What is the vision of this new social order?

These workmen recognise that no saint's blood, nor the power of any God, is going to interfere before a heavenly throne to save sinners who have wasted their lives in predatory accomplishment, instead of saving themselves;

That the re-distribution of the world's wealth will not bring about the new order and beauty of life; that the rich man is to be pitied as much as the poor (God knows that intrinsically he is to be pitied more, because his shell is thicker) that the time is at hand when the vulgarity of being rich in material wealth will be a sense of the common mind; That women are not golden fleeces, nor clinging vines, but human adults with separate principles from men, which make them equally valuable in the social scheme; that women should be their own law in all matters of mating and reproduction, because the male has not the mental organism to cope authoritatively with these affairs;

That heretofore as educators, as fathers, mothers and bringers-forth of children, humankind, in the large, has shown itself less than the animals, inasmuch as it does not fulfil its possibilities as animals do;

That the time is past for cults and creeds, for separate interests and national boundaries, for patriotism and all the other isms; that we are all one in the basic meaning of existence; that there is an adjustment founded upon the principles of liberty and brotherhood, in which that which is good for the one is good for all; that this adjustment can only be attained by a reversal of the old form, personally and nationally—of thinking not of the self first in all things, but of the general good;

Finally, the new social order of workmen, having come up through the blear and sickness of lies, has arrived at the high vantage which reveals that there is nothing so potent as a straight statement of fact, nothing so strategically the masterstroke.



20

COMMON CLAY BRICK

Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the waves.... It had a fine gleam—a vivid wet red against the gravel greys. Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.

... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had once seen on a winter's day—a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet, alone, and now that it was dry—this was just a brick-red. It needed the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason for its appeal to our sense of beauty.

There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain thrilling familiarity—the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.

We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so that we repeat in wonder—"And this is the first time——" Something deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.

For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of red from the pervading greys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other Shore—a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its point—and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales for all this nearer stretch of shore, but its beauty is completed by the peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and the completing vine.

Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which complete each other and suggest a third—the union of two to make one. Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace, the very quest of life.

There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.

We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing third.

Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous paintings. Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in fatness)—but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the promise of the fruit. It was the globe again—the union of the strong and the fragile for a finer dimension of power—bow and cord, ship and sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine—yes, and that which surprised me at the beginning—that gleam of red in the wash of water upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of beauty in a wet, worn brick.

Firelight in a room is just the same thing—a grey stone fireplace with red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....

Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is invariably safe and replete. There are a thousand analogies for every event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul. The plan is one.

The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say, without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines the value of their expression of it.

Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression, but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of those who listen. When one awakens a soul interest, you may rely upon it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character of man or woman.

The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl—the rest is but following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic, only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.

* * * * *

Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey pebble walk.

We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling, setting the frames and laying the concrete foundation. The finishing was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk, but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand. The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind; moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.

The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white. It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep, sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement. To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the least mark of the trowel.

The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain—all frames and shingles removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soil softening the border—the red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey—a walk that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite the same after that afternoon.



21

THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS

One day at Chapel, neither the Abbot nor the Dakotan appeared. The Columbian had left us. I looked up to see two young girls and another there. One of the papers brought in that day was upon the joining of two rivers. Where they came together was a whirlpool, a tremendous vortex that hushed all surrounding Nature. In the lowlands that lay about the place of that mighty meeting, a deep verdure came, for the winds carried the spray from the vortex. Nature loved the sounds of that pouring together. From the whirlpool, where two met, one great river emerged, white-maned with rapids for a way—then broad and pure and still, so that only birds and poets could hear the harmony deep as life. From time to time it gave forth its tributaries, yet seemingly was undiminished. Always on, always one, carrying all, making all pure, through the silent places, past the great mountains—to the sea.

It was not until I had read of this mating of waters that I realised the slightly different conditions in the Chapel, the young men not being there.

... The strangest humility stole over me. It had become the life-theme—to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how women can accept the man-idea of things.

The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best the processes that have been brought to bear upon women—from the establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into Egypt.

It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted to be pleased according to his idea—and women, in accepting that, have prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once betrays the first law of the growth to greatness—that of being true to one's self.

The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this conception.

Would you like to know where man's ideas—man's plan of Conception—is most utterly outraged? In the coming of Messiahs. The Josephs are mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do neither with heights nor depths.

One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of the miracles that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the transition is on....

The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within her—submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream—indeed, the fruits of these dreams have come to be—but more often the heart is filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but the fire they burn with is red and not white.

Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of motherhood—and his words were wise and pure enough—that not one of the women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen, and to answer the dream....

I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When I thought that some time they would be mothers, it came with a rush of emotion—that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these; dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the things said that day are written here without quotations:

... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity—the handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment upon the many—the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.

The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in aspiration—the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services of Romance. As a race we have only touched our lips to the cup of its beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own great being—rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?

I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world.... And then we see the great stony fields of humanity—the potential mass in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer world turns its eyes.

... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought was easily to be comprehended—that it had but to be spoken to be embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and we were strong to answer any call.

It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me so often and so strangely in your coming—but those mysteries within, those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together—all her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the day in Europe of late—the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish these losses.

Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature. This physical being of ours which the Old Mother has raised from the earth that a God might be built within it—even the beauty of this is not yet fulfilled—much less the powers of the mind which we have touched—much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest moments together so memorable.

... You would be mothers—that is the highest of the arts. The making of books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men—that is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us; suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails. Again and again we fail—that is the splendid unifying force, working upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods. Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind for any noble action—that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In the summit of our strength, the voice begins to speak—the Guru's voice.

We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away. But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.

... You would not do less than this to bring forth men—you who have the call.... You must learn the world—be well grounded in the world. You need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay—but you must have the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother—yet it is only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose, the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.

There is a different love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface ecstasies—that the Old Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous bewilderment of sex-opposites—different from all save the immortal romances.

I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the sepulchre rolled away.

I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no respiration of the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on that fairy slope.

The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here—in the deep gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our physical sight.

Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in beautiful deeds?

The willow burns with quiet meagre warmth, like a lamb led to slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...." Each with its fragrance—the elm, the silentest and sweetest of all. The elm has forgotten her body in spreading her grace to the stars; the elm for aspiration, loving the starlight so well that she will not hide it from the ground; most beautiful of all, save the beech in winter, a swift and saintly passing of a noble life. The maple warms you in spite of herself, giving up her secrets which are not all clean—a lover of fatness, her shade too dense, a hater of winter, because she is bare, and the secret of all ugliness in her nudity. (The true tree-lover is never a stranger to the winter woods.)

And the mothering beech, with her soft incense, her heart filling the room with warmth and light, her will to warm the world; the mothering beech, a healer and a shelterer, a lover like that Magdalen whose sin was loving much. She gives her body to Gods and men—and most sweetly to the fire, her passing naked and unashamed.

The different love of Nature that the child knows instinctively; that young men and maidens forget in the heat of themselves—but that comes again to us if we grow decently older; in rock and thicket, in the voices of running water, in every recess of woodland and arch of shore—not the Pipes of Pan, but the mysteries of God, not sensuousness, but the awakening of a spirit that has slumbered—the illumination, sudden and splendid, that all is One—that Nature is the plane of manifestation for the infinite and perfect story of God; that Nature is the table which God has filled to overflowing—this is a suggestion, a beginning of the lifted love of Nature....

If they beckon to you, the trees on the horizon (and God be with you if there are none); if they seem to be calling to you, do not fail them, do not wait too long. For surely that time will come when they will cease to call to your heart. They will not have changed, but you will have gone too far back among the spectres and illusions of detached things to know that they are calling. And be very sure you will never find the love of God in the eyes of passing men—if you have forgotten our Mother.

... Yet Nature alone is but the lowliest of the three caskets. I would not have you miss a breath of her beauty—but upon and within it, I would build the great dream of the coming of one from the Father's House. The Coming to you.... Would you hesitate to make ready for that Guest?... The thousands come in and out and pass to the unprepared houses. They are mute—suffering is unspoken in their eyes. Even their faces and hands are unfinished. They leave no gift nor message. Nature who brought them does not spare them from the infinite causes of death.

... Would you hesitate to go into the wilderness to meet such a Guest?... But you will not hear the call to the wilderness unless your heart is listening—unless your limbs are mighty for the Quest—the little things of life silenced, the passions of the self put away.

There is beauty in the wilderness—the beauty of the Old Mother is there in the stillness.... Would you not go up into the hills for your great passion? Would you not lift your arms for the highest; would you not integrate the fire of martyrdoms in your breast, that you may not be destroyed by the lustre of that which descends to you? Would you be a potter's vessel to contain the murky floods of the lowlands—when you may become an alabaster bowl held to the source of all purity and power?

Do you know that a woman with a dream in her eyes may hold forth her arms and command heaven as no man, as no mere artist, can do? Do you know that her arms shall be filled with glory, according to her dream?

Did I say that you must go into the wilderness alone?... There is one to add his call to yours. There is the other half of your circle. He seldom comes first. Pan comes first to test you. By the very spirit that gives you the different love of Nature, you shall know your Lord when he comes. He is searching, too. Perhaps you shall know him by the Quest in his eyes. He, too, is looking for the white presences.... You must know the world—so that you may not be bewildered. You must not be caught in the brown study of Pan.

This earthy one is very subtle. He will try to take you first. He will try to rub the dreaming and the Quest from your eyes. He will stand between you and the white presences yonder in the hills. Sometimes he is very near to those who try to be simple. There are many who call him a God still. You must never forget that bad curve of him below the shoulders. Forever, the artists lying to themselves have tried to cover that bad curve of Pan as it sweeps down into the haunches of a goat. Pan is the first devil you meet when you reach that rectitude of heart which dares to be mother of souls.

Whole races of artists have lied about Pan, because they listened to the haunting music of his pipes. It calls sweetly, but does not satisfy. How many Pan has called and left them sitting among the rocks with mindless eyes and hands that fiddle with emptiness!... Pan is so sad and level-eyed. He does not explain. He does not promise—too wise for that. He lures and enchants. He makes you pity him with a pity that is red as the lusts of the flesh.

You may come to know that red in the breast. It is the red that drives away the dream of peace.... Yet the pity of him deludes you. You look again and again, and the curve of his back does not break the dream as before. You think that because you pity him, you cannot fall; and all the pull of the ground tells you that your very thought of falling is a breath from the old shames—your dead, but as yet unburied heritage, from generations that learned the lie to self.

You touch the hair of the goat, and say it is Nature. But Pan is not Nature—a hybrid, half of man's making, rather. Your eyes fall to the cloven hoof, but return to the level, steady gaze, smiling with such soft sadness that your heart quickens for him, and you listen, as he says: "All Gods have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, but I alone have dared to reveal mine...." "How brave you are!" your heart answers, and the throb of him bewilders you with passion.... You who are so high must fall far, when you let go.

... And many of your generation shall want to fall. Pan has come to you because you dare.... You have murdered the old shames, you have torn down the ancient and mouldering churches. You do not require the blood, the thorn, the spikes, but I wonder if even you of a glorious generation, do not still require the Cross?... It is because you see so surely and are level-eyed, that Pan is back in the world for you; and it is very strange but true that you must first meet Pan and pass him by, before you can enter into the woodlands with that valid lord of Nature, whose back is a challenge to aspiration, and whose feet are of the purity of the saints.

... He is there, or it may be, if you are not through with the world, he is waiting in the wilderness. You must learn the hardest of all lessons—to wait. You must pass by all others who are not true to the dream. You must integrate your ideal of him—as you dream of the Shining One who will become the third of the Trinity. He must be true to the laws of beauty that the Old Mother has shown you. If he is less than the dream, pass on—for though you travel together for years, at the end you will look into the eyes of a stranger.... They are for those who have no dreams—the dalliances that dull our senses, the Arrivals for whom another is waiting.

... Perhaps in that solitary place, you turn to find him beside you. There is a hush upon the world as you meet his eyes.... The wilderness is bursting into verdure and singing.... He will not lure you to the low earth; he will love you best when your arms turn upward in aspiration. ... A whirlpool, a vortex—this is but the beginning of ecstasy.

This is your hour. The flame that glows upon your mighty mating is from the future. The woman is a love-instrument now, played upon by creative light. This is the highest mystery of Nature—all hitherto is background for this hour. The flight of the bee-queens, the lifting of wings through all the woodland festivals, the turning of comets back to the sun—such are but symbols. In the distance loom the mountains—and beyond them is the ocean of time and space.



22

MIRACLES

From within and without for many months, promptings have come to me on the subject of Order, which mystics denote as the most excellent thing in the Universe.... I remember once emerging from a zone of war in Asia to enter a city untouched by it. The order in that city was to me like the subsiding of a fever. The most terrible picture of disorder that the world can show is a battlefield of human beings.

Order has to do with peace of mind; disorder everywhere is a waste of force. In a purely mental sense, the cultivation of Order begins to appear essential to the worker, as he approaches the height of his powers and realises that there is so much to do, and that life here is both brief and precarious. Order, however, is larger than a mere mental matter. Its abiding-place is in the lasting fabric of man and nature. Evolution in its largest sense is the bringing of Order out of Chaos. The word Cosmos means order, as stated once before.

One descends into the terrors of disorder, financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago—the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely—the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and money. I sat here in the main, working with my back to the building. At times the approach of a contractor upon the Study-walk gave me a panic like a hangman's step; often again as he discussed the weather, all phases and possibilities, reviewing the past season, before telling what he came for, I boiled over like a small pot, but noiselessly for the most part. With penetrative eye, distant but careful observations, I would refer him to the dream which the architect had drawn.... When the different contractors came a last time with bills, I would take the accounts and look studiously into a little book, holding it severely to the light. After much conning, I would announce that my accounts tallied with theirs in the main. And when they had departed, finished and paid with another man's money,—standing alone, tormented with the thought of how little money really can pay for, I wanted to rush after them and thank them for going away.

In the evening, when the last workman was gone, I used to venture into the piling structure. The chaos of it would often bring a fever around the eyes, like that which a man wakes with, after a short and violent night. Then on those evenings when something seemed accomplished that gave a line to the blessed silence of the finished thing, and I found myself turning in pleasure to it—the thought would come that it wasn't really mine; that after all the detail remained of paying for it. I used to go from the building and grounds then—cutting myself clear from it, as a man would snip with scissors the threads of some net that entangled him. I don't breathe freely even now in the meshes of possession.

I used to wonder at the confidence and delight which the other members of the household took in the completing house. They regarded it as the future home.... One by one the different sets of workmen came and went. I am in awe of men who plaster houses for a living—and for pennies the hour. Always they arrive at the very summit of disorganisation—one house after another through life—to accept money and call their work paid for.... There is something to play with in masonry—every stone is different—but to learn order by lathing and plastering! Dante missed it from his inventions. I do not count the plasterers paid—nor the house paid for....

One evening I went through the structure when all but the final finishing was over. I saw it all and was in a daze. The town regarded it as having to do with me; the establishment was connected with my name; yet I stood in a daze, regarding the pool and the balcony and the fireplaces—finding them good.... The lumberman had outlined a plan by which the years would automatically restore me to my own, but I am unable still to see how these things are done. I would go to any length to help him in ways familiar to me, but I could never stake him to a stone house. And that was not all. I didn't look for the bit of Lake shore bluff. I merely chose it to smoke on, because it was still—and presently they called it mine. I didn't look for the architect, yet what he did, his voice and letters full of unvarying pleasure, I could never hope to do for him.... Yet here was the stone house—a week or two more from this night of the dazed inspection, we were supposed to move in.

The old Spanish house in Luzon was quite as real to me. It was in that verdant and shadowy interior that I first saw the tropical heart of a human habitation. But there was no wired glass; its roof was the sky. I remember the stars, the palms and the running water. A woman stood there by the fountain one night—mantilla, dark eyes and falling water. It was there in the palm-foliage that I plighted my troth to the patio....

And here was its northern replica—sunken area paved with gold-brown brick, the gurgle of water among the stones. Some one said that you could see right through from the road to the Lake, through the rear and front doors. I wanted it so—a house to see through like an honest face. Some one said that the whole house could be lit by firelight. I wanted it so.

"When we move in——" one of the children began.

I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't move in, we would....

A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build another (if he ever had to do it again) without raising his voice; without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite generations rather than build again.

There is the order of the small man—a baneful thing in its way, sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.

The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon—the eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation. "The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress. There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer. Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]

Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must keep his mind clean; third, that he must begin to put his spiritual house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove faithful in the small things, first.

I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain, balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing large quantities of work every day—for boys. Yet daily in their work, I was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and youth. This driving force is spiritual.

In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships God best in his work. His work suffers if he misses worship one day in seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality, as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God, or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.

I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something greater than himself—that he has said or sung or written or painted something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and inimitable; that its expression through us cannot be exactly reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other can play.

That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object is held in the hand. There is a higher vision—and the word imagination expresses it almost as well as any other—by which the thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the whole.

There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board. Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.

You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone.... You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy which gives life to all men and things.

Every object and every man tells the same story with its different texture, with its own tongue. One plan is written in every atom, woven in and through and around us in a veritable robe of glory.... The farther a man goes in vision, the more he sees that the plan is for joy; that the plan is one; that separateness and self-sense is illusion and pain; that one story is written in every stone and leaf and star and heart—the one great love story of the universe.

Miracles? They are everywhere; every day to one who enters upon the higher vision. I heard a young man speak for an hour recently—rising to superb rhythm, his voice modulated, his mind constructive and inspired. Three years ago he was inarticulate. No process of intellectual training could have brought him even the beginnings of mastery in this period—or in thirty years. He had listened until he was full, and then had spoken.

Miracles every day here. I am sometimes in awe of these young beings who show me such wisdom, in years when the human child is supposed to be callow and fatuous, his voice even a distraction.... It is only that they have come to see the illusion of detached things; to relate and cohere all together by the use of the power that seeks to flood through them. I am in awe before them many times. The child that can see fairies in wood and water and stone shall see so very soon the Ineffable Seven and the downcast immortals in the eyes of friends and strangers.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] From Midstream.



23

MORE ABOUT ORDER

The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself. In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.

The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally inert—the ones who have to surmount themselves as well as their tasks, and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.

In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours presents a picture of the purest tragedy.

Two of the primary causes of human misery are competitive education of children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error. All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one entity, as it were.

The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and again—from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor Aurelius—and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more clearly and perfectly than any.

A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast over night, but it requires thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the strife—immersed themselves again in the long night of war.

But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest. The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.

Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a competitive plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity. I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind us—every day, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars. The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can and giving only what he must—against every call, every fragrance, every flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring us nearer home as a race.

Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the lie that we prosper by adding things unto ourselves.... A certain automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means, the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear—to say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built nothing.

There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot, or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and pluck it forth—eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages could pay for these hells of routine.

Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a marvel for efficiency.

The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property—but the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.

* * * * *

A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own centres of being, puts his enduring self in it—a self said to be fashioned not of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind. You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price—matter yields unto you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.

I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought—and he didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but bark and green, shade and sun—a kind of twilight curtain dropped before his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.

"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.

"Why?"

"Why, they're just stones——"

I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance—that it was a challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction—the rest of his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a septic-tank where air and light must be excluded.... This man had another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I would point out merely that he did not truly own them.

Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.

I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of two distinct emotions—the first a wearing tension lest some one should come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they were fine; then they received.

It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand. Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing but jingle and tinkle and din.

I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the genius of the machine. It answered, not in tempo and volume alone, but in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch the Waldstein or the Emperor, and that I had now merely to punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....

A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and selling.

Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness, break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue for such productions, which is advertising.

You will say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and sated with inferior objects. The whole art of life is identified with our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true appreciations—in clothing, house-building and furnishing—following the heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.

We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming an incentive of the many.

There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes, and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of the eternal things—just so long will we have war and governmental stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.



24

THE FRESH EYE

Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs our neighbours sing—this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit of pioneers to come into his own.

A few years ago I passed for a square or two along the main avenue of a large city—a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most hideous shades—the reds of blood and lust and decadence.

"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.

A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft. I saw something about America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking and horror-bound peoples—bloody as the Balkans—because Trade had brought them in.

These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood. I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be there.

He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward to the shoulders of the motorman; and from his figure my mind wandered to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon the juice and upon the passing force of steam—through tunnels and trestles at this moment—driving trains and cars and ships around the world.

It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each day—his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the roads of production to those who are ready.

Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding his trousers.

They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer clothing winter and summer for months at a stretch. One must accept this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.

... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wide W that a child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this good man should be shamed so.

And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season, widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the abdomen as from a tightened stem the next—these are the real obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is frank and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the bringing up of children not to revolt.

* * * * *

I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be alone is to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and warm.

It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker who brings up anything worthy, has done just this—reproduced the thing more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him. It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's work in the Chapel.

Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth—white because it contains all colour—is not dominant and flaring enough for the wearied and plethoric eye.

We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character, the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no matter how consummate we become as artists.

It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a more perfect expression in words.

In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of character portrayal—the facility with which we are able to lose ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known delight when some one said, "You must be that person when you are writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer through a book and presently begins to do himself. After that one goes over the early part of the book during which the character is being learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished conception."

It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a shiftiness which must pass.

The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the fiction sense—that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to enflesh their literary efforts in story form.

This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and fictioning of any form is impossible.

Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and the actual.

The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.

I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way is first—all the great companions have taken that way at first. Solitude—that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism. The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of God—then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two worlds—that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings—and a time for great migratory flights.



25

THE CHOICE OF THE MANY

A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation—a patriotic meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their spines touched with death.

The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and the like. It has been a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it—as if they had been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and conception for them, they find it mainly out of accord with things as they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.

This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us, the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to understand him better than their fathers.

I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you—new thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic age.

You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it is here and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset, are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that which is static is dead.

