6VALUES OF LETTER WRITING
VALUES OF LETTER WRITING
Stonestudy particularly is a shop for writers. A man is at his best in writing to the one who pulls the most from him. The thing is to pour out. The pursuit of happiness is a learning how to radiate. Happiness itself is radiation—incandescence.
You say you write to the world. A composite? An abstraction? These will not draw forth your best and greatest.... You pass a thousand faces in the town, and are suddenly torn by one? Do you think that the unmanifested, upon which the thousand faces sleep so far as you are concerned, is capable of bringing out your wisest or tenderest expression, as is this one face pressed against the very window of your habitation?
As a workman, as an artist, as a player, one must give his best, one by one, to individuals first, before he arouses the force to set the table for the world.... It is important for the young writerto answer exactly certain listening attitudes. I think, in a story mood, of the shepherd fires—the endless droning tales of Persia and Palestine—camel bells, bearded men in white hoods, occasional weary movements of women in the tent openings as the evening passes to dead of night. The tale-teller is making his listeners see more or less dimly somethinghesees—something he has heard and visualised, better yet, something he has lived. The finer his telling the more completely he has lived it. The more listeners pull from him, the more excellent his animation, his art. A speaker, accustomed to give himself spontaneously to an audience, said: "If I don't give you what you want—if I am not at my best to-day—remember it's apt not to beallmy fault."
Soil and seed in all things.
We prepare ourselves with much misery and massed experience to tell our story of life. How strange that we should not have reckoned with the fact that all this preparation is only half.... Really, it is as important to think to whom one is writing as what to write about. I've been afield with many young men, soldiers and the like. Their best and highest moments afield were spent in writing home, or possibly to the girl they left under the beeches or sycamores. We should write a myriad or two love letters, before we areready to write for the world.... By writing and dreaming and travelling and living toward the one, we learn how to focalise our forces. Having done that, we are ready to diffuse, to radiate. Sooner or later theonepoint will be taken away.
Don't be distressed; it is only for the time. But the love we have learned with one must be turned upon the many. It's all a love story. The whole universe is that. The stillness of the sun in relation to the planets tells the first story of radiation—love a cosmic force, not a sentiment—all one big, brave tale.... The real priest is trained to draw out, to furnish understanding,—inclusion. One can talk well to one who includes him. As professional essayists and story-tellers, we are only beginning to learn that we must talk or write to some one greater than ourselves, to set ourselves free.
The wonderful power of letters begins and ends just here.... Write your story or your essay to one who contains you—to one who draws your best, to one who sets you free. You can ascertain your relation to another by your mood as you prepare to write. The more you practise the art, the more sensitive you are, the more you realise that no two moods of yours are the same, as you write to different people. One draws humour, one irony, one a tendency to exaggerate, another deeply to be serious and reformative. This shouldreveal the whole secret. Choose your complement for the portrayal of a mood.
The thing we call our style is merely the evidence of that which we have chosen to work toward, plus our particular personality. We should work to that which sets us free. Certainly one cannot be free in another's form. There are fixed vehicles for expression—novel, essay, poem, infinite departments of each, but the fact remains that no workman or artist or player can be utterly himself, who remains in the forms laid down by those who went before, or in forms prescribed by the generation he undertakes to express himself through.
No good workman ever accepts things as they are. To be the workman unashamed, he must be considerably beyond his generation in culture and acumen. He therefore finds the beaten paths—which are the easy paths for the many—the most irksome paths for himself. He grinds long and hideously against the things that are, and thus becomes formidable, since grinding makes the edge. The dullest part of the axe is held the longest against the wheel.
Bit by bit, as the consciousness of the chosen workman expands under years and ordeals, he casts off all the shackles, forms and prescribed nonsense of the trivial and material-minded. He breathes deeper with each unbinding, until hereaches the fair eminence upon which lies the priceless secret of all expression:
That there is no law for the pure in heart.
He reaches this point through many slaveries, and yet a child can be taught the secret. The child must also be taught, at the same time however, that the world is wrong and inferior in all its views; otherwise the child will not have stamina enough to stand against the opinions of all elders of all times, much less those who sit at the same breakfast table. Verily, the thing that Rodin and Balzac and Carpenter and Hugo and Chavannes and Nietzsche and Whitman gave their prodigious vitalities to learn, before their real work began,—can be taught to the child, but the child must find his faith in his own spirit and some true teacher to set him free.
In the later aspirations beyond professional workmanship for the world, the Players achieve that master freedom which detaches itself entirely from causes and effects in materials. They work as do those who are ambitious, yet refuse to tie themselves in the least way to results. They work to their Masters, to the Unseen.... All of which is pure and perfect liberation, but requires one trained in building with spiritual causes and effects. We seek to furnish this training for a few who are ready. It is the way to the inmost and the uppermost in all art and mysticism. We are set free here as expressionists of various kindsby writing or painting or playing to those we hold dearer than ourselves. We wouldn't be writing if we could be with them in the flesh—how clear that is! The fundamental processes of our picture-making are quickened by our yearning. Here we touch an old and curious law, that you must have separation for the true romance.
We learn to mass life into pictures or tones or tales.... All that we do well shortens the grade for those who receive. If they are quite ready, they won't have to make the mistakes we did—mistakes painful at the time, but out of which we make humour now.
A man brings a gift when he brings forth a good tale. He has done something with the worn-out tools of incident and experience which hasn't been done before. To do it well his telling is dependent upon his audience. His telling will be different for each listening group. The greater the artist, the less alike will be his methods of approaching different friends or comrades. Each will bring from him a different tone, a different look to his eyes, a different grip of hand, and different order of unfolding his genius....
The most perfect bits of writing we have from the group of our greatest novelists—is either in the form of letters or parts of work inspired by the influence of a woman's heart—some romantic and one-pointed outbreathing of their souls to one.... The great creative producers rarelyfound steady human companionship in one woman. No flesh was starry enough to endure their idealisation; the break of their picture was often the shattering of life itself. Experience forces us all at last to take our idolatry from that which changes—to continue our lessons of love toward the Unseen. Lovers of the New Race seem to have learned the agony of trying to find all in each other, of trying to find the universe eye to eye. They realise at once that man and woman are but the two earth points of a triangle; that they safely may rear their passions and their transfigurations only to the pure point of union above....
A man has found something when he cries "Eureka!" He loves something, when he pours out his heart to it. The first great struggle of the real workman is to find a form that contains him—a form of expression that will not maim his dream. It is never the form that has held another, that has sufficed for another artist. A letter is one way to freedom. A writer's style should set him free.
The enduring aphorisms and tablets and discourses of the Masters have been spoken to their beloved few. A man's sealed orders in the world, his occult transcriptions from above the world, come in the form of personal messages. Great documents of the future shall be written this way.We write many personal letters. One of my young comrades has the idea to gather together names of a score of mill-girls in New York or somewhere, and write her heart to them—less to try to help them, than to ease her own heart, to tell her love for them. Radiation—that is happiness. Mill-girls have been a dream of hers. She is full of force to pour out.
Incandescence is happiness. All expression is happiness. Happiness is creative. To work, to express, that is to radiate. The object is as important as the thing that aches to go forth. Choose the form that sets you free. To each his form.
A tireless woman asked how she might serve. Her lover was lost in Flanders. We told her to write to the soldiers—to write her heart out in letters to soldiers—that she would save lives and start great dreams and bring the gold back to many grey mists—to be Mary the Mother, the saint, the dream of the film-eyed fighting men—to love them through the heart of her beloved. That is what focalisation leads to—to draw forth the great energies from our souls, to set us free, first to one, then to the world.
We learn to love the one—in order to give this love to the world. We learn to love in matter for the moment, in order to become consummate artists and players in the soul stuff that cannot die. Again and again, through possessions andpersonalities—missing, destroyed or moved away—we learn to take the force of our outpouring from the mutative to the changeless—making a divine bestowal at last of a clinging human need—lifting from the idolatry of the flesh, which encloses all pain, to the love of souls which sets us free.
7THE NEW DANCING
THE NEW DANCING
I have found true North Americans. A woman of twenty-seven, a mother (with a mysterious man somewhere) and a girl-child with the calm and power of Joan come again.... I needed a change, was tired of my house and my voice—close to the end of all human interest that morning as I set out for a walk up the edge of the Lake. On and on walking, until I came to the little girl on the shore. She was making a frowning man in clay. She asked me if I were the Crusader, but answered herself while I was hoping to fit the dimension of that fascinating title. She had decided that I wasn't.
North Americans—I think of them so again and again—something great and calm and deep and beautiful, something arrived, at last, from all the fusion—en rapport with nature, children of the light, living and abiding constantly in the essences of sunlight—with the humour and certainty of Mother Earth about their ways—the cleanliness of earth and the sweetness of golden light in their house and mind....
