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Title: Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

Author: Will Levington Comfort

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Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD AND
COUNTRY: A BOOK OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION ***

CHILD AND COUNTRY

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

Lot & Company
Red Fleece
Midstream
Down Among Men
Fatherland

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK

Child and Country
A Book of the Younger Generation

BY

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT & COMPANY,"
"DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE," ETC.,
ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1916,
By George H. Doran Company

TO THOSE
WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS
TO THE BUILDERS
OF THE RISING GENERATION

FOREWORD
... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all
detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many
intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time.... The
purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making in the
country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture, and shore-
conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house or plant a
garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two. Not at this late
day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found plenty with a little; how
we entered upon a new dimension of health and length of days; and from
the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to laugh over a city man's adventures
with drains and east winds, country people and the meshes of possession.
In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the
Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of the
sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been wrecked
exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and weary,
understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in the midst
of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking the bloom from
life. I had long been troubled about the little children in school—the winter
sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to resist contagions, mental and
physical—the whole tendency of the school toward making an efficient and
a uniform product, rather than to develop the intrinsic and inimitable gift of
each child.
We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but
out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at
hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens and
woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine things
of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming generation
gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings who
belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of their
struggle.

It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain builders
of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in the thought
and action of our life. They have given me more than I could possibly give
them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after chapter are
before me—revelations they have brought—and over all, if I can express it,
is a dream of the education of the future. So the children and the twenty-
year-olds are on every page almost, even in the title.
Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a
spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have been
days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see the
crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age above
the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we perceived
convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of America—
signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have to do with the
very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our children and to every
conception of home—not the war itself, but the forming of the new social
order, the message thrilling for utterance in the breasts of the rising
generation. For they are the builders who are to follow the wreckers of war.
Making a place to live on the lake shore, the development of bluff and
land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a pool of
water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer walls broken with
chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior cultivations, the
establishment of a visible order that is but a symbol of the intenser activity
of the natures within.
Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of food, a
friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the casements—these are sane
desirable matters to gather together; but the fundamental of it all is, that
they correspond to a picture of the builder's ideal. There is a bleakness
about buying one's house built; in fact, a man cannot really possess
anything unless he has an organised receptivity—a conception of its utilities
that has come from long need. A man might buy the most perfect violin, but
it is nothing more than a curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It
is the same in mating with a woman or fathering a child.
There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why
one man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along

with maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will
exchange a roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster.
No chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our
own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual re-
adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.
The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the
cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning—a work so joyous
and productive that I would take any pains to set forth with clearness the
effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep breathing of each
mind—a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a selfless receptivity on
the other. We can only breathe deeply when we are at peace. This is true
mentally as well as physically, and soulfully, so far as one can see. The
human fabric is at peace only when its faculties are held in rhythm by the
task designed for them. Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the
inspiration of to-morrow.
It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal ambition
here to become identified with education in the accepted sense. Those who
come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save that which they
are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing that, they belong,
indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and shall always be; but first
and last is the conviction that literature and art are but incident to life; that
we are here to become masters of life—artists, if possible, but in any case,
men.
... To-day the glimpse of it all—that this is to be a book of the younger
generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly I planned to
relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came into their lovely
being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to me that a man could
do little better for his quiet joy than to raise roses; that nothing was so
perfectly designed to keep romance perennial in his soul. Then the truth
appeared—greater things that were going on here—the cultivation of young
and living minds, minds still fluid, eager to give their faith and take the
story of life; minds that are changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if
the story is well told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it
comes to-day (an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a
man may build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an

intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to tell
simply and with something of order from the beginning.
Will Levington Comfort.
Stonestudy, March, 1916.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Bees and Blooms 17
Bluff and Shore 28
Stonestudy 38
Imagination 43
Wild Geese 55
Workmanship 65
The Little Girl 78
The Abbot 90
The Valley-Road Girl 102
Compassion 113
The Little Girl's Work 123
Tearing-Down Sentiment 134
Natural Cruelty 151
Children Change 163
A Man's Own 171
The Plan is One 186
The Irish Chapter 196
The Bleakest Hour 202
The New Social Order 217
Common Clay Brick 222
The Highest of the Arts 230
Miracles 248
More About Order 259
The Fresh Eye 270
The Choice of the Many 279
The Rose Chapter 284
Letters 294
The Abbot Departs 301
The Dakotan 313

The Dakotan (Continued) 319
The Hill Rocks 330
Assembly of Parts 339

CHILD AND COUNTRY

CHILD AND COUNTRY

1

BEES AND BLOOMS

In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the
country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good district,
but there was no peace there. I felt forgotten. I had not the stuff to stand
that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then to require the vibration
of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it was feverishly missed. The
soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that fact now with something like
amazement, but I was young. Lights and shining surfaces were dear; all
waste and stimulation a part of necessity, and that which the many rushed
after seemed the things which a man should have. Though the air was
dripping with fragrance and the early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms,
the sense of self poisoned the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of
order of that little plot. There was no inner order in my heart—on the
contrary, chaos in and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with
love and gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route
of the Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the
healing of Nature.
So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The
country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the country,
enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always felt a
temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria. I knew
what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live, for I judged
by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental activity would sink
into a bovine rumination.
Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true that
there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more subtle to
meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the roads of the many
—the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A sentence had stood up
again and again before me, that the voice of the devil is the voice of the
crowd.

Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged
city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at our
present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a time. Two
paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of the larger
issues:
"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more
essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing children
into the world. When evolving persons have reached individuality, and the
elements of greatness are formative within them, they pay the price for
reversion to worldliness in the extinction of name. The race that produced
Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that founded our culture and gave us a
name in English, is following the red Indian westward off the face of the
earth.
"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death
of the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of
that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual experiment,
can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of metropolitan
America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is that children will
not come to highly evolved men and women who have turned back upon
their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision which was their
birthright."
It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a generation or
two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the City for the
recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper ways than death. The
City will do for those younger-souled peoples that have not had their taste
of its cruel order and complicating pressures; for the Mediterranean peoples
already touched with decadence; for the strong yet simple peasant vitalities
of Northern Europe, but the flower of the American entity has already
remained too long in the ruck of life.
There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The rest
was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working long in
those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at the window.
There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and that green was all
our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it, and whispers of the
wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a certain dawn in which

I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved profile against the grey-red
East. The spirit of it seemed to come to me, and all that the elm-tree meant
—hill-cabins and country dusks, bees and blooms and stars, and the plain
holy life of kindliness and aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming,
thirsting, wasting for all that the elm-tree knew—as if I were exiled from
the very flesh that could bring the good low earth to my senses again.
Could it be that something was changed within—that we were ready at
last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I stopped
short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to rent. I left the
garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen minutes. We crossed the
river first of all into Canada, because the American side within fifty miles in
every direction had been sorted over again and again, by those who had
followed just such an impulse. In the smaller city opposite, we learned that
there were two suburban cars—one that would take us to the Lake St. Claire
shore, and another that crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along
her northern indentations for nearly ten miles.
"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.
It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation
with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by
one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested that
we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the Lake. This
we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet and quaint,
but something pressed home to us that was not all joy—the tightness of old
scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came running to us from the still
standing car, though this was not his destination, and pointing to a little
grey man in the street, said:
"He can tell you more than I can."
I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it was
true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to say
before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth edited. He
called men by 'phone—names strange to me then that have become
household names since—while we sat by smiling and silent in his little
newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank, when
they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.

Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had rented
one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not always
clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor people had
motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of the car had
been rigid among beer-cases.
We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of
the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East in
our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the house of
a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He was not well
that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages. That boy you shall
be glad to know.
We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach
our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He
would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now from
where I sit—to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to the very edge
of a willowed bluff—to the end of the land. Erie brimmed before us. It led
to a new life, too.
I had always disliked Erie—as one who lived in the Lake Country and
chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a
little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie
heretofore had meant only something to be crossed—something shallow
and petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light
darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I
knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to wait.
We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars from this
vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain where he lived by
the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian peasant's house, for
Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the Inland Sea is to us. I had
heard Japanese children repeat the names of the Great Lakes. When you
come to a shore like this you are at the end of the landscape. You must
pause. Somehow I think—we are pausing still. One must pause to project a
dream.
... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we
hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had brought
such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of life, and the

small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the cosmic answer. All
that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern heavens; and I shall
never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the first swarm of bees. They
had to be carried on a branch down a deep gulley, and several hundred feet
beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster were in the air about me, before the
super was lifted. Yet there was not a sting from the tens of thousands. We
had the true thirst that year. Little things were enough; we were innocent,
even of possession, and brought back to the good land all the sensitizing
that the City had given. There were days in which we were so happy—that
another summer of such life would have seemed too much to ask.
I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read
newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it was
as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully every night
across the Lake—a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide, obscenity and
passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like the smell of blood.

... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country;
literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives apart
from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can find these
sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here for week-ends
and freshen up like newly watered plants—turning back with set faces early
Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants that have grown to the
end of the nourishment of their crowded space, and begin to yellow and
wither, sick of each other.... One does not say what one thinks. It is not a
simple thing for those whose life and work is altogether identified with the
crowded places, to uproot for roomy planting in the country. But the fact
remains, many are dying to be free.
The City, intolerable as it is in itself—in its very nature against the
growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time—is nevertheless the
chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and
naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to avoid
evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.
Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of
spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel tension of
city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet and pass

through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which brings a refining
gained in no other way. All growth is a passage through hollows and over
hills, though the journey regarded as a whole is an ascent.
A great leader of men who has never met the crowds face to face is
inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and
pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men
turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of us
can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure
continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the year-
round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and half-broken
from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the City cannot
conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again from the country
replenished and refreshed.
The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally
true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have returned
to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the last ditch
physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the turnings of life that
we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.
Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the
farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men
within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every
year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep
cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have not
the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the long summer
from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the heart of the
countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the breadth of the
horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men look up more seldom.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Midstream, 1914, George H. Doran Co., New York.

2

BLUFF AND SHORE

There is no playground like a sandy shore—and this was sheltered from
the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and made
a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as broad then
as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore with breakers on
the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of the main Pigeon Bay,
which stretches around for twenty miles and is formed of Pelee Point, the
most southern extension of Canada. The nearer and lesser point is like a bit
of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys of the rain-days with a beauty and
power of its own, and the mornings flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a
structure of idealism forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk.
The young people turn to it often from the classes.
The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely
been seen so far from the swimming place in front of the rented cottages. It
was while in the water that I determined to explore. The first thing that
impressed me when I reached the eminence was the silence. It was
something to be dreamed of, when the Lake was also still. There was no
road; a hay field came down to the very edge of the bluff, and the shore
fifty feet below was narrow and rocky. Very few people passed there. That
most comfortable little town was lying against the rear horizon to the West.
I used to come in the evenings and smoke as the sun went down. Sometimes
the beauty of it was all I could bear—the voices of children in the distance
and the Pelee light flashing every seven seconds far out in the Lake.
I first saw it in dry summer weather and did not know that a bumper crop
of frogs had been harvested that Spring from the deep, grass-covered
hollows formed by the removal of clay for a brick-business long ago. There
was good forage on the mounds, which I did not appreciate at the time. The
fact is these mounds were formed of pure dark loam, as fine a soil as
anywhere in the Lake Country.
Those of the dim eyes say that once upon a time an orchard and brick-
house stood on a bluff in front of the brick-yard, on a natural point, but that

the Lake had nibbled and nibbled, finally digesting the property, fruit-trees,
brick-house and all.
I could well believe it when the first storm came. An East wind for three
days brought steady deluges of high water that wore down the shore-line
almost visibly. A week later came a West wind that enfiladed, so that what
remained of the little point was caught in the cross-play of the weathers. If
some one did not intervene, the brick-yard site would follow the orchard—
that was clear.
... Three or four times the owner came to see me. We had rejoiced in the
rented property, rejoiced in owning nothing, yet having it all.... Thoreau in
his daily westward migrations studied it all with the same critical delight,
and found his abode where others did not care to follow. We look twice at
the spot we choose to build our house. That second look is not so free and
innocent.... Yet a man may build his house. Thoreau had no little brood
coming up, and I have doubted many times, even in moments of austere
admiration, if he wouldn't have lived longer, had there been a woman about
to nourish him. She would have insisted upon a better roof, at least.... I told
the neighbour-man I would buy the brick-yard, if he didn't stop pestering
me about it. He smiled and came once too often.
The day before, standing upon that height of land (not too near the edge,
for it looked higher in those days) I had gazed across the Lake, at one with
it all, a friendly voyager of the skies, comrade of the yarrow and the daisy. I
remember the long grass of the hollows, the peculiar soft bloom of it, and
what a place it was to lie and dream, until one became a part of the solution
of sunshine and tinted immensity.
So I lost the universe for a bit of bluff on the Lake shore.
When the East wind came, I saw with proprietary alarm the point
wearing away. That which coloured the Lake was fine rose-clay and it was
mine, bought by the foot-front.... A man may build his house.
Every one who came along told me how to save the point. For weeks
they came. Heavy drift-wood was placed in times of peace, so that the sand
would be trapped in storm. No one failed me in advice, but the East wind
made match-wood of all arrangements.... The high water would wash and
weaken the base, and in the heaviness of the rains the bulk of earth above

would fall—only to be carried out again by the waves. The base had to be
saved if a natural slope was ever to be secured. Farther down the shore I
noted one day that a row of boulders placed at right angles with the shore
had formed a small point, and that a clump of willows behind had retained
it. This was a bit of advice that had not come so authoritatively, but I
followed the cue, and began rolling up rocks now like an ancient Peruvian.
It was a little jetty, that looked like a lot of labour to a city man, and it
remained as it was for several days.
One morning I came forth in lashing weather—and rubbed my eyes. The
jetty was not in sight. It was covered with a foot of sand, and the clay was
dry at the base. A day's work with a team after that in low water, snaking the
big boulders into line with a chain—a sixty-foot jetty by sun-down, built on
top of the baby spine I had poked together. No man ever spent a few dollars
more profitably. Even these stones were covered in time, and there was over
a yard-deep of sand buttressing the base of the clay and thinning out on the
slope of shore to the end of the stones. Later, when building, I took four
hundred yards of sand from the east side of the stone jetty, and it was all
brought back by the next storm....
I read somewhere with deep and ardent sanction that a man isn't worth
his spiritual salt if he lets a locality hold him, or possessions possess him;
and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy. Whenever you
play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand to weave you in.
It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for quiet, and enough
depth for a permanent fruit-garden—all for the price of a fifty-foot lot in the
City; but these things call upon one for a certain property-mindedness and
desiring, in the usage of which the human mind is common and far from
admirable. There were days in the thrall of stone-work and grading and
drainage, in which I forgot the sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in
which I saw fireplaces and sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to
make the dreams come true), instead of the immortal signatures of the
heavens.
But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers did
not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also forget it. A
few good things—perennials, by all means an elm-tree, stone-work and an
oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in materials, that grow old
with you, or reach their prime after you have passed—these are enough. For

a home that does not promote your naturalness, is a place of vexation to you
and to your children.
Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion—through the very
artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The man of
great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never know the
healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first summer. One
must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a surface that
nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against artificial things all
his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of simplicity which permit a man
to forget himself—just missing the fact that a man must be artificial before
he can be natural; that we learn by suffering and come up through the hell
and complication of cities only to show us wherein our treasure lies.
The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its squirrel-
dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual garnering—that is very far
from the way. Tolstoi went against the eternal law to try that. He wanted
simplicity so tragically that he permitted his desire to prevail, and turned
back to the peasants for it. It is against the law to turn back. The peasants
are simple because they have not met the intervening complications
between their inland lake consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be
very sure that none will escape the complication, for we rise to different
dimensions of simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all
organised hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain
fixed in them—not to rush forth at length from our miserable self-
consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic simplicity is
ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man—that is ahead.
That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through
the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I expect to
get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the bluff, when the
bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They
are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost
every day. It is not that they are on my land—that insensate motive is pretty
well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are
fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one
goes away for a week—there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun
strikes them on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been
severed; they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for.

