It was determined that the children should try the country-town school that Spring from April to June. This school was said to be of exceptional quality, and I talked with the master, a good man. In fact, there was none but the general causes for criticism in this establishment—the same things I found amiss in city schools. The children accepted the situation with a philosophy of obedience which should have taught the race many things it does not yet know. The journey was considerable for them twice daily in warming weather; and from little things I heard from time to time, words dropped with no idea of rebellion, I was reminded of the dark drama of my own "Education," written explicitly enough elsewhere and which I am glad to forget.
The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems are not structurally changed—facility and convenience, speedof transit, mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain, but more obvious, the science of covering ground....
I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men cared to litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of additional assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the child had been taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about it (the book being designed to show the way to others) that struck me as avarice of the most violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for money and baronial holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the flesh are innocent compared to the sins of mind. This book and the tragic child form to my idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient and the obscene.
The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the long past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:
One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.
I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage aged sixteen, a cruel youngmonster filled with rebellion and immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife, designed to smother that which was real in the heart.
Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children, having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut the loaf evenly—to every one his equal part. The first crime was favoritism....
I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be bright; and yet, I found her all caught inrigidities of the brain, tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place; the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a tithe of its tissue.
The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.
The boy next had not done well in school. The worddreamerwas designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me—the mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of almost phenomenal reproduction—and yet he had listened sleepily. Of course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual, in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded schools.
I had been one who thought my own work most important—to the exclusion even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere—tension wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had he only known it.
The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands, regard the bow of shore-line from the East window—the Other Shore—for a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard lessons resulting from breaking thepoint of the day's work before sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.
However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood—the backward and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere—in short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all life—vibration. He arose and started up the bank.
"Don't go yet," the little girl called.
"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."
There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was Summer. The smell of the land was there—the perfume of the Old Mother herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose—the blend of all that springs into being.
"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she smells like atea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant, but the breath of all—as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like mignonette—not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but when the wind brings it."
He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly glorified in her morning veil.
"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not yours until you express them. And the thingsyouexpress, as I expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can do it."
She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.
The Old Man forgot her in a moment.
That was the real beginning.
Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again) had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other, but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference, however. I had no fewergoodmornings than formerly; and yet, any heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged there.
She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:
"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves as below. It might happen that in a few years—this relation might be changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one. I sit in the midst of you—telling you from day to day of the things I have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan. My firstyears here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days, for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in relation to the long life—the importance only of one bead on the endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight moment—that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned to tell."
I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent generations didnot possess, and from the absence of which much deformity and sorrow has come to be.
The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face—a mistake of meaning impossible.
Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul—if the expression can be forgiven.
I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in relationto one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis, and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house closes upon the growing child—that more and more as the years draw on, the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are given to utter remains unexpressed.
I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles and the words of even a child significant.
I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening genius is the thing that has made immortal—shoemakers, blacksmiths and the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from thepast. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.
He was a still boy—the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the affairs of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued me from his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with another lad during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew no nearer to acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the evening I would see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the sense that his regard was somehow different, I believe, did impress me vaguely. It all happened in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I remember his "hello," cheerful but contained, as I would ride by. He was always still as a gull, and seemed natural with the dusk upon him.... One day his father said to me:
"I have to buy everything you write for him."
"Well, well," said I.
I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward, because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him over to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all that I had and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he was seven or eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort that awakened him. He had it read to him several times, but his own reading picked up at that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study does under driving interest. Presently he was out after the star books on his own hook. He suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and that night I got my first look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It was like some magnetic hand upon my breast. I could not speak. Every time I shut my eyes afterward I saw that bright gold jewel afar in the dark. We talked.... Presently I heard that he hated school, but this did not come from him. The fact is, I heard little or nothing from him.
This generation behind us—at least, the few I have met and loved—is not made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to wait. It is most convincing, to have events cleanup a fact which you misunderstood; to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any glibness, but leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He did not come to the Study unless called for. The little girl brought in word from him from time to time, and the little girl's mother, and the boy's father—a very worthy man. I heard again that he was not doing well in school. I knew he was significant, very much so, having met the real boy on star-matters. I knew that the trouble was they were making him look down at school, when he wanted to look up. His parents came over to dinner one day, and I said:
"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."
It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at that time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little girl's education on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me even then that my own time was rather well filled. Neither his father nor mother enthused, and I heard no more from the subject for many days. Meeting The Abbot finally, I asked him what of school.
"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."
"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said—about you coming to me for a time?"
"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know what it would cost."
I told him it wouldn't cost anything. Therewas a chance to talk with his father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still suffering weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the Study. It seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it after an hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of weather and country.
"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner each day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to deal with so many."
"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.
It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.
"That's why I want him," said I.
"But the thing is, we don't want him—a——"
"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come true—even if they are little ones——"
"Yes."
I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations, without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his relatives. Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only touched me on terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived in my heart, and those whowere searching my books to find out were in the main only the more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by not asking for anything in the way of money.
However, the thing came to be.
My first idea was to take him alone—the little girl coming in the morning with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had been accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both. I sat down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there was no sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his eyes sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at first some sort of recognition that I was talking—but none came, neither nod of acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They said as he passed the house farther along the Shore after leaving the Study, that his head was bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with years.
I tried afresh each day—feared that I was not reaching him. I told him the things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some of the things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I known enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but couldn't get a visible result. He was writing little things for me at this time and, though I detected something in the work more than heshowed me, sitting opposite in the Study, his writing was turgid and unlit—like one playing on an instrument he did not understand; indeed, it was like a man talking in his sleep. At the end of one of the talks within the first week, at wit's end as to what I was accomplishing, I said:
"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."
