees. To the west the
+cool, dark depths parted only wide enough for the creek to
+disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in
+the southern wall, I caught glimpses of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>the summer cottages
+on the sandy shore. To the north stretched the pasture-lands
+with shade-trees happy to hide their nakedness with thick
+foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace. To
+the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty
+outline of trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the
+western sky. Two men paddled a boat out into the light and
+disappeared under the bridge. Nothing disturbed the peace of
+the stream save the dip of the paddles, and the fish rising
+to the surface for food. A circle on the surface meant that
+an insect had lain at its centre; a fish had risen and
+devoured it. Circles of this kind were continually being cut
+by the circumferences of other circles.... A dark speck moved
+down the stream. A turtle was voyaging.</p>
+
+<p>Now, far in the shadows, I saw a man sitting on the bank
+fishing. His patience and persistence were remarkable, for he
+had been there all the time. But the fish were at play. The
+occasional splash of the carp, mingling with the perpetual
+song of the birds and the distant roar of the waves breaking
+on the shore to the south, formed one grand over-tone.</p>
+
+<p>A feeling of awe came over me. I felt my insignificance. I
+saw the hand of God. My relation to my surroundings was very
+clear. My soul bowed to the God-ness in all things natural.
+The God-ness in me was calling to be released. It was useless
+to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It
+must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an
+echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought
+becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was
+readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>applied
+and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by
+inward feelings. This was my soul's complaint.</p>
+
+<p>No tree was exactly like one of its neighbours. Each
+fulfilled its purpose in its particular way. Yet all
+proclaimed the One Source. Performing its function, it was
+fit to censure me and I took the cup.</p>
+
+<p>... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the
+little stream; heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was
+weeping tears of sympathy for one so short-sighted and drawn
+to failure.</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P113" id="P113"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>10</h2>
+
+<h2>COMPASSION</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the
+difference between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two
+of fourteen and seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be
+herself. She has never been patronised; and in the last year or more has
+been actively encouraged to express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as
+stated, she has no particular talent for writing. She is the one who
+wants to be a mother. Not in the least precocious, her charm is quite
+equal for little girls or her elders. Her favourite companions until
+recently were those of her own age.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they
+want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the
+passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
+matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech
+and reading, the countless little reserves and covers <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>for neglected
+thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of
+existence&mdash;had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old
+artist, are the very passages of power.</p>
+
+<p>" ... Except that ye become as little children&mdash;&mdash;" that is the
+beginning of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in
+religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the
+world, or most of them, and all have told the same story&mdash;look to Rodin,
+Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of
+the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied
+men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior
+purpose, confronted the lie with the realities of their own nature, and
+fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is so often the
+unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched open, as
+they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and more like
+little children at the end.</p>
+
+<p>The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must
+have the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality
+of the modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation,
+because the old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our
+hearts.... I was promising an untold something for a future lesson to
+the little girl yesterday, just as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>she was getting to work. The
+anticipation disturbed the present moment, and she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a
+song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the
+perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me&mdash;in the sunlight and
+elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it
+was so near&mdash;every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the
+pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I
+was already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song
+was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the
+Old Mother&mdash;that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was
+gone&mdash;a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this
+sentence in the room:</p>
+
+<p>" ... <i>sang four songs and flew away.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of
+course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression.
+However, no after explanations will help&mdash;if the art of the thing is not
+apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman
+said&mdash;"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."</p>
+
+<p>And yesterday again, as we walked over to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>dinner, she said: "I see a
+Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights
+are at half-mast."</p>
+
+<p>She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child
+in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her
+reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all
+within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get
+it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as
+much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to
+express that which he has seen&mdash;which is so small compared to the big
+colour and atmosphere."</p>
+
+<p>I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a
+picture.</p>
+
+<p>A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a
+story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked
+as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."</p>
+
+<p>Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment <i>to get
+started</i>, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end
+of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it
+slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays
+upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded
+white&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Or:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring
+beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little
+woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering
+at their little legs, I felt a part&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to
+write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,&mdash;at
+least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction
+that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could
+get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something
+very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner
+pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do
+that&mdash;to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression.
+The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has
+emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a
+life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his
+deepest inner listening&mdash;in which the trained mind-instrument is
+quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater
+source within.</p>
+
+<p>The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me,
+among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I
+find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her
+expression is becoming <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>"wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I
+administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening
+out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart
+Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his
+work&mdash;honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's
+ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You
+will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept
+the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the
+doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's
+"Walking"&mdash;there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to
+Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer.
+The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It
+was not that I wanted her to <i>get</i> Mill or Burke, but that the mental
+exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or
+masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams,
+playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.</p>
+
+<p>Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child
+becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
+Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the
+mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they
+are without value, and remain hid treasures. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>It is the same as faith
+without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best
+developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes
+from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the
+case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even
+to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly
+inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road
+Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the
+first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have
+related something of the process.</p>
+
+<p>The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of
+intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is
+only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational
+systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual
+potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of
+which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from
+within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an
+heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in
+the present scheme of things.</p>
+
+<p>Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly
+various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount
+to, are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the
+calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the
+world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five
+consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot
+get through to the world except through the brain.</p>
+
+<p>In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe
+that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of
+the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is na&iuml;ve, not
+to have explained before, that from the view these things are written
+the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression&mdash;most superb and
+admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a
+listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the
+machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without
+but within.</p>
+
+<p>If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison,
+having been forced to turn their eyes within&mdash;you will find a hint to
+the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom
+solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the
+time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior
+promptings for their mental activity&mdash;the passage entirely closed
+between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>confinement makes madmen of such&mdash;if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.</p>
+
+<p>The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the
+current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward,
+or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed
+only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to
+be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you
+powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his
+disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of
+equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed
+intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not
+ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.</p>
+
+<p>A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten
+proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take
+his place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own
+individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any
+sense of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a
+man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the
+sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham
+and a delusion.</p>
+
+<p>Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the
+Unity of all Existing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>Things (which is literally brooding upon this
+planet in these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of
+the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy.
+Time has made the greatest of the <i>sheer</i> intellects of the past appear
+apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each
+racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of
+remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the
+conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire,
+Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything
+fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant
+within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this
+awakening is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of
+this greater day, in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion,
+the Unity of All Things is descried.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P123" id="P123"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>11</h2>
+
+<h2>THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have
+done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of
+China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to
+read."</p>
+
+<p>So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future
+work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him
+with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries,
+even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the
+setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the
+monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the
+psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event,
+the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent
+along the Shore. She <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her
+lap&mdash;and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and
+now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so
+good."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write
+until you begin to dream as you write&mdash;until you forget hand and paper
+and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain
+interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."</p>
+
+<p>In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will
+get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an
+idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy
+back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who
+come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these
+papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a
+ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more
+cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the
+quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build
+his civilisation. Of course, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>she is everywhere&mdash;in Germany,
+in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen
+with her in the wild places.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the
+Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted
+to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and
+square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than
+others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees,
+such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve
+their branches without the thought of being cut down for a
+sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings.
+Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at
+the feet of these trees and ask questions that <i>disgraced</i>
+Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower
+fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple
+little stones.</p>
+
+<p>Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds
+like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century
+instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up.
+The thing I <i>really</i> wanted to write about this morning was
+the goodness of being alive here in winter.</p></div>
+
+<p>After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows
+and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes
+up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow,
+all through the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look
+like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.</p>
+
+<p>Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>out of sight when the last
+shades of night pass out of the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot
+look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam&mdash;just enough to make you feel
+like work.</p>
+
+<p>A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening
+the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of
+our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A
+wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many
+lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are
+killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous
+and vulgar ways&mdash;maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end.
+Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year
+these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them
+and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition
+is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies
+and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of
+higher Nature, which men should know.</p>
+
+<p>In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes
+going about their work&mdash;I mean their <i>own</i> work and affairs. To me it
+seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't
+got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering:
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>"Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."</p>
+
+<p>I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see
+the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery
+capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all
+this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are
+small, but too big <i>for them</i>, and make a little clatter as they go over
+the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or
+somewhere that I do not know of.</p>
+
+<p>The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The
+trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp
+from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh
+and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but
+if one moves quickly they all run away.</p>
+
+<p>I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old
+gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There
+were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must
+have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready.
+Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a
+friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and
+spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with
+me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn
+much more about them.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low
+street lamps were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>shaped like question-marks. I told her there was
+something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might
+think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep,
+but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped
+short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me
+something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of
+the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told
+her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>" ... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one
+thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me
+something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or
+tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can
+get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because
+after the voice stops these three things run through my mind,
+just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought
+which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and
+the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to
+be connected with Mother in some way; something she said
+many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and
+she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I
+asked for."</p></div>
+
+<p>I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest
+things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for
+fulfilments at once.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not
+be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every
+day, and perhaps something will come."</p>
+
+<p>These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on
+Roses:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old
+Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot
+express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at
+them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to
+pull me right out of the body and out into another world
+where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose
+the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real
+tea roses.</p>
+
+<p>I took three roses into a house&mdash;a red one, a white one, very
+much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that
+takes me into the other world&mdash;the kind of yellow rose that
+sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room
+every day.</p>
+
+<p>A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that
+is!"</p>
+
+<p>"Which one do you like best?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The red one, of course," the girl answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, the other two are much&mdash;&mdash;" I began.</p>
+
+<p>"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one
+likes them red ones best?"</p>
+
+<p>I walked away. I believe that city people who never see
+Nature, know her better from their reading than country
+people who are closer to her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>brown body (than those who walk
+on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country
+people like red roses because they are like them. The red
+roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow
+teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow
+bigger. They are not ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put
+into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it
+is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down
+under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose
+spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have
+been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is
+fine enough for them, and it has come&mdash;and others. Months
+afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses
+come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all
+wonderful?</p></div>
+
+<p>I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey
+Day:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan
+shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little
+wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the
+crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of
+wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the
+harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday
+scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had
+begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the
+window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>could not finish that essay; I had to write something about
+the grey happy day.</p>
+
+<p>On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always
+so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was
+on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made
+us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water,
+cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and
+pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see
+that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only
+one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if
+they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you,
+they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander
+through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the
+sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many
+different faces, different and strange lands and people.
+Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and
+everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge
+dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away.
+The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new
+ones come.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class="cen">A TALK</p>
+
+<p>What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole
+lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time
+spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I
+have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to
+the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short
+talk from one who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes
+the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally
+wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from
+going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.</p>
+
+<p>At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the
+angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard,
+flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange,
+wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little
+brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the
+fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so
+to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a
+whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the
+green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just
+go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of
+brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves
+are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their
+hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love
+them. But that is all, for they are working hard.</p>
+
+<p>If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be
+able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together,
+and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And
+one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any <i>old</i> thing.</p>
+
+<p>What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has
+stood in the same place <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>for more than a hundred years, and has seen all
+the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking
+up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that
+woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy
+by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches
+would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many
+other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P134" id="P134"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>12</h2>
+
+<h2>TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable,
+the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I
+concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a
+house&mdash;in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been
+seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles
+of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:</p>
+
+<p>"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take
+another look at your little stone study."</p>
+
+<p>I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him
+that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He
+found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped
+some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms&mdash;the old father
+fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine
+stone piers, the bedrooms <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>strung on a balcony under a roof of glass,
+the brick-paved <i>patio</i> below and the fountain in the centre.... As he
+was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the
+picture&mdash;to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff,
+casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work,
+even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.</p>
+
+<p>"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I
+can frame it up for you."</p>
+
+<p>When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it
+was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came
+from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty,
+and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward
+there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the
+afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested
+to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not&mdash;so
+positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the
+contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the
+lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a
+bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.</p>
+
+<p>This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my
+well-trusted friends once <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>said to me, looking up from a work-bench in
+his own cellar:</p>
+
+<p>"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let
+me."</p>
+
+<p>He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw&mdash;of a poor man's kind, and
+spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.</p>
+
+<p>"And it's all paid for?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled. "No&mdash;not by a good deal less than half."</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."</p>
+
+<p>That was not to be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand
+under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the
+foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house,
+because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer
+sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner&mdash;at times.... When
+they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had
+pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints&mdash;for a time.</p>
+
+<p>As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down
+upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had
+ridden through the little town once or twice <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>a day for mail; and had
+learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers&mdash;bankers, doctors,
+merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores
+or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social
+system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.</p>
+
+<p>There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have
+fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in
+the village still, but different.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a
+small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched
+their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted
+upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields
+for grains. Their children lived in the sun&mdash;a strange kind of
+enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one
+evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a
+kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of
+the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An
+old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap
+out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky
+patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted
+the paddle.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound from that, and the stream <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>was in the hush of evening
+and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to
+my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from
+the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw
+the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it.
+The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and
+the dog in the centre of the stream&mdash;the point of a rippling wedge.</p>
+
+<p>The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made
+the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like
+a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us
+the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of
+a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No
+word.</p>
+
+<p>The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed
+him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went
+back. It was <i>all</i> uninteresting night to me now&mdash;beauty,
+picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't
+even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night
+the Canadian said:</p>
+
+<p>"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to
+camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends&mdash;young and old,
+even the young married people. They <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>point&mdash;back and upward&mdash;as if one
+pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's
+tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring
+anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to
+the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them,
+sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring,
+the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the
+race is passing. They do not resist&mdash;they do not care to live
+differently."</p>
+
+<p>Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's
+nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it
+would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have
+amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town,
+when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups
+of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build
+the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another
+incident:</p>
+
+<p>... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so
+well&mdash;had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his
+bare flesh&mdash;that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how
+well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the
+water on the Sabbath (from their homes back on the automobile routes and
+the interurban lines), and for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>what they do not get of the natural
+beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However, they didn't
+miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.</p>
+
+<p>They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was
+shameless.</p>
+
+<p>Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in
+most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious
+of itself&mdash;and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either
+shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the
+trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent
+these shores.</p>
+
+<p>The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that
+is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth&mdash;and vision
+requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive,
+scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they
+are prone to sink.</p>
+
+<p>It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
+have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations.
+We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women
+with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not
+come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to
+satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of
+human reproduction is a man-arrangement <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>according to present standards,
+and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work,
+that subject.</p>
+
+<p>In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have
+debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not
+beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this
+heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of
+this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
+thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to
+educate the countryside by browning his back in public. <i>That</i> did not
+appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would
+frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one
+may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin
+white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting
+mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while
+each day on his own grass-plot without shocking the natives or losing
+his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to
+express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in
+the case of the countryside which complained.</p>
+
+<p>They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without
+knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>face
+to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is
+above the level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all
+the living lights&mdash;the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not
+glorify them, as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to
+Questing&mdash;man's real and most significant business. They do not know
+that which is good or evil in food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in
+houses, lands or faith. They live in a low, lazy rhythm and attract unto
+themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes
+this in their children, in their schools and most pathetically in their
+churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with
+tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the
+hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low established forces, and
+only the more splendid of these young people have the integrity of
+spirit to rise above the resistance.</p>
+
+<p>As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly
+naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find
+some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a
+descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where
+the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian
+rather than individual. The year around, these people wear
+clothing,&mdash;woollen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering
+quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.</p>
+
+<p>They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with
+as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and
+legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh
+and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a
+price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen
+pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love
+is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with
+the sense of possession.</p>
+
+<p>They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
+good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret
+of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of
+the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be
+conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work
+is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may
+the where-with to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and
+the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold
+the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and
+half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men,
+static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>flickering
+from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them
+the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be
+erect in other than bone and sinew.</p>
+
+<p>They cover their bodies&mdash;but they do not cover their faces nor their
+minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, <i>they are not ashamed!</i>
+They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds
+without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint
+of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to
+reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the
+world-crowd, whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and
+motion-photography.</p>
+
+<p>The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our
+ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is
+ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask
+of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each
+other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is
+deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a
+community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is
+merely an unlettered thing.</p>
+
+<p>No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one
+who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind
+that has no quest, that does not begin its search <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>among the world's
+treasures from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive
+in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously
+furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have
+found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of
+appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor
+generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will
+hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The
+essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and
+understanding&mdash;and these are qualities that come from evolution of the
+soul just as every other fine thing comes.</p>
+
+<p>We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening&mdash;love and
+life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter....
+But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness
+is designed to smother an awakened soul. You have to bring God to him in
+his own terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that
+he is serving his God. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his
+sons and daughters quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of
+fear or curses them for straying.</p>
+
+<p>I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos
+and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>of
+life as I had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact
+that one little contract for certain interior installations was strung
+over five months, and surprised me with the possibilities of
+inefficiency and untruth, is long since forgotten. The water runs. Ten
+days after peace was established here, all my wounds were healing by
+first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at work on a new contract
+the day after they left me, the pity that surged through my breast was
+strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct of their days was a
+drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of materials, an arriving
+at something like order against the grittiest odds, and they must do it
+again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the evening&mdash;but
+the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the
+world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve,
+but it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead.
+The paths behind do not contain them; the simplicity of peasants and
+lowly communities is not merely unlettered. One does not need to deal
+with one small town; it is everywhere. The ways of the crowds are small
+ways. We wrong ourselves and bring imperfection to our tasks when we
+forget that. We love the Indian crossing the stream in the great and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>gracious night&mdash;but God pity the Indian's dog. We must look close at
+life, and not lie to ourselves, because our ways are cushioning a
+little.</p>
+
+<p>All idealism that turns back must suffer the fate of mere sentiments. We
+must know the stuff the crowds are made of, if we have a hand in
+bringing in the order and beauty. You have heard men exclaim:</p>
+
+<p>"How noble are the simple-minded&mdash;how sweet the people of the
+Countryside&mdash;how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As
+a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the
+voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth;
+and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in
+politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the
+people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any
+dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.</p>
+
+<p>The rising workman in any art or craft learns by suffering that all good
+is ahead and not elsewhere; that he must dare to be himself even if
+forced to go hungry for that honour; that he must not lose his love for
+men, though he must lose his illusions. Sooner or later, when he is
+ready, one brilliant little fact rises in his consciousness&mdash;one that
+comes to stay, and around which all future thinking must build itself.
+It is this:</p>
+
+<p>When one lifts the mask from any crowd, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>commonness is disclosed in
+every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds
+of common people are the soil of the future, a splendid mass
+potentially, the womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.</p>
+
+<p>All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the
+people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First
+the dreamer dreams&mdash;and then the people make it action....</p>
+
+<p>What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture,
+the back of the tapestry.</p>
+
+<p>To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every
+force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many;
+he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from
+the thing done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to
+give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise
+for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as
+absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.</p>
+
+<p>The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man
+who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade
+intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked
+for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The
+personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of
+three kinds: He may desert his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>vision entirely and return to operate
+among the infinite small doors of the many&mdash;which is cowardice and the
+grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few
+who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful
+devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not
+heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who
+revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its
+wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The
+grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman.
+He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....</p>
+
+<p>The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world.
+Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision&mdash;all good
+comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely,
+which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater
+failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he
+may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings
+beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in
+this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary
+victory.</p>
+
+<p>The real workman then&mdash;vibrating between compassion and contempt&mdash;his
+body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his
+task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>done well. If one is to
+have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic
+levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown
+here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P151" id="P151"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>13</h2>
+
+<h2>NATURAL CRUELTY</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first
+things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and
+the grown man all the states of evolution are vaguely reviewed, as they
+are, in fact, in that more rapid and mysterious passage between
+conception and birth. Young nations pass through the same phases, and
+some of them are abominable. The sense of power is a dangerous thing.
+The child feels it in his hands, and the nation feels it in its first
+victory.... In the Chapel during a period of several days we talked
+about the wonder of animals (the little boys of the house present) and
+the results were so interesting that I put together some of the things
+discussed in the following form, calling the paper Adventures in
+Cruelty:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain
+matters of charity as we used to regard <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>them are vulgar now.
+I remember when a great sign, <span class="smcap">The Home of the
+Friendless</span>, used to stare obscenely at thousands of city
+school children, as we passed daily through a certain street.
+Though it is gone now, something of the curse of it is still
+upon the premises. I always think of what a certain observer
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"You would not think the Christ had ever come to a world,
+where men could give such a name to a house of love-babies."</p>
+
+<p>I remember, too, when there formerly appeared from time to
+time on the streets, during the long summers, <i>different</i>
+green-blue wagons. The drivers were different, too&mdash;I recall
+one was a hunchback. These outfits formed one of the
+fascinating horrors of our bringing-up&mdash;the fork, the noose,
+the stray dog tossed into a maddened pulp of stray dogs, the
+door slammed, and no word at all from the driver&mdash;nothing we
+could build on, or learn his character by. He was a part of
+the law, and we were taught then that the law was
+everlastingly right, that we must grind our characters
+against it.... But the green-blue wagons are gone, and the
+Law has come to conform a bit with the character of youth.</p>
+
+<p>The time is not long since when we met our adventures in
+cruelty alone&mdash;no concert of enlightened citizens on these
+subjects&mdash;and only the very few had found the flaw in the
+gospel that God had made the animals, and all the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>little
+animals, for delectation and service of man. Possibly there
+is a bit of galvanic life still in the teaching, but it
+cannot be said to belong to the New Age.</p>
+
+<p>Economic efficiency has altered many styles for the better.
+Formerly western drovers used to drive their herds into the
+brush for the winters. The few that the winter and the wolves
+didn't get were supposed to be hardy enough to demand a
+price. It was found, however, that wintering-out cost the
+beasts more in vitality than they would spend in seven years
+of labour; that the result was decrepit colts and stringy
+dwarfs for the beef market. Also there was agitation on the
+subject, and the custom passed. City men who owned horses in
+large numbers found their <i>efficiency</i> brought to a higher
+notch at the sacrifice of a little more air and food, warmth
+and rest. There is a far-drive to this appeal, and there are
+those who believe that it will see us through to the
+millennium.</p>
+
+<p>A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country
+there was an old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red
+and white like Stevenson's cow that ate the meadow flowers.
+Her name was Mary&mdash;Mr. Devlin's Mary. The Devlin children
+played with us, and they were like other children in every
+way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves
+disappeared annually (one of the mysteries) and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>Devlin
+children were brought up on Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they
+said, but pure cream. We came to know Mary, because she was
+always on the roadside&mdash;no remote back-pastures for her. She
+loved the children and had to know what passed. We used to
+deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting
+the last circlet fastened, old Mary would tire of the game
+and walk sedately out of the ring&mdash;just as she would when a
+baby calf had enough or some novice had been milking too
+long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus
+think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we
+passed her&mdash;to and from school. It was said that she could
+negotiate any gate or lock.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin
+house, we saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they
+were tying Mary behind. She was led forth. I remember the
+whites of her eyes and her twisted head. Only that, in a kind
+of sickening and pervading blackness. The calf cried to her,
+and Mary answered, and thus they passed.... 'But she is old.
+She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin
+children said.</p>
+
+<p>"Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke
+to certain grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy
+that was mine. No one criticised Devlin. It was the custom,
+they said.... Even the butcher had heard of old <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>Mary.... You
+see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a
+child&mdash;but you never can know what it showed me of the world.
+None of us who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have
+not since. I cannot."</p></div>
+
+<p>Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had
+been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and
+beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I
+wanted butter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted
+a front-yard cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady
+that had eyes the children would see fairies in&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of
+yours&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sound as a trivet."</p>
+
+<p>"A good yielder?"</p>
+
+<p>"All of that."</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the
+milktime, there isn't much left for beef&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want to eat her."</p>
+
+<p>"But as an investment&mdash;you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down&mdash;they
+don't weigh much at the butcher's."</p>
+
+<p>The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good
+economy so prevalent as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's
+exactly why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related
+the episode to a man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's
+abominations in a city street yesterday&mdash;cart with crate, new calf
+inside, old moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter&mdash;a very
+interesting tumbril, but she hadn't conspired against the government.
+For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little
+bewildered bit of veal&mdash;and now we were to eat what was left of her....
+Also I passed through a certain railway yard of a big city last
+holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live
+chickens were piled there awaiting shipment&mdash;crushed into eight-inch
+crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an
+atrocious horror like that&mdash;a man being held in a torture-cell in such a
+position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve,
+to say nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this
+thing before&mdash;yet never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A
+man must see a thing like that just right, in full meaning, and then
+tell it again and again&mdash;until enough others see, to make it dangerous
+to ship that way. I got the idea then, 'Suppose a man would make it his
+life-work to change those crates&mdash;to make those crates such a stench and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>abomination, that poultry butchers would not dare use them. What a
+worthy life work that would be!...' And then I thought, 'Why leave it
+for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is everything," he
+concluded.</p>
+
+<p>There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about
+his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task
+came to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see
+the big thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then
+very often a man sets out to find a passage to India and gets a New
+World. In any case, to put four inches on the chicken-crates of America
+is very much a man's job, when one considers the relation of tariff to
+bulk in freight and express.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there is <i>efficiency</i> even to that added expenditure&mdash;a very
+thrilling one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have
+ever felt the heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and
+suffered the lassitude and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for
+you to believe the demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is
+another; and the breaking down of tissue as a result of continued
+torture is caused by still another poison. The point is that we consume
+these poisons. The government is very active in preventing certain
+diseased meats from reaching our tables, but these of fear, rage,
+blood-madness and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>last-days-of-agony are subtler diseases which have so
+far had little elucidation.</p>
+
+<p>Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed
+to forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged
+in slaughtering&mdash;nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of
+an opera cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and
+bloom. It went around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in
+the wild to-day because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles
+change&mdash;but there is much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time
+the Messiah of the lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens
+found theirs in the city yards.</p>
+
+<p>The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression
+of cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether
+clear the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace,
+merely because cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped
+to spare the helpless creatures a tithe of their suffering, but that
+will not suffice now. A clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work
+to bring it about.</p>
+
+<p>Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his
+beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough
+for us to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver,
+but it has been found that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>more is required. You may threaten him with
+the police, even with lynching; you may frighten him away from his
+manhandling for the moment&mdash;but in some alley, he is alone with his
+horse afterward. His rage has only been flamed by resistance met. It is
+he who puts the poor creature to bed.</p>
+
+<p>The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime,
+for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters
+the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely
+physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively
+intense, the higher they are carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of
+knowing things; it is the coarseness of fibre which resists all the
+fairer and finer bits of human reality. Just so long as men fail to
+master the animals of which they are composed, the poor beasts about
+them will be harrowingly treated.</p>
+
+<p>So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied
+for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general
+education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting
+the human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.</p>
+
+<p>On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one
+of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be
+freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>knew that these
+were not valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious
+fashion. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed&mdash;with a few
+days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the
+fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above
+the price of the hide&mdash;to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big
+city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts
+to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would
+have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for
+the shipment.</p>
+
+<p>The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought
+all that was stopped long ago&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that
+is to run a blockade, if the premium is right&mdash;so will a certain element
+of trade take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of
+people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't
+being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of
+manhood proper.</p>
+
+<p>The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the
+mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the
+lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The
+remarkable part is that the people <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>are ready, but they expect the
+stimulus to come from without instead of from within.</p>
+
+<p>Custom is a formidable enemy&mdash;that herd instinct of a people which
+causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day
+everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out
+the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one
+expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students
+when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are
+children to do when their parents shout <i>mad-dog</i> and run for clubs and
+pitch-forks at the passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster
+when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot?
+Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.</p>
+
+<p>The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences&mdash;upon
+astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology&mdash;are the results of flashes
+of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof
+against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its
+burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and
+cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing
+to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up
+into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.</p>
+
+<p>Which brings us to the very pith of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>endeavour: The child is ready
+to change&mdash;that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile,
+receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so
+ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our
+relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready
+for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be
+closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the
+problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that
+much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often
+again we set out to discover the passage to India and reach the shores
+of a New World.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P163" id="P163"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>14</h2>
+
+<h2>CHILDREN CHANGE</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction
+which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated,
+having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief
+interest at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he
+alleged to have found in my work. After that he intimated that he
+aspired to write. The second young man came from Dakota, also a
+college-bred. A teacher there wrote to me about him. I looked at some of
+his work, and I found in it potentialities of illimitable promise. I was
+not so excited as I would have been had I not met this discovery in
+other cases from the generation behind us. Their fleets are upon every
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a while
+in the evening on short manuscript matters. In fact, the dollar-end has
+not pinched so far; and they help a while in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>the garden in the
+afternoons, designating the period, Track, as they named the little
+class after mid-day, Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they
+really belonged to the class. It was primarily designed for the younger
+minds&mdash;and I was unwilling to change that.</p>
+
+<p>You would think it rather difficult&mdash;I know I did&mdash;to bring the work in
+one class for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the
+young men:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course it is <i>their</i> hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you
+like. Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As
+for me&mdash;the young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two
+classes."</p>
+
+<p>They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It
+happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.</p>
+
+<p>"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.</p>
+
+<p>They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I
+heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been
+unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making
+inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went out
+into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:</p>
+
+<p>"Chapel is the best hour of the day&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He said more, and it surprised me from one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>who talked so rarely. This
+younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is
+not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever
+befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot
+brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of
+mis-technicality&mdash;an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him
+to task&mdash;lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of
+<i>staying down</i> a little each day&mdash;or the world would never hear his
+voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the
+others in the room&mdash;that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like
+a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did.
+The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any
+competitive ideal. They were one&mdash;and there's something immortal about
+that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There
+is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even
+from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses
+all things&mdash;and we rise together&mdash;a gold light in the room that will
+come to all the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth dwelling upon&mdash;this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has
+since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the
+reconstruction write to the Study from time to time&mdash;from different
+parts of the world. I read <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>the class a letter recently from a young
+woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from
+the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the
+Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and
+another group from Washington. All these are placed before the Chapel
+kindred for inspiration and aliment.</p>
+
+<p>"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time
+shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves
+from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You
+will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius&mdash;at the time
+of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of
+the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the
+end of the bleakest and most terrible age&mdash;the breaking down at last of
+an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental
+battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called
+afterward."</p>
+
+<p>... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it
+has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give....
+We watch the world tearing down&mdash;from this quietude. We have no country
+but God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New
+Age&mdash;just children.</p>
+
+<p>... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed&mdash;draining,
+under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be
+developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the
+fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants
+are set. The roses answered&mdash;almost wonderfully. They brought me the old
+romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This
+point was touched upon in the Foreword&mdash;how in the joy of the roses that
+answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred
+what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.</p>
+
+<p>The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop
+of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the
+thoughts I have forgotten&mdash;fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They
+are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and
+again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes,
+that for centuries the world has been maiming its children&mdash;that only
+those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as
+men.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds
+and they are not the same the next day.</p>
+
+<p>... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>after Sunday to
+congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little
+questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers
+and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they
+love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression
+and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be
+self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in the city. We
+met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration.
+For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we
+met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in
+their different conventions&mdash;world ways, the obvious and the temporal,
+as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great
+lessons to me&mdash;to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think
+the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance
+of the Catholic priests' saying&mdash;"Give us your child until he is seven
+only&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change&mdash;to
+watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes
+like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best
+innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground
+upon and master. We are held and refined <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>between the two
+attractions&mdash;one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We
+believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul,
+the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception
+must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that
+man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now;
+that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the
+farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of
+tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to
+reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard
+them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten
+adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand&mdash;they
+are not. The littlest ones have it&mdash;the two small boys of seven and nine,
+who have not regularly entered the Chapel.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and
+without title:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to
+listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And
+if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he
+has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in
+past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept
+in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people
+that played around him and told him queer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>things when he was
+first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in
+his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the
+world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's
+wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can
+write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to
+get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you
+know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will
+find it.</p>
+
+<p>The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can
+only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the <i>brain</i>
+which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was
+going wrong and that <i>he</i> should fix it by telling them the
+right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people
+not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.</p>
+
+<p>It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly,
+and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these
+will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.
+After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther
+ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
+baby.</p>
+
+<p>The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps
+lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you,
+unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand
+all that you earn or achieve."</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P171" id="P171"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>15</h2>
+
+<h2>A MAN'S OWN</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of
+educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting
+the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could
+not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic
+impossibility.</p>
+
+<p>The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that
+the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and
+imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has
+been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to
+place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these
+and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.</p>
+
+<p>... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the
+study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the
+places of books became repositories for dishes, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>desk a
+dining-table&mdash;the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the
+question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each
+week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way,
+like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely,
+shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The
+little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would
+never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.</p>
+
+<p>"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And
+then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just
+now. It is seeing us through these hard days."</p>
+
+<p>But <i>I</i> missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is,
+my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the
+days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about
+as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me
+a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I
+had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I
+didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the
+writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught
+me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest
+again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the
+first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work,
+published in the book called <i>Midstream</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a
+transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain
+manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our
+hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate
+a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man
+who has found his work&mdash;and the splendid discovery invariably follows,
+that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not
+first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising;
+because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks
+deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.</p>
+
+<p>"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too
+lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work.
+No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation
+of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and
+fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the
+schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his
+daily task&mdash;and watching for his own among them.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal
+of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the
+hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness
+for buying cheap and selling dear&mdash;if as a race we were lifted into our
+own work.</p>
+
+<p>"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of
+his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one
+important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his
+work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the
+lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to
+distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager
+and tender.</p>
+
+<p>"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the
+answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the
+Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something
+sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I
+had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full,
+eager and honest, the answer came&mdash;the work of specialists which had
+moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in
+that&mdash;for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.</p>
+
+<p>"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of
+his morals and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive
+not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the
+temperament to choose a work because it is easy.</p>
+
+<p>"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument,
+the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height
+and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.
+That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities&mdash;whether
+tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods
+with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such
+a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.</p>
+
+<p>"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and
+brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer
+receptivity&mdash;and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here
+and there in the cohering line.</p>
+
+<p>" ... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long
+hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is
+ended, the finished forces turn <i>outward</i> in service. According to the
+measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance
+of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the
+instrument in pure listening&mdash;long forenoons passing, without a single
+instant of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even
+awareness of the body....</p>
+
+<p>"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher
+life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world
+for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor
+and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely
+from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has
+mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the
+mind, its multitude of experiences and unreckonable possessions&mdash;are
+given over to the creative and universal force&mdash;the same force that is
+lustrous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human
+heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.</p>
+
+<p>"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He,
+first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the
+power of the superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm;
+this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two
+instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the
+rock; and though we achieve the very sanctity of self-command, our
+inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for
+money. The more valuable <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>a man's time (if his payment in the world's
+standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable
+he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman
+for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to
+others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and
+Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the
+big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand.
+Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line
+of his life will become more clearly established.</p>
+
+<p><i>A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has
+already answered.</i> Browning stood amazed before a man who had met
+Shelley and was not different afterward&mdash;a man who could idly announce
+that he had met the poet Shelley and not accept it as the big event of a
+period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of
+finding the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps
+men had made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been
+enacted on that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of
+earth there, the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was
+just on that spot that he found an eagle's feather.</p>
+
+<p>I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago&mdash;was speechless and outraged
+that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather about
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he
+spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in
+water.... There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are
+called to the same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts
+know each other; the mystics of the arts know each other.</p>
+
+<p>The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the breasts
+of the children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man
+holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a
+child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good
+workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as
+no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story&mdash;of a
+certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all
+energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal
+signified. Mostly the "great man" did not know what he had done for the
+boy.... I would have the great man know. I would have him seek to
+perform this miracle every day.</p>
+
+<p>There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying,
+"There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does
+not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to
+bring him to you&mdash;but he would not come. I think he did not dare."</p>
+
+<p>Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom
+brought the thing about. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>A man should say, "<i>Lead me to him now</i>!..."
+Those who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put
+stamps upon letters they write. God knows they are not ashamed to come
+and ask for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their
+structure of desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail
+the letter he has written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out,
+full of terror and torture before you&mdash;take him to your breast for he is
+your own. Children you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he....
+Do you want a slave, a worshipper&mdash;seek out your own. You want nothing
+of the sort, but you alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate
+his worship to the task. He can learn from you in a week what it would
+take years of misery in the world to teach him. You have done in a way
+the thing he wants to do&mdash;that's the whole magic. You have fitted
+somehow to action the dream that already tortures his heart. There is
+nothing so pure as work in the world. There is something sacred about a
+man's work that is not elsewhere in matter. Teaching is a mutual
+service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but because he has
+reverence, he is potentially great.</p>
+
+<p>The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a
+worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all
+kinds of workmen; these things are not alone for the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>artists and the
+craftsmen and the professions. There is one boy to linger about the
+forge of an artisan, after the others have gone. I would have the
+artisan forget the thing he is doing, to look into the eyes of that
+boy&mdash;and the chemist, the electrician, the florist.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written
+words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The
+work here would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us
+for several days. She was so still that I did not know what was
+happening in her mind. My experience with the others had prevailed to
+make me go slowly, and not to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be
+glad that she had come. I asked no expression from her for several days.
+When I finally suggested something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror
+in the room. Her expression came in a very brief form, and it showed me
+the bewilderment with which she had encountered the new points of view
+in the Chapel. I learned afresh that one must not hurry; that my first
+work was to put to rest her fears of being called upon. I impressed upon
+the class the next day that we have all the time there is; that we want
+nothing; that our work is to establish in due time the natural
+expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in particular, I said
+that when she felt like it she could write again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl
+to see if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All
+I ever got from that afternoon was this sentence:</p>
+
+<p>" ... She is going to be a nurse."</p>
+
+<p>I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I
+allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting
+her surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must
+have nurses.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>... And then the Columbia young man&mdash;a big fellow and a soul. I had
+talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room class in the city. He
+took a cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel
+began; then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening,
+I had good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his
+mind and heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible
+integrity, a natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the
+world's bestowal&mdash;but Inertia.</p>
+
+<p>Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do
+not mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that
+it is of necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the
+valuable inner life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual
+energy came forth to intensify the vibrations of the race, to say
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>nothing of their own poundage. It is less a matter of weight after all
+than texture; still their fat was a handicap.</p>
+
+<p>These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and men;
+all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression
+of the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit
+bring about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required
+to express itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one
+hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression
+of the spiritual life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a
+whole, the great servers of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole
+in every fabrication of man and nature&mdash;the finer the work, the finer
+the instrument.</p>
+
+<p>The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and
+continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.</p>
+
+<p>The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought
+forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of
+a dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of
+pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The
+texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You
+must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the
+light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>We live
+either for appetites or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit,
+in its passionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the
+cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and
+emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.</p>
+
+<p>The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very
+nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of
+countless ages to produce the form that we see&mdash;the gracious beauties of
+the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a
+Clovelly rose is beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding
+mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in
+your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's
+button; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in
+human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand&mdash;and all
+about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand,
+and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered
+itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget
+that inner ardency&mdash;the virgin unfolding to the sun&mdash;born of some great
+passion that seemed poised between earth and heaven&mdash;and expectant of
+its own great passion's maturity.</p>
+
+<p>I went back to the little plant, called the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>children to it and all who
+would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song
+of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things.