Much water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them
too cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing—and
low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without help.
The temporality of all things—even of the great imperturbable trees—is a
thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say morning and
evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."
There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long and
thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started there—dogwoods
and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being brought, and
violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live, but failed. I think
the place where the roots are cut in transplanting should be sealed with wax.
A man here said that you can transplant hickories if you get all the roots,
but that they bleed to death even in winter, if their laterals are severed.... I
want the birds to come to this little wood. Of course, it will be many years
before it follows the plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns
came whole; the ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started,
but that must be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....
I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first
summer that I yearn for again—close to the sand, close to the voices of the
water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones have their
gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of healing. There, too, the
sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it plays upon the water and penetrates
the margin.
The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from
beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below, and
in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty degrees, they
say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any artificial process. I would
not miss one of the natural shelves or fissures. The Japanese are interesting
in their treatment of slopes. Something of the old temples and stonepaved
paths—a trickle of water over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines—
something of all this will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on.
But that is last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this
Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small shoots
springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the leaders
surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to plant a cedar. You
are working for posterity.

The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had
begun to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could
not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a
summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a fireplace. I
wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and clearer—a blend of patio
and broad hearth—running water and red firelight—built of stone and
decorated with ivy. A stone house with a roof of wired glass over a patio
paved with brick; the area sunken slightly from the entrance; a balcony
stretching around to connect the sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad
shelf of oak, to hold the palms, urns, ferns and winter plants.
All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it—and as yet, there
wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop to
finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse was put
on the devouring conditions of the Shore.

3

STONESTUDY

Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work.
This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the
presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there were
ancient scars across my back—as if I had helped in that building, and under
the lash, too.
... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of stone-
work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated to the
truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was afraid of short
time or flaws of construction—I was watching because it satisfied
something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get accustomed
to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy powder, and its
terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is a satisfaction about
stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of setting. If you can find a
bearing for one stone upon another without falling, you may know that
every hour that passes for years, your wall is hardening. These things move
slowly, too. All that has to do with stone-work is a slow process. In the very
lifting, the masons learn that muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly.
The mortar that hardens slowly hardens best.
The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that
there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier Fall
than that—a full year before the thought of Europe became action. I
watched the work—as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen, so
that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns easily after
this.
It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all symbols
which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of order out of
chaos. The hammers interested me as well—six, eight, and eighteen pounds.
The young man who used them was not much to look at, his body sagging a
bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter he dealt with, but terrible
in his holding to what he knew, and steadily increasing that store. I have

come to respect him, for he has done a great deal of stone-work here since
those Fall days, when I seemed to be learning masonry all over again.
"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by
night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."
There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is
something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long roll
without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I asked him if
it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke it.
"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.
Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have
built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone—fifty years of
masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their stone-
hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so. They have
learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed to the Line,
and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence of their being (I
cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly integration. There is a nobility
from stone-work which the masons put on with the years—the tenders have
it not; neither have any of the indiscriminate labour men. One must have a
craft to achieve this. The building is not so much. The houses and barns and
stores which the elder masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands
in this country—they are but symbols of the building of character within.
They see into the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another
all would look the same—the blacks and reds and whites, even the
amalgans—all grey-brown and weathered outside—but the masons know
what is within, the colour and grain and beauty.
"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.
"No, that's a black feller."
"And this?"
"Good colour, but he ain't got no grain—all gnurly—as the feller says."
Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of
men....
A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney—faced
stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a

low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden pegs
to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of firelight in
the stone cave—a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to the East, and
the single door overhanging the Lake—to the suspense of distance and
Southern constellations.
I laugh at this—it sounds so pompous and costly—but it is the shop of a
poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more than a
city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and nearby
fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin—indeed, it had to.
That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put out—a few six-
inch trunks, brought with their own earth frozen to them—a specimen of
oak, walnut, hickory (so hard to move)—but an elm over-tone was the plan,
and a clump of priestly pines near the stable. These are still in the
revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to be. Time brings that, as it will
smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work in vines, establish the roses and
wistaria on the Southern exposure, slope and mellow and put the bloom
over all.
We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In
the meantime the three children—a girl of ten and two younger boys—had
almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of that
then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from April on in
the small town school until the summer vacation. This was tried for a few
weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward the task of teaching
our own.

4

IMAGINATION

Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first
time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter in our
house, and I was associating a good deal with a group of teachers in town,
some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid forms of
modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall especially a
talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught thirty years,
given herself freely to three generations—her own and mine and to another
since then. She had administered to me a thing called rhetoric in another
age, and she looked just the same, having kept her mind wide open to new
and challenging matters of literature and life and religious thought.
I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to
her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She still
retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest human
relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's weaknesses—as
the Master established His church upon the weakest link of the discipleship.
Speaking of the children, I observed:
"I find them ready, when they ask. In the old occult schools there is a
saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the student must
also come half-way——"
"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is so.
There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five classes a day—
twenty-five to fifty students each—but so much falls upon stony ground,
among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds——"
"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated. "If
the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question itself proves
that the soil is somehow ready——"
"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions. The
teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but prepare
the soil, too."

"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the imagination
—to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has to be done in
writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry him away at first.
And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of abundance."
The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.
" ... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that surely
interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all——"
"Nature?"
"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her—what
pictures mean Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature is a
kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a God-
mother—to kittens and trees and butterflies and roses and children. She is
mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her about it.
Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet—shelf after shelf full
of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told her about the Sun as the
Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her. She held to that. Always
now when we fall into talk naturally—it is about the old Mother and the
brilliant Father who pours his strength upon all concerned—Mother
Nature's mate."
The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's
quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do that——"
We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days—of the handful of
days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of
thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam;
beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when all
Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....
"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out of
that, really. A teacher who hasn't—kills it in the child; at least, all the
pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the child's
imagination. What is it that makes all our misery—but the lack of
imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the
wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so terribly in
the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle and repress their
real impulses and rush for things to hold in their hands for a little time. If

they had imagination they would see that the things they hold in their hands
are disintegrating now as everything in Nature is; that the hand itself
weakens and loses its power. Why, here we are upstanding—half-gods
asleep within us. Imagination alone—the seeing of the spirit of things—that
can awaken us."
I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old
debatable ground—but the secret was out. It was the essence of my forming
ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of everything else—all
writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.
" ... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life
prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children see
it—and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by scale
covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday—a man I like—a good
man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things prospering when
fat—children and churches, purses and politicians. A big, imperial-looking
man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned to cover his weaknesses
and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through twenty years' acquaintance,
he has never revealed to me a ray other than from the visible and the
obvious. He hunted me up because one of his children seemed to want to
write. We talked in a club-room and I happened to note the big steel
chandelier above his head. If that should fall, this creature before me would
mainly be carrion.
"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in
building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage has
not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that these half-
gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner are they
aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the connecting lines of
all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at once. No workman, no
craftsman or artisan can be significant without it.... However, as I thought of
the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh beneath, I talked of writing—
something of what writing means to me. When I stopped, he said:
"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing matter
——' and opened the subject again....
"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his view
of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is asked from the

many in the great plan of things—but I like madness better. To me, his is
fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies are better. I would rather
live intensely in error than stolidly in things as they are. If this is a devil and
not a half-god that sleeps within—at least, I want him awake. I must feel his
force. If he is a devil, perhaps I can beat him."
"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said, "——
seeing the spirit of things."
"I hadn't thought of it as a definition—but it expresses what the real part
of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs, knowing
nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their wheel of things;
what their neighbour is going to say next, from the routine of the day's
events. After a little of that, I have to run away—to a book, to a task, to an
awakened imagination. Only those who are in a measure like us can liberate
us. That's the key to our friendships, our affections and loves. We seek those
who set us free—they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give—a
surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin—our dynamics is
doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way——"
The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she said.
" ... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her
sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was
filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root
systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She
read one of Henry Ward Beecher's Star Papers and verified many of its fine
parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The Shore is
ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain is sweet;
even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She looks every
morning, as I do, at the Other Shore. We know the state of the air by that.
And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how full the days are."
"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.
"No—that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she wanted
to be."
"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.
"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her music.
She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her deeps—never aroused

her productivity. And I have found it so with her little attempts at written
expression. She is to be a mother—the highest of the arts.... Once we saw
the terrible drama of the hornet and the grasshopper. I had read it in Fabre,
and was enabled to watch it work out with some intelligence. Nature is a
perfect network of processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human
eyes but by intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought
of one of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said—only
expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."
The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.
"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression
of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the left, so
to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we receive. It is
the giving that completes the circle; the giving formulates, makes matter of
vision, makes the dream come true. You know the tragedies of dreaming
without expression. Even insanity comes of that. I have never told her
matters of technique in writing, and was amazed to find that she has
something that none of us grown-ups have, who are formed of our failures
and drive our expression through an arsenal of laws and fears."
"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"
"I haven't—at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as instruction
even."
"And spelling?"
"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she is
learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading. These
matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather completely.
God knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the real. I could
misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page manuscript
without detriment to the reception of the same, all that being corrected
without charge. There are men who can spell, whose God-given faculties
have been taught to spell, who have met the world with freshness and
power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection to correct spelling. I
would rather have it than not, except from children. But these are things
which a man does with the back of his neck, and he who does the
constructive tasks of the world uses different and higher organs."

