14THE ARTIST UNLEASHED
THE ARTIST UNLEASHED
The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories. Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be prepared.
There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of consciousness—before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated experience are open to his every-day working mind.That may really be what sumptuous artistic equipment is—the capacity to open up the old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.
Certainly intellect alone will never make a great drama of life and love, yet action and romance of the present hour draw hard upon one's present life training and the faculties and tastes of his immediate culture—actual brain possession and the ordering thereof. A child can portray superbly well some ancient imprint upon the Soul, even the passages of his own initiations through earth, water, air and fire, his brain not conscious of the real nature of what is coming forth; yet, the same child cannot put the cohering line through a series of episodes occurring under his own notice. Something of this mental grasp is necessary to make the artful effect required in a short tale. The child's mind, in the first place, is trained to listen and interpret the experiences of the larger consciousness; in the second set of conditions, he is forced to rely upon actual brain tissue which requires the training and culture of the years.
Art is composition. The farther you go, the finer the tools. It is difficult to train the fingers to intricate tricks of weaving, or the brain to sortand place the facts and colours and surprises of a present-day narrative or tale, but the soul may be called upon to express through the narrow temples of an awakened child its cosmic understanding, its ordered firmament.
Decades of observation and reporting; firm and verified actuality of knowledge and opinion; to these, added experience and the excellence of order—such is the training of the intellectual artist who times his production to his own generations. He pays the price in pain and subjection to the things that are; he knows well the meaning of labour; often, though he may still laugh as an artist, he has forgotten how to laugh as a man.
My desk here is covered with papers and poems of a beauty this intellectual artist cannot reach, of a freedom he can never know, until he lifts the torch of his consciousness out of and above the brain, making that serve quite as his knees bend and serve. Thinking of these things to-day, the door of the Study opened and the Little Girl gave me her work. She writes things of the larger consciousness without effort, but finds it hard and wearing to narrate the immediate matters of life. To her, the fine short story of the present hour is the great accomplishment, the ideal she is working toward.
With another she goes often to the cities—rambling among the rooming-houses, cheaper restaurants and mills. She means to work in themills soon—to forget herself and forget us for a time, to be with the harder-lucked girls whom she loves with thrilling passion. She has brought home from these little adventures wonderful stories of the patience and the laughter and the heroism crowding like hidden sacred presences about the duller lives. She brings a humour to the telling of the divine secrets of the poor—the clutching pang for food, the soldier going, his baby coming, the tortured spine, the stunted, the darkened, the wasted—an irresistible divinity about it all—pain impermanent, joy enduring. Back of the lacking eyes and leaking lives, she sees wonders that Zola never saw, that none can see with mere intelligence, that none can dream, who sees only the here and now, who has not learned to laugh at the so-called injustices of men, who cannot see the greater order to come because the present chaos is so devastating.
One may report minutiæ of torments, mass the items of degradation and bring forth a great document of the underworld—but these are mere foundations. The Builders bring the dream, they live the hope, they open the long-road consciousness, they substantiate their visions of better days, bring order and coherence to all the splendid toil of the intellectualist; they raise their edifice uponallthat is done.... Here is the Little Girl's work of to-day's writing:
Meditation
In the night the Master came down to a woman who lay sad and sleepless in a dark house. He came so near that she felt his holy radiance. Her soul breathed; her body ceased to tremble; she felt within his sacred circle. The Master smiled and said:
"Why do you not sleep?"
The woman answered, "I am carried away by thoughts that will not hush. Night after night I lie here so bitterly close to old dreams. I realise that they are not worthy, but my brain is full of them."
The Master smiled again. "There is a way to compel the silence of the brain."
"I have not found it," said the woman.
"Learn to be the soul," the Master said. He suggested a way to begin—then was gone.
The rest of that night the woman thought of his words. Deeper and deeper his words sank into her heart. When morning came, a happiness brooded within; she dressed quickly and went out.... Back of her little house rose the golden brown hills. She climbed, and at the top of the nearest, sat down. The peace and purity and fragrance of the sun-steeped hills filled her soul. For a long time she thought in silence, then slipping off her loose white sandals, said: "I begin with the grass. Yes, I begin with myfeet.... How wonderful you are—so ready to obey, to give your service at any time! What wouldhappen if you carried me other than my will? Supposing some day I should be walking fast to the house of my beloved, when you suddenly took me the other way!"
She laughed, and added: "You stay with me all my life, and little by little are carrying me up the shining path to the Father's house. And yet—how strange! I am not you.... And my knees, how wonderful and willing—all limber and full of life—helping me in all ways to do all things—bending gently when I bow in holy communion, expressing joy through free, easy movements, mute, yet strong before pain! There is nothing more wonderful in the world than you. Yet—I am not my knees.
"And you, old heart," she added. "You have endured the keenest pain; you have loved and given yourself, have hated and become black only through pain to whiten again—old heart of many rendings—until all life was tragedy, and you almost ceased to beat. Little heart, sanctuary of the soul—room forhisrest.... Yet I am not the heart!
"And the white throat in which the lotus unfolds its mystic petals of light—I am not the throat!... And the mind, stream for the soul's fulfilment—listener, runner, interpreter of light—mate of the soul in all things, ever ready, sparkling with the inner fire,—I amnotthe mind. You can hurt me no longer. I amfree!"
The woman sitting alone upon the hilltop, paused again. "What am I?" she almost cried.
It was as though the hills, the air and the rising sun joined her in the answer—"I Am, ... Longer than the living flame leaps within,I Am. Longer than sun and planets radiate light,I Am. Longer than worlds give birth to form,I Am. I am one with the rocks and the sea, one with the warmth and light, one with the earth, one with Humanity.
"I am Humanity.I Am."
It is only when the Little Girl brings in a bit of fiction that we remember her years. The brain that even now can polish a detached incident, or clip into firing-form a bit of humour of the street, cannot as yet order the narrative to a culminating effect. She is in her brain, which is only fourteen, struggling with the matters of time and space, wherein only lie pain and bewilderment.
Art is long. The training of the hand and intellect requires the years—but not the labour, not the agony, not the mad strain supposed to prepare one for an artistic career by those who believe mental equipment to be all.... The key to this whole discussion is the fact that the brain can be developed more in a year through inner awakening than in a decade by the usual methods of external impacts alone.... The ideal education is the balancing of the without with the within—the tallying of the world without withthe world within—the same old story of the kingdom without clearing its correspondences with the kingdom within.
The Little Girl's ideal is to do great stories. They challenge her by their very difficulty. When I see where she stands now, and think of the far ways we elders went to learn the game; when I see what the twenty-year-olds are doing now, how they command their mysticism—a harder task for me than the accomplishment of physical results; when I see the inner bloom and co-ordination and the inimitable surfaces which come to all the arts by the development of the soul life first, the listening for the Master within—I want to get my hands on them all, upon all the young builders of the New Race. I want at once to awaken within them the Spectator—the One who cannot be swung back and forth in the pairs of opposites, who cannot give himself to the partisans, who has glimpsed the Plan and offers it full adoration, who says accordingly that the best possible thing that can happen is the thing that happens next. These are the young Players who will reveal life by living it—portray life as naturally as breathing, whose equipment is not possessions, not even brain possessions, but spiritualen rapportwith all, oneness with all life.
I remember struggling for effects. These young people breathe effects. I remember style as a studied attainment. These young people acknowledge but one style—that is being one's self.... I want to set many of them free from within outward. In their gladness at the finding of themselves, they will go forth to include the world; they will bring to it the compassion which enfolds all, reveals all.... Love the world well and you will understand it. Love the world well, and you will write well to it. Give it yourself, and the world is yours.
15WORK IN SHORT STORIES
WORK IN SHORT STORIES
The Little Girl sketched this impression of an Indian Summer Dusk:
... Just now the great blue dusk, after an Indian summer day. It deepens and seems to laugh, then all is night. Huge black clouds roll up, promising a storm. Against them, tall, selfish, unafraid, stand the poplar trees. The great Mother of the dusk is singing, the God in Nature is singing, and Nature's belongings, all of them, sing in this magical moment. One feels it all in one's self, feels the glory, the romance, the very core-life of the Universe. The matings too, taking place in the grass and air; the matings of the two streams, the two grains of sand; the matings of butterflies, birds and bees. It all flows through one's body like music and honey and sunshine....
Nothing but space is around me. I feel all hollow inside. Power and beauty and all thingselse flow through ... and out, like a sieve. My body is far below me, yet it will be taken care of. It does not stumble, nor make any clumsy, unnecessary movement. Finding it alone and forgotten, Rhythm catches it in her gentle arms. Slowly, softly, gently, Rhythm carries it along, the same that carries the deer so swiftly in the forest, the mountain sheep from ledge to ledge and over valleys, and that which waves the trees' long arms so gracefully.... The night moves on its way, the threat of storm is passed. I am back again—an untellable freshness has sweetened hair and clothing. I am all glowing inside.
This was done two years ago. There was a kind of dream story which she recently finished, gratifying the artistic sense entirely, but in a way that ruined it for the general reader. It was all new to her that there could possibly be two ways to regard a bit of workmanship. Five or six story-writers were present for the reading, and out of the fruits of that evening, we surely saw the lesser beauty give way before a greater. We forecasted the readers of the future, who would prefer the more spiritual, more challenging story texture and dénouement.
There has always been The Few—glad to discover the real, answering to interior order and clarity, "straight grain,"—but the fact for enthusiasm now is that the world is being peopled with the awakened. These young moderns are recognising each other from day to day, pullingtogether for better social order, utilising the wisdom of the East, and the drive of the West—labouring in new paths, daring new leaps, working out philosophies as fresh and ancient as the dawn and, what is straighter to the point, demanding modern books, written out of an integrity to match their own....
Short story writing in America is less a trade and more of an art since Edward J. O'Brien, the poet, took his chair in the flow of the output and began to say which was which. There are a number of people in America who know a good short story when they see one; this is true among those who buy short stories, but editors cannot always buy what they want. A deal of mechanism in a magazine has to be oiled and energised by different kinds of minds from those who paint the pictures and write the tales. O'Brien knew both ends—also he knew that big, unobtrusive part of the market that looks long and pointedly for the real tale.
He is a queer boy—from the bleak fishing grounds north of Boston. He is in no hurry. You couldn't tell if he really wants anything. He doesn't seem to want much—for O'Brien.... After he had his main line and most of the ramifications of his idea laid, he told the editors to send on the stories. Most of them did. O'Brien did a lot of work in a few weeks, did it startlingly well. He started something....Now, if a writer sits down, suddenly struck with a fine idea for a tale, and this fine idea precludes the possibility of selling it for a high price—the writer dares go ahead and finish the task, because he knows O'Brien will get to the thing in due time, and that if it is really what it seems and the performance of the idea adequate, then the work will not be utterly lost.
As a matter of fact, this is a bit of self-placation, since no work is lost; no one gets the value of a big thing to anything like the degree of the man who does it; no big thing is lost from the world, not even if dropped in a sewer, if it is really important for the world to have it. We are all a bit too heavily handicapped with our own idea of what the world should have from our own shops—at the same time, when we are young, we pant for the quicker return, the answering hail within reason—at least, within time and space. Now O'Brien has come, strangely arrived, his proper phylacteries in place, the touch of tinted haze about his head, the right man.
Back of all, however, is the workman's own spine. That's the best thing to lean on; and when the going is heavy, to learn to do without. We often remind each other in Chapel of the modern artist Cezanne, who moved about his painting for many years, paintingthe thing, satisfying his soul, and leaving his canvasses around in the fields for the peasants to laugh at or mull over.... They have long since been brought in out of the rain—those canvasses. I forget the incredible thousands his littlest sketch brings now.... But Cezanne got the films out of himself—tallied them off—the landscapes within and without, when it did him most good. It never fails. What was good for the artist is good for the rest of us afterward.
Meanwhile much is still to do in the story world. The big smash of the moving pictures hasn't cleared from our game yet. It will be the cause of greater tales before the end is seen, for you can't portray the realities of romance upon a flat screen. For a time the many thought it was no longer necessary to learn to read, because there was such a torrent of pictures everywhere, but it was only through the pictures that the few has finally managed to realize how marvelously pictorial mere words are, and how few words are required when they are imaginatively driven. One day in Stonestudy we discussed these story and screen affairs, looking ahead somewhat to better times than these. One of our young men, whose story is told in a later chapter, put down the things we talked about. This is Shuk's writing:
A fresh and different vitality is manifest to-day in American literature. At various points around us, dealing with words, colours and the subtler tools, are active young workmen who forthe first time, in the fullest sense, may be termed "North American." The first characteristic of this new element, these young flexible and vigorous minds, is that they are workmen—not labourers, not professionals, not primarily artists in anything unless it be life—but workers first, and after that novelists, poets, musicians, painters or politicians. They are not competitors. They have not forgotten the warm side of justice, but they know well the stern face of compassion—they know that it takes Christ and anti-Christ to make a world. They are neither modest nor egotistical, being for the most part busy and intensely alive. This implies their joy.
The great love story has not been written. The few great love stories of the world have to be pieced out by the imagination. We find that we have been told that certain are great love stories, but they do not stand examination. The classic form will not do for the New Age. There is to be a new language—for literary handling. It may be called American, to distinguish it from English in the accepted form. It is to be brisk, brief, brave and ebullient—to meet the modification all must reckon with—the screen-trained mind.
American-mindedness of itself, cannot yet accept a great love-story. It would be called "sentimental" if not lascivious. The average American is an impossible lover, making it incident to business. The real and the sham are equally above him. He would not know when to be exalted or when to be ashamed. He thinks his ownpassion is evil, and thus makes it so. The great love-story can only be written with creative dynamics, and can only be accepted as yet by the few of corresponding receptivity. There is nothing soft about true romance. Some passionate singer of the New Age will likely appear right soon, his story to have the full redolence and lustre of the heart, his emotions thoroughbred, his literary quality at the same time crystalline with reality.
The big adventure-story has not been done so far. The day of guns, horses and redskins is over. Photoplays have developed these fiction resources to the limit, proving to those writers born to be modern that their full tales can never be shown on a flat surface. There will be undercurrents, overtones, invisible movements, tensions upon the reader, not only from between the lines, but between words. The story-teller of the New Age may handle his theme in words of one syllable, but his tale will have an intensity scarcely to be explained—only responded to by minds which cannot be satisfied by two-plane production—minds which demand more of life than the camera sees.
The real war-story of to-day, even for to-morrow, ought to arrive soon. This is an age for an epic. Some keen and comprehensive mind will arise—a literary genius who will include the patriot, the anarchist, the poet, dramatist, humanitarian, theosophist, dreamer, judge and statesman, even the iciest aces of the air—and tell the story of War, a tale of trenches, kings and arms; blood, heroism and monstrous greed; vast far-reachingcauses and the slow, inevitable hell of effects—told from a viewpoint so inclusive that thrones are merely pawns in a Planetary Game.
Inclusion is the first business of the writer who is truly allied with the modern element. Propagandists do not fill the picture. Yesterday the wreckers and agnostics—to-day the specialists and onesided enthusiasts—to-morrow, the embodiers, the includers.
16VALLEY ROAD GIRL
VALLEY ROAD GIRL
The Valley Road Girl, who gave us the title, and helped us to see how the New Race will become in due time the planetary hive, asked not to appear in this book. A letter this morning asks it again. She is in the stress and heat of a series of ordeals, learning what it means suddenly to be parted from friends and the centre of her work. A wise and sensitive young woman—I rather thrill over her sufferings. We don't commiserate; we congratulate, when one is called to a stretch of particularly stiff and solitary going. We know that one must be passionately worthy to take the big-calibred ordeals. There is pain to all births—pain, the precursor of greater joys. Pain is not the expansion of the flower to the sun; that is joy, that comes afterward. Pain is the necessary rupturing of the bud-sheaths before the final unfolding into the new dimension. Pain is within, inarticulate—merely finds a correspondence in some outer cause.
Part of the Valley Road Girl's letter follows:
... It hurt to let that last Lamentation go to you. I thought of the times when I had put up a braver fight, bolstered only with pride. But pride is low now, and still dwindling in the glass. Even the gods withdraw from the pathetic. They love us more when we challenge with doubt than when we implore. The many are God-fearing. They must have some divine power to shift their responsibility upon. They can ask the Flame to cleanse them, but quail at working out their own salvation. I have done some crying out to God, but I am finished. The one good path I have is Work—self-expression every day.
I made another mistake—in looking back. Regret identifies us with the past and impedes progress. Youth is smileless, inclined to regard to-day's struggles as ultimate evil, but gradually we learn that all things pass. To consider everything as in transition, we place ourselves in the very current of growth.... For rapid journeying, we must travel light. We can only carry along the spirit of things—the essence of our joys and lessons. That's what I have from Chapel days.
I blush for many hours since. Sometimes I have felt as if I were on a vast plain and there was no God nor earth nor the quality of love anywhere, but only I—deathless—in long, hideous travail, all life to be tested against this Me!...
How I want to write! Every day more awe enfolds the dream. Days bring me closer to theTown. The war has deepened the hearts of all the young people here, especially the women. Young women are very wonderful to me. They have a certain loveliness of body that comes of girl-whiteness within—thoughtful tenderness about them, and something else, a lightness that may be just youth. It attracts me because I have never felt it.
I do not care if the gods laugh at my ambitions to write. By the very sign that we are victims of matter now, we shall become victors. I want the bottom—down among the deeps of pain, where all the sorrow of the world is my sorrow; all tears, my tears.... I am not ready for the Hive. No compromise. To accept less in one's work than the dream—that is failure.
The Valley Road Girl is eighteen. She has hardly been away from the little town by the lake shore. She is held to it queerly still. I expect her to make the place long-lived in the memory of many novel readers. I see the big book of the country-side about her—a gallery of quaint and curious faces—done with her stern, sweet power. I have seen this big book building about her, as I see the top trays of The Abbot's Sea Chest. These are the days of her sketching and tearing down. Deep draughts of life call to her, deeps of religion, deeps of cosmic memory—and all about is the little town. The meaning has come to her at last. Already she has turned to love the nearest; loving the nearest will unfold the big book and sether free. Six hundred pages I call for—the leisurely vibration, terrible intensity of romantic moments, passion of the fields, the hideous mockery of narrow, brittle lives, the country-wife worn glassy with routine and insane monotony, and the young of the country-side—quick bloom, pure youth falling into coarseness before its form is finished, the real and immortal behind it all. These are her properties. Hundreds of pages have been written and prayerfully destroyed. Thus is she setting herself free.
I have a paper of hers on the spiritual adventures of a smileless child—which I liked much when it came in, more than two years ago. The Valley Road Girl is close to us in all our preparing and building; so that these chapters would be strange without her voice:
... Fire was always terrible, so my first aspirations were caused by fear of hellbelow. Before that, I had wanted to laugh when told to pray. As I grew, I thought much of the heavenly state, but could find only vague pictures. Recently I asked a country minister his idea of heaven, and he seemed uncertain. He could only assure me that it was a desirable place. Yet children always wonder about their destination, questioning as they journey.I started early to pray—a grim affair; at first crying out through fear or hurt. God was too awful for such intimacies so I took the Christ figure of the Trinity into my confidence. Just here came a strange transition. It didn't seem sufficientfor me to think those prayers: I felt I must state them clearly or my wish might be ambiguous. Even to-day, I find that only expressing a thing simplifies it for me.If there were acquaintances whose lives were touched with beauty or romance, I prayed for them, but mostly namedmywants. I made the discovery that the intensity put forth in holding the image of a desire brings it into the world. Man may call the answerGod, but that seems his own power. I have sometimes thought of Will with its divine kindred, Wisdom and Love, as the Three Who stood first before His Face.To-day we dream, and to-morrow our hands are filled. I remember the early Chapel days when the Old Man would say, "Be careful what you want—you are apt to get it,"—with a great laugh and mystery playing about his words. How truly one comes to realise that. When I started at Stonestudy, the town-people used to ask how we were taught,—if our English and story-structure were principally considered as in the schools. I could only tell them, "Oh, no, not like school!" Then I tried to explain Chapel and they wondered how that manner of education could make us writers. Yet our writing improved with the days. Work, a few weeks old, embarrassed us with its defects.Then I actually tried to discover just how we were being helped. To a young aspirant, there isawe about an artist; we had come to listen. The same thoughts expressed in homely words wouldn't have quickened us. The Old Man's sentences were rich with figures that clarified everything. We began toseeStonestudy. About this time at home I used to start anything that interested me, "I've got a picture——" Chapel had helped me, as only one can help another, by quickening the imagination.
... Fire was always terrible, so my first aspirations were caused by fear of hellbelow. Before that, I had wanted to laugh when told to pray. As I grew, I thought much of the heavenly state, but could find only vague pictures. Recently I asked a country minister his idea of heaven, and he seemed uncertain. He could only assure me that it was a desirable place. Yet children always wonder about their destination, questioning as they journey.
I started early to pray—a grim affair; at first crying out through fear or hurt. God was too awful for such intimacies so I took the Christ figure of the Trinity into my confidence. Just here came a strange transition. It didn't seem sufficientfor me to think those prayers: I felt I must state them clearly or my wish might be ambiguous. Even to-day, I find that only expressing a thing simplifies it for me.
If there were acquaintances whose lives were touched with beauty or romance, I prayed for them, but mostly namedmywants. I made the discovery that the intensity put forth in holding the image of a desire brings it into the world. Man may call the answerGod, but that seems his own power. I have sometimes thought of Will with its divine kindred, Wisdom and Love, as the Three Who stood first before His Face.
To-day we dream, and to-morrow our hands are filled. I remember the early Chapel days when the Old Man would say, "Be careful what you want—you are apt to get it,"—with a great laugh and mystery playing about his words. How truly one comes to realise that. When I started at Stonestudy, the town-people used to ask how we were taught,—if our English and story-structure were principally considered as in the schools. I could only tell them, "Oh, no, not like school!" Then I tried to explain Chapel and they wondered how that manner of education could make us writers. Yet our writing improved with the days. Work, a few weeks old, embarrassed us with its defects.
Then I actually tried to discover just how we were being helped. To a young aspirant, there isawe about an artist; we had come to listen. The same thoughts expressed in homely words wouldn't have quickened us. The Old Man's sentences were rich with figures that clarified everything. We began toseeStonestudy. About this time at home I used to start anything that interested me, "I've got a picture——" Chapel had helped me, as only one can help another, by quickening the imagination.
That was what drew me to the Little Girl—her vivid impression of things. She could makeherlistener see also. Speaking of children whom school had overwhelmed, she used to tell us of their "lacking eyes" and the world that had crushed them, as the "solid world." ... I think that was the secret of her faith in fairies and Nature's most elusive agencies. I listened doubtfully at first, for school had tampered with my once-ready belief. One had first to trust her words, "If you believe, you will see." And I recalled my early religious experiences, based on "According to your faith, be it unto you."
This is the "really" religion—faith in the hidden world. We conceive its light gradually as the seed pushes its way upward through the soil. All religion that does not make the workshop a Chapel—the place for picturing heaven, is less than we know. I seem to confuse religion with the stimulating of the imagination. It is because they are one to me.
The Valley Road Girl has a beautiful sister who was rather reluctant to come to Stonestudy.She did not think she could ever belong; had no thought ever of writing or taking part in our things, yet none of the young people ever brought us more than Esther. I found the following pages about these two sisters together among the writings of the Little Girl:
... On the floor below lived two girls who came often to visit their beloved friends in the attic. One was a year or so older than the other, and most serious and sober, constantly hunting for her own philosophy and making her own religion, praying for power and vision, fearing lest she fail at the appointed task, suffering over conditions, revolting at times, loving her work and her sister with an everlasting passion. That was the one whom we call the Valley Road Girl.The other was a perfect giver, born with the thought of her own smallness, unwilling to accept a different point of view on the subject from another. A spirit—wide eyes, frail body, living her life calmly, objecting to nothing, obeying others, loving all, frightening her parents with her absolute goodness. And that was Esther.When she came at last to Stonestudy, her cushion with the others round the fire had been waiting for many months. For we all knew her; through the Valley Road Girl we knew Esther belonged to us. One Chapel day later, when she remained at home, we wondered how we'd ever manage without her.... Occasionally Esther brought apaper with her and laid it under the black stone—a bit of verse, perhaps a dream, or something deep and mysterious from her soul. One day it was a picture of the Desert, I remember.... Noonday, the white heat of the sun reflected by the sand, the brown of a camel's eyes, the long road to travel—caravans—then night—the sound of low music, women dancing, the red of fires on black oily bodies of slaves.... Esther made us see it all.There were long days in the woods—spring quickening life in all things. We'd gather moss and violets and talk endlessly, Esther always so free these memorable days, and happy. It was the dance that set her free—her expression through the dance—a dancer's body and soul, her wonderful quality of forgetfulness of self, made her perfect. Literally she could surrender herself to the music, trust it, and be carried in perfect grace and rhythm. We watched her unfold, the beauty of her deepening in every way. Her joy in life grew. She became like a nymph in the pure light of summer....
... On the floor below lived two girls who came often to visit their beloved friends in the attic. One was a year or so older than the other, and most serious and sober, constantly hunting for her own philosophy and making her own religion, praying for power and vision, fearing lest she fail at the appointed task, suffering over conditions, revolting at times, loving her work and her sister with an everlasting passion. That was the one whom we call the Valley Road Girl.
The other was a perfect giver, born with the thought of her own smallness, unwilling to accept a different point of view on the subject from another. A spirit—wide eyes, frail body, living her life calmly, objecting to nothing, obeying others, loving all, frightening her parents with her absolute goodness. And that was Esther.
When she came at last to Stonestudy, her cushion with the others round the fire had been waiting for many months. For we all knew her; through the Valley Road Girl we knew Esther belonged to us. One Chapel day later, when she remained at home, we wondered how we'd ever manage without her.... Occasionally Esther brought apaper with her and laid it under the black stone—a bit of verse, perhaps a dream, or something deep and mysterious from her soul. One day it was a picture of the Desert, I remember.... Noonday, the white heat of the sun reflected by the sand, the brown of a camel's eyes, the long road to travel—caravans—then night—the sound of low music, women dancing, the red of fires on black oily bodies of slaves.... Esther made us see it all.
There were long days in the woods—spring quickening life in all things. We'd gather moss and violets and talk endlessly, Esther always so free these memorable days, and happy. It was the dance that set her free—her expression through the dance—a dancer's body and soul, her wonderful quality of forgetfulness of self, made her perfect. Literally she could surrender herself to the music, trust it, and be carried in perfect grace and rhythm. We watched her unfold, the beauty of her deepening in every way. Her joy in life grew. She became like a nymph in the pure light of summer....
As was set down in the other book,[17]it was the Little Girl who started these educational proceedings. Less than four years ago I suggested that she remain home from school, and take a stroll with me down the Shore. I was a bit boredat the time, doubtless heavy with the sense of parental care. To my best knowledge, the Little Girl was in no way extraordinary. She does not seem so now. It seemed natural for her to turn in the chapter on "Tom" in this book. I did not think of it as a brimming thing for a child to perform. Incidentally Steve brought in an essay last night on the young lovers and beauty lovers of the New Race, covering matters which I planned as necessary for me to do in this book.Weaving, that's really what a book from the group amounts to—weaving, more and more. From time to time in years to come, I hope to take a few weeks and spin a book.
It is only in matters having to do with actual world-facts that the Little Girl ever reminds us that she is only finishing her second period of sevens. There is no one to whom I go more often for wisdom or consolation. Her comradeship is complete. Others forget the matter of age in relation to her. Her big friendship with the Valley Road Girl overrides four years of growth most formidable in the usual attachment. The soul is out of time and space. The same thing is more emphatically shown in the case of John and The Abbot—nine and seventeen.
The Little Girl reads very little—not nearly so much as I do. She carries no weights. The slightest tendency toward precocity would sickenme of the whole business. This growth and development which I speak of is not intellectual in the acquisitive sense. I take the young minds away from long division examples. One of those a day is plenty. Excessive use of the young brain is dangerous. One should handle brain-tissue with delicacy. One should learn well how to think, so as to escape lesion and avoid rupture of those most delicate fibres. Any strain sounds a warning. The use and development of the brain from outside is only safe so long as the process is joyous. The development of the brain from within is natural and continually felicitous. No two processes are alike—for the Soul perfects the instrument to serve Itself. In due time the brain, thus trained, will bring forth the one perfect and inimitable product. Trained by the world solely from without, its product is a mere standard at best.
I have met absolutely no ill results, not even from the gentle encouragement of the practice of concentration among children. This is stiff brainwork for a time—stiff because the brain must be mastered. But the brain that has learned to listen for the voice of the Master within, is already using the fruits of concentration, and as I have written before, the children master the distractions more easily than developed personalities. One must learn how to think obedientlybefore one can silence the thoughts. One must silence the brain to hear the Soul, but one mustbethe Soul to silence the brain.
Intellectual children have been brought to me several times. They lack the essential reverence. They wish to show me what they know; their parents goad them into this showing. These are not the new race type that thrills us.... I cannot help you out of a predicament if my hands are full of bundles. I cannot bring to you the one spontaneous utterance that you long for, if my brain is crowded with the things of to-day and yesterday. I place upon the ground my bundles, and give you a hand. I clear my mind of all its recent and immediate acquisitions, and by the very force and matrix of your need (if I am the valuable teacher) I supply, from the infinite reservoir of massed experiences, an intuitional answer that will not leave you as you were.
... God pity the good little brain-pans so heavily piled in public schools, and the brave little memories so cruelly taxed. I want to brush all junk away from them, let their souls breathe, let them become as little children, show them how the greatest workmen and the master-thinkers are great and masterful, simply because they have learned how to become as little children.
17BEAUTY
BEAUTY
We develop through expression. I find these paragraphs among many of the Little Girl's for which there is no place here:
... Everything in pouring out one's dreams and thoughts, one's very soul into words! It is relief, fulfilment; it completes all thoughts and dreams; it gives them strength. They are only half-powers if left unexpressed. In the moments of great outpouring, order forms—the inner order that is lasting and divine, the order that every man must have running rhythmically through him, before his great task can be given him by the Master. If man lives in truth, he lives in order. There is no truth without order—no order without truth. They are one at the top. There are no mistakes in all the Holy Universe.
... Everything in pouring out one's dreams and thoughts, one's very soul into words! It is relief, fulfilment; it completes all thoughts and dreams; it gives them strength. They are only half-powers if left unexpressed. In the moments of great outpouring, order forms—the inner order that is lasting and divine, the order that every man must have running rhythmically through him, before his great task can be given him by the Master. If man lives in truth, he lives in order. There is no truth without order—no order without truth. They are one at the top. There are no mistakes in all the Holy Universe.
We speak much of the Master. As every artist becomes significant, I think he is more andmore conscious, deep within, of the presence of one whose word is absolute. The great artist isolates himself from criticism—that is, he may listen to the observations of a child or the youngest critic and find values, yet his life is passed in doing things others cannot do, and for which there are no criteria. He loses the sense of all laws at the last, in the great ebullition of his soul—to get its records down. He is not ignited with expression as formerly, because heisexpression. His establishment in flesh is for that, and no other reason. His Master nears. I think of Tolstoi so intimately and Carlyle in these things.... We are close, in our best moments, to the Shop Itself. Kipling touched this mystic arrangement in his inimitableL'envoi, "When earth's last picture is painted——"
More and more life teaches us the treachery of matter, as it teaches us how to love. One by one the things we turn to, vanish, leaving us rent and crying out. Thus we learn to turn to the Unseen. We long at last for our particular archetype who embodies potentially the ideal of parent and teacher and beloved. The last tearing torrential love of the flesh is for the mate, the first of our more purely spiritual aspirations for the Master.... The good days of apprenticeship give us the basic ideal of him—the pure workmanship, the love of truth, need for utter comprehension with few words—the love of oneanother, yet the absolute essential so hard to learn, to cling to nothing in the realm of change—all these are incentives to the quest of the Master. More and more we succeed in turning our love to what we still call the Unseen from old habit. The very love that you turn to the Master builds the path by which he comes to you. He can only appear in your own thought-form....
It comes to us so often that we make our own heavens. So many forget that we require beauty as well as goodness and truth. Not sages alone, not saints alone—but artists, workmen and players in beauty, as well as in love and wisdom. The Master will come to you in your own thought-form; your heaven will fill your own conception. Saints of the elder bigotries will have angels with feathers and peasant feet. Those who have clung so hard to their bodies, must galvanise them again with rheumatism and senility and mortgage-ridden minds.