+I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings&mdash;the ecstasy of the little
+old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose
+marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose
+corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the
+shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a
+thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but
+the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The
+first had great foliages of coarse mane and tail; the other, a splendid
+beast that would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.</p>
+
+<p>We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future
+in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour
+idealism. Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and lustrous we
+become, according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It
+is the quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto
+itself the excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for
+his size, longer-lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural
+elasticity, capable of infinitely greater physical, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>mental, and moral
+tasks, than the tightly compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere
+painter's flourish which adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there
+if we see clearly. If the sanctity is radiant, the glow is intense
+enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow, to be photographed, even
+caught with the physical eye.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P186" id="P186"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>16</h2>
+
+<h2>THE PLAN IS ONE</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>I was relating the experience of the Columbian. In his case there had
+been much time, so there could be no mistake. He had devoted himself to
+making and keeping a rather magnificent set of muscles which manifested
+even through white man's clothing. He did this with long days of sailing
+and swimming, cultivating his body with the assiduity of a
+convalescent.... I told him in various ways he was not getting himself
+out of his work; explained that true preparation is a tearing off of
+husks one after another; that he was a fine creation in husk, but that
+he must get down to the quick before he could taste or feel or see with
+that sensitiveness which would make any observation of his valuable.
+With all this body-building, he was in reality only covering himself the
+thicker. If a man does this sort of thing for a woman's eye, he can only
+attract a creature of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>blood and iron whose ideal is a policeman&mdash;a very
+popular ideal....</p>
+
+<p>For two or three days he would work terrifically, then, his weight
+besetting, he would placate himself with long tissue-feeding sports. I
+told him that he had everything to build upon; that true strength really
+begins where physical strength ends; that all that he had in equipment
+must be set in order and integrated with his own intrinsic powers, it
+being valueless otherwise. I pointed out that he was but a collector of
+things he could not understand, because he did not use them; that the
+great doers of the world had toiled for years upon years, as he did not
+toil for one week's days successively.... It would not do, except for
+short intervals, and it came to me that my best service was to get out
+from under. I told him so, and the manliness of his acceptance choked
+me. I told him to go away, but to come again later if he mastered
+Inertia in part.... It was not all his fault. From somewhere, an income
+reached him regularly, a most complete and commanding curse for any boy.</p>
+
+<p>... I do not believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play
+for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the
+end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation
+period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most
+dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>because the body
+becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the
+fitness of faculty can manifest.</p>
+
+<p>If one's body is ill from overexertion, it must rest; if one's mind is
+ill from nervousness, stimulation, or from excessive brain activity, it
+must rest; but if one's soul is ill, and this is the difference, nothing
+but activity will help it, and this activity can only be expressed
+through the body and mind. Surplus rest of body or mind is a process of
+over-feeding, which is a coarsening and thickening of tissue, which in
+its turn causes Inertia, and this word I continually capitalise, for it
+is the first devil of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be
+overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the
+world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their
+lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their
+sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat
+heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times <i>a great calm</i>,
+another dimension of calm entirely from that which has to do with animal
+peace and repletion. It is the peace of intensive production&mdash;and the
+spectacle of it is best seen when you lift the super from a hive of
+bees, the spirit of which animates every moving creature to one
+constructive end. That which emanates from this intensity of action is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does not have to sink into
+a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest have more to do
+with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of tissue one tears
+down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done. Absolutely this
+is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work a man
+loves replenishes.</p>
+
+<p>Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying
+than to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm
+of his task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so
+continually tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold
+this rhythm, we could not die.</p>
+
+<p>This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full
+exercise&mdash;soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self
+does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a
+song from it&mdash;that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have
+heard from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all
+selfless productivity.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot play until one has worked&mdash;that is the whole truth. Ask that
+restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to
+polish the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless
+cleanliness in a room. Hold the picture of what you want in mind and
+detail it to him, saying that you will come again and inspect <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>his work.
+Watch, if you care, the mystery of it. There will be silence until the
+thing begins to unfold for him&mdash;until the polish comes to wood or metal,
+until the thing begins to answer and the picture of completion bursts
+upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a hum, and nothing will break
+his theme until the end.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls
+differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean
+things; that the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested
+when one enters a clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't
+the room, after all, that gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle
+or the hum comes from harmony within.</p>
+
+<p>A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he "climbed
+out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up
+when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the
+order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away
+the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep
+on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field
+clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where
+bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and
+decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from
+softening and cleansing leather. There is a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>little boy here whose
+occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned
+loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He
+sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture
+comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon
+showing his work.</p>
+
+<p>Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in
+athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being
+inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for
+bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of
+the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world
+expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have
+been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed
+training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a
+body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and
+dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as
+life-quests&mdash;except for the few consummately adapted players whose
+little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized
+rectangle&mdash;the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed,
+and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.</p>
+
+<p>A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with
+it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>loves best to do&mdash;constructive play&mdash;giving play to his powers,
+bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and
+timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and
+garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until
+supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan,
+yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one
+speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake;
+the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the
+stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is
+all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper,
+the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One
+has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as
+sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass
+above&mdash;that fallow lands are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out
+like a wine, and decide there is something in it.</p>
+
+<p>There is something in everything.</p>
+
+<p>The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to
+bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we
+don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and
+that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts
+to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We
+recall the fact that it isn't the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>human ear-drum exactly which will get
+this&mdash;if it ever comes to us&mdash;and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he
+<i>heard</i> his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral
+pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them
+seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to
+bring out.</p>
+
+<p>We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat
+is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come
+to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order
+begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of
+surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has
+come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon
+in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better
+for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and
+strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She
+must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own&mdash;for
+wheat partakes of the <i>alkahest</i>. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.</p>
+
+<p>The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the
+northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a
+bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat,
+thereafter&mdash;but that would be sacrilege.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw
+at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered
+there&mdash;that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia&mdash;so that there is a
+nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course,
+then, that all the aristocrats of Nature&mdash;rose and wheat and olives and
+bees and alabaster and grapes&mdash;must all have their part of the harmony,
+for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in
+the face of a far-come child&mdash;the brute earth-bound lines of self
+gone&mdash;the theme of life, Service.</p>
+
+<p>I am at the end of Capitals now.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon we talked about corn&mdash;from the fields where the passionate
+mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we
+found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the
+nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after
+all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first
+wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.</p>
+
+<p>There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every
+movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is
+mastered, we shall see that there is no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>separateness anywhere, no
+detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story&mdash;that
+the plan is one.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P196" id="P196"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>17</h2>
+
+<h2>THE IRISH CHAPTER</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars&mdash;the
+Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old
+man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to
+tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true
+Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake
+received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't&mdash;it's listening."</p>
+
+<p>It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata,
+called <i>Appassionata</i>. There is one here who plays that, and because it
+tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the
+others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems
+to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never
+tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a
+woman&mdash;of love <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>and life and death. She wants the earth in her love&mdash;but
+her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth.
+The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her&mdash;her love a
+perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not
+be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her
+re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.</p>
+
+<p>The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's <i>Departure</i>&mdash;to us the most
+magic of all the great little poems. But in <i>Departure</i> it is the woman
+who is called.</p>
+
+<p>... Again and again in the <i>Appassionata</i>, the word comes to the woman,
+saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will
+not hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty&mdash;all the wonder that
+Mother Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have
+told her that it must be, but she does not obey&mdash;and then the Master
+comes down.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone.
+The <i>chelas</i> have spoken and have not availed. Now the <i>Guru</i> speaks.
+Out of vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out
+of the deeps and heights of compassion, the <i>Guru</i> speaks&mdash;and suddenly
+the woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is
+expressed in the treble&mdash;a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a
+cup held <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>forth&mdash;or palms held upward. The <i>Guru</i> speaks. His will is
+done.</p>
+
+<p>And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was
+listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked
+of Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always
+brings; or it may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just
+been slaughtered in a cause that had far less significance to Ireland
+than our child talk by the fire; or it may have been the South Wind that
+brought us closer to the fairy Isle, for it is the Irish peasants who
+say to a loved guest at parting:</p>
+
+<p>"May you meet the South Wind."</p>
+
+<p>" ... There isn't really an Ireland any more&mdash;just a few old men and a
+few old, haunting mothers. Ireland is here in America, and the last and
+stiffest of her young blood is afield for England. Her sons have always
+taken the field&mdash;that is their way&mdash;and the mothers have brought in more
+sons born of sorrow&mdash;magic-eyed sons from the wombs of sorrow. Elder
+brothers afield&mdash;fathers gone down overseas&mdash;only the fairies left by
+the hearth for the younger sons to play with.... So they have sung
+strange songs and seen strange lights and moved in rhythms unknown to
+many men. It is these younger sons who are Ireland now. Not a place, but
+a passion; not a country, but a romance.... They are in the love stories
+of the world, and they are always looking for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>their old companions, the
+fairies. They find the fairies in the foreign woodlands; they bring the
+fairies to the new countries. They are in the songs that hush the heart;
+they are in the mysticism that is moving the sodden world. Because they
+played with fairies, they were taught to look past and beyond the flesh
+of faces&mdash;past metals and meals and miles. Of the reds and greys and
+moving golds which they see, the soul of the world loves to listen, for
+the greatest songs and stories of all are from the Unseen&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was the old man dreaming aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"Ireland isn't a place any more. It is a passion infused through the
+world," he added.</p>
+
+<p>"But the fairies are still there," the little girl said.</p>
+
+<p>"Some are left with the old mothers&mdash;yes, some are left. But many have
+taken the field, and not for the wars."</p>
+
+<p>A four-day moon was dropping fast in the low west. Jupiter was climbing
+the east in imperial purple&mdash;as if to take command.... The littlest boy
+stirred in the arms of the Dakotan and began to speak, staring at the
+fire. We all turned and bent to listen&mdash;and it was that very thing that
+spoiled it&mdash;for the sentence faltered and flew away.</p>
+
+<p>We all wanted to know what had been born in that long silence, for the
+firelight was bright in two eyes that were very wide and wise&mdash;but the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>brain was only seven.... I left the circle and went up the cliff to
+find a book in the study&mdash;a well-used book, an American book. Returning,
+I read this from it, holding the page close to the fire:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p style="padding-left: 7em;">OLD IRELAND</p>
+
+<p>
+Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty,<br />
+Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother,<br />
+Once a queen&mdash;now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground,<br />
+Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders;<br />
+Long silent&mdash;she too long silent&mdash;mourning her shrouded hope and heir;<br />
+Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.<br />
+<br />
+Yet a word, ancient mother;<br />
+You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with forehead between<br />
+your knees;<br />
+O you need not sit there, veil'd in your old white hair, so dishevel'd;<br />
+For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave;<br />
+It was an illusion&mdash;the heir, the son you love, was not really dead;<br />
+The Lord is not dead&mdash;he is risen, young and strong, in another country;<br />
+Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the grave,<br />
+What you wept for, was translated, pass'd from the grave,<br />
+The winds favoured and the sea sail'd it,<br /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+And now with rosy and new blood,<br />
+Moves to-day in a new country.<br />
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>One by one they dropped off asleep, the little ones first, as the moon
+went down&mdash;their thoughts so full of stars, asking so dauntlessly all
+questions of world and sky. What I could, I answered, but I felt as
+young as any. It seemed their dreams were fresher than mine, and their
+closeness to God.... The little girl touched me, as we drifted away&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P202" id="P202"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>18</h2>
+
+<h2>THE BLEAKEST HOUR</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are,
+a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without
+penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may
+become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle
+fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find
+certain friends and sterling enemies&mdash;and either lose or win,
+ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.</p>
+
+<p>Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may
+reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are
+wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He
+sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing
+earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the
+dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed.
+He <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet&mdash;at least,
+a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning
+over of the whole afterward.</p>
+
+<p>Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the
+bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are
+moving about our business of house and country and world in a most
+stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine
+of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open
+and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men,
+indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the
+only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to
+the nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the
+world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving&mdash;but
+with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of
+self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which
+has not remotely to do with an erect spine.</p>
+
+<p>Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is
+no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them
+along, find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may
+be said that wars have brought great benefits to the race; that
+materialism has taught us our place here below as no other passion
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>could; that trade has wrought its incomparable good to the races of
+men; that Fear has been the veritable mother of our evolution, its dark
+shadow forever inciting us, breaking our Inertia, bringing swiftness and
+strength first to the body, then to brain. Even desire for self, on the
+long road behind, has been the good angel of our passage, for we had to
+become splendid beasts before the dimension of man could be builded....
+All good; mistakes nowhere in the plan.</p>
+
+<p>But the trouble is, the passage of the many from grade to grade is
+intolerably slow. We had thought the many had finished with war. The few
+already are many grades ahead of that; the few have seen the virtues die
+out of patriotism and trade; they have watched the desire for self turn
+reptile, and hearkened to this truth which is beginning to reverberate
+around the world: <i>What is good for beasts is not of necessity good for
+men</i>.... One recent caller here, male, middle-aged, smilingly discussed
+all things from the philosophical point of view. I was saying:</p>
+
+<p>"From the nursery to world-clutched retirement from public affairs, a
+man nowadays is taught more and more to keep his heart-principle
+locked&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled: "We have all the time there is. It will all come out right.
+You fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others
+of us think them over quietly by our fires. That <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>is the whole
+difference. Scratch off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of
+God-yearning animal underneath."</p>
+
+<p>Few sayings ever have hit me harder.</p>
+
+<p>I studied the years' offerings from this man&mdash;to his house, to his
+acquaintances, to the world in general. An irony filled the room, and so
+intense was it that it seemed to have a colour, a kind of green and
+yellow vapour. It emanated from the centre of his face. I think the
+point that animated me especially was that he was in the habit of
+talking to young men. He had no children of his own. I changed the
+subject and opened the door&mdash;not to hasten his departure but because the
+air was close.</p>
+
+<p>By every law which makes us hold fast to the memory of saviours and
+great men, the finest fabric of any race is its pioneers. We are living
+and putting into action now the dreams of brave spirits who have gone
+before. Philosophically, even they may have found that the plan is good,
+but that did not prevent them from giving their lives to lift the
+soddenness and accelerate the Inertia of the crowds. They took their joy
+in the great goodness of the plan&mdash;only after they had done their best
+to bring the race more swiftly into its higher destiny. A man does not
+sit back and allow his children to spend years in learning that which he
+can explain in a moment from his own experience.... I did not answer the
+philosopher, but many things that occurred from that little talk <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>were
+brought out in Chapel during the days which followed&mdash;matters that had
+to do with America and literary workmanship in particular. Certain of
+the matters we discussed have been written down for expression here:</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>If some one announced that there lived in the Quattuor Islands a man who
+knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
+action of <i>brotherhood</i> and <i>fatherland</i>, there would be some call for
+maps and steamship passages. If the Quattuor Islands were not already on
+the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the first pilgrims
+had set out. And if some one should add that all expression of the arts
+so far in the world is addled and unsightly compared to that which is
+about to be, if a certain formula is followed, and that this man in the
+Quattuor group has the formula&mdash;many more would start on the quest, or
+send their most trusted secretaries.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again
+and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.</p>
+
+<p>The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
+secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give
+to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
+That which I have is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>for you. I am more anxious for you to know and
+live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it
+will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for
+possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you
+before you can adequately receive&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It <i>is</i> old, older
+than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the
+law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts.
+There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good
+for the part; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for
+the first thought, not self-good, but the general good. One nation, so
+established in this conviction that its actions are automatically
+founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true
+world-fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established
+begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is
+beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a
+patriot. It is not <i>my country</i> that is of interest, but humankind.
+America's political interests, her trade, all her localisations as a
+separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new
+social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American
+predatory instincts, her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while
+supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening
+confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for
+the outright demoralisation of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting
+to-day the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
+invariably follows the thought.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
+religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
+change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation
+of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.</p>
+
+<p>The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
+enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
+movement. Within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration
+have recently been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the
+most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau and Lanier took
+pen in hand, forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a
+peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds as a result of
+the very act of getting out from under European influence.</p>
+
+<p>England and France and Germany have fallen into mere national voices.
+The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble, against the basic rumble
+of war. War in this century is a confession, as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>suicide is a
+confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the
+triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you received letters from
+friends in England or Germany or France during the war&mdash;friends whom
+formerly you admired for their culture and acumen&mdash;you were struck by
+the dulness and misery of the communications, the uncentred points of
+view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and
+blackness of life there; if, indeed, you read the newspapers and
+periodicals of those countries, you required no further proof of the
+fact&mdash;that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all
+driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and
+fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.</p>
+
+<p>Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and
+the unclean. The new social order does not recognise the rights and
+desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically <i>one</i> in meaning,
+in aim and in destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the
+sun's rays and in character of country, environment, race, colour and
+structure of mind&mdash;these are primal values, the very values that will
+sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and
+nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments
+of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony
+is one.</p>
+
+<p>The spiritual source of all human achievement <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>is already a harmonic
+whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a
+pattern of it in matter&mdash;to make the dream come true in flesh, each man
+and each nation bringing his labour.</p>
+
+<p>If a certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by
+intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring
+parasite, or formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow.
+In good time there is war to the death.</p>
+
+<p>In a doctor's office in Canada, I saw the picture of a bull-dog standing
+large against the background of the accepted flag, and beneath was this
+line:</p>
+
+<p>"What we have, we'll hold."</p>
+
+<p>I found that the picture had a national popularity. Yet a child stopping
+to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material
+things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a
+man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the
+effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a
+hornet stung him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is a conviction held here that the darkest period of American
+materialism came to its end with the beginning of the war. The
+generation of literary producers in manifestation at that time was
+responsible for the bleakest products which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>America will ever have the
+shame of showing to future generations.</p>
+
+<p>It was not so devoid of genius as would appear; the first cause was the
+difficulty in getting the best work "through." This again was not
+because the public was not ready for the good, but because the public
+taste was brutalised by men who stood between the public and the
+producers. These middlemen insisted, by the right of more direct
+contact, that the public should have what they fancied the public desire
+to be.</p>
+
+<p>I sat in Union Square recently with a beggar who studied me, because it
+appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was
+a great story&mdash;sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance
+of life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from
+him. Rather he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was
+a whine in it. He chose to act, and he was not a good actor. His
+offering hurt, not because he was filthy and a failure, but because he
+lied to himself and to me, because he did not dare to be himself, though
+the facts were upon him, eye and brow and mouth. So I did not get his
+story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in
+American letters&mdash;I, being the public; the truth of his story
+representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was
+ready for, being the middleman's part.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>All workmen of the last generation&mdash;all who would listen&mdash;were taught to
+bring forth their products with an intervening lie between the truth and
+their expression&mdash;the age of advertising heavy in all production.</p>
+
+<p>I recall from those days what was to me a significant talk with an
+American novelist who wanted sales, who was willing to sacrifice all but
+the core of his character to get sales, and who found himself at that
+time in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:</p>
+
+<p>"Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the
+woman's soul wakes up."</p>
+
+<p>"A woman's novel?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Meant to be," said he. "Study of a woman all through. Begins as a
+little girl&mdash;different, you know&mdash;sensitive, does a whole lot of
+thinking that her family doesn't follow. Tries to tell 'em at first, but
+finds herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years&mdash;putting on power and
+beauty in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She's pure
+white fire presently&mdash;body and brain and something else asleep. She
+wants to be a mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of
+her sisters to this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as
+the world conducts it&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I follow you," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm not going to do the novel here for you," he added. "You
+wouldn't think there was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>a ray of light in it from this kind of
+telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in
+telling a story, can't do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at
+the same time&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she wanted a little baby&mdash;was ready to die for it, but had her
+own ideas of what the Father should be. A million women&mdash;mostly having
+been married and failed, have thought the same thing here in
+America&mdash;pricked the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover,
+they're the best women we've got. There are&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He purposely shook the hat from his head&mdash;back into the seat&mdash;at this
+point.</p>
+
+<p>"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America&mdash;God
+bless 'em&mdash;who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for the
+Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did.
+He was a young man doing his own kind of work&mdash;doctoring among the poor,
+let us say, mainly for nothing&mdash;killing himself among men and women and
+babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of
+madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They
+were two to make one&mdash;and a third. She knew. There was a gold light
+about his head which she saw&mdash;and some of the poverty-folk saw&mdash;but
+which he didn't <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.</p>
+
+<p>"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying
+anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it
+came to me was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall
+down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm
+not going to tell you what happened. Only this: a little
+afterward&mdash;along about page two hundred of the copy&mdash;the woman's soul
+woke up."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead when his car is
+pressing the limit.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever have a book fail?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Seven," said I.</p>
+
+<p>He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes:</p>
+
+<p>"They tell me at my publishers' that I slowed up my last book badly&mdash;by
+taking a woman's soul out for an airing&mdash;just a little invalid kind of a
+soul, too. Souls don't wake up in American novels any more. You can't do
+much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas&mdash;I mean <i>movie</i>
+canvas. You can paint <i>soul</i> but you can't photograph it&mdash;that's the
+point. The movies have put imagination to death. We have to compete. You
+can't see a soul without imagination&mdash;or some sort of madness&mdash;and the
+good people who want <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>imagination in their novels don't buy 'em. They
+rent or borrow. It's the crowds that go to the movies that have
+bright-coloured strings of American novels as the product runs&mdash;on their
+shelves&mdash;little shiny varnished shelves&mdash;red carpets&mdash;painted birds on
+the lamp-shades and callers in the evenings."</p>
+
+<p>There was a good silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know," he added presently, "I've about come to the conclusion
+that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd.
+Look at the big movie pictures&mdash;the actors make love like painted
+animals.... I'm not humorous or ironical. It's a big problem to me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you can't touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until
+you are off the sensuous," I offered. "The quest only begins there. I'm
+not averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings&mdash;in part.
+But I am averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a
+romance when a woman's soul wakes up. There's a hotter fire than that
+which burns blood-red&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he said quickly. "I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest
+thing in the world.... I'm sure of this story until her soul wakes up.
+She stirs in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead&mdash;the kind of a woman
+who could whistle to me or to you&mdash;and we'd follow her out&mdash;dazed by the
+draw of her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up&mdash;but I can
+feel the public <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>dropping off every page after two hundred&mdash;like chilled
+bees&mdash;dropping off page by page&mdash;and the old familiar battle ahead for
+me. I can feel that tight look of poverty about the eyes again&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?" I asked, as we turned
+again into the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>I wasn't the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and
+something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen&mdash;how easy it
+is to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise&mdash;when
+the very passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.</p>
+
+<p>"She's beautiful&mdash;even asleep," he said. "I'm afraid I'll have to give
+her something. I'm building a house. She's in the comprehension of the
+little varnished shelves&mdash;asleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't a tight look come about the eyes&mdash;from much use of that sort of
+an&aelig;sthetic?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's get a drink," he answered.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P217" id="P217"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>19</h2>
+
+<h2>THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>But the stroke of death has fallen upon such pandering, and the war put
+it there. The big names of the last generation are now magazine and
+movie men; all save the few whose sutures have not entirely closed, and
+they are making their last frenzied turn to meet the new social order,
+as they met the floating vogues and whims so long. But this is a
+difficult turn for panderers and caterers, because it does not have to
+do with the surface matter, nothing to do with dance and dress and
+appetite, but with the depths of the human spirit, quickened to
+animation afresh by the agony of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Only the rarest few of the greatest names of England and Europe have
+escaped the fatal partisanship. They have become little national voices,
+and in the coming years this will be remembered against them bitterly.
+The truly liberated soul does not fall into lying attempts at national
+exoneration. The truly liberated soul is no longer a nationalist. A few
+of the young men have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>escaped this curse, but the older had their
+training, as has been told, in the blackest age of man. Men have been
+diminished in more spacious times than these by becoming laureates; they
+cannot but be degraded by becoming nationalists in these abandoned
+hours.</p>
+
+<p>Genius, in the last generation, met a destructive force in the material
+world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by
+Copernicus. The voices of very few heralds were even heard, but there is
+a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great
+service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the
+liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of
+work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in
+spirit and truth; they will bring in their children unaccursed.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>... There's always a squeaking when a wagon climbs out of a rut, which
+is another way of saying that a time of transition is a time of pain.</p>
+
+<p>This is a notable and constructive generation now beginning its work in
+America, and joining hands with the few remaining Undefiled of Europe.
+They are not advertisers, nor self-servers. They do not believe in
+intellect alone. Their genius is <i>intuitionally</i> driven, not
+intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitations as a
+force, and is being superseded by electricity (the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>limitations of which
+have not yet been sensed so far even by the most audacious), so the
+intellect, as a producing medium, has had its period&mdash;a period of
+style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, of
+parading, of surface-show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
+blood, a temporal heat. Intuition is driven from the fountain-head of
+spiritual energy. Its great conception is the unity of all nature. The
+intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from
+sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.</p>
+
+<p>In all times, second-class artists have dealt in the form and matter of
+the age, talked of its effects and paraded its styles. Only the very
+greatest above them have realised that the true story of the thing, as
+any given man sees it, is the one important thing in the world for him
+to produce; that the nearness of the expression to the thought is the
+measure of his success; in a word, that his thought must be put into
+words (or tones or paint or stone) without an intervening lie from the
+medium.</p>
+
+<p>The race of men and women in their twenties, now at work in America, are
+doing these things. Especially in the new poetry is the fine
+consummation apparent. These are the leaders of the new social order.
+Before the war, such as had developed a voice had to shout through shut
+doors. The war has beaten down the doors. A <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>comparable race of young
+workmen (more men than women there; more women than men here) has
+appeared in Russia and raised its voice. It is not altogether a dream
+that a unifying span will stretch across the pillars raised by these two
+groups of builders.</p>
+
+<p>In America this rising generation shall return to us the prestige which
+Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Lanier so superbly attracted. Indeed,
+Whitman is the master of the new poetry; his free verse lives in every
+line of the modern production, a point that would not be significant if
+it were alone of manner; but his broad human spirit, the infusing
+brotherhood which was his passion, and the same universal toleration,
+are the inspiring energies of the new workmanship.</p>
+
+<p>What is the vision of this new social order?</p>
+
+<p>These workmen recognise that no saint's blood, nor the power of any God,
+is going to interfere before a heavenly throne to save sinners who have
+wasted their lives in predatory accomplishment, instead of saving
+themselves;</p>
+
+<p>That the re-distribution of the world's wealth will not bring about the
+new order and beauty of life; that the rich man is to be pitied as much
+as the poor (God knows that intrinsically he is to be pitied more,
+because his shell is thicker) that the time is at hand when the
+vulgarity of being rich in material wealth will be a sense of the common
+mind; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>That women are not golden fleeces, nor clinging vines, but human
+adults with separate principles from men, which make them equally
+valuable in the social scheme; that women should be their own law in all
+matters of mating and reproduction, because the male has not the mental
+organism to cope authoritatively with these affairs;</p>
+
+<p>That heretofore as educators, as fathers, mothers and bringers-forth of
+children, humankind, in the large, has shown itself less than the
+animals, inasmuch as it does not fulfil its possibilities as animals do;</p>
+
+<p>That the time is past for cults and creeds, for separate interests and
+national boundaries, for patriotism and all the other <i>isms</i>; that we
+are all one in the basic meaning of existence; that there is an
+adjustment founded upon the principles of liberty and brotherhood, in
+which that which is good for the one is good for all; that this
+adjustment can only be attained by a reversal of the old form,
+personally and nationally&mdash;of thinking not of the self first in all
+things, but of the general good;</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the new social order of workmen, having come up through the
+blear and sickness of lies, has arrived at the high vantage which
+reveals that there is nothing so potent as a straight statement of fact,
+nothing so strategically the masterstroke.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P222" id="P222"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>20</h2>
+
+<h2>COMMON CLAY BRICK</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a
+walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon
+we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A
+gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a
+half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the
+waves.... It had a fine gleam&mdash;a vivid wet red against the gravel greys.
+Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought
+of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.</p>
+
+<p>... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing
+of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had
+once seen on a winter's day&mdash;a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a
+narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet,
+alone, and now that it was dry&mdash;this was just a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>brick-red. It needed
+the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason
+for its appeal to our sense of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no
+machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the
+age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in
+itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative
+strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient
+things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us
+as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them
+before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain
+thrilling familiarity&mdash;the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional
+passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.</p>
+
+<p>We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases
+and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the
+scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so
+that we repeat in wonder&mdash;"And this is the first time&mdash;&mdash;" Something
+deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the
+profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and
+that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of
+red from the pervading <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>greys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other
+Shore&mdash;a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its
+point&mdash;and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a
+fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales
+for all this nearer stretch of shore, but its beauty is completed by the
+peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and
+the completing vine.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which
+complete each other and suggest a third&mdash;the union of two to make one.
+Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the
+stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the
+trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace,
+the very quest of life.</p>
+
+<p>There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union
+of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of
+completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.</p>
+
+<p>We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter
+and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing
+third.</p>
+
+<p>Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its
+haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate
+green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought
+forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>paintings.
+Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or
+the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running
+water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human
+spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the
+lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in
+fatness)&mdash;but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the
+promise of the fruit. It was the globe again&mdash;the union of the strong
+and the fragile for a finer dimension of power&mdash;bow and cord, ship and
+sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine&mdash;yes, and that which
+surprised me at the beginning&mdash;that gleam of red in the wash of water
+upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the
+cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of
+beauty in a wet, worn brick.</p>
+
+<p>Firelight in a room is just the same thing&mdash;a grey stone fireplace with
+red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been
+a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a
+brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....</p>
+
+<p>Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative
+of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always
+occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is
+invariably safe and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>replete. There are a thousand analogies for every
+event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul.
+The plan is one.</p>
+
+<p>The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say,
+without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is
+the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and
+character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the
+faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit
+outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls
+to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of
+the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can
+arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy
+heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made
+clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It
+is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines
+the value of their expression of it.</p>
+
+<p>Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the
+real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression,
+but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training
+for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the
+ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of
+those who listen. When one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>awakens a soul interest, you may rely upon
+it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of
+uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to
+lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character
+of man or woman.</p>
+
+<p>The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure
+of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el
+dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational
+ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and
+bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient
+facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl&mdash;the rest is but
+following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic,
+only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago
+had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread
+along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys
+brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about
+constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out
+and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey
+pebble walk.</p>
+
+<p>We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling,
+setting the frames and laying <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>the concrete foundation. The finishing
+was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk,
+but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand.
+The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind;
+moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.</p>
+
+<p>The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of
+shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches
+of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white.
+It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep,
+sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from
+the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement.
+To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops
+were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the
+least mark of the trowel.</p>
+
+<p>The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique
+round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening
+mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of
+the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed
+without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its
+length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain&mdash;all frames and shingles
+removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soil <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>softening the border&mdash;the
+red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey&mdash;a walk
+that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces
+seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the
+thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite
+the same after that afternoon.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P230" id="P230"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>21</h2>
+
+<h2>THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>One day at Chapel, neither the Abbot nor the Dakotan appeared. The
+Columbian had left us. I looked up to see two young girls and another
+there. One of the papers brought in that day was upon the joining of two
+rivers. Where they came together was a whirlpool, a tremendous vortex
+that hushed all surrounding Nature. In the lowlands that lay about the
+place of that mighty meeting, a deep verdure came, for the winds carried
+the spray from the vortex. Nature loved the sounds of that pouring
+together. From the whirlpool, where two met, one great river emerged,
+white-maned with rapids for a way&mdash;then broad and pure and still, so
+that only birds and poets could hear the harmony deep as life. From time
+to time it gave forth its tributaries, yet seemingly was undiminished.
+Always on, always one, carrying all, making all pure, through the silent
+places, past the great mountains&mdash;to the sea.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>It was not until I had read of this mating of waters that I realised the
+slightly different conditions in the Chapel, the young men not being
+there.</p>
+
+<p>... The strangest humility stole over me. It had become the
+life-theme&mdash;to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to
+the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how
+anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never
+been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a
+matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how
+women can accept the man-idea of things.</p>
+
+<p>The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have
+accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately
+responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the
+limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when
+man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have
+fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best
+the processes that have been brought to bear upon women&mdash;from the
+establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into
+Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been
+allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted
+to be pleased according to his idea&mdash;and women, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>in accepting that, have
+prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring
+forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is
+possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to
+make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once
+betrays the first law of the growth to greatness&mdash;that of being true to
+one's self.</p>
+
+<p>The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred
+lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the
+very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of
+keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this
+conception.</p>
+
+<p>Would you like to know where man's ideas&mdash;man's plan of Conception&mdash;is
+most utterly outraged? <i>In the coming of Messiahs.</i> The Josephs are
+mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do
+neither with heights nor depths.</p>
+
+<p>One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a
+wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the
+sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would
+suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while
+directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has
+been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries
+has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>the miracles
+that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement
+and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the
+transition is on....</p>
+
+<p>The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of
+serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within
+her&mdash;submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are
+neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly
+submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream&mdash;indeed,
+the fruits of these dreams have come to be&mdash;but more often the heart is
+filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but
+the fire they burn with is red and not white.</p>
+
+<p>Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a
+roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of
+motherhood&mdash;and his words were wise and pure enough&mdash;that not one of the
+women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would
+have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many
+young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen,
+and to answer the dream....</p>
+
+<p>I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine
+elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When
+I thought that some time they would be mothers, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>it came with a rush of
+emotion&mdash;that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to
+make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years
+I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these;
+dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could
+not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great
+outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the
+things said that day are written here without quotations:</p>
+
+<p>... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the
+outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the
+orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and
+women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity&mdash;the
+handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl
+to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment
+upon the many&mdash;the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have
+not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have
+waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts
+knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.</p>
+
+<p>The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in
+aspiration&mdash;the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services
+of Romance. As a race we have only touched our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>lips to the cup of its
+beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what
+culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own
+great being&mdash;rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first
+beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of
+animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?</p>
+
+<p>I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with
+which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and
+heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of
+Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of
+the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world....
+And then we see the great stony fields of humanity&mdash;the potential mass
+in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are
+makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer
+world turns its eyes.</p>
+
+<p>... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking
+your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You
+know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of
+the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each
+other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the
+street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>easily to be comprehended&mdash;that it had but to be spoken to be
+embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we
+were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and
+we were strong to answer any call.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me
+so often and so strangely in your coming&mdash;but those mysteries within,
+those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all
+systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in
+aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch
+these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together&mdash;all
+her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of
+air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of
+unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for
+every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive
+principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because
+individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the
+day in Europe of late&mdash;the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have
+followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish
+these losses.</p>
+
+<p>Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature.
+This physical being of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>ours which the Old Mother has raised from the
+earth that a God might be built within it&mdash;even the beauty of this is
+not yet fulfilled&mdash;much less the powers of the mind which we have
+touched&mdash;much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest
+moments together so memorable.</p>
+
+<p>... You would be mothers&mdash;that is the highest of the arts. The making of
+books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men&mdash;that
+is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we
+labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts
+and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly
+at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us;
+suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their
+inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we
+have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails.
+Again and again we fail&mdash;that is the splendid unifying force, working
+upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods.
+Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to
+welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that
+the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind
+for any noble action&mdash;that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer
+any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>summit of our strength, the voice begins to speak&mdash;the <i>Guru's</i> voice.</p>
+
+<p>We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening
+surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely
+made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no
+part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in
+God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere
+bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little
+season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away.
+But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.</p>
+
+<p>... You would not do less than this to bring forth men&mdash;you who have the
+call.... You must learn the world&mdash;be well grounded in the world. You
+need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay&mdash;but you must have
+the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother&mdash;yet it is
+only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It
+is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose,
+the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His
+quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of
+makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.</p>
+
+<p>There is a <i>different</i> love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface
+ecstasies&mdash;that the Old <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and
+colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if
+making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has
+touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the
+Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean
+is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous
+bewilderment of sex-opposites&mdash;different from all save the immortal
+romances.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a
+suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have
+felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the
+weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening
+spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities
+of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a
+sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a
+thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the
+sepulchre rolled away.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found
+the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind
+straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and
+lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and
+it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>respiration of
+the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me
+from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on
+that fairy slope.</p>
+
+<p>The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own
+receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not
+require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken
+us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here&mdash;in the deep
+gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light
+of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and
+pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed
+upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse
+and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not
+stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our
+physical sight.</p>
+
+<p>Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of
+burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or
+your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the
+cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up
+their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like
+the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in
+beautiful deeds?</p>
+
+<p>The willow burns with quiet meagre warmth, like a lamb led to slaughter,
+but with innocence <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The
+oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in
+building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled
+hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not
+believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I
+lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I
+shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...."
+Each with its fragrance&mdash;the elm, the silentest and sweetest of all. The
+elm has forgotten her body in spreading her grace to the stars; the elm
+for aspiration, loving the starlight so well that she will not hide it
+from the ground; most beautiful of all, save the beech in winter, a
+swift and saintly passing of a noble life. The maple warms you in spite
+of herself, giving up her secrets which are not all clean&mdash;a lover of
+fatness, her shade too dense, a hater of winter, because she is bare,
+and the secret of all ugliness in her nudity. (The true tree-lover is
+never a stranger to the winter woods.)</p>
+
+<p>And the mothering beech, with her soft incense, her heart filling the
+room with warmth and light, her will to warm the world; the mothering
+beech, a healer and a shelterer, a lover like that Magdalen whose sin
+was loving much. She gives her body to Gods and men&mdash;and most sweetly to
+the fire, her passing naked and unashamed.</p>
+
+<p>The different love of Nature that the child <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>knows instinctively; that
+young men and maidens forget in the heat of themselves&mdash;but that comes
+again to us if we grow decently older; in rock and thicket, in the
+voices of running water, in every recess of woodland and arch of
+shore&mdash;not the Pipes of Pan, but the mysteries of God, not sensuousness,
+but the awakening of a spirit that has slumbered&mdash;the illumination,
+sudden and splendid, <i>that all is One</i>&mdash;that Nature is the plane of
+manifestation for the infinite and perfect story of God; that Nature is
+the table which God has filled to overflowing&mdash;this is a suggestion, a
+beginning of the lifted love of Nature....</p>
+
+<p>If they beckon to you, the trees on the horizon (and God be with you if
+there are none); if they seem to be calling to you, do not fail them, do
+not wait too long. For surely that time will come when they will cease
+to call to your heart. They will not have changed, but you will have
+gone too far back among the spectres and illusions of detached things to
+know that they are calling. And be very sure you will never find the
+love of God in the eyes of passing men&mdash;if you have forgotten our
+Mother.</p>
+
+<p>... Yet Nature alone is but the lowliest of the three caskets. I would
+not have you miss a breath of her beauty&mdash;but upon and within it, I
+would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's
+House. The Coming to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>you.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that
+Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pass to the unprepared
+houses. They are mute&mdash;suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their
+faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature
+who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.</p>
+
+<p>... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a
+Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your
+heart is listening&mdash;unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest&mdash;the
+little things of life silenced, the passions of the self put away.</p>
+
+<p>There is beauty in the wilderness&mdash;the beauty of the Old Mother is there
+in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great
+passion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not
+integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be
+destroyed by the lustre of that which descends to you? Would you be a
+potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands&mdash;when you
+may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?</p>
+
+<p>Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her
+arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you
+know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to
+add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom
+comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives
+you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he
+comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in
+his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know
+the world&mdash;so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in
+the brown study of Pan.</p>
+
+<p>This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will
+try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand
+between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is
+very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a
+God still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the
+shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover
+that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan
+is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which
+dares to be mother of souls.</p>
+
+<p>Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the
+haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
+many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
+eyes and hands <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and
+level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise&mdash;too wise for that.
+He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as
+the lusts of the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives
+away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look
+again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as
+before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all
+the pull of the ground tells you that your <i>very thought of falling</i> is
+a breath from the old shames&mdash;your dead, but as yet unburied heritage,
+from generations that learned the lie to self.</p>
+
+<p>You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
+Nature&mdash;a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
+cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such
+soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he
+says: "All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have
+dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and
+the throb of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must
+fall far, when you let go.</p>
+
+<p>... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you
+because you <i>dare</i>.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn
+down the ancient and mouldering churches. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>You do not require the blood,
+the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious
+generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so
+surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it
+is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by,
+before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature,
+whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the
+purity of the saints.</p>
+
+<p>... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he
+is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all
+lessons&mdash;to wait. You must pass by all others who are not true to the
+dream. You must integrate your ideal of him&mdash;as you dream of the Shining
+One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the
+laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the
+dream, pass on&mdash;for though you travel together for years, at the end you
+will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no
+dreams&mdash;the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom
+another is waiting.</p>
+
+<p>... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you.
+There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness
+is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low
+earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>... A whirlpool, a vortex&mdash;this is but the beginning of ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from
+the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative
+light. This is the highest mystery of Nature&mdash;all hitherto is background
+for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings
+through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the
+sun&mdash;such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains&mdash;and
+beyond them is the ocean of time and space.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P248" id="P248"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>22</h2>
+
+<h2>MIRACLES</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on
+the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing
+in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia
+to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like
+the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the
+world can show is a battlefield of human beings.</p>
+
+<p>Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of
+force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to
+appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his
+powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is
+both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental
+matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature.
+Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos.
+The word <i>Cosmos</i> means order, as stated once before.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in
+building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on
+this bit of Lake-front three years ago&mdash;the frog-hollows, tiling, the
+wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded
+perversely&mdash;the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still
+sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this
+book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a
+house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I
+sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the
+approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a
+hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and
+possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came
+for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part.
+With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer
+him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different
+contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and
+look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light.
+After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with
+theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with
+another man's money,&mdash;standing alone, tormented with the thought of how
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank
+them for going away.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into
+the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around
+the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent
+night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that
+gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found
+myself turning in pleasure to it&mdash;the thought would come that it wasn't
+really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used
+to go from the building and grounds then&mdash;cutting myself clear from it,
+as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled
+him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.</p>
+
+<p>I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members
+of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the
+future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went.
+I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living&mdash;and for pennies the
+hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation&mdash;one
+house after another through life&mdash;to accept money and call their work
+paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry&mdash;every stone is
+different&mdash;but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid&mdash;nor the house
+paid for....</p>
+
+<p>One evening I went through the structure when all but the final
+finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it
+as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name;
+yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the
+fireplaces&mdash;finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by
+which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am
+unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length
+to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a
+stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake
+shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still&mdash;and
+presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what
+he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never
+hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house&mdash;a week or two more
+from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.</p>
+
+<p>The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that
+verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a
+human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I
+remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there
+by the fountain one night&mdash;mantilla, dark <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>eyes and falling water. It
+was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the
+<i>patio</i>....</p>
+
+<p>And here was its northern replica&mdash;sunken area paved with gold-brown
+brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you
+could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and
+front doors. I wanted it so&mdash;a house to see through like an honest face.
+Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted
+it so.</p>
+
+<p>"When we move in&mdash;&mdash;" one of the children began.</p>
+
+<p>I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't
+move in, we would....</p>
+
+<p>A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside
+his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build
+another (if he ever <i>had</i> to do it again) without raising his voice;
+without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or
+the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if
+they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved
+in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my
+back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I
+arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite
+generations rather than build again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>There is the order of the small man&mdash;a baneful thing in its way,
+sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which
+has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then
+there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling
+duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let
+that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to
+the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon&mdash;the
+eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken
+the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a
+superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation.
+"The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and
+up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress.
+There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer.
+Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of
+disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the
+following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case
+exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road
+to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must
+keep his mind clean; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>third, that he must begin to put his spiritual
+house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove
+faithful in the small things, first.</p>
+
+<p>I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here
+in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain,
+balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were
+large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine
+instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not
+seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were
+at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without
+apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing
+large quantities of work every day&mdash;for boys. Yet daily in their work, I
+was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but
+an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their
+minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a
+million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation
+of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and
+youth. This driving force is spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is
+man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart
+six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships
+God best in his work. His <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>work suffers if he misses worship one day in
+seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of
+devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality,
+as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the
+world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God,
+or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the
+schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow
+before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all
+separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter
+as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something
+greater than himself&mdash;that he has said or sung or written or painted
+something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of
+training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it
+again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe
+and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have
+but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our
+use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and
+inimitable; that its expression <i>through us</i> cannot be exactly
+reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become
+instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other
+can play.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the
+pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after
+the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object
+is held in the hand. There is a higher vision&mdash;and the word
+<i>imagination</i> expresses it almost as well as any other&mdash;by which the
+thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your
+utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give
+yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board.
+Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up
+from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.</p>
+
+<p>You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has
+ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone....
+You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of
+creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the
+poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain
+conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the
+finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre
+of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the
+beauty of it is determined <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>by its instrumentation of the driving energy
+which gives life to all men and things.</p>
+
+<p>Every object and every man tells the same story with its different
+texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven
+in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The
+farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy;
+that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and
+pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and
+heart&mdash;the one great love story of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the
+higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently&mdash;rising to
+superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired.
+Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training
+could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period&mdash;or
+in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.</p>
+
+<p>Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who
+show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be
+callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that
+they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and
+cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through
+them. I am in awe <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>before them many times. The child that can see
+fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable
+Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.</p>
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> From <i>Midstream</i>.</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P259" id="P259"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>23</h2>
+
+<h2>MORE ABOUT ORDER</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself.
+In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the
+resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error
+lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the
+existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult
+life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.</p>
+
+<p>The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man
+lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last
+two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain
+and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no
+help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look
+at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will
+observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally
+inert&mdash;the ones who have to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>surmount themselves as well as their tasks,
+and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.</p>
+
+<p>In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour
+hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is
+allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours
+presents a picture of the purest tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the primary causes of human misery are competitive education of
+children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by
+mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I
+have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one
+whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error.
+All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to
+cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one entity, as
+it were.</p>
+
+<p>The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and
+again&mdash;from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired
+disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been
+a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor
+Aurelius&mdash;and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call
+Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more
+clearly and perfectly than any.</p>
+
+<p>A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast over <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>night, but it requires
+thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We
+look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its
+worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are
+watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and
+in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the
+strife&mdash;immersed themselves again in the long night of war.</p>
+
+<p>But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are
+more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must
+still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest.
+The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands
+of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto
+ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good
+for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is
+in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.</p>
+
+<p>Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a competitive
+plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity.
+I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by
+heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in
+the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered
+this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind
+us&mdash;every <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>day, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this
+baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars.
+The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can
+and giving only what he must&mdash;against every call, every fragrance, every
+flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring
+us nearer home as a race.</p>
+
+<p>Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied
+things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in
+material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the
+lie that we prosper by adding <i>things</i> unto ourselves.... A certain
+automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within
+a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the
+maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a
+commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means,
+the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual
+lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of
+children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear&mdash;to
+say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot,
+or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others
+screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>to the machines and
+pluck it forth&mdash;eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have
+a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do
+again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of
+the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages
+could pay for these hells of routine.</p>
+
+<p>Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his
+individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And
+for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a
+marvel for efficiency.</p>
+
+<p>The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage
+here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down
+another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes
+who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since
+they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property&mdash;but
+the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than
+mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is
+never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task
+well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own
+centres of being, puts his enduring self in it&mdash;a self said to be
+fashioned not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind.
+You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or
+friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes
+to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price&mdash;matter yields unto
+you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or
+the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You
+possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.</p>
+
+<p>I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought&mdash;and he
+didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but
+bark and green, shade and sun&mdash;a kind of twilight curtain dropped before
+his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, they're just stones&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his
+landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the
+bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance&mdash;that it was a
+challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient
+presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal
+with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction&mdash;the rest of
+his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a
+septic-tank where air and light must be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>excluded.... This man had
+another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I
+would point out merely that he did not truly own them.</p>
+
+<p>Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion
+with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any
+beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.</p>
+
+<p>I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of
+two distinct emotions&mdash;the first a wearing tension lest some one should
+come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I
+had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely
+evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that
+money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius
+for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent
+years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as
+life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it
+all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more
+designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I
+found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes
+for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing
+he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many
+decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>that
+charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the
+making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by
+men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they
+were fine; then they received.</p>
+
+<p>It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when
+the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he
+realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand.
+Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a
+spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation
+of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the
+whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe
+and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing
+but jingle and tinkle and din.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain
+slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the
+instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in
+every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and
+exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the
+genius of the machine. It answered, not in <i>tempo</i> and volume alone, but
+in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young
+musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch
+the <i>Waldstein</i> or the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span><i>Emperor</i>, and that I had now merely to
+punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....</p>
+
+<p>A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor
+cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not
+true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured
+objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by
+methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the
+motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played
+upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one
+hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to
+the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of
+manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and
+mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and
+more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and
+selling.</p>
+
+<p>Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness,
+break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices
+through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and
+acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable
+in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue
+for such productions, which is advertising.</p>
+
+<p>You will say that people want these things, or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>they would not buy. A
+people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and
+sated with inferior objects. The whole <i>art of life</i> is identified with
+our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses
+and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current
+style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of
+stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the
+cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true
+appreciations&mdash;in clothing, house-building and furnishing&mdash;following the
+heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.</p>
+
+<p>We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the
+real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows
+that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily
+spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his
+name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter
+inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming
+an incentive of the many.</p>
+
+<p>There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful
+character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the
+man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our
+national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of
+each child, and fitting <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>the task to it; so long as trade masters the
+many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple
+theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling
+dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes,
+and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of
+the eternal things&mdash;just so long will we have war and governmental
+stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P270" id="P270"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>24</h2>
+
+<h2>THE FRESH EYE</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as
+possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs
+our neighbours sing&mdash;this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that
+we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness
+to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as
+true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each
+man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit
+of pioneers to come into his own.</p>
+
+<p>A few years ago I passed for a square or two along the main avenue of a
+large city&mdash;a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the
+hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most
+hideous shades&mdash;the reds of blood and lust and decadence.</p>
+
+<p>"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.</p>
+
+<p>A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>I saw something about
+America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't
+know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the
+season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans
+was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence
+of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to
+ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking
+and horror-bound peoples&mdash;bloody as the Balkans&mdash;because Trade had
+brought them in.</p>
+
+<p>These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain
+colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye
+that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not
+know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short
+steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a
+street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood.
+I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy
+with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency
+of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be
+there.</p>
+
+<p>He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a
+certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying
+set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward
+to the shoulders of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>motorman; and from his figure my mind wandered
+to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon
+the <i>juice</i> and upon the passing force of steam&mdash;through tunnels and
+trestles at this moment&mdash;driving trains and cars and ships around the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this
+motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving
+passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each
+day&mdash;his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his
+faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos
+again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this
+motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The
+average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not
+too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the
+roads of production to those who are ready.</p>
+
+<p>Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding
+his trousers.</p>
+
+<p>They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual
+every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear
+white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that
+change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the
+more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer
+clothing winter and summer for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>months at a stretch. One must accept
+this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not
+want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its
+threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.</p>
+
+<p>... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the
+cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wide <i>W</i> that a
+child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I
+suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and
+conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these
+things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the
+Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for
+us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we
+seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had
+we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the
+debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this
+good man should be shamed so.</p>
+
+<p>And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the
+tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season,
+widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the
+abdomen as from a tightened stem the next&mdash;these are the real
+obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is
+frank <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human
+beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If
+I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me
+do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the
+bringing up of children <i>not to revolt</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall
+man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he
+loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before
+your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be <i>alone</i> is
+to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and
+warm.</p>
+
+<p>It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their
+freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see
+things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as
+they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker
+who brings up anything worthy, has done just this&mdash;reproduced the thing
+more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or
+because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute
+need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him.
+It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's
+work in the Chapel.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of
+character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect
+of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time
+of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an
+important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play
+or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This
+is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial
+settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth&mdash;<i>white</i> because
+it contains all colour&mdash;is not dominant and flaring enough for the
+wearied and plethoric eye.</p>
+
+<p>We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A
+writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the
+story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character,
+the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of
+fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes
+through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These
+forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our
+own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as
+it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion
+that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no
+matter how consummate we become as artists.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his
+study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under
+London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk
+for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary
+grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a
+more perfect expression in words.</p>
+
+<p>In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all
+observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the
+work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of
+acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of
+character portrayal&mdash;the facility with which we are able to lose
+ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known
+delight when some one said, "You must <i>be</i> that person when you are
+writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer
+through a book and presently begins <i>to do himself</i>. After that one goes
+over the early part of the book during which the character is being
+learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished
+conception."</p>
+
+<p>It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a
+shiftiness which must pass.</p>
+
+<p>The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is
+cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The
+expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>in as near
+a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The
+instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because
+it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by
+actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells
+us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit
+of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the
+truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par
+with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal
+is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love
+of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle,
+Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the
+fiction sense&mdash;that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to
+enflesh their literary efforts in story form.</p>
+
+<p>This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors
+above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were
+interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the
+years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own
+minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the
+whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and
+more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind
+draws increasingly deep from a source <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>that is inexhaustible, and its
+expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and
+fictioning of any form is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that
+charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to
+encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its
+centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and
+the actual.</p>
+
+<p>The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their
+inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely
+mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become
+more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form
+their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of
+the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task
+of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.</p>
+
+<p>I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way
+is first&mdash;all the great companions have taken that way at first.
+Solitude&mdash;that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism.
+The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of
+God&mdash;then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two
+worlds&mdash;that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings&mdash;and a time for
+great migratory flights.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P279" id="P279"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>25</h2>
+
+<h2>THE CHOICE OF THE MANY</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it
+had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation&mdash;a patriotic
+meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be
+ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national
+integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new
+civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems
+divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly
+bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in
+themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material
+vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe
+gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their
+spines touched with death.</p>
+
+<p>The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and
+the like. It has been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the
+larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it&mdash;as if they had
+been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and
+understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and
+conception <i>for them</i>, they find it mainly out of accord with things as
+they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build
+forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.</p>
+
+<p>This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us,
+the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their
+distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation
+is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his
+spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many
+or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to
+understand him better than their fathers.</p>
+
+<p>I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect
+significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as
+mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you&mdash;new
+thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic
+age.</p>
+
+<p>You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you
+long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>is here
+and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever
+divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the
+three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein
+the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset,
+are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no
+universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer
+you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you
+will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the
+lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a
+lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may
+live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that
+which is static is dead.</p>
+
+<p>There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of
+the time. Three-score-and-ten&mdash;that is but an evening camp in a vast
+continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour,
+but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone.
+Art&mdash;those who talk art in the temporal&mdash;have not begun to work. If they
+only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose
+lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived
+beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the
+illusion of one life being all.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and
+science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks
+loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the
+universe. That thing known as <i>psychology</i> taught to-day in colleges
+will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the
+preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can
+become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually
+changed into new forms.</p>
+
+<p>Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not
+change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as
+you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on
+the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing
+machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh
+is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and
+changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in
+your heart&mdash;that sleeping one&mdash;is dynamic with all that you have been.
+Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an
+immortal being. You may be workers in magic.</p>
+
+<p>Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does
+not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its
+dictates and learned its wants&mdash;its taste will <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>change and leave you
+nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of
+the many is not the voice of God&mdash;it is the voice of the temporal and
+its destiny is swift mutation.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that
+is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to
+see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us
+sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who
+have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country&mdash;have walked
+with God alone against the crowd&mdash;until they were given the power to
+master their way into authority.</p>
+
+<p>The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its
+choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P284" id="P284"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>26</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ROSE CHAPTER</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became
+irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and
+old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a
+tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature&mdash;a white lid that had been on quite
+long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her
+talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot
+began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though
+outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of
+other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs
+and woodland places&mdash;of the gardens we would make presently.</p>
+
+<p>"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man,
+"I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and
+little beside&mdash;vines, of course. I know men who fall <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>like this into the
+iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will
+have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in
+his front yard with unvarying resolution&mdash;oh, for many years. He knows
+just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with
+the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies.
+They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad&mdash;the single ones, dry and
+thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed
+place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful&mdash;born of evil
+thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear
+innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative
+effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him,
+and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.</p>
+
+<p>"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than
+the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care.
+Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that
+forgets to bloom&mdash;like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human.
+Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see
+deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."</p>
+
+<p>Which remarks were accepted without comment.</p>
+
+<p>"Again," the old man added, "some of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>accepted things are not so far
+along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see
+it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were
+to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen
+anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is
+raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the
+whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in
+their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an
+exhalation that is like a love-potion&mdash;earthy things that ask so little,
+do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the
+bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance
+is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage
+is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency
+goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."</p>
+
+<p>"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.</p>
+
+<p>"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the
+voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their
+odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot
+express his gratitude for&mdash;like the mignonette. Their colouring and form
+warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each
+year&mdash;not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the
+way. Then I may <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>betray a weakness of my own&mdash;and I am glad to&mdash;but I
+love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the
+white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of
+its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown
+like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has
+never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the
+lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can
+only be endured in my case from a distance."</p>
+
+<p>"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me
+that people raise so many <i>just roses</i>. Here is a world by itself. There
+is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and
+saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and
+sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are
+roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are
+delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human
+heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for
+Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that
+one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so
+far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women
+of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>thousands of
+other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past
+against which to measure their romances.</p>
+
+<p>"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and
+woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world&mdash;of
+all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at
+length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be
+veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits
+for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all
+great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since
+greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through
+expression. A great romance will out&mdash;through a child or a book or some
+mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One
+looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest
+deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of
+woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's
+arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his
+actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her
+energy that quickens his conceiving....</p>
+
+<p>"Roses&mdash;how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and
+women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of
+themselves? Do you think that the actual <i>hurt</i> of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>their beauty&mdash;the
+restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their
+silent leaning over the rim of a vase&mdash;is nothing more than a product of
+soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as
+moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist
+before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has
+come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think
+as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like,
+that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic
+influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening&mdash;something that makes a
+flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.</p>
+
+<p>" ... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have
+reached roses&mdash;have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they
+linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses.
+In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which
+has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the
+white to the pink roses&mdash;and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the
+search ever more passionate&mdash;until we begin to discover that which our
+hearts are searching for&mdash;not upon any plant but in ideal.</p>
+
+<p>"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about
+producing the flower&mdash;as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>thought. At least we think so&mdash;as the universe is evolving to
+fulfil at last the full thought of God....</p>
+
+<p>"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes,
+until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy
+Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste
+as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him,
+and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his
+listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news
+of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the
+performance of the lesser ones.... But roses&mdash;so many by-paths, because
+roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell
+is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.</p>
+
+<p>"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens
+which are at the bottom. There are good greens&mdash;the green of young elms
+and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of
+yellow may be&mdash;and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The
+greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging&mdash;the
+water-colours&mdash;the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature
+brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the
+rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like
+ninety degrees <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>of evolution&mdash;the full quarter of the circle that is
+similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect
+spine of man.</p>
+
+<p>"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or
+less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are
+laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These
+improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for
+instance, to represent all stages&mdash;roses that are specialising in their
+present growth, one might say, in form <i>or</i> colour <i>or</i> texture; but in
+the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our
+window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this
+distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but
+when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in
+little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of
+evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body,
+then a mind, then a soul&mdash;and growth in the dimension of soul unifies
+and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who
+see&mdash;that the plan is one....</p>
+
+<p>"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved
+according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper
+reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the
+path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture,
+the sun began <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>to paint a new beauty upon them&mdash;not the pink that is a
+diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl.
+The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a
+white base.</p>
+
+<p>"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral.
+We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is
+steadily upward&mdash;always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our
+valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a
+transition&mdash;an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.</p>
+
+<p>"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The
+greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose
+with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it.
+There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this
+particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have
+fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that
+have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort
+of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland
+maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and
+colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost
+in the same illusion....</p>
+
+<p>"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a
+few spots of red on the outer <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>petals&mdash;like the persistent adhering
+taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys&mdash;they are the
+best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty.
+Like some saintly lives&mdash;they seem to have come all but the last of the
+ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the
+flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in
+due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have
+turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas
+is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of
+all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products.
+In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they
+are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in
+their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own
+heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the
+Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the
+nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the
+inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the <i>fragrance itself</i> to
+our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the
+fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose,
+on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a
+rain."</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P294" id="P294"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>27</h2>
+
+<h2>LETTERS</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Outside, as I have said, it was cracking cold. We talked thirstily by
+the big fire, discussed the perfect yellows in Nature&mdash;symbols of purest
+aspiration&mdash;and the honest browns that come to the sunlight-gold from
+service and wear&mdash;the yellow-brown of clustered honey bees, of the
+Sannysin robe, of the purple martin's breast. We were thirsting for
+Spring before the fire. The heart of man swells and buds like a tree. He
+waits for Spring like all living things. The first months of winter are
+full of zest and joy, but the last becomes intolerable. The little girl
+had not let us forget at all, and so we were yearning a full month too
+soon.</p>
+
+<p>"I know a bit of woods," said the Abbot. "It is only two miles away. A
+creek runs through it, and there are hills all 'round&mdash;lots of hickory
+and elm and beech. There's one beech woods off by itself. Maples and
+chestnuts are there, too, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>and many little cedars. There is a log house
+in the centre, and right near it a Spring&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He was talking like an old saint would talk of the Promised Land.</p>
+
+<p>"You are breaking our hearts," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"The hills are dry, so you can go early," he went on. "The cattle have
+been there in season, as long as I can remember, so there are little
+open meadows like lawns. The creek is never dry, and the Spring near the
+log house never runs dry. I could go there now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"So could I," said the little girl.</p>
+
+<p>They almost trapped me. I stirred in the chair, and remembered there was
+but an hour or two of daylight left in the afternoon.... Besides there
+was a desk covered with letters.... People ask problems of their own,
+having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the
+writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never
+descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the
+work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who
+said, "I have written you several letters, but never mailed them."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" I would ask.</p>
+
+<p>Answers to this question summed into the reason that they found
+themselves saying such personal things that they were afraid I would
+smile or be bored.... Letters are regarded as a shining <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>profit now, a
+fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has
+shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters
+that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too
+fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest
+to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who
+have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their
+minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike
+aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons
+disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man
+is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied
+with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism,
+the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not
+criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do
+not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers
+they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.</p>
+
+<p>There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things
+so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean
+autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to
+make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have <i>habits</i>. There seems
+to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money,
+and who ask such questions <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>as, "What is the best way to approach a
+publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?"
+"Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a
+first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"</p>
+
+<p>I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of
+producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of
+meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet,
+again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much
+money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in
+fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and
+written books that brought much money.</p>
+
+<p>But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the
+driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to
+one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a
+letter on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big
+finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably
+restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all
+truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as
+well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered
+world called Society&mdash;winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain
+and shore. They were very miserable and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>they seemed to sense the
+existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there
+work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world
+existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the
+final page or two&mdash;that most winning quality of the younger generation.</p>
+
+<p>... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world.
+Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is
+not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all
+that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being
+established against American materialism along the Western coast. There
+is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art
+and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a
+conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in
+the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand
+of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is
+becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of
+tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the
+entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that
+is <i>living spirit</i> is being driven westward before gross Matter&mdash;westward
+as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In
+California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be
+builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and
+splendid idealisation.</p>
+
+<p>But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes
+lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter
+day, was a communication from San Francisco&mdash;the last to me of several
+documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The
+documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They
+reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above
+flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the
+brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society
+reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from
+a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a
+purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one
+approach the super-mental area by the force of mentality alone.</p>
+
+<p>But I found <i>the turning</i> in these documents with alarm; that the
+purpose divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black
+business&mdash;known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black
+before the Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>I recalled that psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this
+letter:</p>
+
+<p>"I have received some of your early papers and plans, and thank you. I
+want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse
+running through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read&mdash;to
+play to commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough
+without bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces.
+They will work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin
+will result. For these forces which you show in operation are the real
+vitalities of man, which used other than in the higher schemes of
+life&mdash;call in the bigger devils for man to cope with. When one begins to
+use the dimension of the inner life, before the lower phases of the self
+are mastered, he becomes a peril to himself and to others. I feel that I
+do not need to be explicit to psychologists. I want to be on record as
+strongly urging you to be sure that the animal is caged before you loose
+the angel. Also that I have a conviction that there are ten times too
+many tradesmen in the world now; and that office-efficiency is not the
+kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I know you are in the way
+of real work, and that's why I venture to show my point of view; and
+please believe me energetic only toward the final good of the receptive
+surface you have set out to impress."</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P301" id="P301"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>28</h2>
+
+<h2>THE ABBOT DEPARTS</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>One day in March, the Abbot said:</p>
+
+<p>"You know that woods I was telling you about?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my father bought it the other day."</p>
+
+<p>... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that
+had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the
+Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was
+natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was
+cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and
+beech&mdash;clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men&mdash;with thorn and dogwood
+growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane.
+The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft
+and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven
+their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a
+half-century. It <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would
+have named an estate after&mdash;or a province.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men
+and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I
+turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either
+side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too
+much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was
+there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest
+impression. God bless the fodder&mdash;but what a price to pay. They had
+burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under
+that sacred cattle-path.</p>
+
+<p>Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of
+cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and
+hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and
+the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The <i>story</i> of the
+struggle for life on Mars came to me&mdash;how the only water that remains in
+that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the
+canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply
+for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.</p>
+
+<p>It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer
+of the woodland property. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>If it were going to be cut, I was glad I
+hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.</p>
+
+<p>"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Use it for a pasture."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't going to cut it&mdash;any of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's <i>No</i> and
+<i>Yes</i>. I took hope.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it thin enough to pasture?"</p>
+
+<p>"The main piece is. Better come and see."</p>
+
+<p>A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the
+wan light of March outside.</p>
+
+<p>"There's everything there&mdash;a virgin beech wood&mdash;a few acres of
+second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers&mdash;then the stream
+and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have
+thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw
+the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."</p>
+
+<p>There was a healing in that <i>never</i>.... The Abbot was not the kind to
+ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and
+had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father
+had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the
+rubber-boots.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the
+far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."</p>
+
+<p>He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey,
+clouds yellowish-grey and watery.</p>
+
+<p>We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a
+stream running across&mdash;a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still
+held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not
+get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an
+oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to
+punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for
+thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain
+and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers.
+For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with
+melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the
+afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters,
+presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at
+times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first
+time I saw the Amphitheatre.</p>
+
+<p>We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and
+looked over the wooded <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream
+winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of
+the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire
+bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed
+and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside
+me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent
+branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like
+kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a
+sisterhood&mdash;the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and
+through the naked branches, a log cabin.</p>
+
+<p>An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had
+made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the
+cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched
+it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a
+fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the
+moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many
+decades&mdash;built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and
+floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded
+upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the
+north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new
+roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>men and children coming
+there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a
+forest.</p>
+
+<p>"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.</p>
+
+<p>"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.</p>
+
+<p>"It is different. This is a grove&mdash;thinned for pasture land. Over there
+it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of
+woods&mdash;everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in
+your hand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about
+the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different
+angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main
+timbers only&mdash;beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and
+ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the
+Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.</p>
+
+<p>"It won't be so another Spring," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the
+future years&mdash;for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were
+torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.</p>
+
+<p>"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I
+repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling
+dusk&mdash;across a winter wheat <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>field that lay in water like rice. The town
+came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every
+odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what
+the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said
+to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it
+was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white
+man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment,
+but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do
+not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must
+depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting
+glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high.
+The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though
+chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for
+the edge of the Lake where we belonged.</p>
+
+<p>... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We
+were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their
+highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their
+orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes.
+I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on
+choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day,
+and the beech leaves come forth from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>their wonderful twists of brown,
+formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the
+highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have
+forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its
+demands and making its values known, having long since called unto
+itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high
+northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths
+of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches
+gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too
+slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women
+of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no
+holier place than a beech-wood....</p>
+
+<p>The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us&mdash;put in the fireplace and
+the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent
+there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days
+of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost
+intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a
+place some day for many of the great little books of all time&mdash;the place
+for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The
+Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream,
+too.</p>
+
+<p>... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only
+temporary.... He remained <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>after the others some weeks ago, and said to
+me quite coldly:</p>
+
+<p>"They have decided to make me go back to school&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down," I answered.</p>
+
+<p>As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of
+sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at
+first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic;
+full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the
+worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you
+somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount.
+He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the
+moment all its ravishing greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One
+sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse
+takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced,
+but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not
+slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.</p>
+
+<p>The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand
+on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white
+breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others.
+The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once&mdash;and away.... He is but
+fifteen now. With utmost <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>impartiality I should say that wonderful
+things have happened to him.</p>
+
+<p>They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early
+and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from
+habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is
+new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he
+was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal
+of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never
+runs.</p>
+
+<p>But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former
+teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I
+asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they
+did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The
+appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was
+for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the
+story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I
+would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he
+was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable
+him to get himself out.</p>
+
+<p>My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop
+an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told
+them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and
+steadily-working brain-grip; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>how I had sought to install a system of
+order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one
+of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and
+ordered plane.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I
+used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely
+answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples
+that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of
+Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted
+one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he
+shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and
+must try once more.</p>
+
+<p>It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy,
+believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against
+his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the
+next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I
+cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a
+kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked
+hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was
+really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly
+afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured
+me:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm
+in your Study."</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up
+in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth
+from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the
+books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should
+really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to
+the Abbot:</p>
+
+<p>"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into
+competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through
+the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come.
+You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy&mdash;live
+it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an
+honour&mdash;a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready.
+Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might.
+Feel us behind you&mdash;rooting strong&mdash;and hurry back."</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P313" id="P313"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>29</h2>
+
+<h2>THE DAKOTAN</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large
+bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he
+had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over
+grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's
+shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns
+that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use.
+Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the
+joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about
+finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The
+Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit.
+He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two,
+or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.</p>
+
+<p>But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too
+fine, of too pure a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them
+until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a
+desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot
+touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it
+with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly
+over the writer's words.</p>
+
+<p>The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless
+gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few
+pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left
+the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there.
+I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he
+looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for
+days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like
+Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the
+fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the
+rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of
+the master of Walden in his work.</p>
+
+<p>The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original
+thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the
+big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness
+that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>spent
+the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the
+sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to
+this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the
+companions of hardship and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the
+last summer he has moved about field and wood and shore, between hours
+of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have
+found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons
+together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs
+follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its
+energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and
+light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness
+and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and
+soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the
+first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of
+Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our
+wildest imagination.</p>
+
+<p>"Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things.
+As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on
+the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in
+higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most
+marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as
+yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over <i>telepathy</i> is
+merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.</p>
+
+<p>"It is my belief that over ninety per cent of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>the sounds we
+know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and
+scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that
+is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a
+thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to
+higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of
+shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among
+fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in
+proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration.
+Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to
+give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of
+his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth
+of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling
+chatter. It is only those few who have come <i>to know</i>,
+through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and
+draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that
+become gifted with all-knowing counsels.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a sound born from every thought, action, or
+aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound
+not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive
+enough to receive the impression. From the collective,
+intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or
+working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which
+is to be <i>felt</i> as a fine singing tingle by all in the
+vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an
+exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be
+felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all
+lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the
+voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and
+known before it is uttered; all minds are one.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>" ... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing,
+conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves
+a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is
+something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet
+the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy
+notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are
+impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic,
+spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they
+can to the vibrations of peace and harmony&mdash;to the <i>Sounds</i>,
+which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious
+of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide
+that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and
+study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate
+from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case
+has not to do with intellect and reason, but with
+sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire
+intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness,
+and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless
+and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening,
+inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has
+anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into
+the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?</p>
+
+<p>" ... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are
+low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one
+strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to
+the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the
+West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the
+magic pronunciation of <i>Aum</i>, <i>Amitabha</i>, <i>Allah</i>, of certain
+chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws
+a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the
+injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are
+surrounded by....</p>
+
+<p>"Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken
+rhythm, would call the <i>Vina</i>, that Oriental harp-string of
+the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But <i>Vina's</i> magic cry
+at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The
+voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of
+thunder, the wind in the pines&mdash;these are sounds that bring
+one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of
+the Universe. These are the voice of <i>kung</i>, 'the great tone'
+in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle
+note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern
+China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening
+raptly to <i>kung</i>, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho
+rushing by.' One longs to be the intimate of such
+meditations."</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P319" id="P319"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>30</h2>
+
+<h2>THE DAKOTAN (<i>Continued</i>)</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>I first heard of the Dakotan<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> at a time when I was not quite so
+interested in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country
+wrote me, and sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially,
+though the work was good. She tried again, and I took the later
+manuscript to bed with me, one night when I was "lifted out," as the
+mason said. It did not work as designed. Instead of dropping off on the
+first page, I tossed for hours, and a letter asking him to come to
+Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was
+established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since
+he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a
+childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants
+the popular market; the quality of his <i>bent</i> precludes that for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>the
+present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America
+spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight
+line between the thought and the utterance.</p>
+
+<p>A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the
+sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a
+man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and
+the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the
+run of thought, the better the work.</p>
+
+<p>One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a
+continual changing and refining production about our truest friends&mdash;the
+same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest&mdash;that quickens
+us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we
+must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must
+always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and
+do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in
+our breast&mdash;it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have
+<i>arrived somewhere</i>&mdash;in profession, in trade, in world-standing&mdash;know
+that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is
+dissolute.</p>
+
+<p>I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you
+to come&mdash;but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>you
+to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for
+continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the
+thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well
+already&mdash;arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we
+did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is
+meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It
+may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage&mdash;that I
+may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the
+land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with
+many voices."</p>
+
+<p>Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I
+think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought
+me:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water
+dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I
+learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine
+are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way
+back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has
+been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in
+consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to
+tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked
+fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to
+Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to
+this day as when it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>enacted, and I was not yet five at
+the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the
+explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.</p>
+
+<p>"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the
+condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and
+memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our
+bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into
+certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or
+soul&mdash;conditions that are invoking to great reaches of
+consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too
+thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present
+physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to
+interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually
+embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has
+not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner
+man is ever a hushed whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the
+immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I
+brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself
+into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost
+akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in
+consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is
+wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the
+blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and
+hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the
+ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may
+be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red
+corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>came. A
+bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every
+recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I
+used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain.
+It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing
+away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state
+of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of,
+as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind,
+and the rain beating upon the roof....</p>
+
+<p>"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail
+stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it
+upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed....
+It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low
+monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving,
+lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro.
+It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank,
+lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The
+manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a
+consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I
+merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact,
+during the dream I had hardly a sense of <i>being</i>, except
+through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were
+horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark,
+a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion
+from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I
+seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do,
+since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of
+consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of
+the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent,
+except when a larger form instilled me with fear.</p>
+
+<p>"My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings,
+in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and
+instinct&mdash;everything&mdash;so that I actually lived, in infinitely
+dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.</p>
+
+<p>"All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life
+that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering;
+I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the
+unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a
+dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem
+to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through
+the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan
+filter of grey. It was light shining through water, a light
+which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was
+intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were
+sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob,
+boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what
+it was to cringe.</p>
+
+<p>"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream
+exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write
+I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our
+greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain,
+these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's
+waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it
+appears to me from this distance:</p>
+
+<p>"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into
+the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing,
+undulating fashion and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>settled softly on the water-bed,
+beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the
+depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay
+there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a
+torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon
+me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to
+move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the
+dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect
+hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of
+temperature and vibration to feel the need even of
+nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was
+a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to
+move again had not extraneous influences affected me after
+seeming ages had passed.</p>
+
+<p>"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about
+me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of
+grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it,
+or rather feel it&mdash;a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings
+of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were
+festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed
+out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of
+whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the
+bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe
+and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and
+contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey
+manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with
+hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing
+the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly
+phosphorescent lights, which winked on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>and off at intervals
+as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an
+instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up
+the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they
+feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the
+bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain
+permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at
+intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of
+many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of
+blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in
+the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders
+that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths
+and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They
+were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams without the
+searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first
+felt, and they did not bother me.</p>
+
+<p>" ... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept
+me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by
+one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the
+long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the
+whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey
+world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the
+gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low
+life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not
+been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of
+Fear. I shall never forget it&mdash;the Fear of the Black Bottoms.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and
+the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with
+it. In the midst of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>a kind of freezing paralysis, the
+struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of
+locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then
+there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre
+against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital
+part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment,
+so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow.
+The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the
+terror to escape.</p>
+
+<p>"Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of
+Danger I had started <i>forward</i>. There had been no forward nor
+backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a
+dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was
+thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away
+from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre
+of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking
+forward and always pointed away from the danger&mdash;protected to
+the last.</p>
+
+<p>"As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body
+sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as
+possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the
+bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of
+organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect,
+protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear
+increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the
+same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and
+easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon
+the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the
+dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that
+the rudiments of organs of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>locomotion were begun. And they
+came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side
+was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition,
+reasoning power&mdash;everything&mdash;was generated and fostered by
+Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our
+first overcoming of Inertia.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray;
+and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was
+clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was
+gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appetite, body
+bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me,
+the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but
+literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their
+bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often
+the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....</p>
+
+<p>"There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born
+of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive
+surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born
+from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall
+always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and
+rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower
+pitch.</p>
+
+<p>"Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a
+stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the
+bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows,
+sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky
+bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and
+instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that
+passed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on
+and on forever. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>Repletion would never have come to the
+Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.</p>
+
+<p>"I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths.
+About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were
+extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the
+ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began
+the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It
+was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible&mdash;the winking and waving
+of the blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless
+prey, a sudden extinguishing of the light, devouring&mdash;then
+the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason
+existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless
+things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a
+thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.</p>
+
+<p>" ... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all
+unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement
+takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then
+there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life
+is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement
+is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the
+Law of life.</p>
+
+<p>"I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining
+In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of
+water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about
+my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold
+consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest
+of that day and for long afterward."</p></div>
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p class="noin"><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> H. A. Sturtzel.</p></div>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P330" id="P330"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>31</h2>
+
+<h2>THE HILL ROCKS</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was
+thinking this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over
+the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and
+explainers&mdash;back to the sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there
+that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme,
+Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Fr&ouml;bel, Swedenborg. We delight in the few great
+and isolated names of Greece and Rome that are above style. We turn
+continually to the perpetual fountains of India, but seldom to Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at
+every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are
+stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and
+precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the
+strange splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>chief
+significance is that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a
+Master.</p>
+
+<p>The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has
+been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the
+misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh,
+instead of refuting many of them&mdash;yet the New Testament stands highest
+above all hands pointing heavenward.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that
+accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove
+him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and
+the Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier
+Arrival, that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage
+and the passion of Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical
+generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the
+novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us
+that the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as
+Luther's. Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and
+penetrative gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise
+to declare that it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus.
+Still the man matters less than his influence. His story is emphatically
+in the world; the spirit of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>it lives above all dogma and vulgarity,
+even above nationalism. It is the breath of Brotherhood and Compassion.
+It is nearer to us and less complex than the story of the Buddha.</p>
+
+<p>Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world.
+The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of
+first importance in the education of children is the institution of an
+ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. Children
+become starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake
+ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in
+our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these
+things:</p>
+
+<p>"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."</p>
+
+<p>When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at
+once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest,
+one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a
+reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to
+clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the
+reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of
+one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.</p>
+
+<p>We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter,
+and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had
+poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were
+always different from other children. They suffered more than the others
+about them, because they were more sensitive.</p>
+
+<p>They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child&mdash;misunderstanding;
+often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they
+could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew
+apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think
+of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect
+analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with
+vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the
+maiden who sustained France&mdash;her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It
+was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies
+that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little
+while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden
+did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the
+centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when
+the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly
+enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the
+road to Emmaus&mdash;the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and
+finally made <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>himself known. And they asked one to the other after He
+had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us
+by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"</p>
+
+<p>... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found
+work to do&mdash;work that people could not understand. The people invariably
+thought there must be a trick about the giving&mdash;that the eager one
+wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious
+workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and
+invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often
+they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, they were honest&mdash;that was the hill-rock. Such men come to
+make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves.
+They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they
+stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand
+that they had something good to give&mdash;those closest to them, not always
+seeing it first....</p>
+
+<p>You couldn't buy them&mdash;that was first established; then they turned the
+energies of their lives outward instead of in. The <i>something</i> immortal
+about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found
+their particular <i>something</i> to do. They found their work&mdash;the one thing
+that tested their own inimitable powers&mdash;and that, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>of course, proved
+the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not
+memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The
+world-man wants to give something to his people&mdash;the best he has from
+his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction&mdash;the most important
+in any life&mdash;to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old
+formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely
+new&mdash;the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can
+happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The
+best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The
+man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea
+of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally
+valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally
+realises <i>its own religion</i>. The greatest wrong that has been done us by
+past generations is the detachment of work and religion&mdash;setting off the
+Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days
+for the progress of the animal.</p>
+
+<p>All good work is happiness&mdash;ask any man who has found his work. He is at
+peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire.
+Even his physical organs are healthfully <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>active. The only way to be
+well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full
+powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving
+forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe
+inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper
+source of things&mdash;&mdash;not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A
+man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the
+tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.</p>
+
+<p>Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that
+drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse <i>in</i> to self,
+he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source,
+nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle
+and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward,
+he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their
+energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying
+capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the
+work he does.</p>
+
+<p>A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full
+before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according
+to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the
+vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments,
+but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned
+it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The
+handle of an axe is a poem.</p>
+
+<p>We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as
+men, found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother
+Earth who turns to her God for light and power, and from that pure
+impregnation, brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all
+destruction and greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values
+of woods and coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would
+perceive that they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is
+service; that they have no relation to great individual fortunes. These
+are the free gifts from our Mother. As good workmen we would realise
+that greed and competition pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all
+that is insane within us.</p>
+
+<p>The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in
+Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat,
+and sometimes brings the smart to the eyes&mdash;is the quality of men who
+have found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the
+conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow
+their thoughts in action <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>afterward, as water follows the curve of a
+basin. They go after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter
+passages to India; they sense the new power in the world; their faces
+are turned to the East for the rising of new stars. Often they die to
+make us see, but others spring to finish their work. Our hearts burn
+within us when we speak of their work.</p>
+<br />
+<br /><a name="P339" id="P339"></a>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h2>32</h2>
+
+<h2>ASSEMBLY OF PARTS</h2>
+<br />
+
+<p>Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must
+close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book&mdash;each
+a different book. Fascination attends the work. I assure you a teacher
+gets more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every
+professional man should call for his own. A man's work in the world
+should be judged by his constructive contacts with the young minds about
+him. A man should learn the inspiration which comes in service for the
+great Abstraction, the many, from which there is no answer; but he can
+only become powerful and unerring by trying out the results of his
+offerings face to face with his own group. It should be as natural for a
+matured man to gather his mental and spiritual familiars about him as it
+is for him to become the head of a domestic establishment.</p>
+
+<p>There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>little from ledger and
+margin, to the faces of the young about them&mdash;those who have come for
+the wages of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on
+stone, as great givers to the public. The public will not take these
+things personally; the public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who
+have nothing but money to give away cannot hope to receive other than
+calculating looks and laughter that rings with derision.</p>
+
+<p>The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted
+nationally and municipally. The business of man is to produce something.
+The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's
+goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a
+man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is
+the same with a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing
+transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a
+proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and
+a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he
+conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a
+church every seventh day.</p>
+
+<p>The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story;
+the figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular
+story if done well.</p>
+
+<p>The time is not far off, except to those whose <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>eyes are dim, when
+countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense&mdash;in the sense of
+realising that the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not
+even electrified matter, but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure
+of the Fatherland. The development of youth is the first work of man;
+the highest ideal may be answered first hand. Also through the
+development of the young, the father best puts on his own wisdom and
+rectitude.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is
+pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming
+in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten
+in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to
+supply a great variety of attractions. There is that <i>hum</i> in the room.
+It is not dissonance. The child is encouraged to be himself and express
+himself; never to impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose
+himself in the objects that draw him most deeply.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who
+worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a
+hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the
+education of man. I have not read this of Fr&ouml;bel's work. I wanted to do
+these studies my own way, but I know from what I have seen of
+kindergartens, and what teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the
+work is true&mdash;that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>"The Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it
+have lived a hundred years otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught.
+The process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the
+deeper powers, their organisation and direction. At the end of the year,
+the child is sent into the first grade, where the barbaric process of
+competitive education and brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as
+it was in Fr&ouml;bel's time.... A kindergarten teacher told me in that low
+intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:</p>
+
+<p>"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently
+by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are
+wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast.
+Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand
+the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed
+children. The little dreamers&mdash;the sensitive ones&mdash;are hurt and altered
+for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You
+do not know how we have suffered."</p>
+
+<p>Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten
+teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because
+they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very
+little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great
+ideal that is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>carried out through their first year were continued
+through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with
+serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer
+place to be.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in
+Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something
+of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I
+am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest
+way to write anything is as you would tell it:</p>
+
+<p>" ... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The
+world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to
+the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the
+Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy&mdash;philosophers have called it
+by many names, but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in
+Spirit, since God is spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed,
+but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world
+is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one&mdash;that
+the parts of matter must be assembled into a whole&mdash;that a replica must
+be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men
+are identified with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth,
+a pulling apart instead of together.</p>
+
+<p>"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This
+is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present
+planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves
+with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars&mdash;all have to do with
+the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do
+with the assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is
+good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the
+many&mdash;<i>the instant</i> we leave the part and conceive the whole.</p>
+
+<p>"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that
+the plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers&mdash;voices of
+men in every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and
+meaning, that the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music
+in place&mdash;but the players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own
+little parts. The baton of the leader is lifted, but they do not hear.
+In their self-promulgation they have not yet turned as one to the
+conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its highest, yet the hour has
+struck for the lift of harmony.</p>
+
+<p>"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual
+plan all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>be, is there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has
+touched and taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the
+parts into matter, making his dream come true. Thus have come into the
+world our treasures. We preserve them&mdash;every gift from a spiritual
+source. Often we preserve them (until they are fully understood) against
+our will. The mere matter-models break down and are lost, for matter
+changes endlessly until it is immortalised, as our bodies must be
+through the refinement of spiritual union.</p>
+
+<p>"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have
+made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished
+plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see&mdash;step by step&mdash;the
+song into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and
+the saints have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the
+pictures of the dream somehow in matter&mdash;and their own bodies often to
+martyrdom....</p>
+
+<p>"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest
+disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an
+inspiration to every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts;
+above, the plan as a whole and the missing parts. Man stands
+between&mdash;the first creature to realise that there is an above, as well
+as a below. All creatures beneath man are driven; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>they look down. Man
+alone has looked up; man has raised himself erect and may take what he
+will from the spiritual source to electrify his progress. Man becomes
+significant the moment he realises that the plan is not for self, but
+for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.</p>
+
+<p>"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more.
+There are endless analogies. Thousands before me have written and sung
+and told the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in
+these wrecking days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And
+what has this to do with education?</p>
+
+<p>"Everything. The brain sees but the part. The development of brain will
+never bring to child or man the conception of the spiritual plan. There
+is a man to come for every missing part. Each man, as he develops, is
+more and more a specialist. These missing parts shall be taken down from
+spirit and put into matter by men whose intrinsic gifts are developed to
+contact them. Thus have come the great poems and inventions so far, the
+splendid sacrifices of men, and all renunciation for the healing of the
+nations.</p>
+
+<p>"I would first find the work for the child. The finer the child the
+easier this part of the task. Then I would develop the child to turn to
+a spiritual source for his inspiration&mdash;his expectation to a spiritual
+source for every good and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>perfect thing. The dream is there; the other
+half of the circle is to produce the dream in matter.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"Education is thus religion&mdash;but not the man-idea of religion. It has
+nothing to do with creeds or cults, with affirmations or observances. It
+has to do with establishing connection with the sources of power, and
+bringing the energy down into the performance of constructive work in
+matter. Religion isn't a feeling of piety or devoutness; it is action.
+Spirituality is intellect inspired.</p>
+
+<p>"The mountain is broad at the base only. There are many paths upward.
+These paths are far apart only at the base. On the shoulder of the
+mountain we hear the voices of those who have taken the other paths.
+Still higher, we meet. The Apex is a point; the plan is one.</p>
+
+<p>"I would teach the young mind to find his own voice, his own part, his
+own message. It is there above him. True training is the refinement, the
+preparing of a surface fine enough to receive his part. That is the
+inspiration. The out-breath&mdash;the right hand of the process&mdash;is action,
+making a model in matter of the thing received.</p>
+
+<p>"All training that does not encourage the child to look into the Unseen
+for his power, not only holds, but draws him to the commonness of the
+herds.</p>
+
+<p>" ... Many men to-day can believe in angels <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>who cannot believe in
+fairies; but the child who sees the changes of light in the lowliest
+shadows, whose fancy is filled with little figures of the conservers and
+colourers of nature, shall in good time see the angels&mdash;and one of that
+host shall come forward (which is more important and to the point)
+bringing a task for the child to do.</p>
+
+<p>"I say to the children here: 'I do not see the things you do, and in
+that I am your inferior. They shut the doors upon me when I was little,
+not meaning to, but the world always does that. That fineness of seeing
+went out from my eyes, but it is so good a thing that I do not want you
+to lose it. And always I am ready to listen, when you tell me what you
+have seen.'"</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h2>THE END</h2>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<hr /><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+<br />
+<h3>BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT</h3>
+
+<h4>MIDSTREAM</h4>
+
+<p>... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to
+remain in American literature:</p>
+
+<p><i>Boston Transcript</i>: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that
+Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in
+literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that
+will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in
+<i>Huckleberry Finn</i>.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced
+its full length. One wonders whether the interest, the skill, the
+general worth of it, the things it has to report of all life, as well as
+the one life, do not entitle <i>Midstream</i> to the very long life that is
+enjoyed only by the very best of books.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>San Francisco Argonaut</i>: Read the book. It is autobiography in its
+perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of
+god and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span><i>Springfield Republican</i>: It is difficult to think of any other young
+American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the
+"market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own
+terms of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation,
+<i>Midstream</i>, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story
+of regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will
+he go?</p>
+
+
+<p>Mary Fanton Roberts in <i>The Craftsman</i>: Beside the stature of this book,
+the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with
+a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude.
+There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a
+draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and
+bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep,
+penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's
+words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a
+language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a
+quickened life.</p>
+
+
+<p>Ida Gilbert Myers in <i>Washington Star</i>: Courage backs this revelation.
+The gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>Comfort's rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is
+a tremendous thing&mdash;the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.</p>
+
+
+<p>George Soule in <i>The Little Review</i>: Here is a man's life laid
+absolutely bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has
+done it before&mdash;this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made
+uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more
+important than truth&mdash;these will not read <i>Midstream</i> through, but
+others will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility
+of Mr. Comfort's frankness.</p>
+
+
+<p>Edwin Markham in <i>Hearst's Magazine</i>: Will Levington Comfort, a novelist
+of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with
+passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over
+words. He has been a wandering foot&mdash;familiar with many strands; he has
+known shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He
+tells it all without vaunt, relating his experience to the large
+meanings of life for all men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of
+which we come, to whose great deep we return.</p>
+
+
+<p class="right"><i>12mo., Net, $1.25</i></p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen"><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>Transcriber's Note</p>
+<br />
+
+Typographical errors corrected in the text:<br />
+<br />
+Page&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  59&nbsp;  Ile changed to He<br />
+Page&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  81&nbsp;  quiesence changed to quiescence<br />
+Page&nbsp; 132&nbsp;  blurr changed to blur<br />
+Page&nbsp; 161&nbsp;  unforgetable changed to unforgettable<br />
+Page&nbsp; 243&nbsp;  became changed to become<br />
+Page&nbsp; 261&nbsp;  spirtual changed to spiritual<br />
+Page&nbsp; 262&nbsp;  posessions changed to possessions<br />
+Page&nbsp; 285&nbsp;  apear changed to appear<br />
+Page&nbsp; 287&nbsp;  blossome changed to blossoms<br />
+Page&nbsp; 288&nbsp;  enviroment changed to environment<br />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Child and Country
+       A Book of the Younger Generation
+
+Author: Will Levington Comfort
+
+Release Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #27793]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD AND COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Barbara Kosker and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHILD AND COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
+
+LOT & COMPANY
+RED FLEECE
+MIDSTREAM
+DOWN AMONG MEN
+FATHERLAND
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Child and Country
+
+ _A Book of the
+ Younger Generation_
+
+
+ BY
+
+ WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
+
+ AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT & COMPANY,"
+ "DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE
+ RIDES ALONE," ETC., ETC.
+
+
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+ Copyright, 1916,
+ BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+ TO THOSE
+
+ WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS
+
+ TO THE BUILDERS
+
+ OF THE RISING GENERATION
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all
+detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many
+intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time....
+The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making
+in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture,
+and shore-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house
+or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two.
+Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found
+plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and
+length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to
+laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country
+people and the meshes of possession.
+
+In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the
+Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of
+the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been
+wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and
+weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in
+the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking
+the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children
+in school--the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to
+resist contagions, mental and physical--the whole tendency of the school
+toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop
+the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child.
+
+We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but
+out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at
+hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens
+and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine
+things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming
+generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings
+who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of
+their struggle.
+
+It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain
+builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in
+the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could
+possibly give them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after
+chapter are before me--revelations they have brought--and over all, if
+I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the
+children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the
+title.
+
+Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a
+spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have
+been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see
+the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age
+above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we
+perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of
+America--signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have
+to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our
+children and to every conception of home--not the war itself, but the
+forming of the new social order, the message thrilling for utterance in
+the breasts of the rising generation. For they are the builders who are
+to follow the wreckers of war.
+
+Making a place to live on the lake shore, the development of bluff and
+land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a
+pool of water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer
+walls broken with chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior
+cultivations, the establishment of a visible order that is but a symbol
+of the intenser activity of the natures within.
+
+Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of
+food, a friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the
+casements--these are sane desirable matters to gather together; but the
+fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the
+builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in
+fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised
+receptivity--a conception of its utilities that has come from long need.
+A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a
+curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in
+mating with a woman or fathering a child.
+
+There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why one
+man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along with
+maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will exchange a
+roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster. No
+chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our
+own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual
+re-adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.
+
+The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the
+cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning--a work so
+joyous and productive that I would take any pains to set forth with
+clearness the effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep
+breathing of each mind--a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a
+selfless receptivity on the other. We can only breathe deeply when we
+are at peace. This is true mentally as well as physically, and
+soulfully, so far as one can see. The human fabric is at peace only when
+its faculties are held in rhythm by the task designed for them.
+Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the inspiration of
+to-morrow.
+
+It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal
+ambition here to become identified with education in the accepted sense.
+Those who come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save
+that which they are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing
+that, they belong, indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and
+shall always be; but first and last is the conviction that literature
+and art are but incident to life; that we are here to become masters of
+life--artists, if possible, but in any case, men.
+
+... To-day the glimpse of it all--that this is to be a book of the
+younger generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly
+I planned to relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came
+into their lovely being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to
+me that a man could do little better for his quiet joy than to raise
+roses; that nothing was so perfectly designed to keep romance perennial
+in his soul. Then the truth appeared--greater things that were going on
+here--the cultivation of young and living minds, minds still fluid,
+eager to give their faith and take the story of life; minds that are
+changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if the story is well
+told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it comes to-day
+(an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a man may
+build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an
+intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to
+tell simply and with something of order from the beginning.
+
+WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT.
+
+STONESTUDY, March, 1916.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                              PAGE
+
+ BEES AND BLOOMS                17
+
+ BLUFF AND SHORE                28
+
+ STONESTUDY                     38
+
+ IMAGINATION                    43
+
+ WILD GEESE                     55
+
+ WORKMANSHIP                    65
+
+ THE LITTLE GIRL                78
+
+ THE ABBOT                      90
+
+ THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL          102
+
+ COMPASSION                    113
+
+ THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK        123
+
+ TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT        134
+
+ NATURAL CRUELTY               151
+
+ CHILDREN CHANGE               163
+
+ A MAN'S OWN                   171
+
+ THE PLAN IS ONE               186
+
+ THE IRISH CHAPTER             196
+
+ THE BLEAKEST HOUR             202
+
+ THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER          217
+
+ COMMON CLAY BRICK             222
+
+ THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS       230
+
+ MIRACLES                      248
+
+ MORE ABOUT ORDER              259
+
+ THE FRESH EYE                 270
+
+ THE CHOICE OF THE MANY        279
+
+ THE ROSE CHAPTER              284
+
+ LETTERS                       294
+
+ THE ABBOT DEPARTS             301
+
+ THE DAKOTAN                   313
+
+ THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)     319
+
+ THE HILL ROCKS                330
+
+ ASSEMBLY OF PARTS             339
+
+
+
+
+CHILD AND COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+CHILD AND COUNTRY
+
+
+
+
+1
+
+BEES AND BLOOMS
+
+
+In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the
+country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good
+district, but there was no peace there. I felt _forgotten_. I had not
+the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then
+to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it
+was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that
+fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and
+shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of
+necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which
+a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the
+early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned
+the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little
+plot. There was no inner order in my heart--on the contrary, chaos in
+and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and
+gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the
+Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the
+healing of Nature.
+
+So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The
+country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the
+country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always
+felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria.
+I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live,
+for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental
+activity would sink into a bovine rumination.
+
+Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true
+that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more
+subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the
+roads of the many--the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A
+sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the
+devil is the voice of the crowd.
+
+Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged
+city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at
+our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a
+time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of
+the larger issues:
+
+"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more
+essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing
+children into the world. When evolving persons have reached
+individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them,
+they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of
+name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that
+founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red
+Indian _westward_ off the face of the earth.
+
+"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of
+the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of
+that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual
+experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of
+metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is
+that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have
+turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision
+which was their birthright."
+
+It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a
+generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the
+City for the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper
+ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that
+have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures;
+for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the
+strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower
+of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck of
+life.
+
+There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The
+rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working
+long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at
+the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and
+that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it,
+and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a
+certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved
+profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to
+me, and all that the elm-tree meant--hill-cabins and country dusks, bees
+and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and
+aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for
+all that the elm-tree knew--as if I were exiled from the very flesh that
+could bring the good low earth to my senses again.
+
+Could it be that something was changed within--that we were ready at
+last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I
+stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to
+rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen
+minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the
+American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over
+again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the
+smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban cars--one
+that would take us to the Lake St. Claire shore, and another that
+crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along her northern
+indentations for nearly ten miles.
+
+"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.
+
+It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation
+with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by
+one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested
+that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the
+Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet
+and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy--the
+tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came
+running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his
+destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said:
+
+"He can tell you more than I can."
+
+I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it
+was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to
+say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth
+edited. He called men by 'phone--names strange to me then that have
+become household names since--while we sat by smiling and silent in his
+little newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank,
+when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.
+
+Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had
+rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not
+always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor
+people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of
+the car had been rigid among beer-cases.
+
+We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of
+the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East
+in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the
+house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He
+was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages.
+That boy you shall be glad to know.
+
+We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach
+our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He
+would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now
+from where I sit--to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to
+the very edge of a willowed bluff--to the end of the land. Erie brimmed
+before us. It led to a new life, too.
+
+I had always disliked Erie--as one who lived in the Lake Country and
+chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a
+little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie
+heretofore had meant only something to be crossed--something shallow and
+petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light
+darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I
+knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to
+wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars
+from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain
+where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian
+peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the
+Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of
+the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end
+of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think--we are pausing still.
+One must pause to project a dream.
+
+... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we
+hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had
+brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of
+life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the
+cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern
+heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the
+first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep
+gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster
+were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not
+a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year.
+Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and
+brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had
+given. There were days in which we were so happy--that another summer of
+such life would have seemed too much to ask.
+
+I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read
+newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it
+was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully
+every night across the Lake--a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide,
+obscenity and passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like
+the smell of blood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country;
+literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives
+apart from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can
+find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here
+for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants--turning back
+with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants
+that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded space,
+and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other.... One does not say
+what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work
+is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy
+planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be
+free.
+
+The City, intolerable as it is in itself--in its very nature against the
+growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time--is nevertheless
+the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and
+naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to
+avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.
+
+Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of
+spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel
+tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet
+and pass through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which
+brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a passage
+through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole
+is an ascent.
+
+A great leader of men who has never met the crowds face to face is
+inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and
+pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men
+turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of
+us can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure
+continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the
+year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and
+half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the
+City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again
+from the country replenished and refreshed.
+
+The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally
+true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have
+returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the
+last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the
+turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.
+
+Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the
+farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men
+within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every
+year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep
+cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have
+not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the
+long summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the
+heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the
+breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men
+look up more seldom.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Midstream, 1914, George H. Doran Co., New York.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+BLUFF AND SHORE
+
+
+There is no playground like a sandy shore--and this was sheltered from
+the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and
+made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as
+broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore
+with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of
+the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is
+formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer
+and lesser point is like a bit of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys
+of the rain-days with a beauty and power of its own, and the mornings
+flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a structure of idealism
+forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk. The young people
+turn to it often from the classes.
+
+The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely
+been seen so far from the swimming place in front of the rented
+cottages. It was while in the water that I determined to explore. The
+first thing that impressed me when I reached the eminence was the
+silence. It was something to be dreamed of, when the Lake was also
+still. There was no road; a hay field came down to the very edge of the
+bluff, and the shore fifty feet below was narrow and rocky. Very few
+people passed there. That most comfortable little town was lying against
+the rear horizon to the West. I used to come in the evenings and smoke
+as the sun went down. Sometimes the beauty of it was all I could
+bear--the voices of children in the distance and the Pelee light
+flashing every seven seconds far out in the Lake.
+
+I first saw it in dry summer weather and did not know that a bumper crop
+of frogs had been harvested that Spring from the deep, grass-covered
+hollows formed by the removal of clay for a brick-business long ago.
+There was good forage on the mounds, which I did not appreciate at the
+time. The fact is these mounds were formed of pure dark loam, as fine a
+soil as anywhere in the Lake Country.
+
+Those of the dim eyes say that once upon a time an orchard and
+brick-house stood on a bluff in front of the brick-yard, on a natural
+point, but that the Lake had nibbled and nibbled, finally digesting the
+property, fruit-trees, brick-house and all.
+
+I could well believe it when the first storm came. An East wind for
+three days brought steady deluges of high water that wore down the
+shore-line almost visibly. A week later came a West wind that enfiladed,
+so that what remained of the little point was caught in the cross-play
+of the weathers. If some one did not intervene, the brick-yard site
+would follow the orchard--that was clear.
+
+... Three or four times the owner came to see me. We had rejoiced in the
+rented property, rejoiced in owning nothing, yet having it all....
+Thoreau in his daily westward migrations studied it all with the same
+critical delight, and found his abode where others did not care to
+follow. We look twice at the spot we choose to build our house. That
+second look is not so free and innocent.... Yet a man may build his
+house. Thoreau had no little brood coming up, and I have doubted many
+times, even in moments of austere admiration, if he wouldn't have lived
+longer, had there been a woman about to nourish him. She would have
+insisted upon a better roof, at least.... I told the neighbour-man I
+would buy the brick-yard, if he didn't stop pestering me about it. He
+smiled and came once too often.
+
+The day before, standing upon that height of land (not too near the
+edge, for it looked higher in those days) I had gazed across the Lake,
+at one with it all, a friendly voyager of the skies, comrade of the
+yarrow and the daisy. I remember the long grass of the hollows, the
+peculiar soft bloom of it, and what a place it was to lie and dream,
+until one became a part of the solution of sunshine and tinted
+immensity.
+
+So I lost the universe for a bit of bluff on the Lake shore.
+
+When the East wind came, I saw with proprietary alarm the point wearing
+away. That which coloured the Lake was fine rose-clay and it was mine,
+bought by the foot-front.... A man may build his house.
+
+Every one who came along told me how to save the point. For weeks they
+came. Heavy drift-wood was placed in times of peace, so that the sand
+would be trapped in storm. No one failed me in advice, but the East wind
+made match-wood of all arrangements.... The high water would wash and
+weaken the base, and in the heaviness of the rains the bulk of earth
+above would fall--only to be carried out again by the waves. The base
+had to be saved if a natural slope was ever to be secured. Farther down
+the shore I noted one day that a row of boulders placed at right angles
+with the shore had formed a small point, and that a clump of willows
+behind had retained it. This was a bit of advice that had not come so
+authoritatively, but I followed the cue, and began rolling up rocks now
+like an ancient Peruvian. It was a little jetty, that looked like a lot
+of labour to a city man, and it remained as it was for several days.
+
+One morning I came forth in lashing weather--and rubbed my eyes. The
+jetty was not in sight. It was covered with a foot of sand, and the clay
+was dry at the base. A day's work with a team after that in low water,
+snaking the big boulders into line with a chain--a sixty-foot jetty by
+sun-down, built on top of the baby spine I had poked together. No man
+ever spent a few dollars more profitably. Even these stones were covered
+in time, and there was over a yard-deep of sand buttressing the base of
+the clay and thinning out on the slope of shore to the end of the
+stones. Later, when building, I took four hundred yards of sand from the
+east side of the stone jetty, and it was all brought back by the next
+storm....
+
+I read somewhere with deep and ardent sanction that a man isn't worth
+his spiritual salt if he lets a locality hold him, or possessions
+possess him; and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy.
+Whenever you play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand
+to weave you in. It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for
+quiet, and enough depth for a permanent fruit-garden--all for the price
+of a fifty-foot lot in the City; but these things call upon one for a
+certain property-mindedness and desiring, in the usage of which the
+human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the
+thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the
+sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and
+sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to make the dreams come
+true), instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.
+
+But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers
+did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also
+forget it. A few good things--perennials, by all means an elm-tree,
+stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in
+materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have
+passed--these are enough. For a home that does not promote your
+naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.
+
+Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion--through the
+very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The
+man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never
+know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first
+summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a
+surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against
+artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of
+simplicity which permit a man to forget himself--just missing the fact
+that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by
+suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only
+to show us wherein our treasure lies.
+
+The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its
+squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual
+garnering--that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the
+eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he
+permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it.
+It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they
+have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake
+consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be very sure that none will
+escape the complication, for we rise to different dimensions of
+simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all organised
+hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain fixed
+in them--not to rush forth at length from our miserable
+self-consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic
+simplicity is ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man--that
+is ahead.
+
+That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through
+the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I
+expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the
+bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little
+trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From
+one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my
+land--that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they
+have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes
+think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a
+week--there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them
+on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed;
+they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much
+water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too
+cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing--and
+low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without
+help. The temporality of all things--even of the great imperturbable
+trees--is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say
+morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."
+
+There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long
+and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started
+there--dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being
+brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live,
+but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting
+should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant
+hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in
+winter, if their laterals are severed.... I want the birds to come to
+this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the
+plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the
+ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must
+be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....
+
+I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first
+summer that I yearn for again--close to the sand, close to the voices of
+the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones
+have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of
+healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it
+plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.
+
+The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from
+beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below,
+and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty
+degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any
+artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or
+fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes.
+Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths--a trickle of water
+over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines--something of all this
+will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is
+last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this
+Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small
+shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the
+leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to
+plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.
+
+The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun
+to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could
+not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a
+summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a
+fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and
+clearer--a blend of _patio_ and broad hearth--running water and red
+firelight--built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a
+roof of wired glass over a _patio_ paved with brick; the area sunken
+slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the
+sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms,
+urns, ferns and winter plants.
+
+All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it--and as yet, there
+wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop
+to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse
+was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+STONESTUDY
+
+
+Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work.
+This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the
+presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there
+were ancient scars across my back--as if I had helped in that building,
+and under the lash, too.
+
+... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of
+stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated
+to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was
+afraid of short time or flaws of construction--I was watching because it
+satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get
+accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy
+powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is
+a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of
+setting. If you can find a bearing for one stone upon another without
+falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall
+is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with
+stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that
+muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens
+slowly hardens best.
+
+The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that
+there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier
+Fall than that--a full year before the thought of Europe became action.
+I watched the work--as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen,
+so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns
+easily after this.
+
+It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all
+symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of
+order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well--six, eight, and
+eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at,
+his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter
+he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily
+increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a
+great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be
+learning masonry all over again.
+
+"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by
+night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."
+
+There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is
+something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long
+roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I
+asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke
+it.
+
+"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.
+
+Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have
+built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone--fifty years
+of masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their
+stone-hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so.
+They have learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed
+to the Line, and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence
+of their being (I cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly
+integration. There is a nobility from stone-work which the masons put on
+with the years--the tenders have it not; neither have any of the
+indiscriminate labour men. One must have a craft to achieve this. The
+building is not so much. The houses and barns and stores which the elder
+masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands in this
+country--they are but symbols of the building of character within. They
+see _into_ the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another
+all would look the same--the blacks and reds and whites, even the
+amalgans--all grey-brown and weathered outside--but the masons know what
+is within, the colour and grain and beauty.
+
+"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.
+
+"No, that's a black feller."
+
+"And this?"
+
+"Good colour, but he ain't got no grain--all _gnurly_--as the feller
+says."
+
+Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of
+men....
+
+A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney--faced
+stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a
+low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden
+pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of
+firelight in the stone cave--a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to
+the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake--to the suspense of
+distance and Southern constellations.
+
+I laugh at this--it sounds so pompous and costly--but it is the shop of
+a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more
+than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and
+nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin--indeed,
+it had to. That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put
+out--a few six-inch trunks, brought with their own earth frozen to
+them--a specimen of oak, walnut, hickory (so hard to move)--but an elm
+over-tone was the plan, and a clump of priestly pines near the stable.
+These are still in the revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to
+be. Time brings that, as it will smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work
+in vines, establish the roses and wistaria on the Southern exposure,
+slope and mellow and put the bloom over all.
+
+We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In
+the meantime the three children--a girl of ten and two younger boys--had
+almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of
+that then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from
+April on in the small town school until the summer vacation. This was
+tried for a few weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward
+the task of teaching our own.
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+IMAGINATION
+
+
+Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first
+time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter
+in our house, and I was associating a good deal with a group of teachers
+in town, some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid
+forms of modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall
+especially a talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught
+thirty years, given herself freely to three generations--her own and
+mine and to another since then. She had administered to me a thing
+called _rhetoric_ in another age, and she looked just the same, having
+kept her mind wide open to new and challenging matters of literature and
+life and religious thought.
+
+I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to
+her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She
+still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest
+human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's
+weaknesses--as the Master established His church upon the weakest link
+of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:
+
+"I find them ready, _when they ask_. In the old occult schools there is
+a saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the
+student must also come half-way----"
+
+"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is
+so. There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five classes
+a day--twenty-five to fifty students each--but so much falls upon stony
+ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds----"
+
+"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated.
+"If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question
+itself proves that the soil is somehow ready----"
+
+"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions.
+The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but
+prepare the soil, too."
+
+"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the
+imagination--to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has
+to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry
+him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of
+abundance."
+
+The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.
+
+"... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that
+surely interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all----"
+
+"Nature?"
+
+"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her--what
+pictures _mean_ Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature
+is a kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a
+God-mother--to kittens and trees and butterflies and roses and children.
+She is mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her
+about it. Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet--shelf
+after shelf full of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told
+her about the Sun as the Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her.
+She held to that. Always now when we fall into talk _naturally_--it is
+about the old Mother and the brilliant Father who pours his strength
+upon all concerned--Mother Nature's mate."
+
+The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's
+quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do
+that----"
+
+We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days--of the handful of
+days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of
+thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam;
+beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when
+all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....
+
+"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out
+of that, really. A teacher who hasn't--kills it in the child; at least,
+all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the
+child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery--but the lack
+of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the
+wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so
+terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle
+and repress their real impulses and rush for things to hold in their
+hands for a little time. If they had imagination they would see that the
+things they hold in their hands are disintegrating _now_ as everything
+in Nature is; that the hand itself weakens and loses its power. Why,
+here we are upstanding--half-gods asleep within us. Imagination
+alone--the seeing of the spirit of things--that can awaken us."
+
+I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old
+debatable ground--but the secret was out. It was the essence of my
+forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of
+everything else--all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.
+
+"... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life
+prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children
+see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by
+scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I
+like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things
+prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A
+big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned
+to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through
+twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than
+from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his
+children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I
+happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should
+fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.
+
+"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in
+building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage
+has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that
+these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner
+are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the
+connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at
+once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without
+it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh
+beneath, I talked of writing--something of what writing means to me.
+When I stopped, he said:
+
+"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing
+matter----' and opened the subject again....
+
+"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his
+view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is
+asked from the many in the great plan of things--but I like madness
+better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies
+are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in
+things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-god that sleeps
+within--at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a
+devil, perhaps I can beat him."
+
+"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said,
+"----seeing the spirit of things."
+
+"I hadn't thought of it as a definition--but it expresses what the real
+part of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs,
+knowing nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their
+wheel of things; what their neighbour is going to say next, from the
+routine of the day's events. After a little of that, I have to run
+away--to a book, to a task, to an awakened imagination. Only those who
+are in a measure like us can liberate us. That's the key to our
+friendships, our affections and loves. We seek those who set us
+free--they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give--a
+surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin--our dynamics
+is doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way----"
+
+The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she
+said.
+
+"... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her
+sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was
+filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root
+systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She
+read one of Henry Ward Beecher's _Star Papers_ and verified many of its
+fine parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The
+Shore is ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain
+is sweet; even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She
+looks every morning, as I do, at the Other Shore. We know the state of
+the air by that. And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how
+full the days are."
+
+"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.
+
+"No--that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she
+wanted to be."
+
+"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.
+
+"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her
+music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her
+deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her
+little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the
+highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and
+the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it
+work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of
+processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by
+intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one
+of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only
+expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."
+
+The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.
+
+"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression
+of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the
+left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we
+receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving
+formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know
+the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of
+that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was
+amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have,
+who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an
+arsenal of laws and fears."
+
+"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"
+
+"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as
+instruction even."
+
+"And spelling?"
+
+"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she
+is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading.
+These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather
+completely. God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the
+real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page
+manuscript without detriment to the reception of the same, all that
+being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose
+God-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world
+with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection
+to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from
+children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his
+neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different
+and higher organs."
+
+"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.
+
+"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh
+to me," I said.
+
+"The little girl is ten, you say?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me
+to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"
+
+"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.
+
+"Still you are taking her away from us."
+
+I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as
+much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.
+
+"What do you mean--taking her away?"
+
+"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal
+with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work.
+Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I
+believe you have established the point that one can learn best from
+within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost
+between her and her generation--as represented by my five classes each
+day."
+
+I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me
+straight to the crossing--and with very few words. I realised now that
+more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to
+possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced
+to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep
+open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and
+flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines
+around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination--it is
+all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of
+her--lifting her apart from the many?
+
+There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on,
+the job would be done more and more completely.
+
+"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will
+happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin
+searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find--not to be
+found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams--but the many will
+not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know
+who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were
+Solitaries--that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not
+have one stay with the many--just to avoid the loneliness and the
+heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world
+that is loved and remembered--every life lived with beauty and
+productiveness to the many--has come from the Solitaries. _Quest_, that
+is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on
+the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves--that which
+we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are
+fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more
+poignant suffering--but that is an honour----"
+
+The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that
+all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential
+imagination?"
+
+"But children have it," I said.
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+WILD GEESE
+
+
+I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of
+hard work, night-classes and furnace air--imagination would work to the
+extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some
+days that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold
+mid-March day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come
+forth from the city to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now
+sunset. In the noble stillness, which for many moments had been broken
+only by the sagging of the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of
+geese, so that I looked up the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest
+farmyard, wondering who had turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't
+occurred to me to look up; and that, when you come to think of it, is
+one of the tragedies of being city-bred.
+
+Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force
+and accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with
+the lines of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of
+their strength and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his
+second in command, also alone, and as far back again, the point of the
+V. In this case, the formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice
+as extended as the right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined,
+because of the open water ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in
+passage. They began to break just above, the formation shattering piece
+by piece as they swept on with wild ardour toward the ice-openings.
+Coming up from the thrall of the thing, I found my hat in hand.
+
+It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of
+ducks--darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions
+sweep but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and
+canvas-backs. You can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the
+distance over water confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders
+with a five-foot spread of wing, many of these, and with more than a
+suggestion of the swan's mystic grandeur in passing.
+
+Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the
+wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments
+of music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time
+into certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the
+self, as we know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist
+before Niagara or Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the
+presence of the Chinese Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to
+common sayings, are loosed to murmurings of deepest yearning before the
+spectacle of a full-rigged ship; and it matters not if, within memory,
+they have ever felt the tug of filling cloth in the timber underfoot, or
+crossed even an inland waterway without steam. It was this that the
+flight of geese gave me--a throb from the ancient and perennial romance
+of the soul.
+
+Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge
+is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many
+think they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of
+the triple-screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a
+derelict, some contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old
+fore-and-after, and the steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after
+that--galley and stoke-hole its slums. Then and there, they vow some
+time _really_ to go to sea.
+
+Sing the song of steam--the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet.
+Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking
+its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven
+hydroplanes--some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back
+on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old
+steamer--emotions which defy mere brain and scorn the upstart
+memory--will catch the coherent story of it all, and his expression will
+be the song of steam. For the pangs and passions of the Soul can only
+become articulate at the touch of some ancient reminder, which erects a
+magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to flood in the
+stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose
+yesterdays are lives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I
+mentioned the flying wedge.
+
+"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the
+waiting-room.
+
+I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt--the cut-up of the
+place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the
+District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any
+business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the
+wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the
+farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June
+afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular
+once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside
+for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay,
+and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese
+are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they
+fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black
+powder.
+
+Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would
+have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks
+afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack
+Miner's farm--within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.
+
+Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in--a patch
+of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of
+geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A
+farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of
+_wanderlust_ when he observed the geese that he kept on going without
+return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:
+
+"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back
+mabe. Steve."
+
+Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little
+nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't
+come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople
+from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the
+farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect
+that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and
+get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the critical
+month of April.
+
+Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving
+much corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The
+geese "had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year
+or two afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty
+drop. For once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser
+heads cocked stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding
+fields. That was the second beginning.
+
+The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this
+order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six
+hundred--in five years. The geese never land all at once in the
+artificial pond--some watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot,
+others in the south fields across the road. Jack Miner feeds five
+bushels of corn a day and would like to feed fifteen.
+
+"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor
+man to feed six hundred."
+
+He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to
+help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it
+evidently dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An
+automobile magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of
+his call didn't leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing
+his brick-kiln. Bird-fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the
+States and Provinces, and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk
+who come early enough to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying
+overland to the water in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on
+the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for
+strange dreaming--we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack
+Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse
+blood of the birds calls them forth from the May balm.
+
+Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as
+corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table
+from Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't
+know that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has
+time to tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one
+seething bird-song there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect
+him to be a workman.... But the wild geese are a part of his soul.
+
+"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen
+them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an
+eagle. Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're
+drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any
+outsider. Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've never yet seen
+them do anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the
+wild goose on the back of the Canadian flag!"
+
+I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.
+
+It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper
+impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not
+come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural
+mysteries--at first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand--a
+spectacle of beauty and speed not to be forgotten. They are built long
+and clean. Unlike the larger fliers as a whole, they need little or no
+run to rise; it is enough to say that they rise from the water. You can
+calculate from that the marvellous strength of pinion. And they are
+continental wing-rangers that know the little roads of men, as they know
+the great lakes and waterways and mountain chains--Jack Miner's
+door-yard and Hudson's Bay.
+
+"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.
+
+"You don't have to. Come on."
+
+He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.
+
+"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was
+heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have
+some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came
+home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine,
+but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to
+be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain;
+anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he
+healed."
+
+The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at
+me--something liquid and venomous in the sound--the long black beak as
+fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the
+core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die--perhaps he felt out
+of the law because of that.
+
+"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it
+out."
+
+I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the
+past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy
+which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.
+
+An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind
+was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself
+clean--its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back
+to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining
+to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full
+of feathers.
+
+And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental
+flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration--lean and long,
+powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing--an admirable adversary,
+an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for
+captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird
+and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard--the rise
+and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire--the
+rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in
+the mocking ruins of plenty....
+
+Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came
+back from the chores.
+
+
+
+
+6
+
+WORKMANSHIP
+
+
+As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The
+hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building
+the stone study. We returned in April--and the bluff was like a string
+of lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of
+asparagus were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply
+of air. Moreover, the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and
+goings.... I set about the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came.
+Do you know the suction of clay--the weight of adhering clay to a
+shovel? You can lift a stone and drop it, but the substance goes out of
+a city man's nerve when he lifts a shovel of clay and finds it united in
+a stubborn bond with the implement. I went back to the typewriter, and
+tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers who came and tiled the entire
+piece. It was like healing the sick to see the water go off, but a bad
+day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had been made.
+
+"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will
+make in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next
+corn-planting time like a heap of ashes."
+
+That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.
+
+I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of
+red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my
+thoughts--especially the need in every human heart of producing
+something. Before the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that
+word "efficiency," be reminded that the good old word originally had to
+do with workmanship and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded
+with bad workmen. Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad
+workmanship, which in its turn results from the lack of imagination. A
+man builds his character in his work; through character alone is the
+stamina furnished to withstand with dignity the heavy pressures of life.
+
+... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked
+for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear.
+Toward the end of the week following I passed him in the lane that leads
+down to the Lake--a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his
+back against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.
+
+"I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese,"
+he explained, as I came up.
+
+It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like
+the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The
+geese ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep
+listening to their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them
+fly overland before sunset, which was two hours away at the time I
+passed up the lane. I do not know how long Monte had been sitting there.
+
+Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his
+not working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus
+first-handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to
+the board of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman.
+I wanted a knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover,
+I knew the man who would make it for me.
+
+At the head of the lane, still on the way, I met a farmer, who had not
+missed the figure propped between the stone and the poplar tree. He said
+that the last time Monte had borrowed his gun, he had brought it back
+fouled. That was all he said.
+
+I passed Monte's house, which is the shocking depression of a prosperous
+community. There were many children--a stilled and staring lot. They
+sat in dust upon the ground. They were not waiting for goose. Their
+father had never inspired them with expectancy of any sort; their mother
+would have spoiled a goose, had it been brought by a neighbour. She came
+to the door as I passed, spilled kitchen refuse over the edge of the
+door-stone, and vanished. The children seemed waiting for death. The
+virtue of fatherhood is not to be measured numerically.... April was
+nearly over, but the unsightly heaps that the snows had covered were not
+yet cleared away. Humped, they were, among the children. This is a
+world-old picture--one that need not be finished.
+
+Monte was not a good shot, not a good workman, not a good father--a
+burden and bad odour everywhere, a tainter of the town and the blood of
+the human race. That, which was gathered about him was as pitifully bred
+as reared. Monte's one value lay in his horrible exemplarship. He was a
+complete slum microcosm, without which no civilisation has yet arrived.
+Monte has given me more to think about than any of the happier people.
+In his own mute way, he reminds each man of the depths, furnishes the
+low mark of the human sweep, and keeps us from forgetting the world as
+it is, the myriads of bad workmen of which the leaning cities are made.
+
+Sitting there by the rock, letting the hours go by--and in his own weak
+heart, my neighbour knew that he wouldn't "hit one of them geese." All
+his life he had failed. Nature had long since ceased trying to tempt him
+into real production. Even his series of natural accidents was doubtless
+exhausted. That is the pace that kills--that sitting.
+
+I went on to the forge of the workman. We talked together. I sat by
+while he made the thing I wanted, which was not an ornament simply. He
+will always be identified there in the oak, an excellent influence; just
+as I think of him when I save the wood in the open fireplace, because of
+the perfect damper he made for the stone chimney. Monte was still there
+when I went back. The problem of him returned to mind after the
+freshening of the forge.
+
+He belongs to us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did
+not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the
+weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the
+impoverishment of his line. We are not finding their work for his
+children. We have sent them home from school because they were not
+clean. We complain that they waste what we give them; that they are
+harder on the shoes we furnish, than are our own children. We do not
+inquire with wisdom into their life, to learn on which side of the human
+meridian they stand--whether their disease is decadence and senility of
+spiritual life, or whether their spines are but freshly lifted from the
+animal levels.
+
+As a purely physical aggregate--if our civilisation be that--our
+business is quickly to exterminate Monte and his whole breed. He
+embarrasses us, as sleeker individuals of the herd and hive. He is
+tolerated to the diseases with which he infects us, because we have
+weakened our resistance with cleanliness. But by the authority of our
+better understanding, by our sacred writings and the intuitions of our
+souls, we are men and no longer an animal aggregate. As men, our
+business is to lift Monte from his lowly condition, and hold him there;
+to make him and his children well first, and then to make workmen of
+them. _There are workmen in the world for this very task of lifting
+Monte and his brood._ We do not use them, because the national instinct
+of Fatherhood is not yet profoundly developed. We are not yet brothers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the recent winter months in the city it came to me that I had certain
+things to tell a group of young men. The class was arranged. In the
+beginning I warned them not to expect literary matters; that I meant to
+offer no plan to reach the short-story markets (a game always rather
+deep for me); that the things which I wanted to tell were those which
+had helped me toward being a man, not an artist. Fifteen young men were
+gathered--all strangers to me. When we were really acquainted, weeks
+afterward, I discovered that seven of the fifteen had been writing for
+months or years--that there was certain stuff in the seven that would
+write or die.
+
+They had not come for what I meant to give. As a whole they were
+indifferent at first to my idea of the inner life. They had come for the
+gleanings I would drop, because I could not help it, having spent twenty
+years learning how to learn to write. The name that had called them from
+the different parts of the city was identified for good or bad in their
+minds with the work they meant to do. And what I did for them was done
+as a workman--that was my authority--a workman, a little older, a little
+farther along in the craft that called.
+
+And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know,
+not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a
+store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why,
+to the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more
+than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself,
+because the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had
+told them austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do;
+but I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not
+elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned
+to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do
+just that for a larger class, and in this effort I stumbled upon the
+very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal--for they
+are one and the same.
+
+A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to
+him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most
+hours each day--that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth
+the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions
+and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure
+instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it--that
+man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts.
+It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are
+not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug
+and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very
+long in coming to the end of their fineness.
+
+They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is
+exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each
+workman finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He
+is an illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he
+is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self.
+Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is
+on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service of
+humanity.
+
+... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is
+caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it.
+He feels for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens
+to the forge that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his
+bench, but in his mind--in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk
+to my daughter. She knows about these things," he says. "I must go....
+Yes, it is a fine day."
+
+It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him
+so long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has
+perfected his task. The world laughs at its betters with the same
+facility that it laughs at the half-men. Our national and municipal
+fathers should teach us first that the man who has found his work is one
+of the kings of the earth. Children should be taught to know a workman
+anywhere. All excellence in human affairs should be judged by the
+workmanship and not by the profits.
+
+We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some
+strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came
+at last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is
+nervous and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at
+that; asks himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of
+laughter, for he cannot forget the grinding and the rending of the early
+years--when there were days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps
+his has been a divided house all these years; it may be that he has lost
+even Her for his work.
+
+The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the
+shop again. A man's work lives with him to the end--and beyond--that is
+the eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all
+doubts sink into the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life
+is awake; the heart of reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to
+an identity which cannot grow old.
+
+He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come to
+him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his
+lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below:
+That nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship;
+that the world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money
+for a life's task. The workman can only be paid in kind.
+
+It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They
+may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross
+seas and continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did
+it. His bench was just there--his house over yonder. Here is where he
+stood, and there he hung his coat." But these are only refinements of
+irony.... They may say, "This is his grandson." But that will only
+handicap or ruin the child, if he find not _his_ work. A thousand lesser
+workmen may improve his product, lighten it, accelerate its potency,
+adapt it to freight rates--but that is no concern of the dream.
+
+The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman
+finds himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has
+lost the love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness
+of the source of his being. He does not need to state it
+philosophically, for he lived it. He found the secret of blessedness, if
+not of happiness. At his bench, he integrated the life that lasts. He
+could have told you in the early years, if the world had not laughed. He
+would have learned himself more swiftly, had he been encouraged to tell,
+as he toiled--if the world had not shamed away the few who were drawn to
+his bench.
+
+But alone, he got it all at last--the passion and power of the spiritual
+workman which sustains him now, though his body has lain under the hill
+for fifty years. His shop is the place of a greater transaction than his
+task. The breadth and essence of it that lingers makes it a sacred place
+to the few who would take off their shoes to enter--were it not for the
+misunderstanding of the world.
+
+Out of the artificial he became natural; out of the workman, he emerged
+a man, a living soul.
+
+I would support every plan or dream of education, and none other, that
+seeks to find for the youth his life work. I would call upon every
+workman personally to help; and urge for every community, the goodness
+of its products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the
+world's premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit;
+and a stiff pressure upon the multiplication of these products by
+mechanical means, for we have too many common things, and so few fine
+things. I would inculcate in the educational ideal, first of all, that
+in every man there is a dream, just as there is a soul, and that _to
+express the dream of the soul in matter_ is the perfect individual
+performance. I would impress upon the youth that in all arts and crafts,
+the dream fades and the spirit of the product dies away, when many are
+made in the original likeness. Nature does not make duplicates; her
+creative hallmark is upon every leaf and bee; upon every cliff and cloud
+and star.
+
+I would not endow the young workman while he is learning his trade or
+art; but I would have the State intensely watchful of him, and
+impassioned with parental conviction that her greatness is inseparable
+with his possibilities of achievement. I would not make his ways short,
+but despise and crush all evidences of facility. I would keep him plain
+and lean and fit, and make him earn his peace. All fine work comes from
+the cultivation of the self, not from cultivated environment.... I
+dreamed for twenty years of a silent room and an open wood fire. I shall
+never cease to wonder at the marvel of it, now that it has come. It is
+so to-night alone in the stillness. The years of struggle to produce in
+the midst of din and distraction, while they wore as much as the work
+itself, were helpful to bring the concentration which every decent task
+demands; and in the thrill of which a man grows in reality, and not
+otherwise.
+
+
+
+
+7
+
+THE LITTLE GIRL
+
+
+It was determined that the children should try the country-town school
+that Spring from April to June. This school was said to be of
+exceptional quality, and I talked with the master, a good man. In fact,
+there was none but the general causes for criticism in this
+establishment--the same things I found amiss in city schools. The
+children accepted the situation with a philosophy of obedience which
+should have taught the race many things it does not yet know. The
+journey was considerable for them twice daily in warming weather; and
+from little things I heard from time to time, words dropped with no idea
+of rebellion, I was reminded of the dark drama of my own "Education,"
+written explicitly enough elsewhere and which I am glad to forget.
+
+The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the
+improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems
+are not structurally changed--facility and convenience, speed of
+transit, mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain,
+but more obvious, the science of covering ground....
+
+I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual
+child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from
+fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of
+whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how
+the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men
+cared to litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of
+additional assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the
+child had been taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about
+it (the book being designed to show the way to others) that struck me as
+avarice of the most violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for
+money and baronial holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the
+flesh are innocent compared to the sins of mind. This book and the
+tragic child form to my idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient
+and the obscene.
+
+The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the long
+past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:
+
+One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact
+from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.
+
+I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage
+aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and
+immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague
+failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of
+puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife,
+designed to smother that which was real in the heart.
+
+Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very
+sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it
+appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers
+among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their
+calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called
+upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children,
+having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the
+loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut
+the loaf evenly--to every one his equal part. The first crime was
+favoritism....
+
+I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in
+age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a
+boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically
+opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the
+mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely
+sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be
+bright; and yet, I found her all caught in rigidities of the brain,
+tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production
+was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place;
+the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding
+expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It
+was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a
+tithe of its tissue.
+
+The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.
+
+The boy next had not done well in school. The word _dreamer_ was
+designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me--the
+mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly
+told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if
+anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of
+almost phenomenal reproduction--and yet he had listened sleepily. Of
+course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this
+display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner
+voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to
+repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will
+come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show
+how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual,
+in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded
+schools.
+
+I had been one who thought my own work most important--to the exclusion
+even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is
+affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be
+disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on
+without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old
+Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and
+the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At
+meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and
+things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere--tension
+wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had
+he only known it.
+
+The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so
+well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined
+him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the
+time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was
+accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands,
+regard the bow of shore-line from the East window--the Other Shore--for
+a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the
+continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of
+production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard
+lessons resulting from breaking the point of the day's work before
+sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much
+breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.
+
+However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who
+wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what
+ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The
+answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the
+front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this
+Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood--the backward
+and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere--in
+short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all
+life--vibration. He arose and started up the bank.
+
+"Don't go yet," the little girl called.
+
+"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."
+
+There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was
+still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness
+of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was
+Summer. The smell of the land was there--the perfume of the Old Mother
+herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose--the blend of all that
+springs into being.
+
+"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she
+smells like a tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant,
+but the breath of all--as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you
+winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like
+mignonette--not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but
+when the wind brings it."
+
+He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought
+about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality
+of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed
+is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for
+years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his
+faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here
+was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming
+clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly
+glorified in her morning veil.
+
+"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen
+and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not
+yours until you express them. And the things _you_ express, as I
+expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the
+things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can
+do it."
+
+She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.
+
+The Old Man forgot her in a moment.
+
+That was the real beginning.
+
+Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again)
+had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a
+distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other,
+but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference,
+however. I had no fewer _good_ mornings than formerly; and yet, any
+heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and
+intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her
+happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged
+there.
+
+She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently
+with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation
+of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:
+
+"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves
+as below. It might happen that in a few years--this relation might be
+changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us
+now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come
+in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than
+I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one.
+I sit in the midst of you--telling you from day to day of the things I
+have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan.
+My first years here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently
+the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When
+you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much
+I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days,
+for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must
+reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of
+Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow
+filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with
+the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old
+become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate
+matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in
+relation to the long life--the importance only of one bead on the
+endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us
+that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight
+moment--that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the
+lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned
+to tell."
+
+I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I
+believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the
+more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to
+bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent
+generations did not possess, and from the absence of which much
+deformity and sorrow has come to be.
+
+The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her
+own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to
+one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the
+organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it
+never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be
+at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture
+of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in
+the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter
+a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the
+thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face--a mistake
+of meaning impossible.
+
+Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail
+purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting
+her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I
+wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul--if the expression
+can be forgiven.
+
+I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not
+find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a
+sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to
+our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in
+relation to one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression
+in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human
+conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant
+within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties
+of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this
+giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis,
+and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house
+closes upon the growing child--that more and more as the years draw on,
+the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of
+men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are
+given to utter remains unexpressed.
+
+I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be
+prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager
+to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles
+and the words of even a child significant.
+
+I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but
+must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved
+for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening
+genius is the thing that has made immortal--shoemakers, blacksmiths and
+the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from the
+past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of
+life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but
+a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.
+
+
+
+
+8
+
+THE ABBOT
+
+
+He was a still boy--the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on
+the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him
+without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the
+affairs of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued
+me from his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with
+another lad during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew
+no nearer to acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the
+evening I would see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the
+sense that his regard was somehow different, I believe, did impress me
+vaguely. It all happened in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I
+remember his "hello," cheerful but contained, as I would ride by. He was
+always still as a gull, and seemed natural with the dusk upon him....
+One day his father said to me:
+
+"I have to buy everything you write for him."
+
+"Well, well," said I.
+
+I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only
+fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward,
+because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I
+heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him
+over to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all
+that I had and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he
+was seven or eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort
+that awakened him. He had it read to him several times, but his own
+reading picked up at that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study
+does under driving interest. Presently he was out after the star books
+on his own hook. He suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and
+that night I got my first look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It
+was like some magnetic hand upon my breast. I could not speak. Every
+time I shut my eyes afterward I saw that bright gold jewel afar in the
+dark. We talked.... Presently I heard that he hated school, but this did
+not come from him. The fact is, I heard little or nothing from him.
+
+This generation behind us--at least, the few I have met and loved--is
+not made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to
+wait. It is most convincing, to have events clean up a fact which you
+misunderstood; to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any
+glibness, but leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He
+did not come to the Study unless called for. The little girl brought in
+word from him from time to time, and the little girl's mother, and the
+boy's father--a very worthy man. I heard again that he was not doing
+well in school. I knew he was significant, very much so, having met the
+real boy on star-matters. I knew that the trouble was they were making
+him look down at school, when he wanted to look up. His parents came
+over to dinner one day, and I said:
+
+"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."
+
+It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at
+that time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little
+girl's education on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me
+even then that my own time was rather well filled. Neither his father
+nor mother enthused, and I heard no more from the subject for many days.
+Meeting The Abbot finally, I asked him what of school.
+
+"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."
+
+"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said--about you coming to me
+for a time?"
+
+"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know
+what it would cost."
+
+I told him it wouldn't cost anything. There was a chance to talk with
+his father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still
+suffering weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the
+Study. It seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it
+after an hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of
+weather and country.
+
+"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner
+each day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to
+deal with so many."
+
+"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.
+
+It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man
+whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.
+
+"That's why I want him," said I.
+
+"But the thing is, we don't want him--a----"
+
+"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come
+true--even if they are little ones----"
+
+"Yes."
+
+I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations,
+without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to
+follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his
+relatives. Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only
+touched me on terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived
+in my heart, and those who were searching my books to find out were in
+the main only the more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by
+not asking for anything in the way of money.
+
+However, the thing came to be.
+
+My first idea was to take him alone--the little girl coming in the
+morning with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had
+been accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both.
+I sat down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there
+was no sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his
+eyes sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at
+first some sort of recognition that I was talking--but none came,
+neither nod of acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They
+said as he passed the house farther along the Shore after leaving the
+Study, that his head was bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with
+years.
+
+I tried afresh each day--feared that I was not reaching him. I told him
+the things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some
+of the things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I
+known enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but
+couldn't get a visible result. He was writing little things for me at
+this time and, though I detected something in the work more than he
+showed me, sitting opposite in the Study, his writing was turgid and
+unlit--like one playing on an instrument he did not understand; indeed,
+it was like a man talking in his sleep. At the end of one of the talks
+within the first week, at wit's end as to what I was accomplishing, I
+said:
+
+"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."
+
+I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me--it came back like a
+phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own
+understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from
+members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in
+Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the
+pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a
+colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of
+the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to
+me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days
+later--just to be sure. The result was the same.
+
+I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical
+memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in
+every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if
+your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his
+belongings, when called upon to do something with his hands for
+another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind.
+One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all
+values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that
+the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if
+this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from
+which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he
+is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of
+these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces
+them.
+
+However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the
+lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to
+tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to
+read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little,
+the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did
+that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving--that he could
+grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the
+ground--that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far
+more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if
+permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant,
+however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters
+of fact and technicality.
+
+Finding that he listened so well--that it was merely one of the
+inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me--I, of
+course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to
+overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should
+say to him until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first,
+but that passed. Presently it occurred to me that things were happening
+in the Study with the boy, that the little girl could ill afford to
+miss; and also that he would feel more at ease if I could divide my
+attention upon him with another, so I rearranged her plans somewhat, and
+there were two.
+
+As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I related
+certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from
+scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely
+from a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak
+authoritatively, merely as one adding certain phases I had found
+interesting of an illimitable subject. The next day he slipped in alone
+and a bit early, his "hello" hushed. I looked up and he said, almost
+trembling:
+
+"I had a wonderful night."
+
+The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst
+of great happenings.
+
+"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.
+
+"It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.
+
+His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called
+his paper--
+
+     A VOICE THROUGH A LENS
+
+     Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the
+     day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had
+     last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream.
+     I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was
+     reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy
+     containing the nebular theory, and another that told about
+     the planetary chain.
+
+     The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory,
+     but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into
+     the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical
+     form but in another--the first time I have ever lost my
+     physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes
+     still on.
+
+     As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I
+     heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The
+     Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly
+     drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could
+     drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...
+
+     I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an
+     observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold.
+     As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large
+     telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was
+     upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory
+     like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great
+     telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the
+     eye-piece. As I looked around the heavens to find the great
+     spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a
+     voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the
+     way. Follow me."
+
+     I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of
+     planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not
+     making any indication of steps, but the close connection of
+     the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a
+     screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until
+     it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This
+     no doubt is a complicated affair to you."
+
+     "Yes."
+
+     "Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any
+     clearer."
+
+     I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large
+     globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all
+     rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly
+     mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail
+     of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there
+     was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there
+     were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one
+     gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was
+     covered with animals of every description--a mass, a chaos of
+     animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in
+     battle, the next two showed the development of these
+     men--gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did
+     not see.
+
+     I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I
+     heard the voice again:
+
+     "I suppose you are still amazed."
+
+     "Yes."
+
+     "Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The
+     great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in
+     the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a
+     second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes
+     you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the
+     evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and
+     melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things
+     emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew
+     and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower
+     globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle
+     of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes
+     life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another
+     seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps
+     progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may
+     look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."
+
+     When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful
+     globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery
+     of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a
+     roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills,
+     also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook
+     which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It
+     seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped
+     over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the
+     sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose
+     limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear
+     like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I
+     heard the voice again:
+
+     "You must go now, tell the people what you saw, and some
+     other night you will see the globe of spirituality more
+     closely."
+
+     I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my
+     room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to
+     see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked
+     out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with
+     the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here
+     and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic
+     voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be
+     able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about
+     the seventh globe some time again.
+
+
+
+
+9
+
+THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL
+
+
+The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:
+
+"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the
+girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it.
+She's the noblest girl I know."
+
+That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to
+me at the time and set me to thinking.
+
+"How old is she?"
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+"What is she interested in?"
+
+"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."
+
+"You might ask her to come."
+
+I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the
+end of a week he remarked:
+
+"She is coming."
+
+It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the
+lane together.... She took a seat by the door--she takes it still, the
+same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a
+sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in
+justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's
+and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called
+her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She
+had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell
+back upon the theme of all themes to me--a man's work, the meaning of
+it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this
+was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said
+something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered
+the ultimate heresy--that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for
+the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot
+long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken
+his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any
+other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the
+straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and
+blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that
+it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and
+religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one reaches the top,
+the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are
+one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense
+of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and
+integrating the life that lasts.
+
+I have said this before in this book--in other books. I may say it
+again. It is the truth to me--truth that the world is in need of. I am
+sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is
+production. Handling the production of others in some cases is
+production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural
+synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true
+in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.
+
+The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own
+early essay classes. Old friends were here again--Introduction,
+Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where
+they would make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her
+work was spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the
+teachers, that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for
+their ideas to authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change
+the entire order and impulse of their craft.
+
+She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not
+penetrated it. I was afraid to open the throttle anywhere, lest she
+break and drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment
+after she was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.
+
+"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.
+
+Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty.
+We had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to
+expect and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness
+and impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he
+returned it to me.
+
+"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."
+
+When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal
+impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken
+the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger."
+There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but
+partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the
+principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I
+could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The
+Valley-Road Girl's discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful
+sense.
+
+The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about
+Fichte. The old German is greatly loved and revered in this Study. He
+set us free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a
+portion of one of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the
+Universe." The next day I read her paper--and there was a beam in it.
+
+I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get
+away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set
+me clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their
+work, in the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two
+papers--held the substance of the whole matter--stumbled upon as usual.
+We had a grand time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his
+positions, writing to his countrymen--a wanderer, an awakened soul. And
+this brought us the hosts of great ones--the Burned Ones and their
+exaltations--George Fox and the Maid of Domremy--the everlasting spirit
+behind and above mortal affairs--the poor impotency of wood-fire to
+quench such immortality. Her eyes gleamed--and all our hearts burned.
+
+"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to
+deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the
+skies. All things that are done--let them alone. The undone things
+challenge us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions
+which have not yet found substance--is already prepared for the workmen
+of to-day to bring into matter--all great poems and inventions for the
+good of the world. They must gleam into being through our minds. The
+mind of some workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened
+as yet; the sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake.
+Inertia is always of matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the
+light. When the shutters of the mind are opened and the grey appears, he
+will arise and, looking forth, will discover his work.
+
+"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the
+great, _the impossible_ tasks. But the mind must be entered by the
+Light--the heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."
+
+That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was
+not an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that
+my task with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with
+The Abbot--that he was dynamic within and required only the developed
+instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with
+obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally
+splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real
+self through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we
+all deeply missed her presence from the Study.
+
+Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she
+brought me the following which told the story in her own words of
+something she had met:
+
+     WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN
+
+     Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can
+     you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing
+     made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with
+     me the things I am struggling to explain.
+
+     I like to look back at those times when everything to me was
+     new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very
+     own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick
+     raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me
+     that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to
+     indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for
+     each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to
+     school.
+
+     There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its
+     head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul.
+     The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man
+     must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not
+     keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop
+     and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came
+     to learn.
+
+     At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I
+     had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was
+     accused of copying; that was the first wound. How I would
+     have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is
+     trusted.
+
+     At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One
+     of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have
+     some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was
+     intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation
+     for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged
+     competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more
+     studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well
+     as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school
+     friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our
+     hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's
+     misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends.
+     Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school
+     we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I
+     have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my
+     school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child
+     filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his
+     egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is
+     hard for such a one to love his neighbour.
+
+     The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is
+     the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the
+     miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.
+
+     The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me
+     how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own
+     eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work
+     all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing
+     well that the teacher would praise his perfect reflection.
+     Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut
+     that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.
+
+     Unless the school can trust children, show them that they
+     should also be interested in their less fortunate
+     school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular
+     work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A
+     child had much better remain at home, a simple but
+     whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and
+     wise books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes.
+This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender
+and wise:
+
+     MAY EVENING
+
+     A spirit of restlessness ruled me. Each night I retired with
+     the hope that the morning would find it gone. It disturbed my
+     sleep. It was not the constant discontent I had hitherto felt
+     with the world. This was a new disquietude.
+
+     One May evening I followed our little river down to the place
+     it flows into the Lake. Slowly the light of day faded. From
+     my seat upon the green bank of a stream, a wonderful picture
+     stretched before me. The small stream and the surrounding
+     country were walled in by dense green trees. To the west the
+     cool, dark depths parted only wide enough for the creek to
+     disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in
+     the southern wall, I caught glimpses of the summer cottages
+     on the sandy shore. To the north stretched the pasture-lands
+     with shade-trees happy to hide their nakedness with thick
+     foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace. To
+     the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty
+     outline of trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the
+     western sky. Two men paddled a boat out into the light and
+     disappeared under the bridge. Nothing disturbed the peace of
+     the stream save the dip of the paddles, and the fish rising
+     to the surface for food. A circle on the surface meant that
+     an insect had lain at its centre; a fish had risen and
+     devoured it. Circles of this kind were continually being cut
+     by the circumferences of other circles.... A dark speck moved
+     down the stream. A turtle was voyaging.
+
+     Now, far in the shadows, I saw a man sitting on the bank
+     fishing. His patience and persistence were remarkable, for he
+     had been there all the time. But the fish were at play. The
+     occasional splash of the carp, mingling with the perpetual
+     song of the birds and the distant roar of the waves breaking
+     on the shore to the south, formed one grand over-tone.
+
+     A feeling of awe came over me. I felt my insignificance. I
+     saw the hand of God. My relation to my surroundings was very
+     clear. My soul bowed to the God-ness in all things natural.
+     The God-ness in me was calling to be released. It was useless
+     to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It
+     must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an
+     echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought
+     becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was
+     readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be applied
+     and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by
+     inward feelings. This was my soul's complaint.
+
+     No tree was exactly like one of its neighbours. Each
+     fulfilled its purpose in its particular way. Yet all
+     proclaimed the One Source. Performing its function, it was
+     fit to censure me and I took the cup.
+
+     ... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the
+     little stream; heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was
+     weeping tears of sympathy for one so short-sighted and drawn
+     to failure.
+
+
+
+
+10
+
+COMPASSION
+
+
+I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the
+difference between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two
+of fourteen and seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be
+herself. She has never been patronised; and in the last year or more has
+been actively encouraged to express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as
+stated, she has no particular talent for writing. She is the one who
+wants to be a mother. Not in the least precocious, her charm is quite
+equal for little girls or her elders. Her favourite companions until
+recently were those of her own age.
+
+On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they
+want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the
+passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
+matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech
+and reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected
+thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of
+existence--had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old
+artist, are the very passages of power.
+
+"... Except that ye become as little children----" that is the
+beginning of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in
+religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the
+world, or most of them, and all have told the same story--look to Rodin,
+Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of
+the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied
+men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior
+purpose, confronted the lie with the realities of their own nature, and
+fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is so often the
+unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched open, as
+they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and more like
+little children at the end.
+
+The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must
+have the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality
+of the modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation,
+because the old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our
+hearts.... I was promising an untold something for a future lesson to
+the little girl yesterday, just as she was getting to work. The
+anticipation disturbed the present moment, and she said:
+
+"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek----"
+
+Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a
+song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the
+perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me--in the sunlight and
+elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it
+was so near--every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the
+pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I
+was already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song
+was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the
+Old Mother--that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was
+gone--a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this
+sentence in the room:
+
+"... _sang four songs and flew away._"
+
+It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of
+course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression.
+However, no after explanations will help--if the art of the thing is not
+apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman
+said--"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."
+
+And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a
+Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights
+are at half-mast."
+
+She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child
+in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her
+reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all
+within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get
+it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as
+much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to
+express that which he has seen--which is so small compared to the big
+colour and atmosphere."
+
+I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a
+picture.
+
+A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a
+story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked
+as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."
+
+Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment _to get
+started_, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end
+of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it
+slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays
+upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded
+white----"
+
+Or:
+
+"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring
+beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little
+woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering
+at their little legs, I felt a part----"
+
+I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to
+write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,--at
+least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction
+that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could
+get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something
+very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner
+pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do
+that--to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression.
+The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has
+emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a
+life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his
+deepest inner listening--in which the trained mind-instrument is
+quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater
+source within.
+
+The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me,
+among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I
+find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her
+expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I
+administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening
+out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart
+Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his
+work--honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's
+ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You
+will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept
+the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the
+doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's
+"Walking"--there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to
+Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer.
+The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It
+was not that I wanted her to _get_ Mill or Burke, but that the mental
+exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or
+masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams,
+playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.
+
+Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child
+becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
+Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the
+mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they
+are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith
+without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best
+developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes
+from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.
+
+In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the
+case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even
+to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly
+inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road
+Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the
+first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have
+related something of the process.
+
+The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of
+intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is
+only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational
+systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual
+potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of
+which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from
+within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an
+heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in
+the present scheme of things.
+
+Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly
+various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount
+to, are all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the
+calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the
+world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five
+consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot
+get through to the world except through the brain.
+
+In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe
+that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of
+the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is naive, not
+to have explained before, that from the view these things are written
+the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression--most superb and
+admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a
+listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the
+machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without
+but within.
+
+If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison,
+having been forced to turn their eyes within--you will find a hint to
+the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom
+solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the
+time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior
+promptings for their mental activity--the passage entirely closed
+between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary
+confinement makes madmen of such--if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.
