Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the waves.... It had a fine gleam—a vivid wet red against the gravel greys. Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.
... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had once seen on a winter's day—a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet, alone, and now that it was dry—this was just abrick-red. It needed the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason for its appeal to our sense of beauty.
There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain thrilling familiarity—the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.
We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so that we repeat in wonder—"And this is the first time——" Something deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.
For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of red from the pervadinggreys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other Shore—a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its point—and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales for all this nearer stretch of shore, but its beauty is completed by the peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and the completing vine.
Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which complete each other and suggest a third—the union of two to make one. Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace, the very quest of life.
There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.
We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing third.
Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought forth later some small reproductions of a number of famouspaintings. Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in fatness)—but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the promise of the fruit. It was the globe again—the union of the strong and the fragile for a finer dimension of power—bow and cord, ship and sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine—yes, and that which surprised me at the beginning—that gleam of red in the wash of water upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of beauty in a wet, worn brick.
Firelight in a room is just the same thing—a grey stone fireplace with red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....
Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is invariably safe andreplete. There are a thousand analogies for every event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul. The plan is one.
The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say, without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines the value of their expression of it.
Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression, but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of those who listen. When oneawakens a soul interest, you may rely upon it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character of man or woman.
The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl—the rest is but following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic, only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.
Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey pebble walk.
We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling, setting the frames and layingthe concrete foundation. The finishing was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk, but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand. The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind; moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.
The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white. It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep, sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement. To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the least mark of the trowel.
The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain—all frames and shingles removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soilsoftening the border—the red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey—a walk that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite the same after that afternoon.
One day at Chapel, neither the Abbot nor the Dakotan appeared. The Columbian had left us. I looked up to see two young girls and another there. One of the papers brought in that day was upon the joining of two rivers. Where they came together was a whirlpool, a tremendous vortex that hushed all surrounding Nature. In the lowlands that lay about the place of that mighty meeting, a deep verdure came, for the winds carried the spray from the vortex. Nature loved the sounds of that pouring together. From the whirlpool, where two met, one great river emerged, white-maned with rapids for a way—then broad and pure and still, so that only birds and poets could hear the harmony deep as life. From time to time it gave forth its tributaries, yet seemingly was undiminished. Always on, always one, carrying all, making all pure, through the silent places, past the great mountains—to the sea.
It was not until I had read of this mating of waters that I realised the slightly different conditions in the Chapel, the young men not being there.
... The strangest humility stole over me. It had become the life-theme—to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how women can accept the man-idea of things.
The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best the processes that have been brought to bear upon women—from the establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into Egypt.
It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted to be pleased according to his idea—and women,in accepting that, have prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once betrays the first law of the growth to greatness—that of being true to one's self.
The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this conception.
Would you like to know where man's ideas—man's plan of Conception—is most utterly outraged?In the coming of Messiahs.The Josephs are mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do neither with heights nor depths.
One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one ofthe miracles that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the transition is on....
The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within her—submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream—indeed, the fruits of these dreams have come to be—but more often the heart is filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but the fire they burn with is red and not white.
Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of motherhood—and his words were wise and pure enough—that not one of the women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen, and to answer the dream....
I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When I thought that some time they would be mothers,it came with a rush of emotion—that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these; dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the things said that day are written here without quotations:
... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity—the handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment upon the many—the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.
The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in aspiration—the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services of Romance. As a race we have only touched ourlips to the cup of its beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own great being—rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?
I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world.... And then we see the great stony fields of humanity—the potential mass in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer world turns its eyes.
... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought waseasily to be comprehended—that it had but to be spoken to be embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and we were strong to answer any call.
It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me so often and so strangely in your coming—but those mysteries within, those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together—all her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the day in Europe of late—the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish these losses.
Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature. This physical being ofours which the Old Mother has raised from the earth that a God might be built within it—even the beauty of this is not yet fulfilled—much less the powers of the mind which we have touched—much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest moments together so memorable.
... You would be mothers—that is the highest of the arts. The making of books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men—that is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us; suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails. Again and again we fail—that is the splendid unifying force, working upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods. Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind for any noble action—that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In thesummit of our strength, the voice begins to speak—theGuru'svoice.
We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away. But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.
... You would not do less than this to bring forth men—you who have the call.... You must learn the world—be well grounded in the world. You need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay—but you must have the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother—yet it is only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose, the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.
There is adifferentlove of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface ecstasies—that the OldMother was never so beautiful, her contours and colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous bewilderment of sex-opposites—different from all save the immortal romances.
I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the sepulchre rolled away.
I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was norespiration of the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on that fairy slope.
The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here—in the deep gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our physical sight.
Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in beautiful deeds?