There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of the time. Three-score-and-ten—that is but an evening camp in a vast continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour, but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone. Art—those who talk art in the temporal—have not begun to work. If they only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the illusion of one life being all.

There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the universe. That thing known as psychology taught to-day in colleges will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually changed into new forms.

Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in your heart—that sleeping one—is dynamic with all that you have been. Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an immortal being. You may be workers in magic.

Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its dictates and learned its wants—its taste will change and leave you nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of the many is not the voice of God—it is the voice of the temporal and its destiny is swift mutation.

Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country—have walked with God alone against the crowd—until they were given the power to master their way into authority.

The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.



26

THE ROSE CHAPTER

I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature—a white lid that had been on quite long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs and woodland places—of the gardens we would make presently.

"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man, "I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and little beside—vines, of course. I know men who fall like this into the iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in his front yard with unvarying resolution—oh, for many years. He knows just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies. They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad—the single ones, dry and thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful—born of evil thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him, and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.

"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care. Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that forgets to bloom—like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human. Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."

Which remarks were accepted without comment.

"Again," the old man added, "some of the accepted things are not so far along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an exhalation that is like a love-potion—earthy things that ask so little, do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."

"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.

"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot express his gratitude for—like the mignonette. Their colouring and form warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each year—not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the way. Then I may betray a weakness of my own—and I am glad to—but I love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can only be endured in my case from a distance."

"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.

"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me that people raise so many just roses. Here is a world by itself. There is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, as thousands of other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past against which to measure their romances.

"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world—of all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through expression. A great romance will out—through a child or a book or some mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her energy that quickens his conceiving....

"Roses—how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of themselves? Do you think that the actual hurt of their beauty—the restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their silent leaning over the rim of a vase—is nothing more than a product of soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like, that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening—something that makes a flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.

"... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have reached roses—have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses. In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the white to the pink roses—and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the search ever more passionate—until we begin to discover that which our hearts are searching for—not upon any plant but in ideal.

"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about producing the flower—as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of the thought. At least we think so—as the universe is evolving to fulfil at last the full thought of God....

"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes, until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him, and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the performance of the lesser ones.... But roses—so many by-paths, because roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.

"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens which are at the bottom. There are good greens—the green of young elms and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of yellow may be—and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging—the water-colours—the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like ninety degrees of evolution—the full quarter of the circle that is similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect spine of man.

"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for instance, to represent all stages—roses that are specialising in their present growth, one might say, in form or colour or texture; but in the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body, then a mind, then a soul—and growth in the dimension of soul unifies and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who see—that the plan is one....

"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture, the sun began to paint a new beauty upon them—not the pink that is a diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl. The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a white base.

"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral. We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is steadily upward—always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a transition—an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.

"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it. There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost in the same illusion....

"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a few spots of red on the outer petals—like the persistent adhering taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys—they are the best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty. Like some saintly lives—they seem to have come all but the last of the ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products. In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the fragrance itself to our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose, on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a rain."



27

LETTERS

Outside, as I have said, it was cracking cold. We talked thirstily by the big fire, discussed the perfect yellows in Nature—symbols of purest aspiration—and the honest browns that come to the sunlight-gold from service and wear—the yellow-brown of clustered honey bees, of the Sannysin robe, of the purple martin's breast. We were thirsting for Spring before the fire. The heart of man swells and buds like a tree. He waits for Spring like all living things. The first months of winter are full of zest and joy, but the last becomes intolerable. The little girl had not let us forget at all, and so we were yearning a full month too soon.

"I know a bit of woods," said the Abbot. "It is only two miles away. A creek runs through it, and there are hills all 'round—lots of hickory and elm and beech. There's one beech woods off by itself. Maples and chestnuts are there, too, and many little cedars. There is a log house in the centre, and right near it a Spring——"

He was talking like an old saint would talk of the Promised Land.

"You are breaking our hearts," I said.

"The hills are dry, so you can go early," he went on. "The cattle have been there in season, as long as I can remember, so there are little open meadows like lawns. The creek is never dry, and the Spring near the log house never runs dry. I could go there now——"

"So could I," said the little girl.

They almost trapped me. I stirred in the chair, and remembered there was but an hour or two of daylight left in the afternoon.... Besides there was a desk covered with letters.... People ask problems of their own, having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who said, "I have written you several letters, but never mailed them."

"Why?" I would ask.

Answers to this question summed into the reason that they found themselves saying such personal things that they were afraid I would smile or be bored.... Letters are regarded as a shining profit now, a fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism, the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.