I tell them here to be careful what they dream—to take all the loves, the safe things, love of child and mother and mate, love of comrades, the passion for dying for another ... to take Nature's perfect things,—the grains, the fruits, bees, stars, devas, poems—majesty of mountain, strength of the field, holy breath of sea—the highest moments of song and thought and meetings ... to take all that is consummate for the thought-form—to build the coming of the Master in that—light from the Unseen—to build for eternity.... The Master can only show you that much of Himself as your own highest picture contains.... This is the practice of his presence, so liberating to the minds of dreamers and workmen and mothers.
Steve has done some thinking on the quest of beauty in relation to the young lovers of the New Race. The rest of the chapter is his writing:
Beauty is the lustre shining from within, because of the sheer intensity of being. It is proof of spiritual battles won, a gift earned by ages of renunciation, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice. It is manifest balance, order and serenity gained from isolation and self-conquest. The glow seen about the heads of saints is really there. It is a splendour not of earth, the same ray from which beauty is drawn.A certain tragic joy and a terrible serenity, that is mistaken for melancholy, often goes with beauty. It is the result of turning back voluntarily for work in the world, renouncing possible bliss for the service of humanity. Chief among the spiritual victories mentioned, is this turning back, facing the stream of evolution again, and all its cold metal, for new work. So its light is a light from behind—a reflection to the world of the wonders ahead.Beauty is an indication of the weave of one'shigher life, of developed discrimination, material proof of the perfecting ordination of the life, will and emotions. All that is beautiful is good, all that is good must be beautiful. Ugliness is false and fleeting, a confession of sickness and turmoil within. There can absolutely be no great love without a sheer worship of beauty, not for itself, not from the æsthetic standpoint—no temperamental moth-man ethics—but the calm mastery of its inner meaning, which is mastery of life itself.This does not mean that we must love things merely because they are beautiful, but because of the truth we know to be in them, manifest in their beauty. Also it means that we must never accept a thing merely because it is demonstrated, or seek truth for truth's sake. Beauty is the one lasting criterion.As soon as we truly see these things, we know the secret of real love, which is beauty's expression. The lover is no longer lover only, but love-master—all domination of the sexes then becomes a slavery of the past. The lover is parent, mate and child in one. Each is also the other's teacher.At the beginning these lovers give each other complete freedom, knowing that nothing can be maintained that is held; that joyous freedom is its own wise bondage. The finding of the lover is never the end of the quest as in the world. Rather, it is the beginning. Never is there a lying back in satisfaction or inconsequence. Thatwould be failure for themselves as well as their children. Growth is the goal. Growth goes on after the mating at a rate never before approached, for each has been opened, liberated. Every relation is evident alternately in this growth, parent and child, teacher and pupil, master and disciple, madonna and messiah. At certain high moments, the other appears as the Master himself; through his eyes the mysteries of the universe are seen.The three-ply love yearns to give, knowing that by giving all one gains all. It yearns to protect, to mother, to love failings and make them virtues. It loves the failings as well as the gifts, treasuring all the little humanesses of the loved one, searching them out zealously. Never are they foolish enough to expect perfection at first. Every fault is told point-blank, at any cost of pain or injury to the other. For it is the god-given privilege of each to bring suffering to the other, because he loves that other more than life, more than self, more than happiness, and it is understood that their mutual goal is the priceless heritage, perfection. Nothing short of perfection remains. For this all else, even life, is a paltry price. There is no hiding the truth. This is the supreme test for great loves, great friendships. Both mates are equal.Equality—the word comes to mean more than worship.This philosophy is justified by the law of sacrifice. That which we love more than life is ours more wholly than ourselves, by the great law.In fact, we cannot belong to ourselves; we must work upon ourselves until we are big enough to cast body mind and soul in the heart of another, without fear. Separateness—the pitiful sense of self, has long been the prime illusion of the world, the cause of all lust, wars and torments. Those who are not great enough lovers to surrender all to their love find pain and disparity throughout. They have yet to learn that all that belongs to the self-willed, only half belongs, for it has not been given its freedom.In loves such as the New Age is bringing in, true creativeness is touched. In worshipping both the soul of her child and that of her mate more than her own, the mother is given for the moment a beam from the divine shaft from the Creator. For that moment she has over-reached herself. Just so is the new love constantly over-reaching itself in the cause of the loved one, a divine madness the world has not begun to dream of—to belong and to have, to be in and through and around the loved one. Thus to over-reach is to create. The ordinary one must become extraordinary when loved in this god-like manner. To over-reach oneself—that is the cry of the New!... To think or act in any way that will hurt the self becomes impossible then, for the self is truly become the other lover.Blindness of passion is far from the nature of things in the new loves. Or rather such passions have been washed and redeemed until they are self-governing. There is all the differencebetween them and the world idea of passion, as between adoration and infatuation. Deep waters and deep characters hold to their channels. Only shallow and frothy currents are loud and turbulent.... Again it is the three in one. How could one hold a mad destroying passion for one in whom the parent child and master are equally dominant? Always the spirit of tenderness is there like an unseen third. Thus passion has become compassion, and the earth love is seen truly for the first time partaking of the nature of the infinite love which holds the universe together. This is the source of calm, of will-lessness.The elder generation, judging all things from the standpoint of the self will, is dumbfounded. Such iron repression among children is beyond its imagination. The elder generation goes on living sharkish and predatory lives, experimenting with repression after too much getting and taking and licentiousness. It concentrates terribly on repression, throwing up about itself temporary breastworks, developing cruel red rays of personal will which at best is but a defiant pugnacity. Its eyes grow red and voice savage. For the time the gargoyles of the ancient self are locked in the lower room, but they are not mastered. All personal will is but a confession of inordination within. Where there is inner order and beauty, it is not needed, becomes indeed an affront to the most high.The beautiful will-lessness which marks the relation of the sexes of the New Order is the key to the freedom of the future. Tiger and ape are transformed into white presences—the mutinous slaves of the earth-self become cosmic servants.