The willow burns with quiet meagre warmth, like a lamb led to slaughter, but with innocencefeigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...." Each with its fragrance—the elm, the silentest and sweetest of all. The elm has forgotten her body in spreading her grace to the stars; the elm for aspiration, loving the starlight so well that she will not hide it from the ground; most beautiful of all, save the beech in winter, a swift and saintly passing of a noble life. The maple warms you in spite of herself, giving up her secrets which are not all clean—a lover of fatness, her shade too dense, a hater of winter, because she is bare, and the secret of all ugliness in her nudity. (The true tree-lover is never a stranger to the winter woods.)
And the mothering beech, with her soft incense, her heart filling the room with warmth and light, her will to warm the world; the mothering beech, a healer and a shelterer, a lover like that Magdalen whose sin was loving much. She gives her body to Gods and men—and most sweetly to the fire, her passing naked and unashamed.
The different love of Nature that the childknows instinctively; that young men and maidens forget in the heat of themselves—but that comes again to us if we grow decently older; in rock and thicket, in the voices of running water, in every recess of woodland and arch of shore—not the Pipes of Pan, but the mysteries of God, not sensuousness, but the awakening of a spirit that has slumbered—the illumination, sudden and splendid,that all is One—that Nature is the plane of manifestation for the infinite and perfect story of God; that Nature is the table which God has filled to overflowing—this is a suggestion, a beginning of the lifted love of Nature....
If they beckon to you, the trees on the horizon (and God be with you if there are none); if they seem to be calling to you, do not fail them, do not wait too long. For surely that time will come when they will cease to call to your heart. They will not have changed, but you will have gone too far back among the spectres and illusions of detached things to know that they are calling. And be very sure you will never find the love of God in the eyes of passing men—if you have forgotten our Mother.
... Yet Nature alone is but the lowliest of the three caskets. I would not have you miss a breath of her beauty—but upon and within it, I would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's House. The Coming toyou.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pass to the unprepared houses. They are mute—suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.
... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your heart is listening—unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest—the little things of life silenced, the passions of the self put away.
There is beauty in the wilderness—the beauty of the Old Mother is there in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great passion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be destroyed by the lustre of that which descends to you? Would you be a potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands—when you may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?
Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?
Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know the world—so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in the brown study of Pan.
This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a God still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which dares to be mother of souls.
Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless eyes and handsthat fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that. He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as the lusts of the flesh.
You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all the pull of the ground tells you that yourvery thought of fallingis a breath from the old shames—your dead, but as yet unburied heritage, from generations that learned the lie to self.
You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not Nature—a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he says: "All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and the throb of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must fall far, when you let go.
... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you because youdare.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn down the ancient and mouldering churches.You do not require the blood, the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by, before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature, whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the purity of the saints.
... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all lessons—to wait. You must pass by all others who are not true to the dream. You must integrate your ideal of him—as you dream of the Shining One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the dream, pass on—for though you travel together for years, at the end you will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no dreams—the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom another is waiting.
... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you. There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration.... A whirlpool, a vortex—this is but the beginning of ecstasy.
This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative light. This is the highest mystery of Nature—all hitherto is background for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the sun—such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains—and beyond them is the ocean of time and space.
From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the world can show is a battlefield of human beings.
Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature. Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos. The wordCosmosmeans order, as stated once before.
One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago—the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely—the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part. With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light. After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with another man's money,—standing alone, tormented with the thought of howlittle money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank them for going away.
In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found myself turning in pleasure to it—the thought would come that it wasn't really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used to go from the building and grounds then—cutting myself clear from it, as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.
I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went. I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living—and for pennies the hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation—one house after another through life—to accept money and call their work paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry—every stone is different—but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed itfrom his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid—nor the house paid for....
One evening I went through the structure when all but the final finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name; yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the fireplaces—finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still—and presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house—a week or two more from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.
The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there by the fountain one night—mantilla, darkeyes and falling water. It was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to thepatio....
And here was its northern replica—sunken area paved with gold-brown brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and front doors. I wanted it so—a house to see through like an honest face. Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted it so.
"When we move in——" one of the children began.
I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't move in, we would....
A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build another (if he everhadto do it again) without raising his voice; without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite generations rather than build again.
There is the order of the small man—a baneful thing in its way, sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.
The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon—the eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation. "The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress. There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer. Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]
Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must keep his mind clean;third, that he must begin to put his spiritual house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove faithful in the small things, first.
I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain, balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing large quantities of work every day—for boys. Yet daily in their work, I was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and youth. This driving force is spiritual.
In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships God best in his work. Hiswork suffers if he misses worship one day in seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality, as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God, or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.
I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something greater than himself—that he has said or sung or written or painted something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and inimitable; that its expressionthrough uscannot be exactly reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other can play.
That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object is held in the hand. There is a higher vision—and the wordimaginationexpresses it almost as well as any other—by which the thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the whole.
There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board. Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.
You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone.... You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the beauty of it is determinedby its instrumentation of the driving energy which gives life to all men and things.
Every object and every man tells the same story with its different texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy; that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and heart—the one great love story of the universe.
Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently—rising to superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired. Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period—or in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.
Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through them. I am in awebefore them many times. The child that can see fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.