"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.
"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh to
me," I said.
"The little girl is ten, you say?"
"Yes."
"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me
to think of my myriads. But we do our best——"
"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.
"Still you are taking her away from us."
I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as
much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.
"What do you mean—taking her away?"
"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal
with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work. Your
work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I believe
you have established the point that one can learn best from within, but one
who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost between her and
her generation—as represented by my five classes each day."
I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me straight
to the crossing—and with very few words. I realised now that more and
more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to possessions that
I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced to go around, and
often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep open that dream-
passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and flesh through which
fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines around all things. By every
impulse I was arousing imagination—it is all said in that. In doing this, was
I also making a "solitary" of her—lifting her apart from the many?
There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on,
the job would be done more and more completely.
"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will happen.
She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin searching for those
who liberate her. They are hard to find—not to be found among the many.

Books and nature and her dreams—but the many will not follow her to
these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know who are great to me,
have entered this solitude in childhood. They were Solitaries—that seems
the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not have one stay with the
many—just to avoid the loneliness and the heart-pulling that leads us into
ourselves. Everything done in the world that is loved and remembered—
every life lived with beauty and productiveness to the many—has come
from the Solitaries. Quest, that is the greatest word in English. One must
have imagination to set out on the quest.... In reality we only search for our
real selves—that which we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods
within. When they are fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we
do meet a more poignant suffering—but that is an honour——"
The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that
all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential
imagination?"
"But children have it," I said.

5

WILD GEESE

I could not stay away entirely that winter. After a week or ten days of
hard work, night-classes and furnace air—imagination would work to the
extent that a day by the open fire was required. It seemed to me some days
that I wanted a century of silence.... There was one bright cold mid-March
day, the northern shore still frozen a mile out. I had come forth from the city
to smell wood-smoke, a spring symptom. It was now sunset. In the noble
stillness, which for many moments had been broken only by the sagging of
the dead ice, there came now a great cackling of geese, so that I looked up
the lane a quarter of a mile to the nearest farmyard, wondering who had
turned loose the collie pups. It hadn't occurred to me to look up; and that,
when you come to think of it, is one of the tragedies of being city-bred.
Presently I had to. Voices of wild geese carry with astonishing force and
accuracy. A hundred yards ahead was the long-necked gander, with the lines
of a destroyer, his wings sweeping more slowly because of their strength
and gear, yet he was making the pace. Then came his second in command,
also alone, and as far back again, the point of the V. In this case, the
formation was uneven, the left oblique being twice as extended as the
right.... They were all cackling, as I imagined, because of the open water
ahead, for geese either honk or are silent in passage. They began to break
just above, the formation shattering piece by piece as they swept on with
wild ardour toward the ice-openings. Coming up from the thrall of the
thing, I found my hat in hand.
It would shake any one. Indeed, there's a fine thrill in the flight of ducks
—darting dwarfs compared to these standard-breds, whose pinions sweep
but once to the triple-beat of the twinkling red-heads and canvas-backs. You
can tell the difference by the twinkle, when the distance over water
confuses the eye as to size. Mighty twelve-pounders with a five-foot spread
of wing, many of these, and with more than a suggestion of the swan's
mystic grandeur in passing.

Somewhere back of memory, most of us have strange relations with the
wild things. Something deeper than the beauty of them thrills. Moments of
music stir these inward animations; or steaming for the first time into
certain oriental harbours. Suddenly we are estranged from the self, as we
know it, and are greater beings. I feel as new as a tourist before Niagara or
Montmorency, but as old as Paul and Silas in the presence of the Chinese
Wall. The lips of many men, strange save to common sayings, are loosed to
murmurings of deepest yearning before the spectacle of a full-rigged ship;
and it matters not if, within memory, they have ever felt the tug of filling
cloth in the timber underfoot, or crossed even an inland waterway without
steam. It was this that the flight of geese gave me—a throb from the ancient
and perennial romance of the soul.
Many a man goes gunning on the same principle, and thinks that the urge
is game. It isn't so, unless he is a mere animated stomach; the many think
they have come into their own as they go to sea, the vibration of the triple-
screws singing along the keel.... They pass an iceberg or a derelict, some
contour of tropical shore, a fishing fleet, or an old fore-and-after, and the
steamer is a stifling modern metropolis after that—galley and stoke-hole its
slums. Then and there, they vow some time really to go to sea.
Sing the song of steam—the romance of steel? There isn't any, yet.
Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking its
place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven hydroplanes—some
youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back on the crowd, and from
his own tossing emotions at sight of the old steamer—emotions which defy
mere brain and scorn the upstart memory—will catch the coherent story of
it all, and his expression will be the song of steam. For the pangs and
passions of the Soul can only become articulate at the touch of some ancient
reminder, which erects a magnificent distance of perspective, and permits to
flood in the stillness of that larger time, whose crises are epochal and whose
yesterdays are lives.

Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I
mentioned the flying wedge.
"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the waiting-
room.

I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt—the cut-up of the place.
Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the District of
Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any business relation to
a flock of wild geese, the same being about the wildest things we have left.
I recalled the crippled goose which the farmer's boy chased around a hay-
stack for the better part of a June afternoon, and only saw once; the goose
being detained that particular once with the dog of the establishment. This
dog ranged the countryside for many years thereafter, but couldn't be
coaxed past a load of hay, and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew,
moreover, that the geese are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy
Labradors; that they fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless
instead of black powder.
Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen
would have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few
weeks afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on
Jack Miner's farm—within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.
Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in—a patch of
corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of geese
flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A farm-
hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of wanderlust when he
observed the geese that he kept on going without return to the house. He
wrote, however, this significant news:
"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back
mabe. Steve."
Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little nearer
the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't come onto
his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople from taking a
shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the farm feeding ground
to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect that of Jack. He says they
would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and get stale; and then it does a
similar lot for the town in the critical month of April.
Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres, leaving much
corn on the clean marges. He has a strong heart to wait with. The geese
"had him" when he first carried forth the corn, but it was a year or two
afterward before a daring young gander and pair made a hasty drop. For

once there was no chorus of "I-told-you-so's," from the wiser heads cocked
stiff as cattails from the low growth of the surrounding fields. That was the
second beginning.
The system has been cumulative ever since, and in something like this
order: fifteen, forty, one hundred and fifty, four hundred, six hundred—in
five years. The geese never land all at once in the artificial pond—some
watching as far back as from the remote wood-lot, others in the south fields
across the road. Jack Miner feeds five bushels of corn a day and would like
to feed fifteen.
"A rich man can afford a few geese," he remarked, "but it takes a poor
man to feed six hundred."
He asked the Canadian Government for one hundred dollars the year to
help feed the geese, but the formidable process entailed to get it evidently
dismayed Ottawa at the outset, for it didn't go through. An automobile
magnate came over from the States recently. The substance of his call didn't
leak out. In any event, Jack Miner is still managing his brick-kiln. Bird-
fanciers come nowadays in season from all over the States and Provinces,
and Jack feeds them too. Meantime, we Lake folk who come early enough
to the Shore to see the inspiring flocks flying overland to the water in the
beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on the Lake where they moor at
night, a bedtime music that makes for strange dreaming—we know well
what kind of a gift to the community Jack Miner is; and we are almost as
sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse blood of the birds calls them forth
from the May balm.
Of course, Jack is an individual. He has time to plant roses as well as
corn. At luncheon to-day, there was an armful of red roses on the table from
Jack Miner's. He had sent them three miles in hay time, and didn't know
that I had spent the morning in writing about his geese. He has time to
tempt thousands of smaller birds to his acreage. It's one seething bird-song
there. Besides, he makes a fine brick. You'd expect him to be a workman....
But the wild geese are a part of his soul.
"I've watched them for a good many years now," he told me. "I've seen
them tackle a man, a bull, a team, and stand against the swoop of an eagle.
Two ganders may be hard as swordsmen at each other, when they're
drawing off their flocks, but they'll stand back to back against any outsider.