Mind you, I had walked forth as one would wade out to sea in the path of the moon—actually yearning for a better land than this.... There on the shore, after hours, was the child—her eyes turned to mine, putting me into the enchantment of the wise—stilling hate and ennui. We had words together, the great awe of life stealing over me again after many days. Her hand stretched forth to take me to her mother (this day called the Lonely Queen, for they live in an enchanted story-book). A climb to the top of the bluff and into the most fragrant and godly lane, a low house in the distance in the shelter of beeches—solitary and isolate beeches sheltering a human house, built for sunshine long ago. Many pages would not tell of the lane and the house, the lawn and the hives.... I want to touch the core of this inimitable pair that took me in—poor but dining upon the perfect foods, so poor that they make and dye the lovely things they wear—a kind of holy handiwork everywhere—perfume of summer in the house and in the heart of it a deepdelved peace where broods a sort of lustrous dream.
The child is but seven—that is, her body and brain are but seven. Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheatbread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning—a last jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray—all miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking sombre and wrathful in the distance.
Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a grove of white beeches—lingering gold on the vines at the window, the murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle begins to sing, and the mother hovers over—a kind of sacred rite, all this—then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and France are in the room. Tearoses—some daughter of poetry must have named them.
... Still I am telling you aboutthings—not aboutthem. I thought I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ... sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the hushes between.... I must get down toearth again. I must begin with the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned up to me from the frowning clay....
I should like to report them moment by moment—to make you see, but there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that first night, I contemplated the North America of the future—a kind of dream that nestles within a dream—the Great Companions, superb men and women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made cigarette—not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned drowsy—opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and sweet as a new-woven basket.
... I awoke to low singing. The room was grey and seemed to lift with me, and the walls to widen. It was as if I had caught the old house just waking from a sleep of its own. The phenomenon of the singing lived in my mind. I don't know the song—a rapid bird-like improvisation possibly—two voices hushed, but a vibration of clear liquid joy. I went to the window. The earth was still asleep—a pearl-grey worldof dripping trees in a kind of listening ecstasy—two beings below on the lawn—a lawn that was grey with dew. It was like looking down upon a cloud from the Matterhorn. These two beings—one in a veil of rose, one in a veil of gold—were dancing upon the cloud, dancing bare-armed and limbed, their voices interpreting some soft harmony that seemed to come from the break of day upon the sphere.
It was not for me—yet I could not draw back from the vines. I brought only thankfulness to it—sharing the joy in the dim of a room, in the dim of a mere man's heart. Yet all I could contain came to me from the mother and child. They knelt in the grass, the song more hushed, bringing up to their faces and shoulders hands that dripped with the holy distillations of the night—a wash in dew and day, their song a prayer, their dance a sacred rite.... I should have thought it the gift of dreams, but there was a starry track of deep green across the lawn, where their bare feet had broken the sheen of dew.
... I dwelt with souls—that was the truth. I sat at breakfast with souls, dew-washed, speaking to each other and to me from that long road of life which we lose for a squalid by-way when we put on the garments of the world.... They talked again about what the birds hear in the morning. They said that what the birds sing is their interpretation of the great song of daybreak—that the earth does not meet her Lord Sun in silence.... And then I knew that the song I heard was their interpretation—think of it—a child of seven eating buttered toast.
And I knew that power is a song—that the singing of the kettle is the song of steam, that the inimitablet'singof an electric burner when the current first charges through, is the awakening song of steel and carbon to their native capacity and direction. The same is in the heart of a boy when he finds his task—the same is in the order of a master and in the making of his poem.... These two hear it—the song of Mother Earth as the floods of light pour out and over her from the East.
Here was a mother who knew how to play. She had launched somehow into a sphere of her own making—doubtless having found life of the world insupportable. I had thought much about bringing up children, about unfolding the child, and here it was being worked out with brimming joy.... It was all too natural to be called education. It was nature—it was liberation, rather—a new and higher meaning of naturalness.
I was almost afraid to speak. The life here seemed so delicate and delightful that comments would bruise the fine form of it.... They played together—that was the point. Play is a liberation of force—great play is ecstasy. In it one rises to thestillnessof production, whereinone bathes in mystery and potency and all commonness is cleansed away. Those who reach this stillness are the great beings of the world.
When we finally open ourselves to any subject, we find intimations of it everywhere. I found presently that all the voices of the New Age had designated the magic of the dance. It seems almost dull to declare that I do not refer now to the dance as it is taught and used and exploited as a social accomplishment, but that in which the personality is subdued and quiescent, quite as absolutely as it is in all great moments of production. One must give oneself. Music carries the sensitive soul into its own mystic region. A rhythm within answers to the external rhythm—the two meet and mate—the fusion is bewildering beauty.
As in all creativeness, the first law is spontaneity.
The great dancers of the future willheartheir own music—possibly give voice to it as they give their body to the rhythm. There shall be no exact interpretation of song or sonata—at least, not until absolute genius interprets the exact figure of each tone-set. This is impossible in a world of mutation. Accordingly, one who establishes a series of movements to accompany a certain harmony, misses the meaning of the divine improvisations which is the essential beauty of the NewAge dances. One should dance as freely as one called upon to speak. And one will neither speak nor dance greatly by prearrangement or following any arbitrary form.
The very tone of the voice is different and deeper when one is caught in the spirit of spontaneity. The prime object of the new education, which includes dancing, is to set the soul free. Music is one of the master-lures to call forth the sleeping giant.
One night a stranger[11]came to Stonestudy. She said she was called by the way we were doing things, and that she hoped she had something to bring to us.... The next morning at daybreak, down on the shore, I saw stars and circles of young women and girls folding and bending together in exquisite tones of colour and song. Her gift was the new dancing. Over night she had captured the young people, bringing them a new joy in the world. For two or three months she remained with us and has since established classes east and west—life given to the message of beauty. With us her expression and magic has endured.
There is no way more swift to merge in the universal, than by the response to music through movement. Not dancing, which is a response to time in music more than to rhythm, but the actual blotting out of self, a spiritual exaltationwhich many religionists have sought and few attained.
The means is very simple; nothing strange or peculiar. It is the dropping of the human will so that the music may flow through. One does not move to the music then; one is moved by it. The objective mind ceases to operate and through the larger consciousness absolute Beauty streams. The response to the music may be totally different with several pupils, but where the dancer is really lost to the objective world, the movement is always true and satisfying to those who watch. This is easy for those who are close to Nature and God, but it is fraught with difficulties for those who are over-mental or who have been terribly repressed. In many ways the will is man's highest asset and it requires a supreme effort of the will itself to drop the objective consciousness.
There is a technique of the dance to be sure, but it is designed only to free the body so that it may be a purer channel for the music, and to facilitate the effacement of self. Physical strength, agility, beauty as mere beauty, are never sought, but only the revelation of eternal harmony.
There is rhythm throughout Nature. Man often moves less gracefully than the higher mammals. He has opposed his will to the law of the universe, for centuries abusing his ancient right, but through music he may realise again the harmony of all. The dancer is radiant with the splendour of theinfinite and there comes an ecstasy into the spirit, of those who witness the transfiguration—the hush that one feels only before the highest art and purest religion.
It is reasonable to suppose that those who dance must bring back with them into every-day living something of the beauty of those exalted moments when they touch "the white radiance of eternity." Here is natural education, natural religion—a practical mysticism, the merging of self in the Infinite with a consequent fitness for daily living.
So the dancing of the New Age is but a different form of contemplation and production, by which the Soul becomes the creature—for the period achieving that blessedness which is above time and space, and dwelling in that dimension, where goodness, beauty and truth are one.
The new dancing is "in the air." Like vers libre and all New Age realisations and creations, its first essential is freedom. This is the meaning of the word Democracy—equality, liberation. The very spirit of all that is new demands freedom. The deeper one penetrates, the lovelier the folds of this marvellous conception. There is no title for friend or comrade, for child or lover—comparable to the assumption of equality.
Equality—its power sings. It dances. When the last is said and done, we all want the same thing, if we really knew,—goodness, beauty andtruth, one at the top. There is joy in the fine new conception appearing now in all the arts—freedom first and last, even to lawlessness at first, but that will right itself more swiftly than smugness, which has had its age-long and hideous trial.... To me, the house in the beeches slowly unfolds it all—the mystery of the cosmic peasantry of the future—that fastidious poverty, that delicate plenty which is perfection. These two, mother and child, mean the new dancing to me, and the New Race beside. I have not dared to go again, because I build incorrigible dreams, and this one especially is dear.... Yet I often recall their loveliness together.
The mother's beauty had turned to loveliness. It had more than the mystic chiselling of sorrow—it had passion, it had humour.... I feel the need of telling you from time to time that I am not rhapsodising, the need of reminding you, how weathered and drab my mind was, when I went up the shore that day. She made me think of grapes and olives and laurel-boughs; she seemed the sister to the child. All about the two were subtle, pervasive, ever-changing tests of the power of the soul. The country people around did not think her extraordinary, much less beautiful. How much is revealed in that? Loveliness requires certain vision, an interpretative spirit, and thus it is protected from the vulgar gaze. These good country people carry upon their faces andhands and persons picture-writing of secret sins and dreamless stolidity, and yet they are scandalised by this woman. You cannot imagine how sweetly it came to me that she had utterly lost the sense that she was outcast.
A lamp burns at her door every evening. I don't suppose it is seen three times a month—yet the lamp burns.... There's a big wooden Cross in the room where they sleep—the child led me to it—a mat of grass before it,kusagrass, who knows?... A great Cross, a much-worshipped Cross, with spike-holes, the broken edges worn smooth.... The child whispered to me thatshehad been brought (when she was too small to know) and placed on the mat at the foot of the Cross for her mother to find; also that she came when the white clover bloomed.
... It is only this way, bit by bit, that I can make the picture. I have never before been so disturbed by the sense of inadequacy. The light about their heads is all diffused like morning upon a cloud.
8OLD PICTURES IN RED
OLD PICTURES IN RED
There was a period between the second and third year of the war, when it seemed that the guiding, shielding spirits of the planet were slowly being withdrawn—leaving only the mockery of goods, the chaos of multiplied things. But at the blackest, in the very hush of desolation, the new breath stole in upon us, a breath of lilacs on the chill, dank, wintry air. Many now stand arisen, waiting the flash that changes the world.... Five men were gathered in Stonestudy one evening; we talked of our parts, the best we could do in the clean-up. It was hard to look over the barriers at first; hard for an American to accept the fact that he dare not say what he thought, nor write what he thought. It was hard to realise that we were prevented from expressing what we thought, by the very forces that had drawn us into this deep trouble. We who are the distant generation of a party of pilgrims and voyagers who came to America to find a free country, were strange and intolerant at first, when we felt the yoke of Europe settle upon ancient scar-tissue.
We discussed.
A country is superb when one is unconscious of it, we said. One's country should be like one's health, part of the song of life. Suddenly to find the freedom of the past unremembered, the freedom of the future unglimpsed, to hear the loathly low beat of talk from groups of frock-coated Appetites, with heavy half-dead legs and heads like pitching-quoits, settling our sacred future on the basis of steel and coal and margin and murder market; to feel ourselves clutched and borne forward with stub-nailed fingers in the stench of big business; black-garbed shopmen pointing the way to the ports, urging and shouldering other people's children to the ports of the gunboats, advising the efficacy of "Nearer My God to Thee," as a song for sinking ships,—we forgot at first in our own pain that this was merely the body of the Old strained to a cracking point by the resistless growth of the New.
Presently we grew kinder.... In a way, the Old was the grim stepmother in whose house we learned hownotto do most things; in whose kitchen we learned cleanliness, because of the vile example of her organic sloth; in whose walled garden we learned the peril and the passion of Quest, because we loathed her long snoring of afternoons; from the death of whose sects and schism-shops we set forth to find the unity of life; from the obscenity of whose loves we came into the first great cleansing hatred of ourselves....
No hatred now. Hatred is part of the Old. It has no part to unsteady the hands of the reconstructionists. This New Race has come up in strong soil. The Old nourished and fertilised all its vitalities. The new green beneath the litter of dead leaves cries out under the decay, "You are stifling me!" but the plan of it all is wiser, for there is warmth still in the humus of the old to protect the new and the frosts may not be finished.
More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed. That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect on the constructive side,and will continue to destroy itself against itself as all such forces do in their madness.
If any one concludes that we were a group of religionists gathered in Stonestudy that night it will be well to point out that this planet will be a whole lot more religious before war ends, and no one will be louder about it than the trade-mind everywhere.
War brings death, and death enforces the faith of the human heart, and faith is one of a trinity (as we learned in Sabbath School and variously since) that inclines the heart of man to God. You take a loved object from the Seen and place it in the Unseen (thousands each day the soldiers pass) and faith is born of the agony of separation. The human heart forces a bridge across the abyss from the Seen to the Unseen. It's the old story of the bereaved turning to God. Saints are thus made—thus tenderness and purity come to be.
Within the next ten years there will be heroisms before our eyes—heroisms such as seers and saints and sages have dreamed of as the consummation of the human heart. And those who have lost most and mourned most will read the eternal joy of the Plan from the Book of God's Remembrance.
When you see the remnant of a race of people crying out that there is no God—then you begin to know what war means. When a country hasgiven its tithe of human blood,or one in five is gone—then you begin to know what an Austrian woman meant, when she spoke of the "horrible grinding of war and the answer of the women to man's cries of pain afield." ... When peace brings a worship of materials and a dulness that cannot look beyond existing institutions—the end is war, and after that a sitting in black upon the ground.
We didn't know what death meant before this war—but many have learned. The very word death has the sweetest sound of all uttered names to many a lonely heart to-day. We didn't know enough about death. We had the habit of thinking this was all. The end of such thinking is war, and after that, a sitting in black upon the ground.
