MAY EVENINGA 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 ofthe 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 beapplied 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.
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 ofthe 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 beapplied 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.
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 coversfor 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 asshe 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 todinner, 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 environmentto 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 togetMill 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, areall 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. Solitaryconfinement 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 ExistingThings (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 thesheerintellects 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.
"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. Shesat 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 thatdisgracedMr. 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 Ireallywanted to write about this morning was the goodness of being alive here in winter.
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 thatdisgracedMr. 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 Ireallywanted 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, fadesout 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 theirownwork 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 bigfor 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 wereshaped 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."
" ... 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 herbrown 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?
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 herbrown 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. Icould 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.
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. Icould 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 whoknows 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 anyoldthing.
What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has stood in the same placefor 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.
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 bedroomsstrung on a balcony under a roof of glass, the brick-pavedpatiobelow 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 oncesaid 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 twicea 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 streamwas 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 wasalluninteresting 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. Theypoint—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 forwhat 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-arrangementaccording 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.Thatdid 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 herface 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 visionflickering 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 searchamong 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 reviewof 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 andgracious 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 hisvision 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 hasdone 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.