Yes, I've watched them a long time, and I've never yet seen them do
anything a man would be ashamed of. Why, I'd like to see the wild goose on
the back of the Canadian flag!"
I wondered if Canada were worthy, but didn't say so.
It is rather too fine an event to go often to Jack Miner's. The deeper
impressions are those which count, and such are spontaneous. They do not
come at call. One feels as if breaking into one of the natural mysteries—at
first glimpse of the huge geese so near at hand—a spectacle of beauty and
speed not to be forgotten. They are built long and clean. Unlike the larger
fliers as a whole, they need little or no run to rise; it is enough to say that
they rise from the water. You can calculate from that the marvellous
strength of pinion. And they are continental wing-rangers that know the
little roads of men, as they know the great lakes and waterways and
mountain chains—Jack Miner's door-yard and Hudson's Bay.
"I'd give a lot to see one right close, Jack," said I.
"You don't have to. Come on."
He took me to a little enclosure where a one-winged gander was held.
"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It
was heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have
some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came
home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine, but he
tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to be the way
they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain; anyway, they'll drink
until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he healed."
The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at me—
something liquid and venomous in the sound—the long black beak as fine
and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the core and
wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die—perhaps he felt out of the law
because of that.
"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it
out."
I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the
past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy which

comes from experience, to leave me there alone.
An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind
was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself
clean—its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back to a
rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining to lay
itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full of feathers.
And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental
flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration—lean and long,
powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing—an admirable adversary, an
antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for captivity.... All
that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird and its obscene
relative dragging its liver about a barnyard—the rise and fall of the Roman,
and every other human and natural, empire—the rise by toil and penury and
aspiration, and the fall to earth again in the mocking ruins of plenty....
Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came
back from the chores.

6

WORKMANSHIP

As related, I had seen the Lake-front property first in August. The
hollows were idealised into sunken gardens, while the mason was building
the stone study. We returned in April—and the bluff was like a string of
lakes. The garden in the rear had been ploughed wrong. Rows of asparagus
were lanes of still water, the roots cut off from their supply of air. Moreover,
the frogs commented in concert upon our comings and goings.... I set about
the salvage alone, and as I worked thoughts came. Do you know the suction
of clay—the weight of adhering clay to a shovel? You can lift a stone and
drop it, but the substance goes out of a city man's nerve when he lifts a
shovel of clay and finds it united in a stubborn bond with the implement. I
went back to the typewriter, and tried to keep up with the gang of ditchers
who came and tiled the entire piece. It was like healing the sick to see the
water go off, but a bad day for the frogs in the ponds where the bricks had
been made.
"You'll be surprised at the change in the land which this tiling will make
in one season," the boss told me. "It will turn over next corn-planting time
like a heap of ashes."
That's the general remark. Good land turns over like a heap of ashes.
I would hardly dare to tell how I enjoyed working in that silent cave of
red firelight. Matters of craftsmanship were continually in my thoughts—
especially the need in every human heart of producing something. Before
the zest is utterly drained by popular din from that word "efficiency," be
reminded that the good old word originally had to do with workmanship
and not with dollar-piling.... The world is crowded with bad workmen.
Much of its misery and cruelty is the result of bad workmanship, which in
its turn results from the lack of imagination. A man builds his character in
his work; through character alone is the stamina furnished to withstand with
dignity the heavy pressures of life.

... I arranged with a neighbour to do some work for me. In fact he asked
for the work, and promised to come the next Tuesday. He did not appear.
Toward the end of the week following I passed him in the lane that leads
down to the Lake—a tall, tired man, sitting beside a huge stone, his back
against a Lombard poplar, a shotgun across his knees.
"I thought I'd wait here, and see if I couldn't hit one of them geese," he
explained, as I came up.
It seemed I had never seen such a tired face. His eyes were burning like
the eyes of a sentry, long unrelieved, at the outpost of a city.... The geese
ride at mooring out in the Lake at night. I have fallen asleep listening to
their talk far out in the dark. But I have never seen them fly overland before
sunset, which was two hours away at the time I passed up the lane. I do not
know how long Monte had been sitting there.
Now except for the triviality of the promise, I had no objection to his not
working for me, and no objection to his feeding his family, thus first-
handed, though very little breast of the game wild goose comes to the board
of such as he.... I was on the way to the forge of a workman. I wanted a
knocker for an oaken door; and I wanted it just so. Moreover, I knew the
man who would make it for me.
At the head of the lane, still on the way, I met a farmer, who had not
missed the figure propped between the stone and the poplar tree. He said
that the last time Monte had borrowed his gun, he had brought it back
fouled. That was all he said.
I passed Monte's house, which is the shocking depression of a prosperous
community. There were many children—a stilled and staring lot. They sat in
dust upon the ground. They were not waiting for goose. Their father had
never inspired them with expectancy of any sort; their mother would have
spoiled a goose, had it been brought by a neighbour. She came to the door
as I passed, spilled kitchen refuse over the edge of the door-stone, and
vanished. The children seemed waiting for death. The virtue of fatherhood
is not to be measured numerically.... April was nearly over, but the unsightly
heaps that the snows had covered were not yet cleared away. Humped, they
were, among the children. This is a world-old picture—one that need not be
finished.

Monte was not a good shot, not a good workman, not a good father—a
burden and bad odour everywhere, a tainter of the town and the blood of the
human race. That, which was gathered about him was as pitifully bred as
reared. Monte's one value lay in his horrible exemplarship. He was a
complete slum microcosm, without which no civilisation has yet arrived.
Monte has given me more to think about than any of the happier people. In
his own mute way, he reminds each man of the depths, furnishes the low
mark of the human sweep, and keeps us from forgetting the world as it is,
the myriads of bad workmen of which the leaning cities are made.
Sitting there by the rock, letting the hours go by—and in his own weak
heart, my neighbour knew that he wouldn't "hit one of them geese." All his
life he had failed. Nature had long since ceased trying to tempt him into real
production. Even his series of natural accidents was doubtless exhausted.
That is the pace that kills—that sitting.
I went on to the forge of the workman. We talked together. I sat by while
he made the thing I wanted, which was not an ornament simply. He will
always be identified there in the oak, an excellent influence; just as I think
of him when I save the wood in the open fireplace, because of the perfect
damper he made for the stone chimney. Monte was still there when I went
back. The problem of him returned to mind after the freshening of the forge.
He belongs to us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did
not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the
weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the impoverishment
of his line. We are not finding their work for his children. We have sent
them home from school because they were not clean. We complain that they
waste what we give them; that they are harder on the shoes we furnish, than
are our own children. We do not inquire with wisdom into their life, to learn
on which side of the human meridian they stand—whether their disease is
decadence and senility of spiritual life, or whether their spines are but
freshly lifted from the animal levels.
As a purely physical aggregate—if our civilisation be that—our business
is quickly to exterminate Monte and his whole breed. He embarrasses us, as
sleeker individuals of the herd and hive. He is tolerated to the diseases with
which he infects us, because we have weakened our resistance with
cleanliness. But by the authority of our better understanding, by our sacred

writings and the intuitions of our souls, we are men and no longer an animal
aggregate. As men, our business is to lift Monte from his lowly condition,
and hold him there; to make him and his children well first, and then to
make workmen of them. There are workmen in the world for this very task
of lifting Monte and his brood. We do not use them, because the national
instinct of Fatherhood is not yet profoundly developed. We are not yet
brothers.

In the recent winter months in the city it came to me that I had certain
things to tell a group of young men. The class was arranged. In the
beginning I warned them not to expect literary matters; that I meant to offer
no plan to reach the short-story markets (a game always rather deep for
me); that the things which I wanted to tell were those which had helped me
toward being a man, not an artist. Fifteen young men were gathered—all
strangers to me. When we were really acquainted, weeks afterward, I
discovered that seven of the fifteen had been writing for months or years—
that there was certain stuff in the seven that would write or die.
They had not come for what I meant to give. As a whole they were
indifferent at first to my idea of the inner life. They had come for the
gleanings I would drop, because I could not help it, having spent twenty
years learning how to learn to write. The name that had called them from
the different parts of the city was identified for good or bad in their minds
with the work they meant to do. And what I did for them was done as a
workman—that was my authority—a workman, a little older, a little farther
along in the craft that called.
And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know,
not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a
store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why, to
the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more
than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself, because
the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had told them
austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do; but I did more
and more what they really asked, for therein and not elsewhere I had a
certain authority. More and more accurately I learned to furnish what they
came for. All my work in the study alone was to do just that for a larger

class, and in this effort I stumbled upon the very heart of the fatherhood
ideal and the educational ideal—for they are one and the same.
A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to him.
The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most hours each
day—that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth the best that is
in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions and petty devices for
ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure instrument of his task and
open to all inspiration regarding it—that man is safe and superb. There is
something holy in the crafts and arts. It is not an accident that a painting
lives three hundred years. We are not permitted to forget the great potters,
the great metallists, the rug and tapestry makers. They put themselves in
their tasks, and we are very long in coming to the end of their fineness.
They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is
exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each workman
finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He is an
illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he is giving
forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self. Giving forth purely
the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is on the highway to the
divine vocation which is the love and service of humanity.
... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is
caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it. He feels
for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens to the forge
that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his bench, but in his mind
—in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk to my daughter. She
knows about these things," he says. "I must go.... Yes, it is a fine day."
It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him so
long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has perfected his
task. The world laughs at its betters with the same facility that it laughs at
the half-men. Our national and municipal fathers should teach us first that
the man who has found his work is one of the kings of the earth. Children
should be taught to know a workman anywhere. All excellence in human
affairs should be judged by the workmanship and not by the profits.
We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some
strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came at
last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is nervous

and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at that; asks
himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of laughter, for he cannot
forget the grinding and the rending of the early years—when there were
days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps his has been a divided
house all these years; it may be that he has lost even Her for his work.
The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the shop
again. A man's work lives with him to the end—and beyond—that is the
eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all doubts sink into
the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life is awake; the heart of
reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to an identity which cannot
grow old.
He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come
to him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his
lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below: That
nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship; that the
world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money for a life's
task. The workman can only be paid in kind.
It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They
may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross seas and
continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did it. His bench
was just there—his house over yonder. Here is where he stood, and there he
hung his coat." But these are only refinements of irony.... They may say,
"This is his grandson." But that will only handicap or ruin the child, if he
find not his work. A thousand lesser workmen may improve his product,
lighten it, accelerate its potency, adapt it to freight rates—but that is no
concern of the dream.
The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman finds
himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has lost the
love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness of the source
of his being. He does not need to state it philosophically, for he lived it. He
found the secret of blessedness, if not of happiness. At his bench, he
integrated the life that lasts. He could have told you in the early years, if the
world had not laughed. He would have learned himself more swiftly, had he
been encouraged to tell, as he toiled—if the world had not shamed away the
few who were drawn to his bench.

But alone, he got it all at last—the passion and power of the spiritual
workman which sustains him now, though his body has lain under the hill
for fifty years. His shop is the place of a greater transaction than his task.
The breadth and essence of it that lingers makes it a sacred place to the few
who would take off their shoes to enter—were it not for the
misunderstanding of the world.
Out of the artificial he became natural; out of the workman, he emerged a
man, a living soul.
I would support every plan or dream of education, and none other, that
seeks to find for the youth his life work. I would call upon every workman
personally to help; and urge for every community, the goodness of its
products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the world's
premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit; and a stiff
pressure upon the multiplication of these products by mechanical means, for
we have too many common things, and so few fine things. I would inculcate
in the educational ideal, first of all, that in every man there is a dream, just
as there is a soul, and that to express the dream of the soul in matter is the
perfect individual performance. I would impress upon the youth that in all
arts and crafts, the dream fades and the spirit of the product dies away,
when many are made in the original likeness. Nature does not make
duplicates; her creative hallmark is upon every leaf and bee; upon every
cliff and cloud and star.
I would not endow the young workman while he is learning his trade or
art; but I would have the State intensely watchful of him, and impassioned
with parental conviction that her greatness is inseparable with his
possibilities of achievement. I would not make his ways short, but despise
and crush all evidences of facility. I would keep him plain and lean and fit,
and make him earn his peace. All fine work comes from the cultivation of
the self, not from cultivated environment.... I dreamed for twenty years of a
silent room and an open wood fire. I shall never cease to wonder at the
marvel of it, now that it has come. It is so to-night alone in the stillness. The
years of struggle to produce in the midst of din and distraction, while they
wore as much as the work itself, were helpful to bring the concentration
which every decent task demands; and in the thrill of which a man grows in
reality, and not otherwise.

7

THE LITTLE GIRL

It was determined that the children should try the country-town school
that Spring from April to June. This school was said to be of exceptional
quality, and I talked with the master, a good man. In fact, there was none
but the general causes for criticism in this establishment—the same things I
found amiss in city schools. The children accepted the situation with a
philosophy of obedience which should have taught the race many things it
does not yet know. The journey was considerable for them twice daily in
warming weather; and from little things I heard from time to time, words
dropped with no idea of rebellion, I was reminded of the dark drama of my
own "Education," written explicitly enough elsewhere and which I am glad
to forget.
The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the
improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems
are not structurally changed—facility and convenience, speed of transit,
mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain, but more
obvious, the science of covering ground....
I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual
child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from
fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of
whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how the
child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men cared to
litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of additional
assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the child had been
taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about it (the book being
designed to show the way to others) that struck me as avarice of the most
violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for money and baronial
holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the flesh are innocent
compared to the sins of mind. This book and the tragic child form to my
idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient and the obscene.

The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the
long past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:
One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact from
book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.
I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage
aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and immorality,
not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague failures, having in
common with those of my years, all the levels of puerile understanding,
stung with patronage and competitive strife, designed to smother that which
was real in the heart.
Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very
sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it appeared,
and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers among them,
women especially who would have ascended to genius in their calling, had
they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called upon, as now, to
dissipate their values in large classes of children, having time to see none
clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the loaf that was to be cut. The
good teacher in my day was the one who cut the loaf evenly—to every one
his equal part. The first crime was favoritism....
I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in age
from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a boy of
fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically opposite.
The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the mountain. Yet
they had been coming for three months before I acutely sensed this. The girl
had done very well in school. She was known to be bright; and yet, I found
her all caught in rigidities of the brain, tightly corseted in mental forms of
the accepted order. Her production was painfully designed to meet the
requirements of her time and place; the true production of her nature was
not only incapable of finding expression, but it was not even in a state of
healthful quiescence. It was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was
breathing with only a tithe of its tissue.
The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.
The boy next had not done well in school. The word dreamer was
designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me—the mute

might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly told him to
bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if anything, in what I
had said. He brought me in two thousand words of almost phenomenal
reproduction—and yet he had listened sleepily. Of course, I did not care to
develop his reportorial instinct after this display. My work was to develop
his brain to express the splendid inner voltage of the boy, just as certainly as
I had found it necessary to repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit
of the girl. I will come to this individual study again. It is my point here
merely to show how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the
individual, in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded
schools.
I had been one who thought my own work most important—to the
exclusion even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as
he is affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be
disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on
without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old
Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and the
Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At meal-
time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and things to
do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere—tension wherever the
Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had he only
known it.
The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so well-taught
to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined him on the path
to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the time of day for the
first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was accustomed to enter
the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands, regard the bow of shore-
line from the East window—the Other Shore—for a moment; scrutinise the
copy of the day or night before, for the continuity of the present day, light
the pipe and await the impulse of production. Many years of work had
ordained this order; many hard lessons resulting from breaking the point of
the day's work before sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by
a bite too much breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.
However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten
who wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what
ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The

answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the
front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this Lake, in
teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood—the backward and forward
movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere—in short, the Old
Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all life—vibration. He arose
and started up the bank.
"Don't go yet," the little girl called.
"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."
There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was still
cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness of its
own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was Summer.
The smell of the land was there—the perfume of the Old Mother herself
which is the perfume of the tea-rose—the blend of all that springs into
being.
"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she
smells like a tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant, but the
breath of all—as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you winded the
beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like mignonette—
not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but when the wind
brings it."
He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought
about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality of his
product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed is
dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for years in
the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his faults, and loses
more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here was a wrinkled
forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming clearly, or when the
tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly glorified in her morning veil.
"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen
and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not yours
until you express them. And the things you express, as I expressed them, are
not yours either. What you want to express is the things you get from all
this. The value of that is that no one else can do it."
She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.