I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me—it came back like a phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days later—just to be sure. The result was the same.
I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his belongings, when called upon to do somethingwith his hands for another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind. One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces them.
However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little, the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving—that he could grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the ground—that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant, however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters of fact and technicality.
Finding that he listened so well—that it was merely one of the inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me—I, of course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should say to him until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first, but that passed. Presently it occurred to me that things were happening in the Study with the boy, that the little girl could ill afford to miss; and also that he would feel more at ease if I could divide my attention upon him with another, so I rearranged her plans somewhat, and there were two.
As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I related certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely from a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak authoritatively, merely as one adding certain phases I had found interesting of an illimitable subject. The next day he slipped in alone and a bit early, his "hello" hushed. I looked up and he said, almost trembling:
"I had a wonderful night."
The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst of great happenings.
"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.
It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.
His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called his paper—
A VOICE THROUGH A LENSSome people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream. I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy containing the nebular theory, and another that told about the planetary chain.The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory, but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical form but in another—the first time I have ever lost my physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes still on.As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold. As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the eye-piece. AsI looked around the heavens to find the great spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the way. Follow me."I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not making any indication of steps, but the close connection of the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This no doubt is a complicated affair to you.""Yes.""Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any clearer."I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was covered with animals of every description—a mass, a chaos of animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in battle, the next two showed the development of these men—gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did not see.I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I heard the voice again:"I suppose you are still amazed.""Yes.""Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills, also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I heard the voice again:"You must go now, tell the people what yousaw, and some other night you will see the globe of spirituality more closely."I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about the seventh globe some time again.
A VOICE THROUGH A LENS
Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream. I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy containing the nebular theory, and another that told about the planetary chain.
The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory, but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical form but in another—the first time I have ever lost my physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes still on.
As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...
I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold. As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the eye-piece. AsI looked around the heavens to find the great spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the way. Follow me."
I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not making any indication of steps, but the close connection of the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This no doubt is a complicated affair to you."
"Yes."
"Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any clearer."
I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was covered with animals of every description—a mass, a chaos of animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in battle, the next two showed the development of these men—gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did not see.
I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I heard the voice again:
"I suppose you are still amazed."
"Yes."
"Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."
When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills, also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I heard the voice again:
"You must go now, tell the people what yousaw, and some other night you will see the globe of spirituality more closely."
I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about the seventh globe some time again.
The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:
"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it. She's the noblest girl I know."
That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to me at the time and set me to thinking.
"How old is she?"
"Seventeen."
"What is she interested in?"
"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."
"You might ask her to come."
I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the end of a week he remarked:
"She is coming."
It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the lane together.... She took a seat by the door—she takes it still, the same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell back upon the theme of all themes to me—a man's work, the meaning of it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered the ultimate heresy—that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and religion are the same at the top;that the nearer one reaches the top, the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and integrating the life that lasts.
I have said this before in this book—in other books. I may say it again. It is the truth to me—truth that the world is in need of. I am sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is production. Handling the production of others in some cases is production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.
The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own early essay classes. Old friends were here again—Introduction, Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where they would make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her work was spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the teachers, that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for their ideas to authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change the entire order and impulse of their craft.
She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not penetrated it. I was afraidto open the throttle anywhere, lest she break and drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment after she was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.
"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.
Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty. We had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to expect and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness and impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he returned it to me.
"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."
When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger." There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The Valley-Road Girl's discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful sense.
The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about Fichte. The old Germanis greatly loved and revered in this Study. He set us free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a portion of one of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the Universe." The next day I read her paper—and there was a beam in it.
I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set me clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their work, in the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two papers—held the substance of the whole matter—stumbled upon as usual. We had a grand time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his positions, writing to his countrymen—a wanderer, an awakened soul. And this brought us the hosts of great ones—the Burned Ones and their exaltations—George Fox and the Maid of Domremy—the everlasting spirit behind and above mortal affairs—the poor impotency of wood-fire to quench such immortality. Her eyes gleamed—and all our hearts burned.
"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the skies. All things that are done—let them alone. The undone things challenge us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions which have not yet found substance—is alreadyprepared for the workmen of to-day to bring into matter—all great poems and inventions for the good of the world. They must gleam into being through our minds. The mind of some workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened as yet; the sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake. Inertia is always of matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the light. When the shutters of the mind are opened and the grey appears, he will arise and, looking forth, will discover his work.
"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the great,the impossibletasks. But the mind must be entered by the Light—the heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."
That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was not an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that my task with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with The Abbot—that he was dynamic within and required only the developed instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real self through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we all deeply missed her presence from the Study.
Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she brought me the following which told the story in her own words of something she had met:
WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDRENTry to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with me the things I am struggling to explain.I like to look back at those times when everything to me was new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to school.There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul. The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came to learn.At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was accused of copying;that was the first wound. How I would have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is trusted.At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends. Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is hard for such a one to love his neighbour.The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing well that the teacher would praise his perfectreflection. Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.Unless the school can trust children, show them that they should also be interested in their less fortunate school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A child had much better remain at home, a simple but whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and wise books.
WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN
Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with me the things I am struggling to explain.
I like to look back at those times when everything to me was new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to school.
There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul. The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came to learn.
At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was accused of copying;that was the first wound. How I would have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is trusted.
At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends. Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is hard for such a one to love his neighbour.
The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.
The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing well that the teacher would praise his perfectreflection. Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.
Unless the school can trust children, show them that they should also be interested in their less fortunate school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A child had much better remain at home, a simple but whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and wise books.
... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes. This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender and wise: