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 regardthem 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,differentgreen-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 thelittle 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 theirefficiencybrought 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 theDevlin 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 oldMary.... 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."
As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain matters of charity as we used to regardthem 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,differentgreen-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 thelittle 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 theirefficiencybrought 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 theDevlin 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 oldMary.... 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 asto 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 andabomination, 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 isefficiencyeven 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 andlast-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 thatmore 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 agentsknew 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 peopleare 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 shoutmad-dogand 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 theendeavour: 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.
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 inthe 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 istheirhour. 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 onewho 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 ofstaying downa 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 readthe 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 andmadness, 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 Sundayafter 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 refinedbetween 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 queerthings 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 thebrainwhich told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was going wrong and thatheshould 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."
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 queerthings 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 thebrainwhich told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was going wrong and thatheshould 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."
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 thedesk 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."
ButImissed 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 firstobjection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work, published in the book calledMidstream.
"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 andmanners. 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 turnoutwardin 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 ofself-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 valuablea 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 aboutafterward, 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 theartists 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 saynothing 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 thechildren 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.