The Old Man forgot her in a moment.
That was the real beginning.
Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again)
had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a
distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other, but
the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference, however. I had
no fewer good mornings than formerly; and yet, any heavy or critical
attitudes of mind would have been a steady and intolerable burden. In fact, I
believe that there was a lift in her happiness and naturalness. It came to me
so often that she belonged there.
She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently
with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation of
teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:
"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves
as below. It might happen that in a few years—this relation might be
changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us
now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come in;
things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than I, but we
do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one. I sit in the
midst of you—telling you from day to day of the things I have learned
about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan. My first years
here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently the doors will shut
upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When you reach your best,
you may smile at your childish fancies of how much I knew. You will
always be kind in your thoughts of these early days, for that is the deep law
of good men and women; indeed one must reverence one's teacher, for the
teacher is the symbol of Nature, of Mother, of Giving. But there must be
equality first. My brain is somehow filled now; the time will come when
yours is more filled than mine with the immediate matters of our life. For
children become old, and the old become children, if their days are happy.
After all, the immediate matters of our present life are of astonishingly
small account, in relation to the long life—the importance only of one bead
on the endless string. So I would have you know that the differences
between us that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight

moment—that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the lessons
of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned to tell."
I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I
believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the more
one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to bring about
that equality between the young and the old which the recent generations
did not possess, and from the absence of which much deformity and sorrow
has come to be.
The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her
own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to
one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the organisation of
ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it never occurs twice the
same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be at its best in the first trial,
for one of the essences of the rapture of production is the novelty of the new
relation. There were times in the forenoons when I met halting stages and
was ready possibly to banter a moment. I very quickly encountered a
repulse, if she were in the thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward
before her face—a mistake of meaning impossible.
Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail purposely
postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting her to spell
phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I wanted her to
do was to say the things in her soul—if the expression can be forgiven.
I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not
find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a
sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to our
immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in relation to one
bead. I believe that every great moment of expression in poetry and
invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human conduct, is
significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant within. I
believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties of brain and
memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this giant. I believe,
under the influence of modern life on a self-basis, and modern education on
a competitive basis, that the prison-house closes upon the growing child—
that more and more as the years draw on, the arousing of the sleeping giant

becomes impossible; that the lives of men are common on account of this,
because the one perfect thing we are given to utter remains unexpressed.
I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be
prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager to
awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles and
the words of even a child significant.
I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but
must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been
proved for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very
awakening genius is the thing that has made immortal—shoemakers,
blacksmiths and the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to
our lives from the past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every
process of life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not
hard, but a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.

8

THE ABBOT

He was a still boy—the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on
the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him
without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the affairs
of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued me from
his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with another lad
during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew no nearer to
acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the evening I would
see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the sense that his regard
was somehow different, I believe, did impress me vaguely. It all happened
in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I remember his "hello," cheerful but
contained, as I would ride by. He was always still as a gull, and seemed
natural with the dusk upon him.... One day his father said to me:
"I have to buy everything you write for him."
"Well, well," said I.
I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only
fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward,
because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I
heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him over
to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all that I had
and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he was seven or
eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort that awakened
him. He had it read to him several times, but his own reading picked up at
that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study does under driving
interest. Presently he was out after the star books on his own hook. He
suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and that night I got my first
look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It was like some magnetic hand
upon my breast. I could not speak. Every time I shut my eyes afterward I
saw that bright gold jewel afar in the dark. We talked.... Presently I heard
that he hated school, but this did not come from him. The fact is, I heard
little or nothing from him.

This generation behind us—at least, the few I have met and loved—is not
made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to wait. It is
most convincing, to have events clean up a fact which you misunderstood;
to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any glibness, but
leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He did not come to the
Study unless called for. The little girl brought in word from him from time
to time, and the little girl's mother, and the boy's father—a very worthy
man. I heard again that he was not doing well in school. I knew he was
significant, very much so, having met the real boy on star-matters. I knew
that the trouble was they were making him look down at school, when he
wanted to look up. His parents came over to dinner one day, and I said:
"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."
It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at that
time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little girl's education
on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me even then that my
own time was rather well filled. Neither his father nor mother enthused, and
I heard no more from the subject for many days. Meeting The Abbot finally,
I asked him what of school.
"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."
"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said—about you coming to
me for a time?"
"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know
what it would cost."
I told him it wouldn't cost anything. There was a chance to talk with his
father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still suffering
weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the Study. It
seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it after an
hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of weather and
country.
"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner each
day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to deal with
so many."
"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.

It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man
whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.
"That's why I want him," said I.
"But the thing is, we don't want him—a——"
"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come
true—even if they are little ones——"
"Yes."
I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations,
without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to
follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his relatives.
Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only touched me on
terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived in my heart, and
those who were searching my books to find out were in the main only the
more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by not asking for
anything in the way of money.
However, the thing came to be.
My first idea was to take him alone—the little girl coming in the morning
with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had been
accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both. I sat
down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there was no
sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his eyes
sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at first
some sort of recognition that I was talking—but none came, neither nod of
acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They said as he passed the
house farther along the Shore after leaving the Study, that his head was
bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with years.
I tried afresh each day—feared that I was not reaching him. I told him the
things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some of the
things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I known
enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but couldn't get a
visible result. He was writing little things for me at this time and, though I
detected something in the work more than he showed me, sitting opposite in
the Study, his writing was turgid and unlit—like one playing on an
instrument he did not understand; indeed, it was like a man talking in his

sleep. At the end of one of the talks within the first week, at wit's end as to
what I was accomplishing, I said:
"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."
I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me—it came back like a
phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own
understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from
members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in Tokyo.
The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the pause of the
speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a colour of his own,
without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of the source of
eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to me from the
boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days later—just to be sure.
The result was the same.
I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical
memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in
every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if your
hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his belongings, when
called upon to do something with his hands for another. Free-handed, he
may succeed. It is the same with the mind. One's faculties are not open to
revelations from the true origin of all values, if one's brain is clutching, with
all its force, objects that the volition calls upon to be remembered. The
memory is temporal; if this were not so, we would know the deeps of that
great bourne from which we come. No man is significant in any kind of
expression when he is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures
the products of these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that
produces them.
However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the
lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to
tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to read. I
encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little, the same
mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did that the
boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving—that he could grasp a
concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the ground—
that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far more pleasure
than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if permitted to keep the

pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant, however, that I was inclined to
let pass, for the present, the matters of fact and technicality.
Finding that he listened so well—that it was merely one of the
inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me—I, of course,
learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to overlap
somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should say to him
until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first, but that passed.
Presently it occurred to me that things were happening in the Study with the
boy, that the little girl could ill afford to miss; and also that he would feel
more at ease if I could divide my attention upon him with another, so I
rearranged her plans somewhat, and there were two.
As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I
related certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from
scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely from
a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak authoritatively,
merely as one adding certain phases I had found interesting of an illimitable
subject. The next day he slipped in alone and a bit early, his "hello" hushed.
I looked up and he said, almost trembling:
"I had a wonderful night."
The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst of
great happenings.
"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.
It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.
His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called
his paper—
A VOICE THROUGH A LENS
Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the day-time, you
may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had last night was a dream, but it
was more than a stomach dream. I like to think it was a true vision. Before
bedtime I was reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy
containing the nebular theory, and another that told about the planetary
chain.