+
+The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the
+current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward,
+or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed
+only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to
+be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you
+powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his
+disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of
+equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed
+intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not
+ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.
+
+A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten
+proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take
+his place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own
+individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any
+sense of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a
+man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the
+sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham
+and a delusion.
+
+Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the
+Unity of all Existing Things (which is literally brooding upon this
+planet in these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of
+the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy.
+Time has made the greatest of the _sheer_ intellects of the past appear
+apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each
+racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of
+remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the
+conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire,
+Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.
+
+Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything
+fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant
+within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this
+awakening is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of
+this greater day, in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion,
+the Unity of All Things is descried.
+
+
+
+
+11
+
+THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK
+
+
+"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have
+done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of
+China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to
+read."
+
+So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future
+work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him
+with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries,
+even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the
+setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the
+monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the
+psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event,
+the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.
+
+The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent
+along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her
+lap--and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:
+
+"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and
+now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so
+good."
+
+"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write
+until you begin to dream as you write--until you forget hand and paper
+and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain
+interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."
+
+In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will
+get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an
+idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy
+back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who
+come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these
+papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a
+ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more
+cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the
+quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:
+
+     Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build
+     his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere--in Germany,
+     in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen
+     with her in the wild places.
+
+     In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the
+     Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted
+     to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and
+     square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than
+     others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees,
+     such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve
+     their branches without the thought of being cut down for a
+     sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings.
+     Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at
+     the feet of these trees and ask questions that _disgraced_
+     Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower
+     fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple
+     little stones.
+
+     Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds
+     like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century
+     instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up.
+     The thing I _really_ wanted to write about this morning was
+     the goodness of being alive here in winter.
+
+After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows
+and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes
+up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow,
+all through the sky.
+
+Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look
+like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.
+
+Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last
+shades of night pass out of the sky.
+
+Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot
+look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam--just enough to make you feel
+like work.
+
+A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening
+the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of
+our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A
+wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many
+lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are
+killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous
+and vulgar ways--maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end.
+Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year
+these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them
+and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition
+is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies
+and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of
+higher Nature, which men should know.
+
+In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes
+going about their work--I mean their _own_ work and affairs. To me it
+seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't
+got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering:
+"Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."
+
+I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see
+the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery
+capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all
+this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are
+small, but too big _for them_, and make a little clatter as they go over
+the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or
+somewhere that I do not know of.
+
+The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The
+trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp
+from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh
+and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but
+if one moves quickly they all run away.
+
+I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old
+gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There
+were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must
+have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready.
+Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a
+friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and
+spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with
+me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn
+much more about them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low
+street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was
+something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might
+think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep,
+but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped
+short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me
+something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of
+the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told
+her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:
+
+     "... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one
+     thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me
+     something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or
+     tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can
+     get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because
+     after the voice stops these three things run through my mind,
+     just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought
+     which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and
+     the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to
+     be connected with Mother in some way; something she said
+     many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and
+     she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I
+     asked for."
+
+I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest
+things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for
+fulfilments at once.
+
+"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not
+be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every
+day, and perhaps something will come."
+
+These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on
+Roses:
+
+     If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old
+     Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot
+     express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at
+     them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to
+     pull me right out of the body and out into another world
+     where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose
+     the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real
+     tea roses.
+
+     I took three roses into a house--a red one, a white one, very
+     much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that
+     takes me into the other world--the kind of yellow rose that
+     sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room
+     every day.
+
+     A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.
+
+     "Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that
+     is!"
+
+     "Which one do you like best?" I asked.
+
+     "The red one, of course," the girl answered.
+
+     "Why, the other two are much----" I began.
+
+     "No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one
+     likes them red ones best?"
+
+     I walked away. I believe that city people who never see
+     Nature, know her better from their reading than country
+     people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk
+     on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country
+     people like red roses because they are like them. The red
+     roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow
+     teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow
+     bigger. They are not ashamed.
+
+     A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put
+     into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it
+     is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down
+     under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose
+     spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have
+     been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is
+     fine enough for them, and it has come--and others. Months
+     afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses
+     come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all
+     wonderful?
+
+I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey
+Day:
+
+     Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan
+     shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little
+     wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the
+     crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of
+     wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the
+     harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday
+     scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had
+     begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the
+     window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I
+     could not finish that essay; I had to write something about
+     the grey happy day.
+
+     On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always
+     so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was
+     on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made
+     us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water,
+     cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and
+     pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see
+     that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only
+     one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if
+     they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you,
+     they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander
+     through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the
+     sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many
+     different faces, different and strange lands and people.
+     Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and
+     everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge
+     dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away.
+     The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new
+     ones come.
+
+
+A TALK
+
+What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole
+lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time
+spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I
+have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to
+the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short
+talk from one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes
+the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally
+wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from
+going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.
+
+At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the
+angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard,
+flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange,
+wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little
+brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the
+fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so
+to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a
+whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the
+green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just
+go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of
+brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves
+are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their
+hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love
+them. But that is all, for they are working hard.
+
+If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be
+able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together,
+and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And
+one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any _old_ thing.
+
+What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has
+stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all
+the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking
+up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that
+woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy
+by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches
+would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many
+other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.
+
+
+
+
+12
+
+TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT
+
+
+It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable,
+the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I
+concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a
+house--in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been
+seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles
+of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:
+
+"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take
+another look at your little stone study."
+
+I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him
+that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He
+found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped
+some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father
+fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine
+stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass,
+the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he
+was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the
+picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff,
+casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work,
+even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.
+
+"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I
+can frame it up for you."
+
+When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it
+was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came
+from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty,
+and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward
+there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the
+afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested
+to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so
+positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the
+contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the
+lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a
+bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.
+
+This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my
+well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in
+his own cellar:
+
+"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let
+me."
+
+He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and
+spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.
+
+"And it's all paid for?" I asked.
+
+He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."
+
+"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for
+it?"
+
+"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."
+
+That was not to be forgotten.
+
+So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand
+under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the
+foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house,
+because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer
+sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When
+they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had
+pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.
+
+As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down
+upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had
+ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had
+learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors,
+merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores
+or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social
+system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.
+
+There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have
+fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in
+the village still, but different.
+
+Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a
+small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched
+their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted
+upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields
+for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of
+enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one
+evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a
+kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of
+the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An
+old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap
+out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky
+patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted
+the paddle.
+
+There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening
+and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to
+my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from
+the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw
+the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it.
+The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and
+the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.
+
+The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made
+the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like
+a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us
+the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of
+a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No
+word.
+
+The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed
+him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went
+back. It was _all_ uninteresting night to me now--beauty,
+picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't
+even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night
+the Canadian said:
+
+"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to
+camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends--young and old,
+even the young married people. They point--back and upward--as if one
+pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's
+tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring
+anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to
+the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them,
+sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring,
+the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the
+race is passing. They do not resist--they do not care to live
+differently."
+
+Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's
+nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it
+would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have
+amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town,
+when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups
+of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build
+the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another
+incident:
+
+... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so
+well--had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his
+bare flesh--that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how
+well he looked.... The country people occasionally come down to the
+water on the Sabbath (from their homes back on the automobile routes and
+the interurban lines), and for what they do not get of the natural
+beauty of shore and bluff, I have a fine respect. However, they didn't
+miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.
+
+They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was
+shameless.
+
+Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in
+most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious
+of itself--and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either
+shameless, an inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the
+trained eye; or else it is touched with divinity and does not frequent
+these shores.
+
+The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that
+is denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth--and vision
+requires light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive,
+scrawny from struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they
+are prone to sink.
+
+It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
+have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations.
+We have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women
+with veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not
+come from women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to
+satisfy his own ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of
+human reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards,
+and every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work,
+that subject.
+
+In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have
+debased our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not
+beautiful, and does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this
+heritage. The human body is associated with darkness, and the place of
+this association in our minds is of corresponding darkness.
+
+The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
+thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to
+educate the countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not
+appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would
+frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one
+may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin
+white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting
+mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while
+each day on his own grass-plot without shocking the natives or losing
+his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to
+express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in
+the case of the countryside which complained.
+
+They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without
+knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face
+to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is
+above the level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all
+the living lights--the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not
+glorify them, as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to
+Questing--man's real and most significant business. They do not know
+that which is good or evil in food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in
+houses, lands or faith. They live in a low, lazy rhythm and attract unto
+themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes
+this in their children, in their schools and most pathetically in their
+churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with
+tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the
+hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low established forces, and
+only the more splendid of these young people have the integrity of
+spirit to rise above the resistance.
+
+As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly
+naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find
+some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a
+descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where
+the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian
+rather than individual. The year around, these people wear
+clothing,--woollen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron,
+touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering
+quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.
+
+They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with
+as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and
+legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh
+and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a
+price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen
+pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love
+is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with
+the sense of possession.
+
+They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
+good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret
+of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of
+the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be
+conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work
+is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may
+the where-with to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and
+the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold
+the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and
+half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men,
+static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering
+from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them
+the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be
+erect in other than bone and sinew.
+
+They cover their bodies--but they do not cover their faces nor their
+minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed!_
+They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds
+without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint
+of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to
+reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the
+world-crowd, whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and
+motion-photography.
+
+The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our
+ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is
+ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask
+of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each
+other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is
+deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a
+community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is
+merely an unlettered thing.
+
+No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one
+who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind
+that has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's
+treasures from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive
+in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously
+furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have
+found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of
+appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor
+generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will
+hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.
+
+All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The
+essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and
+understanding--and these are qualities that come from evolution of the
+soul just as every other fine thing comes.
+
+We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening--love and
+life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter....
+But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness
+is designed to smother an awakened soul. You have to bring God to him in
+his own terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that
+he is serving his God. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his
+sons and daughters quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of
+fear or curses them for straying.
+
+I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos
+and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review of
+life as I had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact
+that one little contract for certain interior installations was strung
+over five months, and surprised me with the possibilities of
+inefficiency and untruth, is long since forgotten. The water runs. Ten
+days after peace was established here, all my wounds were healing by
+first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at work on a new contract
+the day after they left me, the pity that surged through my breast was
+strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct of their days was a
+drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of materials, an arriving
+at something like order against the grittiest odds, and they must do it
+again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the evening--but
+the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is knowledge.
+
+I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the
+world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve,
+but it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead.
+The paths behind do not contain them; the simplicity of peasants and
+lowly communities is not merely unlettered. One does not need to deal
+with one small town; it is everywhere. The ways of the crowds are small
+ways. We wrong ourselves and bring imperfection to our tasks when we
+forget that. We love the Indian crossing the stream in the great and
+gracious night--but God pity the Indian's dog. We must look close at
+life, and not lie to ourselves, because our ways are cushioning a
+little.
+
+All idealism that turns back must suffer the fate of mere sentiments. We
+must know the stuff the crowds are made of, if we have a hand in
+bringing in the order and beauty. You have heard men exclaim:
+
+"How noble are the simple-minded--how sweet the people of the
+Countryside--how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As
+a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the
+voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth;
+and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in
+politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the
+people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any
+dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.
+
+The rising workman in any art or craft learns by suffering that all good
+is ahead and not elsewhere; that he must dare to be himself even if
+forced to go hungry for that honour; that he must not lose his love for
+men, though he must lose his illusions. Sooner or later, when he is
+ready, one brilliant little fact rises in his consciousness--one that
+comes to stay, and around which all future thinking must build itself.
+It is this:
+
+When one lifts the mask from any crowd, commonness is disclosed in
+every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds
+of common people are the soil of the future, a splendid mass
+potentially, the womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.
+
+All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the
+people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First
+the dreamer dreams--and then the people make it action....
+
+What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture,
+the back of the tapestry.
+
+To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every
+force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many;
+he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from
+the thing done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to
+give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise
+for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as
+absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.
+
+The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man
+who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade
+intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked
+for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The
+personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of
+three kinds: He may desert his vision entirely and return to operate
+among the infinite small doors of the many--which is cowardice and the
+grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few
+who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful
+devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not
+heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who
+revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its
+wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The
+grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman.
+He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....
+
+The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world.
+Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision--all good
+comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely,
+which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater
+failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he
+may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings
+beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in
+this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary
+victory.
+
+The real workman then--vibrating between compassion and contempt--his
+body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his
+task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to
+have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic
+levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown
+here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.
+
+
+
+
+13
+
+NATURAL CRUELTY
+
+
+In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first
+things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and
+the grown man all the states of evolution are vaguely reviewed, as they
+are, in fact, in that more rapid and mysterious passage between
+conception and birth. Young nations pass through the same phases, and
+some of them are abominable. The sense of power is a dangerous thing.
+The child feels it in his hands, and the nation feels it in its first
+victory.... In the Chapel during a period of several days we talked
+about the wonder of animals (the little boys of the house present) and
+the results were so interesting that I put together some of the things
+discussed in the following form, calling the paper Adventures in
+Cruelty:
+
+     As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain
+     matters of charity as we used to regard them are vulgar now.
+     I remember when a great sign, THE HOME OF THE
+     FRIENDLESS, used to stare obscenely at thousands of city
+     school children, as we passed daily through a certain street.
+     Though it is gone now, something of the curse of it is still
+     upon the premises. I always think of what a certain observer
+     said:
+
+     "You would not think the Christ had ever come to a world,
+     where men could give such a name to a house of love-babies."
+
+     I remember, too, when there formerly appeared from time to
+     time on the streets, during the long summers, _different_
+     green-blue wagons. The drivers were different, too--I recall
+     one was a hunchback. These outfits formed one of the
+     fascinating horrors of our bringing-up--the fork, the noose,
+     the stray dog tossed into a maddened pulp of stray dogs, the
+     door slammed, and no word at all from the driver--nothing we
+     could build on, or learn his character by. He was a part of
+     the law, and we were taught then that the law was
+     everlastingly right, that we must grind our characters
+     against it.... But the green-blue wagons are gone, and the
+     Law has come to conform a bit with the character of youth.
+
+     The time is not long since when we met our adventures in
+     cruelty alone--no concert of enlightened citizens on these
+     subjects--and only the very few had found the flaw in the
+     gospel that God had made the animals, and all the little
+     animals, for delectation and service of man. Possibly there
+     is a bit of galvanic life still in the teaching, but it
+     cannot be said to belong to the New Age.
+
+     Economic efficiency has altered many styles for the better.
+     Formerly western drovers used to drive their herds into the
+     brush for the winters. The few that the winter and the wolves
+     didn't get were supposed to be hardy enough to demand a
+     price. It was found, however, that wintering-out cost the
+     beasts more in vitality than they would spend in seven years
+     of labour; that the result was decrepit colts and stringy
+     dwarfs for the beef market. Also there was agitation on the
+     subject, and the custom passed. City men who owned horses in
+     large numbers found their _efficiency_ brought to a higher
+     notch at the sacrifice of a little more air and food, warmth
+     and rest. There is a far-drive to this appeal, and there are
+     those who believe that it will see us through to the
+     millennium.
+
+     A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country
+     there was an old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red
+     and white like Stevenson's cow that ate the meadow flowers.
+     Her name was Mary--Mr. Devlin's Mary. The Devlin children
+     played with us, and they were like other children in every
+     way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves
+     disappeared annually (one of the mysteries) and the Devlin
+     children were brought up on Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they
+     said, but pure cream. We came to know Mary, because she was
+     always on the roadside--no remote back-pastures for her. She
+     loved the children and had to know what passed. We used to
+     deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting
+     the last circlet fastened, old Mary would tire of the game
+     and walk sedately out of the ring--just as she would when a
+     baby calf had enough or some novice had been milking too
+     long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus
+     think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we
+     passed her--to and from school. It was said that she could
+     negotiate any gate or lock.
+
+     "Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin
+     house, we saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they
+     were tying Mary behind. She was led forth. I remember the
+     whites of her eyes and her twisted head. Only that, in a kind
+     of sickening and pervading blackness. The calf cried to her,
+     and Mary answered, and thus they passed.... 'But she is old.
+     She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin
+     children said.
+
+     "Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke
+     to certain grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy
+     that was mine. No one criticised Devlin. It was the custom,
+     they said.... Even the butcher had heard of old Mary.... You
+     see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a
+     child--but you never can know what it showed me of the world.
+     None of us who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have
+     not since. I cannot."
+
+Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had
+been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and
+beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I
+wanted butter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted
+a front-yard cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady
+that had eyes the children would see fairies in----
+
+"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of
+yours----"
+
+"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"
+
+"Yes, sound as a trivet."
+
+"A good yielder?"
+
+"All of that."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the
+milktime, there isn't much left for beef----"
+
+"But I don't want to eat her."
+
+"But as an investment--you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down--they
+don't weigh much at the butcher's."
+
+The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good
+economy so prevalent as to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's
+exactly why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related
+the episode to a man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:
+
+"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's
+abominations in a city street yesterday--cart with crate, new calf
+inside, old moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter--a very
+interesting tumbril, but she hadn't conspired against the government.
+For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little
+bewildered bit of veal--and now we were to eat what was left of her....
+Also I passed through a certain railway yard of a big city last
+holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live
+chickens were piled there awaiting shipment--crushed into eight-inch
+crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an
+atrocious horror like that--a man being held in a torture-cell in such a
+position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve,
+to say nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this
+thing before--yet never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A
+man must see a thing like that just right, in full meaning, and then
+tell it again and again--until enough others see, to make it dangerous
+to ship that way. I got the idea then, 'Suppose a man would make it his
+life-work to change those crates--to make those crates such a stench and
+abomination, that poultry butchers would not dare use them. What a
+worthy life work that would be!...' And then I thought, 'Why leave it
+for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is everything," he
+concluded.
+
+There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about
+his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task
+came to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see
+the big thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then
+very often a man sets out to find a passage to India and gets a New
+World. In any case, to put four inches on the chicken-crates of America
+is very much a man's job, when one considers the relation of tariff to
+bulk in freight and express.
+
+Yet there is _efficiency_ even to that added expenditure--a very
+thrilling one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have
+ever felt the heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and
+suffered the lassitude and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for
+you to believe the demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is
+another; and the breaking down of tissue as a result of continued
+torture is caused by still another poison. The point is that we consume
+these poisons. The government is very active in preventing certain
+diseased meats from reaching our tables, but these of fear, rage,
+blood-madness and last-days-of-agony are subtler diseases which have so
+far had little elucidation.
+
+Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed
+to forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged
+in slaughtering--nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of
+an opera cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and
+bloom. It went around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in
+the wild to-day because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles
+change--but there is much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time
+the Messiah of the lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens
+found theirs in the city yards.
+
+The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression
+of cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether
+clear the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace,
+merely because cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped
+to spare the helpless creatures a tithe of their suffering, but that
+will not suffice now. A clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work
+to bring it about.
+
+Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his
+beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough
+for us to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver,
+but it has been found that more is required. You may threaten him with
+the police, even with lynching; you may frighten him away from his
+manhandling for the moment--but in some alley, he is alone with his
+horse afterward. His rage has only been flamed by resistance met. It is
+he who puts the poor creature to bed.
+
+The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime,
+for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters
+the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely
+physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively
+intense, the higher they are carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of
+knowing things; it is the coarseness of fibre which resists all the
+fairer and finer bits of human reality. Just so long as men fail to
+master the animals of which they are composed, the poor beasts about
+them will be harrowingly treated.
+
+So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied
+for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general
+education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting
+the human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.
+
+On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one
+of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be
+freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these
+were not valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious
+fashion. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed--with a few
+days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the
+fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above
+the price of the hide--to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big
+city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts
+to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would
+have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for
+the shipment.
+
+The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought
+all that was stopped long ago----"
+
+Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that
+is to run a blockade, if the premium is right--so will a certain element
+of trade take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of
+people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't
+being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of
+manhood proper.
+
+The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the
+mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the
+lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The
+remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the
+stimulus to come from without instead of from within.
+
+Custom is a formidable enemy--that herd instinct of a people which
+causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day
+everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out
+the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one
+expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students
+when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are
+children to do when their parents shout _mad-dog_ and run for clubs and
+pitch-forks at the passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster
+when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot?
+Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.
+
+The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences--upon
+astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology--are the results of flashes
+of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof
+against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its
+burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and
+cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing
+to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up
+into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.
+
+Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready
+to change--that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile,
+receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so
+ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our
+relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready
+for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be
+closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the
+problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that
+much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often
+again we set out to discover the passage to India and reach the shores
+of a New World.
+
+
+
+
+14
+
+CHILDREN CHANGE
+
+
+The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction
+which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated,
+having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief
+interest at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he
+alleged to have found in my work. After that he intimated that he
+aspired to write. The second young man came from Dakota, also a
+college-bred. A teacher there wrote to me about him. I looked at some of
+his work, and I found in it potentialities of illimitable promise. I was
+not so excited as I would have been had I not met this discovery in
+other cases from the generation behind us. Their fleets are upon every
+sea.
+
+The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a while
+in the evening on short manuscript matters. In fact, the dollar-end has
+not pinched so far; and they help a while in the garden in the
+afternoons, designating the period, Track, as they named the little
+class after mid-day, Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they
+really belonged to the class. It was primarily designed for the younger
+minds--and I was unwilling to change that.
+
+You would think it rather difficult--I know I did--to bring the work in
+one class for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the
+young men:
+
+"Of course it is _their_ hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you
+like. Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As
+for me--the young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two
+classes."
+
+They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It
+happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.
+
+"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.
+
+They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I
+heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been
+unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making
+inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went out
+into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:
+
+"Chapel is the best hour of the day----"
+
+He said more, and it surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This
+younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is
+not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever
+befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot
+brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of
+mis-technicality--an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him
+to task--lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of
+_staying down_ a little each day--or the world would never hear his
+voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the
+others in the room--that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like
+a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did.
+The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any
+competitive ideal. They were one--and there's something immortal about
+that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There
+is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even
+from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses
+all things--and we rise together--a gold light in the room that will
+come to all the world.
+
+It is worth dwelling upon--this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has
+since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the
+reconstruction write to the Study from time to time--from different
+parts of the world. I read the class a letter recently from a young
+woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from
+the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the
+Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and
+another group from Washington. All these are placed before the Chapel
+kindred for inspiration and aliment.
+
+"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time
+shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves
+from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You
+will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius--at the time
+of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of
+the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the
+end of the bleakest and most terrible age--the breaking down at last of
+an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental
+battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called
+afterward."
+
+... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it
+has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give....
+We watch the world tearing down--from this quietude. We have no country
+but God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and
+madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New
+Age--just children.
+
+... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed--draining,
+under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be
+developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the
+fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants
+are set. The roses answered--almost wonderfully. They brought me the old
+romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This
+point was touched upon in the Foreword--how in the joy of the roses that
+answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred
+what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.
+
+The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop
+of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the
+thoughts I have forgotten--fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They
+are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and
+again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes,
+that for centuries the world has been maiming its children--that only
+those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as
+men.
+
+Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds
+and they are not the same the next day.
+
+... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to
+congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little
+questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers
+and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they
+love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression
+and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be
+self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in the city. We
+met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration.
+For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we
+met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in
+their different conventions--world ways, the obvious and the temporal,
+as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great
+lessons to me--to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think
+the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance
+of the Catholic priests' saying--"Give us your child until he is seven
+only----"
+
+In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change--to
+watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes
+like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in
+the world.
+
+We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best
+innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground
+upon and master. We are held and refined between the two
+attractions--one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We
+believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul,
+the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception
+must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that
+man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now;
+that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the
+farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of
+tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to
+reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard
+them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten
+adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand--they
+are not. The littlest ones have it--the two small boys of seven and nine,
+who have not regularly entered the Chapel.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and
+without title:
+
+     The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to
+     listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And
+     if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he
+     has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in
+     past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept
+     in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people
+     that played around him and told him queer things when he was
+     first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in
+     his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the
+     world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's
+     wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can
+     write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to
+     get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you
+     know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will
+     find it.
+
+     The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can
+     only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the _brain_
+     which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was
+     going wrong and that _he_ should fix it by telling them the
+     right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people
+     not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.
+
+     It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly,
+     and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these
+     will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.
+     After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther
+     ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
+     baby.
+
+     The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps
+     lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you,
+     unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand
+     all that you earn or achieve."
+
+
+
+
+15
+
+A MAN'S OWN
+
+
+The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of
+educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting
+the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could
+not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic
+impossibility.
+
+The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that
+the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and
+imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has
+been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to
+place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these
+and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.
+
+... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the
+study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the
+places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a
+dining-table--the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the
+question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each
+week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way,
+like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely,
+shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The
+little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would
+never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.
+
+"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And
+then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just
+now. It is seeing us through these hard days."
+
+But _I_ missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is,
+my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the
+days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about
+as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me
+a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I
+had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I
+didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the
+writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught
+me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest
+again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the
+first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first
+objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work,
+published in the book called _Midstream_.
+
+"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a
+transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain
+manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our
+hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate
+a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man
+who has found his work--and the splendid discovery invariably follows,
+that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not
+first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising;
+because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks
+deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.
+
+"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too
+lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work.
+No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation
+of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.
+
+"_I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and
+fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the
+schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his
+daily task--and watching for his own among them._
+
+"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal
+of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the
+hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness
+for buying cheap and selling dear--if as a race we were lifted into our
+own work.
+
+"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of
+his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one
+important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his
+work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the
+lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to
+distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager
+and tender.
+
+"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the
+answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the
+Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something
+sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I
+had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full,
+eager and honest, the answer came--the work of specialists which had
+moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in
+that--for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.
+
+"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of
+his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive
+not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the
+temperament to choose a work because it is easy.
+
+"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument,
+the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height
+and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.
+That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities--whether
+tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods
+with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such
+a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.
+
+"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and
+brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer
+receptivity--and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here
+and there in the cohering line.
+
+"... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long
+hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is
+ended, the finished forces turn _outward_ in service. According to the
+measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance
+of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the
+instrument in pure listening--long forenoons passing, without a single
+instant of self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even
+awareness of the body....
+
+"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher
+life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world
+for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor
+and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely
+from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has
+mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the
+mind, its multitude of experiences and unreckonable possessions--are
+given over to the creative and universal force--the same force that is
+lustrous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human
+heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.
+
+"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He,
+first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the
+power of the superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm;
+this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two
+instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the
+rock; and though we achieve the very sanctity of self-command, our
+inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for
+money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's
+standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable
+he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman
+for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to
+others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and
+Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the
+big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand.
+Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line
+of his life will become more clearly established.
+
+_A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has
+already answered._ Browning stood amazed before a man who had met
+Shelley and was not different afterward--a man who could idly announce
+that he had met the poet Shelley and not accept it as the big event of a
+period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of
+finding the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps
+men had made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been
+enacted on that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of
+earth there, the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was
+just on that spot that he found an eagle's feather.
+
+I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago--was speechless and outraged
+that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather about
+afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he
+spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in
+water.... There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are
+called to the same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts
+know each other; the mystics of the arts know each other.
+
+The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the breasts
+of the children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man
+holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a
+child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good
+workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as
+no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story--of a
+certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all
+energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal
+signified. Mostly the "great man" did not know what he had done for the
+boy.... I would have the great man know. I would have him seek to
+perform this miracle every day.
+
+There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying,
+"There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does
+not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to
+bring him to you--but he would not come. I think he did not dare."
+
+Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom
+brought the thing about. A man should say, "_Lead me to him now_!..."
+Those who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put
+stamps upon letters they write. God knows they are not ashamed to come
+and ask for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their
+structure of desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail
+the letter he has written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out,
+full of terror and torture before you--take him to your breast for he is
+your own. Children you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he....
+Do you want a slave, a worshipper--seek out your own. You want nothing
+of the sort, but you alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate
+his worship to the task. He can learn from you in a week what it would
+take years of misery in the world to teach him. You have done in a way
+the thing he wants to do--that's the whole magic. You have fitted
+somehow to action the dream that already tortures his heart. There is
+nothing so pure as work in the world. There is something sacred about a
+man's work that is not elsewhere in matter. Teaching is a mutual
+service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but because he has
+reverence, he is potentially great.
+
+The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a
+worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all
+kinds of workmen; these things are not alone for the artists and the
+craftsmen and the professions. There is one boy to linger about the
+forge of an artisan, after the others have gone. I would have the
+artisan forget the thing he is doing, to look into the eyes of that
+boy--and the chemist, the electrician, the florist.
+
+It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written
+words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The
+work here would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us
+for several days. She was so still that I did not know what was
+happening in her mind. My experience with the others had prevailed to
+make me go slowly, and not to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be
+glad that she had come. I asked no expression from her for several days.
+When I finally suggested something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror
+in the room. Her expression came in a very brief form, and it showed me
+the bewilderment with which she had encountered the new points of view
+in the Chapel. I learned afresh that one must not hurry; that my first
+work was to put to rest her fears of being called upon. I impressed upon
+the class the next day that we have all the time there is; that we want
+nothing; that our work is to establish in due time the natural
+expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in particular, I said
+that when she felt like it she could write again.
+
+Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl
+to see if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All
+I ever got from that afternoon was this sentence:
+
+"... She is going to be a nurse."
+
+I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I
+allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting
+her surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must
+have nurses.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... And then the Columbia young man--a big fellow and a soul. I had
+talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room class in the city. He
+took a cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel
+began; then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening,
+I had good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his
+mind and heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible
+integrity, a natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the
+world's bestowal--but Inertia.
+
+Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do
+not mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that
+it is of necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the
+valuable inner life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual
+energy came forth to intensify the vibrations of the race, to say
+nothing of their own poundage. It is less a matter of weight after all
+than texture; still their fat was a handicap.
+
+These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and men;
+all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression
+of the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit
+bring about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required
+to express itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one
+hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression
+of the spiritual life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a
+whole, the great servers of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole
+in every fabrication of man and nature--the finer the work, the finer
+the instrument.
+
+The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and
+continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.
+
+The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought
+forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of
+a dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of
+pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The
+texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You
+must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the
+light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live
+either for appetites or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit,
+in its passionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the
+cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and
+emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.
+
+The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very
+nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of
+countless ages to produce the form that we see--the gracious beauties of
+the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a
+Clovelly rose is beautiful.
+
+The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding
+mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in
+your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's
+button; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in
+human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand--and all
+about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand,
+and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered
+itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget
+that inner ardency--the virgin unfolding to the sun--born of some great
+passion that seemed poised between earth and heaven--and expectant of
+its own great passion's maturity.
+
+I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who
+would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song
+of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things.
+I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings--the ecstasy of the little
+old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in
+the world.
+
+I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose
+marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose
+corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the
+shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a
+thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but
+the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The
+first had great foliages of coarse mane and tail; the other, a splendid
+beast that would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.
+
+We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future
+in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour
+idealism. Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and lustrous we
+become, according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It
+is the quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto
+itself the excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for
+his size, longer-lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural
+elasticity, capable of infinitely greater physical, mental, and moral
+tasks, than the tightly compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere
+painter's flourish which adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there
+if we see clearly. If the sanctity is radiant, the glow is intense
+enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow, to be photographed, even
+caught with the physical eye.
+
+
+
+
+16
+
+THE PLAN IS ONE
+
+
+I was relating the experience of the Columbian. In his case there had
+been much time, so there could be no mistake. He had devoted himself to
+making and keeping a rather magnificent set of muscles which manifested
+even through white man's clothing. He did this with long days of sailing
+and swimming, cultivating his body with the assiduity of a
+convalescent.... I told him in various ways he was not getting himself
+out of his work; explained that true preparation is a tearing off of
+husks one after another; that he was a fine creation in husk, but that
+he must get down to the quick before he could taste or feel or see with
+that sensitiveness which would make any observation of his valuable.
+With all this body-building, he was in reality only covering himself the
+thicker. If a man does this sort of thing for a woman's eye, he can only
+attract a creature of blood and iron whose ideal is a policeman--a very
+popular ideal....
+
+For two or three days he would work terrifically, then, his weight
+besetting, he would placate himself with long tissue-feeding sports. I
+told him that he had everything to build upon; that true strength really
+begins where physical strength ends; that all that he had in equipment
+must be set in order and integrated with his own intrinsic powers, it
+being valueless otherwise. I pointed out that he was but a collector of
+things he could not understand, because he did not use them; that the
+great doers of the world had toiled for years upon years, as he did not
+toil for one week's days successively.... It would not do, except for
+short intervals, and it came to me that my best service was to get out
+from under. I told him so, and the manliness of his acceptance choked
+me. I told him to go away, but to come again later if he mastered
+Inertia in part.... It was not all his fault. From somewhere, an income
+reached him regularly, a most complete and commanding curse for any boy.
+
+... I do not believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play
+for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the
+end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation
+period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most
+dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent because the body
+becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the
+fitness of faculty can manifest.
+
+If one's body is ill from overexertion, it must rest; if one's mind is
+ill from nervousness, stimulation, or from excessive brain activity, it
+must rest; but if one's soul is ill, and this is the difference, nothing
+but activity will help it, and this activity can only be expressed
+through the body and mind. Surplus rest of body or mind is a process of
+over-feeding, which is a coarsening and thickening of tissue, which in
+its turn causes Inertia, and this word I continually capitalise, for it
+is the first devil of the soul.
+
+Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be
+overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the
+world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their
+lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their
+sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat
+heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times _a great calm_,
+another dimension of calm entirely from that which has to do with animal
+peace and repletion. It is the peace of intensive production--and the
+spectacle of it is best seen when you lift the super from a hive of
+bees, the spirit of which animates every moving creature to one
+constructive end. That which emanates from this intensity of action is
+calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does not have to sink into
+a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest have more to do
+with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of tissue one tears
+down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done. Absolutely this
+is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work a man
+loves replenishes.
+
+Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying
+than to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm
+of his task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so
+continually tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold
+this rhythm, we could not die.
+
+This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full
+exercise--soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self
+does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a
+song from it--that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have
+heard from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all
+selfless productivity.
+
+One cannot play until one has worked--that is the whole truth. Ask that
+restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to
+polish the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless
+cleanliness in a room. Hold the picture of what you want in mind and
+detail it to him, saying that you will come again and inspect his work.
+Watch, if you care, the mystery of it. There will be silence until the
+thing begins to unfold for him--until the polish comes to wood or metal,
+until the thing begins to answer and the picture of completion bursts
+upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a hum, and nothing will break
+his theme until the end.
+
+The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls
+differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean
+things; that the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested
+when one enters a clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't
+the room, after all, that gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle
+or the hum comes from harmony within.
+
+A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he "climbed
+out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up
+when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the
+order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away
+the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep
+on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field
+clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where
+bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and
+decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from
+softening and cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose
+occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned
+loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He
+sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture
+comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon
+showing his work.
+
+Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in
+athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being
+inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for
+bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of
+the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world
+expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have
+been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed
+training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a
+body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and
+dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as
+life-quests--except for the few consummately adapted players whose
+little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized
+rectangle--the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed,
+and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.
+
+A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with
+it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he
+loves best to do--constructive play--giving play to his powers,
+bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and
+timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and
+garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until
+supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan,
+yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one
+speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake;
+the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the
+stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is
+all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper,
+the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One
+has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as
+sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass
+above--that fallow lands are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out
+like a wine, and decide there is something in it.
+
+There is something in everything.
+
+The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to
+bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we
+don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and
+that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts
+to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We
+recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get
+this--if it ever comes to us--and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he
+_heard_ his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral
+pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them
+seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to
+bring out.
+
+We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat
+is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come
+to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order
+begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of
+surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has
+come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon
+in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better
+for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and
+strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She
+must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own--for
+wheat partakes of the _alkahest_. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.
+
+The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the
+northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a
+bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat,
+thereafter--but that would be sacrilege.
+
+Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw
+at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered
+there--that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia--so that there is a
+nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course,
+then, that all the aristocrats of Nature--rose and wheat and olives and
+bees and alabaster and grapes--must all have their part of the harmony,
+for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in
+the face of a far-come child--the brute earth-bound lines of self
+gone--the theme of life, Service.
+
+I am at the end of Capitals now.
+
+One afternoon we talked about corn--from the fields where the passionate
+mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we
+found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the
+nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in
+everything.
+
+Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after
+all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first
+wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.
+
+There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every
+movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is
+mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no
+detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story--that
+the plan is one.
+
+
+
+
+17
+
+THE IRISH CHAPTER
+
+
+There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars--the
+Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old
+man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to
+tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true
+Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake
+received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.
+
+"It isn't--it's listening."
+
+It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata,
+called _Appassionata_. There is one here who plays that, and because it
+tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the
+others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems
+to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never
+tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a
+woman--of love and life and death. She wants the earth in her love--but
+her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth.
+The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her--her love a
+perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not
+be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her
+re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.
+
+The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's _Departure_--to us the most
+magic of all the great little poems. But in _Departure_ it is the woman
+who is called.
+
+... Again and again in the _Appassionata_, the word comes to the woman,
+saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will
+not hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty--all the wonder that
+Mother Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have
+told her that it must be, but she does not obey--and then the Master
+comes down.
+
+It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone.
+The _chelas_ have spoken and have not availed. Now the _Guru_ speaks.
+Out of vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out
+of the deeps and heights of compassion, the _Guru_ speaks--and suddenly
+the woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is
+expressed in the treble--a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a
+cup held forth--or palms held upward. The _Guru_ speaks. His will is
+done.
+
+And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was
+listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked
+of Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always
+brings; or it may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just
+been slaughtered in a cause that had far less significance to Ireland
+than our child talk by the fire; or it may have been the South Wind that
+brought us closer to the fairy Isle, for it is the Irish peasants who
+say to a loved guest at parting:
+
+"May you meet the South Wind."
+
+"... There isn't really an Ireland any more--just a few old men and a
+few old, haunting mothers. Ireland is here in America, and the last and
+stiffest of her young blood is afield for England. Her sons have always
+taken the field--that is their way--and the mothers have brought in more
+sons born of sorrow--magic-eyed sons from the wombs of sorrow. Elder
+brothers afield--fathers gone down overseas--only the fairies left by
+the hearth for the younger sons to play with.... So they have sung
+strange songs and seen strange lights and moved in rhythms unknown to
+many men. It is these younger sons who are Ireland now. Not a place, but
+a passion; not a country, but a romance.... They are in the love stories
+of the world, and they are always looking for their old companions, the
+fairies. They find the fairies in the foreign woodlands; they bring the
+fairies to the new countries. They are in the songs that hush the heart;
+they are in the mysticism that is moving the sodden world. Because they
+played with fairies, they were taught to look past and beyond the flesh
+of faces--past metals and meals and miles. Of the reds and greys and
+moving golds which they see, the soul of the world loves to listen, for
+the greatest songs and stories of all are from the Unseen----"
+
+It was the old man dreaming aloud.
+
+"Ireland isn't a place any more. It is a passion infused through the
+world," he added.
+
+"But the fairies are still there," the little girl said.
+
+"Some are left with the old mothers--yes, some are left. But many have
+taken the field, and not for the wars."
+
+A four-day moon was dropping fast in the low west. Jupiter was climbing
+the east in imperial purple--as if to take command.... The littlest boy
+stirred in the arms of the Dakotan and began to speak, staring at the
+fire. We all turned and bent to listen--and it was that very thing that
+spoiled it--for the sentence faltered and flew away.
+
+We all wanted to know what had been born in that long silence, for the
+firelight was bright in two eyes that were very wide and wise--but the
+brain was only seven.... I left the circle and went up the cliff to
+find a book in the study--a well-used book, an American book. Returning,
+I read this from it, holding the page close to the fire:
+
+     OLD IRELAND
+
+ Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
+ Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother,
+ Once a queen--now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground,
+ Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders;
+ Long silent--she too long silent--mourning her shrouded hope and heir;
+ Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.
+
+ Yet a word, ancient mother;
+ You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with forehead between
+   your knees;
+ O you need not sit there, veil'd in your old white hair, so dishevel'd;
+ For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave;
+ It was an illusion--the heir, the son you love, was not really dead;
+ The Lord is not dead--he is risen, young and strong, in another country;
+ Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the grave,
+ What you wept for, was translated, pass'd from the grave,
+ The winds favoured and the sea sail'd it,
+ And now with rosy and new blood,
+ Moves to-day in a new country.
+
+One by one they dropped off asleep, the little ones first, as the moon
+went down--their thoughts so full of stars, asking so dauntlessly all
+questions of world and sky. What I could, I answered, but I felt as
+young as any. It seemed their dreams were fresher than mine, and their
+closeness to God.... The little girl touched me, as we drifted away----
+
+"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.
+
+
+
+
+18
+
+THE BLEAKEST HOUR
+
+
+It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are,
+a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without
+penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may
+become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle
+fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find
+certain friends and sterling enemies--and either lose or win,
+ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.
+
+Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may
+reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are
+wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He
+sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing
+earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the
+dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed.
+He blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet--at least,
+a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning
+over of the whole afterward.
+
+Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the
+bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are
+moving about our business of house and country and world in a most
+stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine
+of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open
+and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men,
+indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the
+only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to
+the nostrils.
+
+But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the
+world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving--but
+with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of
+self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which
+has not remotely to do with an erect spine.
+
+Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is
+no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them
+along, find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may
+be said that wars have brought great benefits to the race; that
+materialism has taught us our place here below as no other passion
+could; that trade has wrought its incomparable good to the races of
+men; that Fear has been the veritable mother of our evolution, its dark
+shadow forever inciting us, breaking our Inertia, bringing swiftness and
+strength first to the body, then to brain. Even desire for self, on the
+long road behind, has been the good angel of our passage, for we had to
+become splendid beasts before the dimension of man could be builded....
+All good; mistakes nowhere in the plan.
+
+But the trouble is, the passage of the many from grade to grade is
+intolerably slow. We had thought the many had finished with war. The few
+already are many grades ahead of that; the few have seen the virtues die
+out of patriotism and trade; they have watched the desire for self turn
+reptile, and hearkened to this truth which is beginning to reverberate
+around the world: _What is good for beasts is not of necessity good for
+men_.... One recent caller here, male, middle-aged, smilingly discussed
+all things from the philosophical point of view. I was saying:
+
+"From the nursery to world-clutched retirement from public affairs, a
+man nowadays is taught more and more to keep his heart-principle
+locked----"
+
+He smiled: "We have all the time there is. It will all come out right.
+You fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others
+of us think them over quietly by our fires. That is the whole
+difference. Scratch off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of
+God-yearning animal underneath."
+
+Few sayings ever have hit me harder.
+
+I studied the years' offerings from this man--to his house, to his
+acquaintances, to the world in general. An irony filled the room, and so
+intense was it that it seemed to have a colour, a kind of green and
+yellow vapour. It emanated from the centre of his face. I think the
+point that animated me especially was that he was in the habit of
+talking to young men. He had no children of his own. I changed the
+subject and opened the door--not to hasten his departure but because the
+air was close.
+
+By every law which makes us hold fast to the memory of saviours and
+great men, the finest fabric of any race is its pioneers. We are living
+and putting into action now the dreams of brave spirits who have gone
+before. Philosophically, even they may have found that the plan is good,
+but that did not prevent them from giving their lives to lift the
+soddenness and accelerate the Inertia of the crowds. They took their joy
+in the great goodness of the plan--only after they had done their best
+to bring the race more swiftly into its higher destiny. A man does not
+sit back and allow his children to spend years in learning that which he
+can explain in a moment from his own experience.... I did not answer the
+philosopher, but many things that occurred from that little talk were
+brought out in Chapel during the days which followed--matters that had
+to do with America and literary workmanship in particular. Certain of
+the matters we discussed have been written down for expression here:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If some one announced that there lived in the Quattuor Islands a man who
+knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
+action of _brotherhood_ and _fatherland_, there would be some call for
+maps and steamship passages. If the Quattuor Islands were not already on
+the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the first pilgrims
+had set out. And if some one should add that all expression of the arts
+so far in the world is addled and unsightly compared to that which is
+about to be, if a certain formula is followed, and that this man in the
+Quattuor group has the formula--many more would start on the quest, or
+send their most trusted secretaries.
+
+And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again
+and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.
+
+The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
+secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give
+to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander
+said:
+
+"It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
+That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and
+live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it
+will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for
+possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you
+before you can adequately receive----"
+
+You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It _is_ old, older
+than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the
+law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts.
+There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good
+for the part; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for
+the first thought, not self-good, but the general good. One nation, so
+established in this conviction that its actions are automatically
+founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true
+world-fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established
+begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of
+life.
+
+Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is
+beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a
+patriot. It is not _my country_ that is of interest, but humankind.
+America's political interests, her trade, all her localisations as a
+separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new
+social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American
+predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while
+supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening
+confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for
+the outright demoralisation of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting
+to-day the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
+invariably follows the thought.
+
+Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
+religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
+change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation
+of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
+
+The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
+enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
+movement. Within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration
+have recently been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the
+most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau and Lanier took
+pen in hand, forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a
+peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds as a result of
+the very act of getting out from under European influence.
+
+England and France and Germany have fallen into mere national voices.
+The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble, against the basic rumble
+of war. War in this century is a confession, as suicide is a
+confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the
+triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you received letters from
+friends in England or Germany or France during the war--friends whom
+formerly you admired for their culture and acumen--you were struck by
+the dulness and misery of the communications, the uncentred points of
+view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and
+blackness of life there; if, indeed, you read the newspapers and
+periodicals of those countries, you required no further proof of the
+fact--that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all
+driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and
+fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.
+
+Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and
+the unclean. The new social order does not recognise the rights and
+desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically _one_ in meaning,
+in aim and in destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the
+sun's rays and in character of country, environment, race, colour and
+structure of mind--these are primal values, the very values that will
+sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and
+nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments
+of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony
+is one.
+
+The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic
+whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a
+pattern of it in matter--to make the dream come true in flesh, each man
+and each nation bringing his labour.
+
+If a certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by
+intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring
+parasite, or formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow.
+In good time there is war to the death.
+
+In a doctor's office in Canada, I saw the picture of a bull-dog standing
+large against the background of the accepted flag, and beneath was this
+line:
+
+"What we have, we'll hold."
+
+I found that the picture had a national popularity. Yet a child stopping
+to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material
+things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a
+man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the
+effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a
+hornet stung him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a conviction held here that the darkest period of American
+materialism came to its end with the beginning of the war. The
+generation of literary producers in manifestation at that time was
+responsible for the bleakest products which America will ever have the
+shame of showing to future generations.
+
+It was not so devoid of genius as would appear; the first cause was the
+difficulty in getting the best work "through." This again was not
+because the public was not ready for the good, but because the public
+taste was brutalised by men who stood between the public and the
+producers. These middlemen insisted, by the right of more direct
+contact, that the public should have what they fancied the public desire
+to be.
+
+I sat in Union Square recently with a beggar who studied me, because it
+appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was
+a great story--sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance
+of life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from
+him. Rather he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was
+a whine in it. He chose to act, and he was not a good actor. His
+offering hurt, not because he was filthy and a failure, but because he
+lied to himself and to me, because he did not dare to be himself, though
+the facts were upon him, eye and brow and mouth. So I did not get his
+story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in
+American letters--I, being the public; the truth of his story
+representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was
+ready for, being the middleman's part.
+
+All workmen of the last generation--all who would listen--were taught to
+bring forth their products with an intervening lie between the truth and
+their expression--the age of advertising heavy in all production.
+
+I recall from those days what was to me a significant talk with an
+American novelist who wanted sales, who was willing to sacrifice all but
+the core of his character to get sales, and who found himself at that
+time in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:
+
+"Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the
+woman's soul wakes up."
+
+"A woman's novel?" I asked.
+
+"Meant to be," said he. "Study of a woman all through. Begins as a
+little girl--different, you know--sensitive, does a whole lot of
+thinking that her family doesn't follow. Tries to tell 'em at first, but
+finds herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years--putting on power and
+beauty in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She's pure
+white fire presently--body and brain and something else asleep. She
+wants to be a mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of
+her sisters to this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as
+the world conducts it----"
+
+"I follow you," said I.
+
+"Well, I'm not going to do the novel here for you," he added. "You
+wouldn't think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of
+telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in
+telling a story, can't do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at
+the same time----"
+
+"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.
+
+"Well, she wanted a little baby--was ready to die for it, but had her
+own ideas of what the Father should be. A million women--mostly having
+been married and failed, have thought the same thing here in
+America--pricked the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover,
+they're the best women we've got. There are----"
+
+He purposely shook the hat from his head--back into the seat--at this
+point.
+
+"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America--God
+bless 'em--who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for the
+Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did.
+He was a young man doing his own kind of work--doctoring among the poor,
+let us say, mainly for nothing--killing himself among men and women and
+babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of
+madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They
+were two to make one--and a third. She knew. There was a gold light
+about his head which she saw--and some of the poverty-folk saw--but
+which he didn't know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.
+
+"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying
+anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it
+came to me was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall
+down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm
+not going to tell you what happened. Only this: a little
+afterward--along about page two hundred of the copy--the woman's soul
+woke up."
+
+"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.
+
+He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead when his car is
+pressing the limit.
+
+"Ever have a book fail?" he asked.
+
+"Seven," said I.
+
+He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes:
+
+"They tell me at my publishers' that I slowed up my last book badly--by
+taking a woman's soul out for an airing--just a little invalid kind of a
+soul, too. Souls don't wake up in American novels any more. You can't do
+much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas--I mean _movie_
+canvas. You can paint _soul_ but you can't photograph it--that's the
+point. The movies have put imagination to death. We have to compete. You
+can't see a soul without imagination--or some sort of madness--and the
+good people who want imagination in their novels don't buy 'em. They
+rent or borrow. It's the crowds that go to the movies that have
+bright-coloured strings of American novels as the product runs--on their
+shelves--little shiny varnished shelves--red carpets--painted birds on
+the lamp-shades and callers in the evenings."
+
+There was a good silence.
+
+"Do you know," he added presently, "I've about come to the conclusion
+that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd.
+Look at the big movie pictures--the actors make love like painted
+animals.... I'm not humorous or ironical. It's a big problem to me----"
+
+"Why, you can't touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until
+you are off the sensuous," I offered. "The quest only begins there. I'm
+not averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings--in part.
+But I am averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a
+romance when a woman's soul wakes up. There's a hotter fire than that
+which burns blood-red----"
+
+"I know," he said quickly. "I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest
+thing in the world.... I'm sure of this story until her soul wakes up.
+She stirs in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead--the kind of a woman
+who could whistle to me or to you--and we'd follow her out--dazed by the
+draw of her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up--but I can
+feel the public dropping off every page after two hundred--like chilled
+bees--dropping off page by page--and the old familiar battle ahead for
+me. I can feel that tight look of poverty about the eyes again----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?" I asked, as we turned
+again into the crowd.
+
+I wasn't the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and
+something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen--how easy it
+is to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise--when
+the very passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.
+
+"She's beautiful--even asleep," he said. "I'm afraid I'll have to give
+her something. I'm building a house. She's in the comprehension of the
+little varnished shelves--asleep."
+
+"Doesn't a tight look come about the eyes--from much use of that sort of
+anaesthetic?" I asked.
+
+"Let's get a drink," he answered.
+
+
+
+
+19
+
+THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER
+
+
+But the stroke of death has fallen upon such pandering, and the war put
+it there. The big names of the last generation are now magazine and
+movie men; all save the few whose sutures have not entirely closed, and
+they are making their last frenzied turn to meet the new social order,
+as they met the floating vogues and whims so long. But this is a
+difficult turn for panderers and caterers, because it does not have to
+do with the surface matter, nothing to do with dance and dress and
+appetite, but with the depths of the human spirit, quickened to
+animation afresh by the agony of the world.
+
+Only the rarest few of the greatest names of England and Europe have
+escaped the fatal partisanship. They have become little national voices,
+and in the coming years this will be remembered against them bitterly.
+The truly liberated soul does not fall into lying attempts at national
+exoneration. The truly liberated soul is no longer a nationalist. A few
+of the young men have escaped this curse, but the older had their
+training, as has been told, in the blackest age of man. Men have been
+diminished in more spacious times than these by becoming laureates; they
+cannot but be degraded by becoming nationalists in these abandoned
+hours.
+
+Genius, in the last generation, met a destructive force in the material
+world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by
+Copernicus. The voices of very few heralds were even heard, but there is
+a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great
+service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the
+liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of
+work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in
+spirit and truth; they will bring in their children unaccursed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... There's always a squeaking when a wagon climbs out of a rut, which
+is another way of saying that a time of transition is a time of pain.
+
+This is a notable and constructive generation now beginning its work in
+America, and joining hands with the few remaining Undefiled of Europe.
+They are not advertisers, nor self-servers. They do not believe in
+intellect alone. Their genius is _intuitionally_ driven, not
+intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitations as a
+force, and is being superseded by electricity (the limitations of which
+have not yet been sensed so far even by the most audacious), so the
+intellect, as a producing medium, has had its period--a period of
+style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, of
+parading, of surface-show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the
+world.
+
+For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
+blood, a temporal heat. Intuition is driven from the fountain-head of
+spiritual energy. Its great conception is the unity of all nature. The
+intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from
+sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
+
+In all times, second-class artists have dealt in the form and matter of
+the age, talked of its effects and paraded its styles. Only the very
+greatest above them have realised that the true story of the thing, as
+any given man sees it, is the one important thing in the world for him
+to produce; that the nearness of the expression to the thought is the
+measure of his success; in a word, that his thought must be put into
+words (or tones or paint or stone) without an intervening lie from the
+medium.
+
+The race of men and women in their twenties, now at work in America, are
+doing these things. Especially in the new poetry is the fine
+consummation apparent. These are the leaders of the new social order.
+Before the war, such as had developed a voice had to shout through shut
+doors. The war has beaten down the doors. A comparable race of young
+workmen (more men than women there; more women than men here) has
+appeared in Russia and raised its voice. It is not altogether a dream
+that a unifying span will stretch across the pillars raised by these two
+groups of builders.
+
+In America this rising generation shall return to us the prestige which
+Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Lanier so superbly attracted. Indeed,
+Whitman is the master of the new poetry; his free verse lives in every
+line of the modern production, a point that would not be significant if
+it were alone of manner; but his broad human spirit, the infusing
+brotherhood which was his passion, and the same universal toleration,
+are the inspiring energies of the new workmanship.
+
+What is the vision of this new social order?
+
+These workmen recognise that no saint's blood, nor the power of any God,
+is going to interfere before a heavenly throne to save sinners who have
+wasted their lives in predatory accomplishment, instead of saving
+themselves;
+
+That the re-distribution of the world's wealth will not bring about the
+new order and beauty of life; that the rich man is to be pitied as much
+as the poor (God knows that intrinsically he is to be pitied more,
+because his shell is thicker) that the time is at hand when the
+vulgarity of being rich in material wealth will be a sense of the common
+mind; That women are not golden fleeces, nor clinging vines, but human
+adults with separate principles from men, which make them equally
+valuable in the social scheme; that women should be their own law in all
+matters of mating and reproduction, because the male has not the mental
+organism to cope authoritatively with these affairs;
+
+That heretofore as educators, as fathers, mothers and bringers-forth of
+children, humankind, in the large, has shown itself less than the
+animals, inasmuch as it does not fulfil its possibilities as animals do;
+
+That the time is past for cults and creeds, for separate interests and
+national boundaries, for patriotism and all the other _isms_; that we
+are all one in the basic meaning of existence; that there is an
+adjustment founded upon the principles of liberty and brotherhood, in
+which that which is good for the one is good for all; that this
+adjustment can only be attained by a reversal of the old form,
+personally and nationally--of thinking not of the self first in all
+things, but of the general good;
+
+Finally, the new social order of workmen, having come up through the
+blear and sickness of lies, has arrived at the high vantage which
+reveals that there is nothing so potent as a straight statement of fact,
+nothing so strategically the masterstroke.
+
+
+
+
+20
+
+COMMON CLAY BRICK
+
+
+Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a
+walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon
+we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A
+gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a
+half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the
+waves.... It had a fine gleam--a vivid wet red against the gravel greys.
+Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought
+of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.
+
+... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing
+of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had
+once seen on a winter's day--a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a
+narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet,
+alone, and now that it was dry--this was just a brick-red. It needed
+the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason
+for its appeal to our sense of beauty.
+
+There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no
+machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the
+age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in
+itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative
+strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient
+things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us
+as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them
+before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain
+thrilling familiarity--the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional
+passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.
+
+We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases
+and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the
+scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so
+that we repeat in wonder--"And this is the first time----" Something
+deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the
+profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and
+that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.
+
+For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of
+red from the pervading greys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other
+Shore--a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its
+point--and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a
+fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales
+for all this nearer stretch of shore, but its beauty is completed by the
+peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and
+the completing vine.
+
+Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which
+complete each other and suggest a third--the union of two to make one.
+Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the
+stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the
+trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace,
+the very quest of life.
+
+There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union
+of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of
+completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.
+
+We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter
+and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing
+third.
+
+Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its
+haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate
+green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought
+forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous paintings.
+Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or
+the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running
+water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human
+spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the
+lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in
+fatness)--but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the
+promise of the fruit. It was the globe again--the union of the strong
+and the fragile for a finer dimension of power--bow and cord, ship and
+sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine--yes, and that which
+surprised me at the beginning--that gleam of red in the wash of water
+upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the
+cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of
+beauty in a wet, worn brick.
+
+Firelight in a room is just the same thing--a grey stone fireplace with
+red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been
+a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a
+brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....
+
+Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative
+of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always
+occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is
+invariably safe and replete. There are a thousand analogies for every
+event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul.
+The plan is one.
+
+The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say,
+without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is
+the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and
+character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the
+faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit
+outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls
+to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of
+the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can
+arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy
+heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made
+clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It
+is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines
+the value of their expression of it.
+
+Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the
+real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression,
+but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training
+for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the
+ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of
+those who listen. When one awakens a soul interest, you may rely upon
+it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of
+uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to
+lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character
+of man or woman.
+
+The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure
+of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el
+dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational
+ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and
+bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient
+facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl--the rest is but
+following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic,
+only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago
+had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread
+along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys
+brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about
+constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out
+and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey
+pebble walk.
+
+We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling,
+setting the frames and laying the concrete foundation. The finishing
+was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk,
+but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand.
+The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind;
+moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.
+
+The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of
+shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches
+of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white.
+It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep,
+sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from
+the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement.
+To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops
+were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the
+least mark of the trowel.
+
+The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique
+round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening
+mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of
+the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed
+without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its
+length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain--all frames and shingles
+removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soil softening the border--the
+red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey--a walk
+that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces
+seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the
+thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite
+the same after that afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+21
+
+THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS
+
+
+One day at Chapel, neither the Abbot nor the Dakotan appeared. The
+Columbian had left us. I looked up to see two young girls and another
+there. One of the papers brought in that day was upon the joining of two
+rivers. Where they came together was a whirlpool, a tremendous vortex
+that hushed all surrounding Nature. In the lowlands that lay about the
+place of that mighty meeting, a deep verdure came, for the winds carried
+the spray from the vortex. Nature loved the sounds of that pouring
+together. From the whirlpool, where two met, one great river emerged,
+white-maned with rapids for a way--then broad and pure and still, so
+that only birds and poets could hear the harmony deep as life. From time
+to time it gave forth its tributaries, yet seemingly was undiminished.
+Always on, always one, carrying all, making all pure, through the silent
+places, past the great mountains--to the sea.
+
+It was not until I had read of this mating of waters that I realised the
+slightly different conditions in the Chapel, the young men not being
+there.
+
+... The strangest humility stole over me. It had become the
+life-theme--to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to
+the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how
+anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never
+been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a
+matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how
+women can accept the man-idea of things.
+
+The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have
+accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately
+responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the
+limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when
+man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have
+fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best
+the processes that have been brought to bear upon women--from the
+establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into
+Egypt.
+
+It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been
+allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted
+to be pleased according to his idea--and women, in accepting that, have
+prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring
+forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is
+possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to
+make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once
+betrays the first law of the growth to greatness--that of being true to
+one's self.
+
+The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred
+lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the
+very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of
+keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this
+conception.
+
+Would you like to know where man's ideas--man's plan of Conception--is
+most utterly outraged? _In the coming of Messiahs._ The Josephs are
+mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do
+neither with heights nor depths.
+
+One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a
+wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the
+sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would
+suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while
+directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has
+been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries
+has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of the miracles
+that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement
+and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the
+transition is on....
+
+The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of
+serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within
+her--submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are
+neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly
+submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream--indeed,
+the fruits of these dreams have come to be--but more often the heart is
+filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but
+the fire they burn with is red and not white.
+
+Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a
+roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of
+motherhood--and his words were wise and pure enough--that not one of the
+women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would
+have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many
+young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen,
+and to answer the dream....
+
+I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine
+elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When
+I thought that some time they would be mothers, it came with a rush of
+emotion--that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to
+make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years
+I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these;
+dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could
+not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great
+outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the
+things said that day are written here without quotations:
+
+... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the
+outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the
+orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and
+women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity--the
+handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl
+to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment
+upon the many--the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have
+not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have
+waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts
+knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.
+
+The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in
+aspiration--the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services
+of Romance. As a race we have only touched our lips to the cup of its
+beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what
+culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own
+great being--rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first
+beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of
+animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?
+
+I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with
+which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and
+heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of
+Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of
+the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world....
+And then we see the great stony fields of humanity--the potential mass
+in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are
+makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer
+world turns its eyes.
+
+... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking
+your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You
+know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of
+the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each
+other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the
+street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought was
+easily to be comprehended--that it had but to be spoken to be
+embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we
+were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and
+we were strong to answer any call.
+
+It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me
+so often and so strangely in your coming--but those mysteries within,
+those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all
+systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in
+aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch
+these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together--all
+her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of
+air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of
+unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for
+every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive
+principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because
+individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the
+day in Europe of late--the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have
+followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish
+these losses.
+
+Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature.
+This physical being of ours which the Old Mother has raised from the
+earth that a God might be built within it--even the beauty of this is
+not yet fulfilled--much less the powers of the mind which we have
+touched--much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest
+moments together so memorable.
+
+... You would be mothers--that is the highest of the arts. The making of
+books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men--that
+is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we
+labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts
+and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly
+at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us;
+suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their
+inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we
+have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails.
+Again and again we fail--that is the splendid unifying force, working
+upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods.
+Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to
+welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that
+the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind
+for any noble action--that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer
+any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In the
+summit of our strength, the voice begins to speak--the _Guru's_ voice.
+
+We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening
+surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely
+made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no
+part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in
+God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere
+bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little
+season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away.
+But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.
+
+... You would not do less than this to bring forth men--you who have the
+call.... You must learn the world--be well grounded in the world. You
+need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay--but you must have
+the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother--yet it is
+only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It
+is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose,
+the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His
+quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of
+makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.
+
+There is a _different_ love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface
+ecstasies--that the Old Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and
+colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if
+making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has
+touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the
+Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean
+is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous
+bewilderment of sex-opposites--different from all save the immortal
+romances.
+
+I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a
+suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have
+felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the
+weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening
+spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities
+of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a
+sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a
+thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the
+sepulchre rolled away.
+
+I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found
+the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind
+straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and
+lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and
+it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no respiration of
+the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me
+from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on
+that fairy slope.
+
+The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own
+receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not
+require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken
+us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here--in the deep
+gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light
+of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and
+pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed
+upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse
+and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not
+stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our
+physical sight.
+
+Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of
+burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or
+your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the
+cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up
+their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like
+the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in
+beautiful deeds?
+
+The willow burns with quiet meagre warmth, like a lamb led to slaughter,
+but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The
+oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in
+building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled
+hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not
+believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I
+lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I
+shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...."
+Each with its fragrance--the elm, the silentest and sweetest of all. The
+elm has forgotten her body in spreading her grace to the stars; the elm
+for aspiration, loving the starlight so well that she will not hide it
+from the ground; most beautiful of all, save the beech in winter, a
+swift and saintly passing of a noble life. The maple warms you in spite
+of herself, giving up her secrets which are not all clean--a lover of
+fatness, her shade too dense, a hater of winter, because she is bare,
+and the secret of all ugliness in her nudity. (The true tree-lover is
+never a stranger to the winter woods.)
+
+And the mothering beech, with her soft incense, her heart filling the
+room with warmth and light, her will to warm the world; the mothering
+beech, a healer and a shelterer, a lover like that Magdalen whose sin
+was loving much. She gives her body to Gods and men--and most sweetly to
+the fire, her passing naked and unashamed.
+
+The different love of Nature that the child knows instinctively; that
+young men and maidens forget in the heat of themselves--but that comes
+again to us if we grow decently older; in rock and thicket, in the
+voices of running water, in every recess of woodland and arch of
+shore--not the Pipes of Pan, but the mysteries of God, not sensuousness,
+but the awakening of a spirit that has slumbered--the illumination,
+sudden and splendid, _that all is One_--that Nature is the plane of
+manifestation for the infinite and perfect story of God; that Nature is
+the table which God has filled to overflowing--this is a suggestion, a
+beginning of the lifted love of Nature....
+
+If they beckon to you, the trees on the horizon (and God be with you if
+there are none); if they seem to be calling to you, do not fail them, do
+not wait too long. For surely that time will come when they will cease
+to call to your heart. They will not have changed, but you will have
+gone too far back among the spectres and illusions of detached things to
+know that they are calling. And be very sure you will never find the
+love of God in the eyes of passing men--if you have forgotten our
+Mother.
+
+... Yet Nature alone is but the lowliest of the three caskets. I would
+not have you miss a breath of her beauty--but upon and within it, I
+would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's
+House. The Coming to you.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that
+Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pass to the unprepared
+houses. They are mute--suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their
+faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature
+who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.
+
+... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a
+Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your
+heart is listening--unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest--the
+little things of life silenced, the passions of the self put away.
+
+There is beauty in the wilderness--the beauty of the Old Mother is there
+in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great
+passion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not
+integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be
+destroyed by the lustre of that which descends to you? Would you be a
+potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands--when you
+may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?
+
+Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her
+arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you
+know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?
+
+Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to
+add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom
+comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives
+you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he
+comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in
+his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know
+the world--so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in
+the brown study of Pan.
+
+This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will
+try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand
+between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is
+very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a
+God still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the
+shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover
+that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan
+is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which
+dares to be mother of souls.
+
+Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the
+haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How
+many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless
+eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and
+level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise--too wise for that.
+He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as
+the lusts of the flesh.
+
+You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives
+away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look
+again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as
+before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all
+the pull of the ground tells you that your _very thought of falling_ is
+a breath from the old shames--your dead, but as yet unburied heritage,
+from generations that learned the lie to self.
+
+You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not
+Nature--a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the
+cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such
+soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he
+says: "All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have
+dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and
+the throb of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must
+fall far, when you let go.
+
+... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you
+because you _dare_.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn
+down the ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood,
+the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious
+generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so
+surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it
+is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by,
+before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature,
+whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the
+purity of the saints.
+
+... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he
+is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all
+lessons--to wait. You must pass by all others who are not true to the
+dream. You must integrate your ideal of him--as you dream of the Shining
+One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the
+laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the
+dream, pass on--for though you travel together for years, at the end you
+will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no
+dreams--the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom
+another is waiting.
+
+... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you.
+There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness
+is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low
+earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration.
+... A whirlpool, a vortex--this is but the beginning of ecstasy.
+
+This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from
+the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative
+light. This is the highest mystery of Nature--all hitherto is background
+for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings
+through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the
+sun--such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains--and
+beyond them is the ocean of time and space.
+
+
+
+
+22
+
+MIRACLES
+
+
+From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on
+the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing
+in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia
+to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like
+the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the
+world can show is a battlefield of human beings.
+
+Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of
+force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to
+appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his
+powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is
+both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental
+matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature.
+Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos.
+The word _Cosmos_ means order, as stated once before.
+
+One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in
+building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on
+this bit of Lake-front three years ago--the frog-hollows, tiling, the
+wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded
+perversely--the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still
+sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this
+book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a
+house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I
+sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the
+approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a
+hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and
+possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came
+for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part.
+With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer
+him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different
+contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and
+look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light.
+After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with
+theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with
+another man's money,--standing alone, tormented with the thought of how
+little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank
+them for going away.
+
+In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into
+the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around
+the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent
+night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that
+gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found
+myself turning in pleasure to it--the thought would come that it wasn't
+really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used
+to go from the building and grounds then--cutting myself clear from it,
+as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled
+him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.
+
+I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members
+of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the
+future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went.
+I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living--and for pennies the
+hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation--one
+house after another through life--to accept money and call their work
+paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry--every stone is
+different--but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it
+from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid--nor the house
+paid for....
+
+One evening I went through the structure when all but the final
+finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it
+as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name;
+yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the
+fireplaces--finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by
+which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am
+unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length
+to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a
+stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake
+shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still--and
+presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what
+he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never
+hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house--a week or two more
+from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.
+
+The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that
+verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a
+human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I
+remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there
+by the fountain one night--mantilla, dark eyes and falling water. It
+was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the
+_patio_....
+
+And here was its northern replica--sunken area paved with gold-brown
+brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you
+could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and
+front doors. I wanted it so--a house to see through like an honest face.
+Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted
+it so.
+
+"When we move in----" one of the children began.
+
+I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't
+move in, we would....
+
+A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside
+his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build
+another (if he ever _had_ to do it again) without raising his voice;
+without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or
+the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if
+they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved
+in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my
+back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I
+arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite
+generations rather than build again.
+
+There is the order of the small man--a baneful thing in its way,
+sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which
+has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then
+there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling
+duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let
+that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.
+
+The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to
+the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon--the
+eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken
+the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a
+superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation.
+"The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and
+up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress.
+There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer.
+Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of
+disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]
+
+Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the
+following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case
+exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road
+to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must
+keep his mind clean; third, that he must begin to put his spiritual
+house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove
+faithful in the small things, first.
+
+I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here
+in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain,
+balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were
+large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine
+instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not
+seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were
+at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without
+apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing
+large quantities of work every day--for boys. Yet daily in their work, I
+was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but
+an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their
+minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a
+million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation
+of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and
+youth. This driving force is spiritual.
+
+In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is
+man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart
+six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships
+God best in his work. His work suffers if he misses worship one day in
+seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of
+devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality,
+as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the
+world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God,
+or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.
+
+I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the
+schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow
+before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all
+separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter
+as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something
+greater than himself--that he has said or sung or written or painted
+something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of
+training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it
+again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe
+and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have
+but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our
+use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and
+inimitable; that its expression _through us_ cannot be exactly
+reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become
+instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other
+can play.
+
+That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the
+pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after
+the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object
+is held in the hand. There is a higher vision--and the word
+_imagination_ expresses it almost as well as any other--by which the
+thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the
+whole.
+
+There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your
+utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give
+yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board.
+Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up
+from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.
+
+You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has
+ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone....
+You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of
+creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the
+poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain
+conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the
+finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre
+of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the
+beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy
+which gives life to all men and things.
+
+Every object and every man tells the same story with its different
+texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven
+in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The
+farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy;
+that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and
+pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and
+heart--the one great love story of the universe.
+
+Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the
+higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently--rising to
+superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired.
+Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training
+could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period--or
+in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.
+
+Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who
+show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be
+callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that
+they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and
+cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through
+them. I am in awe before them many times. The child that can see
+fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable
+Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] From _Midstream_.
+
+
+
+
+23
+
+MORE ABOUT ORDER
+
+
+The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself.
+In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the
+resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error
+lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the
+existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult
+life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.
+
+The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man
+lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last
+two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain
+and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no
+help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look
+at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will
+observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally
+inert--the ones who have to surmount themselves as well as their tasks,
+and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.
+
+In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour
+hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is
+allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours
+presents a picture of the purest tragedy.
+
+Two of the primary causes of human misery are competitive education of
+children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by
+mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I
+have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one
+whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error.
+All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to
+cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one entity, as
+it were.
+
+The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and
+again--from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired
+disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been
+a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor
+Aurelius--and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call
+Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more
+clearly and perfectly than any.
+
+A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast over night, but it requires
+thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We
+look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its
+worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are
+watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and
+in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the
+strife--immersed themselves again in the long night of war.
+
+But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are
+more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must
+still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest.
+The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands
+of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto
+ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good
+for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is
+in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.
+
+Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a competitive
+plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity.
+I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by
+heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in
+the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered
+this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind
+us--every day, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this
+baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars.
+The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can
+and giving only what he must--against every call, every fragrance, every
+flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring
+us nearer home as a race.
+
+Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied
+things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in
+material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the
+lie that we prosper by adding _things_ unto ourselves.... A certain
+automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within
+a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the
+maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a
+commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means,
+the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual
+lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of
+children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear--to
+say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built
+nothing.
+
+There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot,
+or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others
+screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and
+pluck it forth--eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have
+a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do
+again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of
+the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages
+could pay for these hells of routine.
+
+Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his
+individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And
+for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a
+marvel for efficiency.
+
+The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage
+here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down
+another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes
+who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since
+they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property--but
+the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than
+mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is
+never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task
+well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own
+centres of being, puts his enduring self in it--a self said to be
+fashioned not of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind.
+You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or
+friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes
+to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price--matter yields unto
+you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or
+the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You
+possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.
+
+I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought--and he
+didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but
+bark and green, shade and sun--a kind of twilight curtain dropped before
+his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.
+
+"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why, they're just stones----"
+
+I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his
+landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the
+bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance--that it was a
+challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient
+presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal
+with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction--the rest of
+his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a
+septic-tank where air and light must be excluded.... This man had
+another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I
+would point out merely that he did not truly own them.
+
+Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion
+with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any
+beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.
+
+I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of
+two distinct emotions--the first a wearing tension lest some one should
+come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I
+had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely
+evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that
+money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius
+for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent
+years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as
+life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it
+all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more
+designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I
+found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes
+for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing
+he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many
+decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that
+charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the
+making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by
+men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they
+were fine; then they received.
+
+It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when
+the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he
+realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand.
+Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a
+spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation
+of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the
+whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe
+and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing
+but jingle and tinkle and din.
+
+I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain
+slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the
+instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in
+every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and
+exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the
+genius of the machine. It answered, not in _tempo_ and volume alone, but
+in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young
+musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch
+the _Waldstein_ or the _Emperor_, and that I had now merely to
+punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....
+
+A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor
+cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not
+true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured
+objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by
+methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the
+motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played
+upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one
+hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to
+the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of
+manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and
+mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and
+more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and
+selling.
+
+Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness,
+break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices
+through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and
+acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable
+in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue
+for such productions, which is advertising.
+
+You will say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A
+people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and
+sated with inferior objects. The whole _art of life_ is identified with
+our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses
+and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current
+style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of
+stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the
+cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true
+appreciations--in clothing, house-building and furnishing--following the
+heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.
+
+We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the
+real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows
+that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily
+spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his
+name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter
+inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming
+an incentive of the many.
+
+There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful
+character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the
+man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our
+national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of
+each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the
+many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple
+theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling
+dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes,
+and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of
+the eternal things--just so long will we have war and governmental
+stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.
+
+
+
+
+24
+
+THE FRESH EYE
+
+
+Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as
+possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs
+our neighbours sing--this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that
+we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness
+to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as
+true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each
+man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit
+of pioneers to come into his own.
+
+A few years ago I passed for a square or two along the main avenue of a
+large city--a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the
+hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most
+hideous shades--the reds of blood and lust and decadence.
+
+"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.
+
+A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft. I saw something about
+America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't
+know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the
+season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans
+was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence
+of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to
+ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking
+and horror-bound peoples--bloody as the Balkans--because Trade had
+brought them in.
+
+These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain
+colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye
+that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not
+know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short
+steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a
+street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood.
+I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy
+with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency
+of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be
+there.
+
+He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a
+certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying
+set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward
+to the shoulders of the motorman; and from his figure my mind wandered
+to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon
+the _juice_ and upon the passing force of steam--through tunnels and
+trestles at this moment--driving trains and cars and ships around the
+world.
+
+It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this
+motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving
+passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each
+day--his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his
+faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos
+again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this
+motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The
+average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not
+too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the
+roads of production to those who are ready.
+
+Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding
+his trousers.
+
+They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual
+every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear
+white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that
+change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the
+more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer
+clothing winter and summer for months at a stretch. One must accept
+this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not
+want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its
+threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.
+
+... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the
+cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wide _W_ that a
+child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I
+suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and
+conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these
+things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the
+Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for
+us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we
+seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had
+we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the
+debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this
+good man should be shamed so.
+
+And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the
+tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season,
+widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the
+abdomen as from a tightened stem the next--these are the real
+obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is
+frank and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human
+beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If
+I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me
+do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the
+bringing up of children _not to revolt_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall
+man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he
+loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before
+your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be _alone_ is
+to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and
+warm.
+
+It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their
+freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see
+things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as
+they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker
+who brings up anything worthy, has done just this--reproduced the thing
+more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or
+because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute
+need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him.
+It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's
+work in the Chapel.
+
+Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of
+character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect
+of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time
+of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an
+important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play
+or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This
+is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial
+settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth--_white_ because
+it contains all colour--is not dominant and flaring enough for the
+wearied and plethoric eye.
+
+We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A
+writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the
+story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character,
+the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of
+fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes
+through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These
+forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our
+own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as
+it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion
+that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no
+matter how consummate we become as artists.
+
+It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his
+study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under
+London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk
+for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary
+grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a
+more perfect expression in words.
+
+In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all
+observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the
+work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of
+acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of
+character portrayal--the facility with which we are able to lose
+ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known
+delight when some one said, "You must _be_ that person when you are
+writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer
+through a book and presently begins _to do himself_. After that one goes
+over the early part of the book during which the character is being
+learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished
+conception."
+
+It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a
+shiftiness which must pass.
+
+The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is
+cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The
+expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near
+a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The
+instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because
+it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by
+actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells
+us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit
+of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the
+truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par
+with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal
+is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love
+of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle,
+Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the
+fiction sense--that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to
+enflesh their literary efforts in story form.
+
+This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors
+above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were
+interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the
+years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own
+minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the
+whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and
+more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind
+draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its
+expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and
+fictioning of any form is impossible.
+
+Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that
+charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to
+encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its
+centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and
+the actual.
+
+The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their
+inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely
+mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become
+more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form
+their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of
+the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task
+of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.
+
+I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way
+is first--all the great companions have taken that way at first.
+Solitude--that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism.
+The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of
+God--then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two
+worlds--that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings--and a time for
+great migratory flights.
+
+
+
+
+25
+
+THE CHOICE OF THE MANY
+
+
+A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it
+had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation--a patriotic
+meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be
+ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national
+integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new
+civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems
+divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly
+bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in
+themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material
+vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe
+gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their
+spines touched with death.
+
+The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and
+the like. It has been a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the
+larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it--as if they had
+been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and
+understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and
+conception _for them_, they find it mainly out of accord with things as
+they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build
+forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.
+
+This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us,
+the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their
+distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation
+is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his
+spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many
+or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to
+understand him better than their fathers.
+
+I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect
+significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as
+mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you--new
+thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic
+age.
+
+You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you
+long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it is here
+and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever
+divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the
+three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein
+the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset,
+are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no
+universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer
+you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you
+will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the
+lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a
+lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may
+live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that
+which is static is dead.
+
+There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of
+the time. Three-score-and-ten--that is but an evening camp in a vast
+continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour,
+but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone.
+Art--those who talk art in the temporal--have not begun to work. If they
+only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose
+lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived
+beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the
+illusion of one life being all.
+
+There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and
+science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks
+loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the
+universe. That thing known as _psychology_ taught to-day in colleges
+will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the
+preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can
+become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually
+changed into new forms.
+
+Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not
+change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as
+you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on
+the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing
+machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh
+is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and
+changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in
+your heart--that sleeping one--is dynamic with all that you have been.
+Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an
+immortal being. You may be workers in magic.
+
+Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does
+not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its
+dictates and learned its wants--its taste will change and leave you
+nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of
+the many is not the voice of God--it is the voice of the temporal and
+its destiny is swift mutation.
+
+Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that
+is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to
+see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us
+sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who
+have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country--have walked
+with God alone against the crowd--until they were given the power to
+master their way into authority.
+
+The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its
+choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.
+
+
+
+
+26
+
+THE ROSE CHAPTER
+
+
+I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became
+irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and
+old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a
+tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature--a white lid that had been on quite
+long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her
+talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot
+began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though
+outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of
+other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs
+and woodland places--of the gardens we would make presently.
+
+"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man,
+"I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and
+little beside--vines, of course. I know men who fall like this into the
+iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will
+have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in
+his front yard with unvarying resolution--oh, for many years. He knows
+just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with
+the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies.
+They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad--the single ones, dry and
+thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed
+place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful--born of evil
+thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear
+innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative
+effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him,
+and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.
+
+"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than
+the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care.
+Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that
+forgets to bloom--like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human.
+Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see
+deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."
+
+Which remarks were accepted without comment.
+
+"Again," the old man added, "some of the accepted things are not so far
+along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see
+it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were
+to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen
+anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is
+raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the
+whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in
+their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an
+exhalation that is like a love-potion--earthy things that ask so little,
+do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the
+bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance
+is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage
+is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency
+goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."
+
+"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.
+
+"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the
+voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their
+odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot
+express his gratitude for--like the mignonette. Their colouring and form
+warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each
+year--not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the
+way. Then I may betray a weakness of my own--and I am glad to--but I
+love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the
+white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of
+its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown
+like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has
+never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the
+lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can
+only be endured in my case from a distance."
+
+"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.
+
+"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me
+that people raise so many _just roses_. Here is a world by itself. There
+is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and
+saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and
+sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are
+roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are
+delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human
+heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for
+Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that
+one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so
+far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women
+of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, as thousands of
+other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past
+against which to measure their romances.
+
+"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and
+woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world--of
+all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at
+length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be
+veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits
+for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all
+great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since
+greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through
+expression. A great romance will out--through a child or a book or some
+mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One
+looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest
+deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of
+woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's
+arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his
+actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her
+energy that quickens his conceiving....
+
+"Roses--how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and
+women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of
+themselves? Do you think that the actual _hurt_ of their beauty--the
+restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their
+silent leaning over the rim of a vase--is nothing more than a product of
+soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as
+moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist
+before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has
+come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think
+as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like,
+that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic
+influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening--something that makes a
+flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.
+
+"... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have
+reached roses--have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they
+linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses.
+In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which
+has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the
+white to the pink roses--and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the
+search ever more passionate--until we begin to discover that which our
+hearts are searching for--not upon any plant but in ideal.
+
+"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about
+producing the flower--as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of
+the thought. At least we think so--as the universe is evolving to
+fulfil at last the full thought of God....
+
+"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes,
+until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy
+Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste
+as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him,
+and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his
+listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news
+of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the
+performance of the lesser ones.... But roses--so many by-paths, because
+roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell
+is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.
+
+"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens
+which are at the bottom. There are good greens--the green of young elms
+and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of
+yellow may be--and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The
+greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging--the
+water-colours--the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature
+brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the
+rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like
+ninety degrees of evolution--the full quarter of the circle that is
+similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect
+spine of man.
+
+"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or
+less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are
+laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These
+improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for
+instance, to represent all stages--roses that are specialising in their
+present growth, one might say, in form _or_ colour _or_ texture; but in
+the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our
+window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this
+distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but
+when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in
+little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of
+evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body,
+then a mind, then a soul--and growth in the dimension of soul unifies
+and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who
+see--that the plan is one....
+
+"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved
+according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper
+reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the
+path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture,
+the sun began to paint a new beauty upon them--not the pink that is a
+diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl.
+The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a
+white base.
+
+"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral.
+We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is
+steadily upward--always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our
+valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a
+transition--an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.
+
+"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The
+greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose
+with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it.
+There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this
+particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have
+fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that
+have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort
+of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland
+maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and
+colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost
+in the same illusion....
+
+"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a
+few spots of red on the outer petals--like the persistent adhering
+taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys--they are the
+best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty.
+Like some saintly lives--they seem to have come all but the last of the
+ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the
+flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in
+due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have
+turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas
+is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of
+all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products.
+In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they
+are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in
+their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own
+heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the
+Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the
+nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the
+inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the _fragrance itself_ to
+our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the
+fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose,
+on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a
+rain."
+
+
+
+
+27
+
+LETTERS
+
+
+Outside, as I have said, it was cracking cold. We talked thirstily by
+the big fire, discussed the perfect yellows in Nature--symbols of purest
+aspiration--and the honest browns that come to the sunlight-gold from
+service and wear--the yellow-brown of clustered honey bees, of the
+Sannysin robe, of the purple martin's breast. We were thirsting for
+Spring before the fire. The heart of man swells and buds like a tree. He
+waits for Spring like all living things. The first months of winter are
+full of zest and joy, but the last becomes intolerable. The little girl
+had not let us forget at all, and so we were yearning a full month too
+soon.
+
+"I know a bit of woods," said the Abbot. "It is only two miles away. A
+creek runs through it, and there are hills all 'round--lots of hickory
+and elm and beech. There's one beech woods off by itself. Maples and
+chestnuts are there, too, and many little cedars. There is a log house
+in the centre, and right near it a Spring----"
+
+He was talking like an old saint would talk of the Promised Land.
+
+"You are breaking our hearts," I said.
+
+"The hills are dry, so you can go early," he went on. "The cattle have
+been there in season, as long as I can remember, so there are little
+open meadows like lawns. The creek is never dry, and the Spring near the
+log house never runs dry. I could go there now----"
+
+"So could I," said the little girl.
+
+They almost trapped me. I stirred in the chair, and remembered there was
+but an hour or two of daylight left in the afternoon.... Besides there
+was a desk covered with letters.... People ask problems of their own,
+having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the
+writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never
+descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the
+work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who
+said, "I have written you several letters, but never mailed them."
+
+"Why?" I would ask.
+
+Answers to this question summed into the reason that they found
+themselves saying such personal things that they were afraid I would
+smile or be bored.... Letters are regarded as a shining profit now, a
+fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has
+shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters
+that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too
+fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest
+to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who
+have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their
+minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike
+aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons
+disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man
+is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied
+with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism,
+the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not
+criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do
+not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers
+they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.
+
+There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things
+so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean
+autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to
+make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have _habits_. There seems
+to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money,
+and who ask such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a
+publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?"
+"Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a
+first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"
+
+I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of
+producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of
+meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet,
+again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much
+money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in
+fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and
+written books that brought much money.
+
+But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the
+driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to
+one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a
+letter on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big
+finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably
+restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all
+truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as
+well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered
+world called Society--winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain
+and shore. They were very miserable and they seemed to sense the
+existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there
+work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world
+existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the
+final page or two--that most winning quality of the younger generation.
+
+... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world.
+Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is
+not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all
+that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being
+established against American materialism along the Western coast. There
+is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art
+and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a
+conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in
+the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand
+of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.
+
+All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is
+becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of
+tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the
+entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that
+is _living spirit_ is being driven westward before gross Matter--westward
+as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.
+
+The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In
+California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be
+builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and
+splendid idealisation.
+
+But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes
+lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter
+day, was a communication from San Francisco--the last to me of several
+documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The
+documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They
+reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above
+flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the
+brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society
+reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from
+a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a
+purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one
+approach the super-mental area by the force of mentality alone.
+
+But I found _the turning_ in these documents with alarm; that the
+purpose divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black
+business--known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black
+before the Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism.
+I recalled that psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this
+letter:
+
+"I have received some of your early papers and plans, and thank you. I
+want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse
+running through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read--to
+play to commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough
+without bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces.
+They will work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin
+will result. For these forces which you show in operation are the real
+vitalities of man, which used other than in the higher schemes of
+life--call in the bigger devils for man to cope with. When one begins to
+use the dimension of the inner life, before the lower phases of the self
+are mastered, he becomes a peril to himself and to others. I feel that I
+do not need to be explicit to psychologists. I want to be on record as
+strongly urging you to be sure that the animal is caged before you loose
+the angel. Also that I have a conviction that there are ten times too
+many tradesmen in the world now; and that office-efficiency is not the
+kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I know you are in the way
+of real work, and that's why I venture to show my point of view; and
+please believe me energetic only toward the final good of the receptive
+surface you have set out to impress."
+
+
+
+
+28
+
+THE ABBOT DEPARTS
+
+
+One day in March, the Abbot said:
+
+"You know that woods I was telling you about?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, my father bought it the other day."
+
+... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that
+had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the
+Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was
+natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was
+cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and
+beech--clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men--with thorn and dogwood
+growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane.
+The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft
+and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven
+their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a
+half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would
+have named an estate after--or a province.
+
+Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men
+and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I
+turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either
+side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too
+much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was
+there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest
+impression. God bless the fodder--but what a price to pay. They had
+burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under
+that sacred cattle-path.
+
+Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of
+cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and
+hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and
+the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The _story_ of the
+struggle for life on Mars came to me--how the only water that remains in
+that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the
+canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply
+for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.
+
+It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer
+of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I
+hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.
+
+"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.
+
+"Use it for a pasture."
+
+"Isn't going to cut it--any of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's _No_ and
+_Yes_. I took hope.
+
+"Is it thin enough to pasture?"
+
+"The main piece is. Better come and see."
+
+A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the
+wan light of March outside.
+
+"There's everything there--a virgin beech wood--a few acres of
+second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers--then the stream
+and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."
+
+"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.
+
+"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have
+thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw
+the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."
+
+There was a healing in that _never_.... The Abbot was not the kind to
+ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and
+had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father
+had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that
+we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the
+rubber-boots.
+
+"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the
+far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."
+
+He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey,
+clouds yellowish-grey and watery.
+
+We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a
+stream running across--a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still
+held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not
+get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an
+oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to
+punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for
+thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain
+and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers.
+For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with
+melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the
+afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters,
+presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at
+times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first
+time I saw the Amphitheatre.
+
+We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and
+looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream
+winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of
+the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire
+bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed
+and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside
+me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent
+branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like
+kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a
+sisterhood--the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and
+through the naked branches, a log cabin.
+
+An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had
+made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the
+cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched
+it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a
+fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the
+moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many
+decades--built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and
+floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded
+upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the
+north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new
+roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming
+there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a
+forest.
+
+"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.
+
+"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.
+
+"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there
+it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of
+woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in
+your hand----"
+
+We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about
+the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different
+angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main
+timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and
+ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the
+Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.
+
+"It won't be so another Spring," he said.
+
+Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the
+future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were
+torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.
+
+"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I
+repeated.
+
+"No."
+
+There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling
+dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town
+came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every
+odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what
+the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said
+to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it
+was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white
+man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment,
+but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do
+not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must
+depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting
+glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high.
+The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though
+chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for
+the edge of the Lake where we belonged.
+
+... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We
+were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their
+highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their
+orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes.
+I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on
+choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day,
+and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown,
+formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the
+highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have
+forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its
+demands and making its values known, having long since called unto
+itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high
+northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths
+of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches
+gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too
+slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women
+of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no
+holier place than a beech-wood....
+
+The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us--put in the fireplace and
+the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent
+there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days
+of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost
+intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a
+place some day for many of the great little books of all time--the place
+for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The
+Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream,
+too.
+
+... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only
+temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to
+me quite coldly:
+
+"They have decided to make me go back to school----"
+
+"Sit down," I answered.
+
+As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of
+sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at
+first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic;
+full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the
+worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you
+somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount.
+He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the
+moment all its ravishing greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One
+sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse
+takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced,
+but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not
+slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.
+
+The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand
+on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white
+breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others.
+The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once--and away.... He is but
+fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful
+things have happened to him.
+
+They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early
+and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from
+habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is
+new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he
+was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal
+of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never
+runs.
+
+But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former
+teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I
+asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they
+did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The
+appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was
+for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the
+story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I
+would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he
+was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable
+him to get himself out.
+
+My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop
+an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told
+them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and
+steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of
+order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one
+of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and
+ordered plane.
+
+The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I
+used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely
+answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples
+that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of
+Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted
+one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he
+shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and
+must try once more.
+
+It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy,
+believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against
+his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the
+next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I
+cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a
+kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked
+hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was
+really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly
+afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured
+me:
+
+"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm
+in your Study."
+
+There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up
+in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth
+from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the
+books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should
+really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to
+the Abbot:
+
+"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into
+competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through
+the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come.
+You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy--live
+it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an
+honour--a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready.
+Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might.
+Feel us behind you--rooting strong--and hurry back."
+
+
+
+
+29
+
+THE DAKOTAN
+
+
+It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large
+bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he
+had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over
+grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's
+shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns
+that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use.
+Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the
+joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about
+finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The
+Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit.
+He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two,
+or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.
+
+But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too
+fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them
+until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a
+desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot
+touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it
+with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly
+over the writer's words.
+
+The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless
+gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few
+pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left
+the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there.
+I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he
+looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for
+days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like
+Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the
+fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the
+rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of
+the master of Walden in his work.
+
+The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original
+thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the
+big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness
+that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent
+the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the
+sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to
+this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the
+companions of hardship and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the
+last summer he has moved about field and wood and shore, between hours
+of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have
+found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons
+together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs
+follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:
+
+     "Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its
+     energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and
+     light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness
+     and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and
+     soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the
+     first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of
+     Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our
+     wildest imagination.
+
+     "Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things.
+     As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on
+     the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in
+     higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most
+     marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as
+     yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over _telepathy_ is
+     merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.
+
+     "It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we
+     know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and
+     scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that
+     is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a
+     thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to
+     higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of
+     shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among
+     fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in
+     proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration.
+     Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to
+     give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of
+     his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth
+     of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling
+     chatter. It is only those few who have come _to know_,
+     through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and
+     draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that
+     become gifted with all-knowing counsels.
+
+     "There is a sound born from every thought, action, or
+     aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound
+     not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive
+     enough to receive the impression. From the collective,
+     intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or
+     working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which
+     is to be _felt_ as a fine singing tingle by all in the
+     vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an
+     exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be
+     felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all
+     lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the
+     voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and
+     known before it is uttered; all minds are one.
+
+     "... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing,
+     conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves
+     a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is
+     something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet
+     the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy
+     notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are
+     impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic,
+     spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they
+     can to the vibrations of peace and harmony--to the _Sounds_,
+     which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious
+     of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide
+     that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and
+     study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate
+     from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case
+     has not to do with intellect and reason, but with
+     sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire
+     intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness,
+     and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless
+     and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.
+
+     "Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening,
+     inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has
+     anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into
+     the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?
+
+     "... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are
+     low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one
+     strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to
+     the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the
+     West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of
+     sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the
+     magic pronunciation of _Aum_, _Amitabha_, _Allah_, of certain
+     chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws
+     a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the
+     injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are
+     surrounded by....
+
+     "Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken
+     rhythm, would call the _Vina_, that Oriental harp-string of
+     the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But _Vina's_ magic cry
+     at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The
+     voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of
+     thunder, the wind in the pines--these are sounds that bring
+     one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of
+     the Universe. These are the voice of _kung_, 'the great tone'
+     in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle
+     note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern
+     China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening
+     raptly to _kung_, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho
+     rushing by.' One longs to be the intimate of such
+     meditations."
+
+
+
+
+30
+
+THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)
+
+
+I first heard of the Dakotan[3] at a time when I was not quite so
+interested in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country
+wrote me, and sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially,
+though the work was good. She tried again, and I took the later
+manuscript to bed with me, one night when I was "lifted out," as the
+mason said. It did not work as designed. Instead of dropping off on the
+first page, I tossed for hours, and a letter asking him to come to
+Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the morning.
+
+He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was
+established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since
+he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a
+childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants
+the popular market; the quality of his _bent_ precludes that for the
+present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America
+spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight
+line between the thought and the utterance.
+
+A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the
+sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a
+man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and
+the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the
+run of thought, the better the work.
+
+One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a
+continual changing and refining production about our truest friends--the
+same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest--that quickens
+us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we
+must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must
+always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and
+do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in
+our breast--it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have
+_arrived somewhere_--in profession, in trade, in world-standing--know
+that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is
+dissolute.
+
+I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you
+to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you
+to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for
+continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the
+thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well
+already--arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we
+did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is
+meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It
+may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I
+may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the
+land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with
+many voices."
+
+Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I
+think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought
+me:
+
+     "This is the latest and most complete of many under-water
+     dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I
+     learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine
+     are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way
+     back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has
+     been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in
+     consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to
+     tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked
+     fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to
+     Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to
+     this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at
+     the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the
+     explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.
+
+     "Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the
+     condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and
+     memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our
+     bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into
+     certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or
+     soul--conditions that are invoking to great reaches of
+     consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too
+     thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present
+     physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to
+     interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually
+     embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has
+     not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner
+     man is ever a hushed whisper.
+
+     "The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the
+     immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I
+     brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself
+     into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost
+     akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in
+     consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is
+     wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the
+     blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and
+     hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the
+     ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may
+     be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red
+     corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.
+
+     "It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A
+     bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every
+     recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I
+     used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain.
+     It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing
+     away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state
+     of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of,
+     as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind,
+     and the rain beating upon the roof....
+
+     "There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail
+     stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it
+     upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed....
+     It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low
+     monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving,
+     lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro.
+     It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank,
+     lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The
+     manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a
+     consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I
+     merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact,
+     during the dream I had hardly a sense of _being_, except
+     through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were
+     horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark,
+     a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion
+     from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I
+     seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do,
+     since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of
+     consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of
+     the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of
+     self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent,
+     except when a larger form instilled me with fear.
+
+     "My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings,
+     in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and
+     instinct--everything--so that I actually lived, in infinitely
+     dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.
+
+     "All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life
+     that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering;
+     I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the
+     unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a
+     dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem
+     to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through
+     the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan
+     filter of grey. It was light shining through water, a light
+     which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was
+     intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were
+     sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob,
+     boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what
+     it was to cringe.
+
+     "And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream
+     exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write
+     I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our
+     greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain,
+     these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's
+     waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it
+     appears to me from this distance:
+
+     "As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into
+     the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing,
+     undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed,
+     beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the
+     depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay
+     there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a
+     torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon
+     me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to
+     move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the
+     dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect
+     hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of
+     temperature and vibration to feel the need even of
+     nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was
+     a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to
+     move again had not extraneous influences affected me after
+     seeming ages had passed.
+
+     "The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about
+     me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of
+     grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it,
+     or rather feel it--a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings
+     of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were
+     festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed
+     out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of
+     whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the
+     bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe
+     and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and
+     contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey
+     manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with
+     hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing
+     the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.
+
+     "Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly
+     phosphorescent lights, which winked on and off at intervals
+     as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an
+     instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up
+     the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they
+     feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the
+     bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain
+     permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at
+     intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of
+     many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of
+     blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in
+     the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders
+     that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths
+     and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They
+     were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams without the
+     searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first
+     felt, and they did not bother me.
+
+     "... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept
+     me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by
+     one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the
+     long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the
+     whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey
+     world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the
+     gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low
+     life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not
+     been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of
+     Fear. I shall never forget it--the Fear of the Black Bottoms.
+
+     "There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and
+     the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with
+     it. In the midst of a kind of freezing paralysis, the
+     struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of
+     locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then
+     there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre
+     against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital
+     part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment,
+     so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow.
+     The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the
+     terror to escape.
+
+     "Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of
+     Danger I had started _forward_. There had been no forward nor
+     backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a
+     dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was
+     thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away
+     from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre
+     of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking
+     forward and always pointed away from the danger--protected to
+     the last.
+
+     "As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body
+     sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as
+     possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the
+     bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of
+     organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect,
+     protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear
+     increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the
+     same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and
+     easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon
+     the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the
+     dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that
+     the rudiments of organs of locomotion were begun. And they
+     came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side
+     was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition,
+     reasoning power--everything--was generated and fostered by
+     Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our
+     first overcoming of Inertia.
+
+     "I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray;
+     and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was
+     clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was
+     gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appetite, body
+     bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me,
+     the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but
+     literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their
+     bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often
+     the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....
+
+     "There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born
+     of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive
+     surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born
+     from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall
+     always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and
+     rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower
+     pitch.
+
+     "Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a
+     stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the
+     bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows,
+     sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky
+     bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and
+     instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that
+     passed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on
+     and on forever. Repletion would never have come to the
+     Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.
+
+     "I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths.
+     About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were
+     extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the
+     ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began
+     the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It
+     was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible--the winking and waving
+     of the blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless
+     prey, a sudden extinguishing of the light, devouring--then
+     the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason
+     existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless
+     things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a
+     thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.
+
+     "... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all
+     unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement
+     takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then
+     there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life
+     is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement
+     is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the
+     Law of life.
+
+     "I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining
+     In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of
+     water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about
+     my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold
+     consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest
+     of that day and for long afterward."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] H. A. Sturtzel.
+
+
+
+
+31
+
+THE HILL ROCKS
+
+
+Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was
+thinking this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over
+the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and
+explainers--back to the sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there
+that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme,
+Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Froebel, Swedenborg. We delight in the few great
+and isolated names of Greece and Rome that are above style. We turn
+continually to the perpetual fountains of India, but seldom to Egypt.
+
+We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at
+every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are
+stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and
+precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the
+strange splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its chief
+significance is that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a
+Master.
+
+The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has
+been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the
+misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh,
+instead of refuting many of them--yet the New Testament stands highest
+above all hands pointing heavenward.
+
+In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that
+accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove
+him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and
+the Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier
+Arrival, that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage
+and the passion of Jesus.
+
+Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical
+generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the
+novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us
+that the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as
+Luther's. Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and
+penetrative gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise
+to declare that it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus.
+Still the man matters less than his influence. His story is emphatically
+in the world; the spirit of it lives above all dogma and vulgarity,
+even above nationalism. It is the breath of Brotherhood and Compassion.
+It is nearer to us and less complex than the story of the Buddha.
+
+Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world.
+The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of
+first importance in the education of children is the institution of an
+ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. Children
+become starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake
+ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in
+our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these
+things:
+
+"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."
+
+When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at
+once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest,
+one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a
+reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to
+clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the
+reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of
+one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.
+
+We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter,
+and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about
+the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had
+poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were
+always different from other children. They suffered more than the others
+about them, because they were more sensitive.
+
+They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child--misunderstanding;
+often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they
+could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew
+apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think
+of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect
+analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with
+vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the
+maiden who sustained France--her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It
+was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies
+that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little
+while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden
+did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the
+centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when
+the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly
+enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the
+road to Emmaus--the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and
+finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He
+had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us
+by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"
+
+... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found
+work to do--work that people could not understand. The people invariably
+thought there must be a trick about the giving--that the eager one
+wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious
+workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and
+invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often
+they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.
+
+First of all, they were honest--that was the hill-rock. Such men come to
+make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves.
+They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they
+stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand
+that they had something good to give--those closest to them, not always
+seeing it first....
+
+You couldn't buy them--that was first established; then they turned the
+energies of their lives outward instead of in. The _something_ immortal
+about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found
+their particular _something_ to do. They found their work--the one thing
+that tested their own inimitable powers--and that, of course, proved
+the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not
+memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The
+world-man wants to give something to his people--the best he has from
+his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction--the most important
+in any life--to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old
+formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely
+new--the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.
+
+Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can
+happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The
+best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The
+man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea
+of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally
+valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally
+realises _its own religion_. The greatest wrong that has been done us by
+past generations is the detachment of work and religion--setting off the
+Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days
+for the progress of the animal.
+
+All good work is happiness--ask any man who has found his work. He is at
+peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire.
+Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be
+well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full
+powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving
+forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe
+inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper
+source of things----not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A
+man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the
+tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.
+
+Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that
+drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse _in_ to self,
+he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source,
+nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle
+and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward,
+he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their
+energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying
+capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the
+work he does.
+
+A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full
+before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according
+to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the
+vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.
+
+There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments,
+but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned
+it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The
+handle of an axe is a poem.
+
+We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as
+men, found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother
+Earth who turns to her God for light and power, and from that pure
+impregnation, brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all
+destruction and greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values
+of woods and coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would
+perceive that they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is
+service; that they have no relation to great individual fortunes. These
+are the free gifts from our Mother. As good workmen we would realise
+that greed and competition pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all
+that is insane within us.
+
+The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in
+Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat,
+and sometimes brings the smart to the eyes--is the quality of men who
+have found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the
+conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow
+their thoughts in action afterward, as water follows the curve of a
+basin. They go after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter
+passages to India; they sense the new power in the world; their faces
+are turned to the East for the rising of new stars. Often they die to
+make us see, but others spring to finish their work. Our hearts burn
+within us when we speak of their work.
+
+
+
+
+32
+
+ASSEMBLY OF PARTS
+
+
+Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must
+close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book--each
+a different book. Fascination attends the work. I assure you a teacher
+gets more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every
+professional man should call for his own. A man's work in the world
+should be judged by his constructive contacts with the young minds about
+him. A man should learn the inspiration which comes in service for the
+great Abstraction, the many, from which there is no answer; but he can
+only become powerful and unerring by trying out the results of his
+offerings face to face with his own group. It should be as natural for a
+matured man to gather his mental and spiritual familiars about him as it
+is for him to become the head of a domestic establishment.
+
+There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a little from ledger and
+margin, to the faces of the young about them--those who have come for
+the wages of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on
+stone, as great givers to the public. The public will not take these
+things personally; the public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who
+have nothing but money to give away cannot hope to receive other than
+calculating looks and laughter that rings with derision.
+
+The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted
+nationally and municipally. The business of man is to produce something.
+The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's
+goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a
+man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is
+the same with a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing
+transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a
+proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and
+a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he
+conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a
+church every seventh day.
+
+The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story;
+the figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular
+story if done well.
+
+The time is not far off, except to those whose eyes are dim, when
+countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense--in the sense of
+realising that the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not
+even electrified matter, but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure
+of the Fatherland. The development of youth is the first work of man;
+the highest ideal may be answered first hand. Also through the
+development of the young, the father best puts on his own wisdom and
+rectitude.
+
+The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is
+pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming
+in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten
+in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to
+supply a great variety of attractions. There is that _hum_ in the room.
+It is not dissonance. The child is encouraged to be himself and express
+himself; never to impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose
+himself in the objects that draw him most deeply.
+
+I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who
+worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a
+hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the
+education of man. I have not read this of Froebel's work. I wanted to do
+these studies my own way, but I know from what I have seen of
+kindergartens, and what teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the
+work is true--that "The Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it
+have lived a hundred years otherwise.
+
+The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught.
+The process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the
+deeper powers, their organisation and direction. At the end of the year,
+the child is sent into the first grade, where the barbaric process of
+competitive education and brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as
+it was in Froebel's time.... A kindergarten teacher told me in that low
+intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:
+
+"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently
+by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are
+wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast.
+Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand
+the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed
+children. The little dreamers--the sensitive ones--are hurt and altered
+for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You
+do not know how we have suffered."
+
+Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten
+teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because
+they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very
+little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great
+ideal that is carried out through their first year were continued
+through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with
+serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer
+place to be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in
+Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something
+of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I
+am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest
+way to write anything is as you would tell it:
+
+"... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The
+world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to
+the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the
+Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy--philosophers have called it
+by many names, but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in
+Spirit, since God is spirit.
+
+"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed,
+but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world
+is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one--that
+the parts of matter must be assembled into a whole--that a replica must
+be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men
+are identified with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth,
+a pulling apart instead of together.
+
+"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This
+is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present
+planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves
+with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars--all have to do with
+the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do
+with the assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is
+good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the
+many--_the instant_ we leave the part and conceive the whole.
+
+"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that
+the plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers--voices of
+men in every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and
+meaning, that the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music
+in place--but the players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own
+little parts. The baton of the leader is lifted, but they do not hear.
+In their self-promulgation they have not yet turned as one to the
+conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its highest, yet the hour has
+struck for the lift of harmony.
+
+"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual
+plan all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to
+be, is there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has
+touched and taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the
+parts into matter, making his dream come true. Thus have come into the
+world our treasures. We preserve them--every gift from a spiritual
+source. Often we preserve them (until they are fully understood) against
+our will. The mere matter-models break down and are lost, for matter
+changes endlessly until it is immortalised, as our bodies must be
+through the refinement of spiritual union.
+
+"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have
+made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished
+plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see--step by step--the
+song into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and
+the saints have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the
+pictures of the dream somehow in matter--and their own bodies often to
+martyrdom....
+
+"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest
+disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an
+inspiration to every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts;
+above, the plan as a whole and the missing parts. Man stands
+between--the first creature to realise that there is an above, as well
+as a below. All creatures beneath man are driven; they look down. Man
+alone has looked up; man has raised himself erect and may take what he
+will from the spiritual source to electrify his progress. Man becomes
+significant the moment he realises that the plan is not for self, but
+for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.
+
+"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more.
+There are endless analogies. Thousands before me have written and sung
+and told the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in
+these wrecking days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And
+what has this to do with education?
+
+"Everything. The brain sees but the part. The development of brain will
+never bring to child or man the conception of the spiritual plan. There
+is a man to come for every missing part. Each man, as he develops, is
+more and more a specialist. These missing parts shall be taken down from
+spirit and put into matter by men whose intrinsic gifts are developed to
+contact them. Thus have come the great poems and inventions so far, the
+splendid sacrifices of men, and all renunciation for the healing of the
+nations.
+
+"I would first find the work for the child. The finer the child the
+easier this part of the task. Then I would develop the child to turn to
+a spiritual source for his inspiration--his expectation to a spiritual
+source for every good and perfect thing. The dream is there; the other
+half of the circle is to produce the dream in matter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Education is thus religion--but not the man-idea of religion. It has
+nothing to do with creeds or cults, with affirmations or observances. It
+has to do with establishing connection with the sources of power, and
+bringing the energy down into the performance of constructive work in
+matter. Religion isn't a feeling of piety or devoutness; it is action.
+Spirituality is intellect inspired.
+
+"The mountain is broad at the base only. There are many paths upward.
+These paths are far apart only at the base. On the shoulder of the
+mountain we hear the voices of those who have taken the other paths.
+Still higher, we meet. The Apex is a point; the plan is one.
+
+"I would teach the young mind to find his own voice, his own part, his
+own message. It is there above him. True training is the refinement, the
+preparing of a surface fine enough to receive his part. That is the
+inspiration. The out-breath--the right hand of the process--is action,
+making a model in matter of the thing received.
+
+"All training that does not encourage the child to look into the Unseen
+for his power, not only holds, but draws him to the commonness of the
+herds.
+
+"... Many men to-day can believe in angels who cannot believe in
+fairies; but the child who sees the changes of light in the lowliest
+shadows, whose fancy is filled with little figures of the conservers and
+colourers of nature, shall in good time see the angels--and one of that
+host shall come forward (which is more important and to the point)
+bringing a task for the child to do.
+
+"I say to the children here: 'I do not see the things you do, and in
+that I am your inferior. They shut the doors upon me when I was little,
+not meaning to, but the world always does that. That fineness of seeing
+went out from my eyes, but it is so good a thing that I do not want you
+to lose it. And always I am ready to listen, when you tell me what you
+have seen.'"
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
+
+MIDSTREAM
+
+... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to
+remain in American literature:
+
+_Boston Transcript_: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that
+Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in
+literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that
+will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in
+_Huckleberry Finn_.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced
+its full length. One wonders whether the interest, the skill, the
+general worth of it, the things it has to report of all life, as well as
+the one life, do not entitle _Midstream_ to the very long life that is
+enjoyed only by the very best of books.
+
+
+_San Francisco Argonaut_: Read the book. It is autobiography in its
+perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of
+god and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.
+
+
+_Springfield Republican_: It is difficult to think of any other young
+American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the
+"market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own
+terms of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation,
+_Midstream_, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story
+of regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will
+he go?
+
+
+Mary Fanton Roberts in _The Craftsman_: Beside the stature of this book,
+the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with
+a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude.
+There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a
+draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and
+bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep,
+penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's
+words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a
+language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a
+quickened life.
+
+
+Ida Gilbert Myers in _Washington Star_: Courage backs this revelation.
+The gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr.
+Comfort's rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is
+a tremendous thing--the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.
+
+
+George Soule in _The Little Review_: Here is a man's life laid
+absolutely bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has
+done it before--this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made
+uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more
+important than truth--these will not read _Midstream_ through, but
+others will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility
+of Mr. Comfort's frankness.
+
+
+Edwin Markham in _Hearst's Magazine_: Will Levington Comfort, a novelist
+of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with
+passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over
+words. He has been a wandering foot--familiar with many strands; he has
+known shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He
+tells it all without vaunt, relating his experience to the large
+meanings of life for all men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of
+which we come, to whose great deep we return.
+
+
+ _12mo., Net, $1.25_
+
+
+
+
+    +-------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                             |
+    |                                                 |
+    | Typographical errors corrected in the text:     |
+    |                                                 |
+    | Page  59  Ile changed to He                     |
+    | Page  81  quiesence changed to quiescence       |
+    | Page 132  blurr changed to blur                 |
+    | Page 161  unforgetable changed to unforgettable |
+    | Page 243  became changed to become              |
+    | Page 261  spirtual changed to spiritual         |
+    | Page 262  posessions changed to possessions     |
+    | Page 285  apear changed to appear               |
+    | Page 287  blossome changed to blossoms          |
+    | Page 288  enviroment changed to environment     |
+    +-------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort
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