Beauty is the lustre shining from within, because of the sheer intensity of being. It is proof of spiritual battles won, a gift earned by ages of renunciation, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice. It is manifest balance, order and serenity gained from isolation and self-conquest. The glow seen about the heads of saints is really there. It is a splendour not of earth, the same ray from which beauty is drawn.
A certain tragic joy and a terrible serenity, that is mistaken for melancholy, often goes with beauty. It is the result of turning back voluntarily for work in the world, renouncing possible bliss for the service of humanity. Chief among the spiritual victories mentioned, is this turning back, facing the stream of evolution again, and all its cold metal, for new work. So its light is a light from behind—a reflection to the world of the wonders ahead.
Beauty is an indication of the weave of one'shigher life, of developed discrimination, material proof of the perfecting ordination of the life, will and emotions. All that is beautiful is good, all that is good must be beautiful. Ugliness is false and fleeting, a confession of sickness and turmoil within. There can absolutely be no great love without a sheer worship of beauty, not for itself, not from the æsthetic standpoint—no temperamental moth-man ethics—but the calm mastery of its inner meaning, which is mastery of life itself.
This does not mean that we must love things merely because they are beautiful, but because of the truth we know to be in them, manifest in their beauty. Also it means that we must never accept a thing merely because it is demonstrated, or seek truth for truth's sake. Beauty is the one lasting criterion.
As soon as we truly see these things, we know the secret of real love, which is beauty's expression. The lover is no longer lover only, but love-master—all domination of the sexes then becomes a slavery of the past. The lover is parent, mate and child in one. Each is also the other's teacher.
At the beginning these lovers give each other complete freedom, knowing that nothing can be maintained that is held; that joyous freedom is its own wise bondage. The finding of the lover is never the end of the quest as in the world. Rather, it is the beginning. Never is there a lying back in satisfaction or inconsequence. Thatwould be failure for themselves as well as their children. Growth is the goal. Growth goes on after the mating at a rate never before approached, for each has been opened, liberated. Every relation is evident alternately in this growth, parent and child, teacher and pupil, master and disciple, madonna and messiah. At certain high moments, the other appears as the Master himself; through his eyes the mysteries of the universe are seen.
The three-ply love yearns to give, knowing that by giving all one gains all. It yearns to protect, to mother, to love failings and make them virtues. It loves the failings as well as the gifts, treasuring all the little humanesses of the loved one, searching them out zealously. Never are they foolish enough to expect perfection at first. Every fault is told point-blank, at any cost of pain or injury to the other. For it is the god-given privilege of each to bring suffering to the other, because he loves that other more than life, more than self, more than happiness, and it is understood that their mutual goal is the priceless heritage, perfection. Nothing short of perfection remains. For this all else, even life, is a paltry price. There is no hiding the truth. This is the supreme test for great loves, great friendships. Both mates are equal.Equality—the word comes to mean more than worship.
This philosophy is justified by the law of sacrifice. That which we love more than life is ours more wholly than ourselves, by the great law.In fact, we cannot belong to ourselves; we must work upon ourselves until we are big enough to cast body mind and soul in the heart of another, without fear. Separateness—the pitiful sense of self, has long been the prime illusion of the world, the cause of all lust, wars and torments. Those who are not great enough lovers to surrender all to their love find pain and disparity throughout. They have yet to learn that all that belongs to the self-willed, only half belongs, for it has not been given its freedom.
In loves such as the New Age is bringing in, true creativeness is touched. In worshipping both the soul of her child and that of her mate more than her own, the mother is given for the moment a beam from the divine shaft from the Creator. For that moment she has over-reached herself. Just so is the new love constantly over-reaching itself in the cause of the loved one, a divine madness the world has not begun to dream of—to belong and to have, to be in and through and around the loved one. Thus to over-reach is to create. The ordinary one must become extraordinary when loved in this god-like manner. To over-reach oneself—that is the cry of the New!... To think or act in any way that will hurt the self becomes impossible then, for the self is truly become the other lover.
Blindness of passion is far from the nature of things in the new loves. Or rather such passions have been washed and redeemed until they are self-governing. There is all the differencebetween them and the world idea of passion, as between adoration and infatuation. Deep waters and deep characters hold to their channels. Only shallow and frothy currents are loud and turbulent.... Again it is the three in one. How could one hold a mad destroying passion for one in whom the parent child and master are equally dominant? Always the spirit of tenderness is there like an unseen third. Thus passion has become compassion, and the earth love is seen truly for the first time partaking of the nature of the infinite love which holds the universe together. This is the source of calm, of will-lessness.
The elder generation, judging all things from the standpoint of the self will, is dumbfounded. Such iron repression among children is beyond its imagination. The elder generation goes on living sharkish and predatory lives, experimenting with repression after too much getting and taking and licentiousness. It concentrates terribly on repression, throwing up about itself temporary breastworks, developing cruel red rays of personal will which at best is but a defiant pugnacity. Its eyes grow red and voice savage. For the time the gargoyles of the ancient self are locked in the lower room, but they are not mastered. All personal will is but a confession of inordination within. Where there is inner order and beauty, it is not needed, becomes indeed an affront to the most high.
The beautiful will-lessness which marks the relation of the sexes of the New Order is the key to the freedom of the future. Tiger and ape are transformed into white presences—the mutinous slaves of the earth-self become cosmic servants.