[2]FromMidstream.
[2]FromMidstream.
The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself. In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.
The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally inert—the ones who have tosurmount themselves as well as their tasks, and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.
In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours presents a picture of the purest tragedy.
Two of the primary causes of human misery are competitive education of children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error. All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one entity, as it were.
The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and again—from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor Aurelius—and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more clearly and perfectly than any.
A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast overnight, but it requires thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the strife—immersed themselves again in the long night of war.
But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest. The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.
Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a competitive plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity. I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind us—everyday, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars. The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can and giving only what he must—against every call, every fragrance, every flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring us nearer home as a race.
Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the lie that we prosper by addingthingsunto ourselves.... A certain automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means, the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear—to say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built nothing.
There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot, or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steelto the machines and pluck it forth—eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages could pay for these hells of routine.
Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a marvel for efficiency.
The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property—but the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.
A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own centres of being, puts his enduring self in it—a self said to be fashioned notof clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind. You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price—matter yields unto you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.
I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought—and he didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but bark and green, shade and sun—a kind of twilight curtain dropped before his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.
"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.
"Why?"
"Why, they're just stones——"
I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance—that it was a challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction—the rest of his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a septic-tank where air and light must beexcluded.... This man had another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I would point out merely that he did not truly own them.
Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.
I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of two distinct emotions—the first a wearing tension lest some one should come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thingthat charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they were fine; then they received.
It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand. Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing but jingle and tinkle and din.
I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the genius of the machine. It answered, not intempoand volume alone, but in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch theWaldsteinor theEmperor, and that I had now merely to punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....
A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and selling.
Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness, break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue for such productions, which is advertising.
You will say that people want these things, orthey would not buy. A people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and sated with inferior objects. The wholeart of lifeis identified with our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true appreciations—in clothing, house-building and furnishing—following the heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.
We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming an incentive of the many.
There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of each child, and fittingthe task to it; so long as trade masters the many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes, and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of the eternal things—just so long will we have war and governmental stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.
Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs our neighbours sing—this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit of pioneers to come into his own.
A few years ago I passed for a square or two along the main avenue of a large city—a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most hideous shades—the reds of blood and lust and decadence.
"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.
A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft.I saw something about America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking and horror-bound peoples—bloody as the Balkans—because Trade had brought them in.
These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood. I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be there.
He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward to the shoulders of themotorman; and from his figure my mind wandered to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon thejuiceand upon the passing force of steam—through tunnels and trestles at this moment—driving trains and cars and ships around the world.
It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each day—his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the roads of production to those who are ready.
Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding his trousers.
They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer clothing winter and summer formonths at a stretch. One must accept this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.
... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wideWthat a child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this good man should be shamed so.
And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season, widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the abdomen as from a tightened stem the next—these are the real obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is frankand clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the bringing up of childrennot to revolt.
I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever bealoneis to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and warm.
It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker who brings up anything worthy, has done just this—reproduced the thing more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him. It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's work in the Chapel.
Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth—whitebecause it contains all colour—is not dominant and flaring enough for the wearied and plethoric eye.
We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character, the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no matter how consummate we become as artists.
It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a more perfect expression in words.
In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of character portrayal—the facility with which we are able to lose ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known delight when some one said, "You mustbethat person when you are writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer through a book and presently beginsto do himself. After that one goes over the early part of the book during which the character is being learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished conception."
It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a shiftiness which must pass.
The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passingin as near a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the fiction sense—that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to enflesh their literary efforts in story form.
This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind draws increasingly deep from a sourcethat is inexhaustible, and its expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and fictioning of any form is impossible.
Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and the actual.
The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.
I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way is first—all the great companions have taken that way at first. Solitude—that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism. The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of God—then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two worlds—that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings—and a time for great migratory flights.
A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation—a patriotic meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their spines touched with death.
The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and the like. It has beena true joy to watch the young minds grasp the larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it—as if they had been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and conceptionfor them, they find it mainly out of accord with things as they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.
This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us, the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to understand him better than their fathers.
I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you—new thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic age.
You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; itis here and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset, are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that which is static is dead.
There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of the time. Three-score-and-ten—that is but an evening camp in a vast continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour, but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone. Art—those who talk art in the temporal—have not begun to work. If they only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the illusion of one life being all.
There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the universe. That thing known aspsychologytaught to-day in colleges will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually changed into new forms.
Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in your heart—that sleeping one—is dynamic with all that you have been. Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an immortal being. You may be workers in magic.
Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its dictates and learned its wants—its taste willchange and leave you nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of the many is not the voice of God—it is the voice of the temporal and its destiny is swift mutation.
Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country—have walked with God alone against the crowd—until they were given the power to master their way into authority.
The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.
I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature—a white lid that had been on quite long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs and woodland places—of the gardens we would make presently.
"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man, "I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and little beside—vines, of course. I know men who falllike this into the iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in his front yard with unvarying resolution—oh, for many years. He knows just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies. They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad—the single ones, dry and thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful—born of evil thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him, and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.
"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care. Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that forgets to bloom—like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human. Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."
Which remarks were accepted without comment.
"Again," the old man added, "some of theaccepted things are not so far along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an exhalation that is like a love-potion—earthy things that ask so little, do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."
"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.
"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot express his gratitude for—like the mignonette. Their colouring and form warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each year—not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the way. Then I maybetray a weakness of my own—and I am glad to—but I love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can only be endured in my case from a distance."
"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.
"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me that people raise so manyjust roses. Here is a world by itself. There is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, asthousands of other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past against which to measure their romances.
"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world—of all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through expression. A great romance will out—through a child or a book or some mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her energy that quickens his conceiving....
"Roses—how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of themselves? Do you think that the actualhurtoftheir beauty—the restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their silent leaning over the rim of a vase—is nothing more than a product of soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like, that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening—something that makes a flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.
" ... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have reached roses—have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses. In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the white to the pink roses—and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the search ever more passionate—until we begin to discover that which our hearts are searching for—not upon any plant but in ideal.
"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about producing the flower—as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of thethought. At least we think so—as the universe is evolving to fulfil at last the full thought of God....
"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes, until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him, and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the performance of the lesser ones.... But roses—so many by-paths, because roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.
"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens which are at the bottom. There are good greens—the green of young elms and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of yellow may be—and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging—the water-colours—the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like ninety degreesof evolution—the full quarter of the circle that is similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect spine of man.
"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for instance, to represent all stages—roses that are specialising in their present growth, one might say, in formorcolourortexture; but in the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body, then a mind, then a soul—and growth in the dimension of soul unifies and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who see—that the plan is one....
"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture, the sun beganto paint a new beauty upon them—not the pink that is a diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl. The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a white base.
"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral. We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is steadily upward—always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a transition—an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.
"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it. There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost in the same illusion....
"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a few spots of red on the outerpetals—like the persistent adhering taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys—they are the best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty. Like some saintly lives—they seem to have come all but the last of the ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products. In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the inner vial, but the golden teas have brought thefragrance itselfto our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose, on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a rain."