When your heart is cleft in twain and one part stays on this side, and the other over the dim borderland—there's a straining of eyes into the Unseen, a picture making out of the creative materials of human spirit. Life of the soul begins again—out of pain—always out of pain.
We have not yet learned to accept life from the higher masters, Joy and Beauty. We still learn through Pain. We forget the meaning of death, even as we gather our things of death about us, and war comes along to remind us again. Always those who answer to Master Pain must look to death to find their relation to God. The faith thatcomes with peace at last to the human heart, is energised by a love that crosses the abyss of life and death.... A grand old teacher, Master Pain. When we know all his lessons, and take his hand from our shoulder, and touch it to our lips (for we shall know well his wonderful work when the time comes for us to part with him), then we shall find that he is not a black man at all—but a Sunburnt God....
Four at a supper table—a little child, its young mother, and the old father and mother of a grown son, who has just died for France. The old man's eyes roved from the child to its mother, back to the old woman, and lingered there, something rough and deep and wise in his look. The child suffered vaguely. There was much suffering in the house.... The young mother asked coldly if they could feelhimin the room. Then just as coldly she asked if there were a God. Then she ran from the room with a cry like a night animal. The silent child began to weep. The old man and the old woman stared at each other and wondered what their daughter-in-law meant abouthimbeing in the room.
A picture of the chastened world.
The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or abreath of God. The old man and the old woman looked so long at each other in the darkness—that the soul of the son of their flesh stood for one healing instant between them. Thus the enduring figures of the Unseen reveal themselves to those who have suffered to the end.
The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything.
The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.
The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. Profound and tragic impressions followed each other. It became icy clear that the greater nations, as well as the pawns of the Balkans and theLevant, were puppets alike, churned together in a great planetary cleansing. Every partisan path was found to be increasingly crooked the farther one advanced—and a sheer descent at the last. Any national point of view used to dupe the people into greater destructive energy, proved in itself, no matter how sincerely offered, as short-sighted and ill-founded as the hatred of two soldiers who meet between trenches and discover, as they gore each other to death, that their only basis for hostility is a different colour of coat.
Studying Europe in those dark days, the unprejudiced eye was in danger of having some truths torn down with the host of illusions. It was hard to hold fast to the fact that there was anything magic or holy about nations at war. Indeed, they seemed entities formed of groups of greedy men who wanted their way—in the main, groups of leaders devoid of vision and the spirit of fraternity, and careless of the welfare of the people, quite the same as many great commercial organisations.... The real enemies of any people are groups of men who want things for themselves. The real issue of the war has nothing to do with entities of this kind, nor with alliances of such entities, but with the painful groping consciousness of the peasant mind—its slow and torturous awakening to the fact that royalty in its utmost pomp and glow does not enfold God.
The people must learn before they can be free.Hitherto they have been duped by the nations; and the nations are now being duped by each other; but there is a greater plan at work—using men and nations alike,—a plan to do away with boundaries and hatred and preying, to strike the spear from the hand of man and leave it free to help his neighbour, to establish democracy in the place of imperialism, and fraternity upon the solid footings of the earth in the place of separateness and strife.... The new volume of human spirit already has been opened. We felt it that night in Stonestudy before lights out,—the first beauty as of a song across still waters.
An American correspondent going home from the field in Europe "the long way around," met an old Persian Master on the road to Damascus. With the sage was his nearest disciple, also a Persian; in fact, the young man was so loved that he had been changed from discipleship into sonship. This young Persian became very devoted to the American. They stood together for a moment in silence, when the time for parting came. The old Master drew near and said:
"It is good to see you place your hands together. To me it is a symbol of the marriage of the East and West, for the East and West must mate. Long ago the East went up to God and the West went down to men. The East has learned Vision and the West has learned Action. These twomust meet and mate again for the glory of God and the splendour of earth. The East has lifted its soul to the hills and held fast to its memory of the Father's house. The West has descended into the folds of the valley, and won from agony and isolation its efficacy in material things. And now the mystic is looking down and the materialist is looking up. Soon their hands shall join—like your two hands in mine—and there shall be great joy in the Father's House."
9STEVE
STEVE
Steve and I were camping together for a few weeks on the Southern California strand. One morning he looked up from the pages of a book in his hands and remarked:
"This fellow is one of us."
The book wasYouth, by Joseph Conrad.
"I haven't read a book for a long time," Steve added. "There are three stories in this. I've read only one—Heart of Darkness—in fact, I haven't finished that.... You have to fall into this Conrad and be his—to get him. You let your mind open into a cup, and presently after six or seven pages, you find it brimming. If you fall into him deep enough, you get almost what he sees—not quite though. No reader ever does. But you get something intense, fascinating, a restlessness, a terror. You find that all your somnolence and inertia has caught fire."
There had been a ten minutes' rain at dawn. The smell of the tropics moved over the sterilesand. It was cool, but there was no wind. The day promised heat. We had been up in Canada for the winter, and it was hard to believe that hot sunlight was free. A broad quilt of gulls and plover sat together on the shore waiting for the drying light or for the mist to rise, or the tide to ebb....
Steve resumed:
"He tells about a boy who loved maps—who used to look for hours at the continents—thrillingly attracted to the darkest places, the patches still unprotected. There was one heart of darkness with a river winding through. He doesn't tell you the continent or the river, but there were elephants there. He should have called the storyIvory.... Years afterward, the man, worn to the bone from the world's lies, sets out to penetrate this deepest black of the planet. He reaches the river and follows it for endless days, but the world has arrived. Some nation is there colonising for Ivory—you don't know which. The story is told like that—unplaced in time and space. Really it doesn't matter what particular imperialistic tendency is at work. The fact is, he climbed the river into the ghastliest chaos....
"You get the deep green of the heart of the continent, the mournful brooding leafiness—the natives herded and distracted, more afraid of the blast of a river-steamer's whistle than of any kind of violent death. Death was familiar tothem. They were chained to labour, cast loose to die. Vultures swept the sky waiting for their limbs to fall still. There was the salty pester of fever in the air—men foolish with fever and heat—a haze of flies—white men burning out inside—oxidisation of human souls—a steady and hideous beat of death—devils of hate and violence and acquisitiveness—clerks making entries of Ivory—a nation's young men running through the jungles for Ivory—carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for Ivory—all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory—murder for that—lives lost, tribes shattered—the leafy heart of a fresh continent seared with the civil flame of greed—commodities dumped in river beds—mails that men would die for torn open by vandal hands—waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible non-initiative of the middlemen.... All this told with patient exactitude, but with indescribable intensity; told by a master-hand that trembles; with the control that one can only know who is sensitive enough to tremble. You feel a big man bending forward to make you see something that all but killed him to find out. You feel him scarred and sick, his heart leaking, because he found it all so hideously and stupidly rotten. It's a little picture of a trade war—that's the point—the war of middlemen—middlemen turning to rend each other.... Heart of darkness—after that the light comes."
Steve opened and shut his fingers in the sunlight. The warmth was sweeter every minute.
"This fellow sees it all," he went on. "He's done a big job for me—for anybody who gives himself to the book. There's something immortal about being a workman like that—about any workman. That's why one wants to cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work. They don't even see the fog of human agony they've painted the world with. They areit. It is the old against the old. It's all about Ivory. They crucify for fossil."
Steve was lighting up.
"This Conrad brought back to me to-day a bigger love for the workman. The starved and scorned inventor gets the best of it, after all—not in Ivory—but he builds something in himself. He quickens something in himself that goes on in freed consciousness when the body falls. No, I don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to be alive to-day. I believe there are secret agencies at work behind all the governments—that they are one at the top. I don't mean detectives, not intelligence or espionage bureaus. Potent, mystic, infallible forces. It doesn't matter.Some person or some group is holding the plan of the New Age.
"We're learning life as never before—plucking the deeper fruits and mysteries of pain. But one must go apart from the crowd to see. One must cease to be a partisan. The real seer sees the whole, not the part. All the war-lands are in pain. One sees only the part, when one is in pain. Not one man out of a million sees it all. A few Russians see it all—a few in China—a few in India. Romain Rolland sees it all. This fellow, Conrad, sees it all.... It's a pity if America doesn't soon get the full picture. It's worth seeing——"
Ocean and sunlight and mountains. The world was a brimming cup. If a man could take all the beauty there was for him, he could never die.... We went over to the post-office of the little town. The business men of the place were coming in. The first mail had just been distributed.... Grocers, butchers, the hardware man, the real estate men, the man who ran the newspaper, fishermen, barbers, lawyers—mainly fat and pleasant—children on the way to school.
They were short-breathed and short-armed. They dressed in wool and wore heavy dark hats. I had never noticed before how short-armed the race of tradespeople are. Labourers and peasants are not so; painters and musicians have a tendency to be long-armed. I mentioned this to Steve.
"The middlemen," said he. "They are tightened throughout—ligaments contracted—contraction taking place in the deeper weaves of mind, a drying up of the deeper sources of life. Contraction, self-centering—that's what madness is. A man must sing, or weave, or build or make bricks. The ways of competitive life are paltry ways. They hide their ways from one another, and afterward from themselves. They pluck no fruits; they contrive no short cuts; they do not become intimate even with the commodities of the earth—the very things they worship and pare margins from. They eat infamously, filch from each other.... It's all here—all that Conrad pictured in the heart of darkness. These are the sick, the maimed, the blind of the earth. They live in the realm of fear, pain, anger, desire. These are the war-makers.... Their arms are twisting and shortening in to their navels——"
Sunlight streamed in through the open doors of the post-office. Motors going by drowned the soft rustling from the sea. The hell of the outer world trickled in through bits of conversation. Everybody had read the morning paper at the same time. No one thought of telling anything that his neighbour did not know.... Europe was starving—the President was ill—railroads in strike, coal famine, prohibitive cost of staples—France cracking with the dry-rot of exhaustion—England ... a voice—Germany choking in her own blood.
The tradespeople of the little town by the sea gathered in their bills and orders and advertisements and hurried back to their shops. Nothing astonished any more. There were no words for the world's woe—no ears for lamentations—no mind but to buy cheap at the right time and sell dear all the time. We walked back to the shore.
"I once saw a little town on a hill-side," Steve said. "A grand boot-maker was there, and a man who made clocks with such tools as he had—big noble clocks that ran unvaryingly eight full days. Another man made furniture—perfect woods from the forest drying in his kilns and sheds. There was a sweet smell about his shop. There was a weaver and a potter there. The days were long and singing, full of labour and peace. No one multiplied by mechanical means. Every artisan had his apprentices. The age of the apprentices will come back—with a new dimension added——"
"Switzerland or dream?" said I.
Steve smiled. "They are starting communities all along this coast," he said. "Many are on the quest of the town I saw."
We sat down upon the sand again. The sun was higher. White clouds brooded in heaven's own daylight; white wings moved upon the sea, I was thinking about Steve and all he had said. What Conrad pictured in the dark continentexisted here in one of the cleanest small towns of America—an earlier stage of the same malignant disease. From the broad and beautiful vantage points of democracy and fraternity—every shop here was a lair, the products, exposed and secreted, a spectacle of moral decay and insensate devouring; every schoolhouse a place of dismal enchantment where competition was not only taught but enforced. Steve knew deeply well when he spoke, that the creative artist, the producer of every real and true and beautiful thing, comes into the power to express himself, in spite of such education, not because of them.
One can laugh at all mediocre men occupying seats of the mighty and calling their dead gods to witness that they are right—but one who knows that the intrinsic gift of each child is the one thing in sunlight to be promoted, turns away a bit dismally from the spectacle of the standardisation of the child mind—from the wholesale manufacture of middlemen by school system.
Steve loves America. I know of no one who loves America more. He doesn't rise and cheer when the orchestra plays a questionable bit of verse and tune in a movie-hall where imagination is being put to death—but he believes in the vision of the Founders of America. He believes in the spaciousness and splendour of the American spirit; that the dream of a few mystics will triumph at the last, and that the many will follow the dream of the few. He does not believe that the voice of the middlemen is the voice of God.
It's hard to credit, but this young man does not hate one country to love another. He loves America because the dream of a new heaven and a new earth has a quicker chance for breaking through into matter here than elsewhere. He perceives the tissues of the senile and the obscene breaking down in America, under intense civil and martial and moral processes. He believes that this breaking down is essential before the building begins. He believes that the future will be built upon the thoughts of men who are great enough to stand apart from the dumas, from the cabinets and the senates, just now. As Steve sees it, all partisans have to do with the parts, and the parts of the partisans have to do with the Old, which is destroying itself—sense against substance, limb against limb, organ against organ.
The young men of the New Race are born of a mating of the East and West. They are naturally intolerant of partitions. Steve is one of these. He isn't a spirit alone. He is a body and brain. He has stayed awake through the full night and day. He sees the planet in one piece. He has crossed all the rivers. He knows the young men of America. He is one of them. He loves America because he knows the rest of the world. He has friends among the Chinese youngmen—among the young men of Russia and India. He says that all three have greater obstacles to overcome in getting the dream through, than we of America—that everybody will be singing it after the wreckage is cleared away.
"America, Russia, India, China—they are lands, not pavements," Steve declared.
He was looking across and to the south. The sun was a glory about us—all the background a tentative, swiftly passing thing, all but forgotten now, stilled by the rustle of the long, low white lines of the sea.
"The New Age will redeem all the broad lands," he said, with a trace of a smile—"lands for meadows and fields and gardens—meadows for milk, fields for wheat, gardens for honey—the New Race is particular for the perfect foods—foods for the giant and the child—broad lands for the toilers—the great sea coasts for the dreamers.... It's all a matter of taste," he added.