The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory, but in the
spiritual form. It was that which threw me into the vision. I was away from
the world; not in the physical form but in another—the first time I have ever
lost my physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes still
on.
As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I heard on earth was
my mother playing and singing, "The Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my
worldly senses and I slowly drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley.
Who could drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...
I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an observatory
of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold. As I opened the door and
stepped inside, I saw a large telescope and a few chairs. The observer's
chair was upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory like
the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great telescope, covering the
object-glass, and then uncovered the eye-piece. As I looked around the
heavens to find the great spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I
heard a voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the way. Follow
me."
I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of planets leading
heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not making any indication of
steps, but the close connection of the rise was like the winding around of
the threads of a screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until it
was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This no doubt is a
complicated affair to you."
"Yes."
"Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any clearer."
I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large globe. It was
cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all rocks and upon close
examination I found that it was mostly mineral rocks. That globe drifted
away and left a small trail of light until another came in sight. On this
globe, there was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there
were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one gradually drifted
away like the preceding. The third was covered with animals of every
description—a mass, a chaos of animals. The fourth was similarly crowded

with hairy men in battle, the next two showed the development of these
men—gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did not see.
I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I heard the voice
again:
"I suppose you are still amazed."
"Yes."
"Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The great spiral of
planets represents the way man progresses in the life eternal. Man's life on
this earth is the life of a second, compared with the long evolution. In these
six globes you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the
evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and melted into
earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things emerged from vegetable life
and animals from them. Man grew and lifted out from the form of lower
animals. The lower globes represented the development of man. In the long
cycle of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes life on the
seven globes, he starts over again on another seven, only the next group he
lives on, his life keeps progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now
you may look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."
When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful globe. It
was one great garden. In it there was a monastery of Nature. Overhead the
trees had grown together and formed a roof. Far off to the north stretched a
low range of hills, also to the east and west, but at the south was a small
brook which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It seemed to be
happy in its course to the lake as it leaped over rocky shelves and formed
small cascades while the sunbeams shone through the matted branches of
the trees whose limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear
like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I heard the voice
again:
"You must go now, tell the people what you saw, and some other night
you will see the globe of spirituality more closely."
I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my room. "Can
it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to see if I were awake; walked
over to the window and looked out. There the world was just the same. I
was so taken with the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit

here and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic voice
commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be able to tell you
about the rest of the vision and more about the seventh globe some time
again.

9

THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL

The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:
"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the
girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it. She's
the noblest girl I know."
That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to me at
the time and set me to thinking.
"How old is she?"
"Seventeen."
"What is she interested in?"
"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."
"You might ask her to come."
I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the end
of a week he remarked:
"She is coming."
It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the
lane together.... She took a seat by the door—she takes it still, the same seat.
It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a sense responsible;
also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in justice to him. We would
have to continue his work and the little girl's and gradually draw the new
one into an accelerating current. We called her The Valley-Road Girl. She
suffered. It was very strange to her. She had been at school eleven years. I
did not talk stars; in fact, I fell back upon the theme of all themes to me—a
man's work, the meaning of it; what he gets and what the world gets out of
it; intimating that this was not a place to learn how to reach the book and
story markets. I said something the first day, which a few years ago I should
have considered the ultimate heresy—that the pursuit of literature for itself,
or for the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot

long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken his
potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any other man;
to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the straightest, simplest
way he can. I said that there is joy and blessedness in doing this and in no
other activity under the sun; that it is the key to all good; the door to a man's
religion; that work and religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one
reaches the top, the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception
that they are one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing
the sense of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and
integrating the life that lasts.
I have said this before in this book—in other books. I may say it again. It
is the truth to me—truth that the world is in need of. I am sorry for the man
who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is production.
Handling the production of others in some cases is production. There are
natural orderers and organisers, natural synthesisers, shippers, assemblers,
and traffic masters. A truth is true in all its parts; there are workmen for all
the tasks.
The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own
early essay classes. Old friends were here again—Introduction, Discussion,
Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where they would
make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her work was
spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the teachers,
that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for their ideas to
authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change the entire order
and impulse of their craft.
She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not
penetrated it. I was afraid to open the throttle anywhere, lest she break and
drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment after she
was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.
"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.
Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty. We
had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to expect
and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness and
impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he returned it to
me.

"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."
When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal
impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken
the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger."
There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but
partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the
principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I could
read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The Valley-Road Girl's
discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful sense.
The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about
Fichte. The old German is greatly loved and revered in this Study. He set us
free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a portion of one
of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the Universe." The next
day I read her paper—and there was a beam in it.
I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get
away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set me
clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their work, in
the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two papers—held
the substance of the whole matter—stumbled upon as usual. We had a grand
time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his positions, writing to
his countrymen—a wanderer, an awakened soul. And this brought us the
hosts of great ones—the Burned Ones and their exaltations—George Fox
and the Maid of Domremy—the everlasting spirit behind and above mortal
affairs—the poor impotency of wood-fire to quench such immortality. Her
eyes gleamed—and all our hearts burned.
"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to
deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the
skies. All things that are done—let them alone. The undone things challenge
us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions which have not
yet found substance—is already prepared for the workmen of to-day to
bring into matter—all great poems and inventions for the good of the world.
They must gleam into being through our minds. The mind of some
workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened as yet; the
sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake. Inertia is always of
matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the light. When the shutters of the

mind are opened and the grey appears, he will arise and, looking forth, will
discover his work.
"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the
great, the impossible tasks. But the mind must be entered by the Light—the
heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."
That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was not
an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that my task
with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with The
Abbot—that he was dynamic within and required only the developed
instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with
obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally
splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real self
through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we all
deeply missed her presence from the Study.
Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she
brought me the following which told the story in her own words of
something she had met:
WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN
Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can you
recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing made its first
impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with me the things I am struggling
to explain.
I like to look back at those times when everything to me was new; when
every happening brought to me thoughts of my very own. Just now I recall
the time I first noticed a tiny chick raise its head after drinking from a basin
of water. To me that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to
indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for each swallow it
offered thanks. This was before I went to school.
There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its head to
swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul. The many children
taught me the world's lesson that each man must look out for himself. If the
simpler children did not keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time
to stop and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came to learn.

At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I had always
been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was accused of copying; that
was the first wound. How I would have those all-powerful teachers make
the child know he is trusted.
At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One of the chief
was competition. I learned it early. To have some of the class-stars shine
brighter than I was intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient
compensation for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged
competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more studious. Our
motto was not to do our best, but to do as well as the best. Competition
often grew so keen among my school friends that rivalry, jealousy and
dislike entered our hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one
another's misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends. Out of
school we were all fond of one another, but in school we grew further apart.
My sister would compete with no one. I have often since wondered if that is
why she, of all my school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The
child filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his egress from
school, enters the world a competitive man. It is hard for such a one to love
his neighbour.
The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is the taste of
the world it gave me. For school is the miniature world. A man is said to
benefit from a past evil.
The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me how to echo
the books I read. I did not look through my own eyes, but used the teacher's.
I tried to keep from my work all trace of myself, reflecting only my
instruction, knowing well that the teacher would praise his perfect
reflection. Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut that I
can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.
Unless the school can trust children, show them that they should also be
interested in their less fortunate school-mates, try to do always their best at
the particular work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A
child had much better remain at home, a simple but whole-souled creature,
learning what he can from Nature and wise books.

... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes.
This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender and
wise:
MAY EVENING
A spirit of restlessness ruled me. Each night I retired with the hope that
the morning would find it gone. It disturbed my sleep. It was not the
constant discontent I had hitherto felt with the world. This was a new
disquietude.
One May evening I followed our little river down to the place it flows
into the Lake. Slowly the light of day faded. From my seat upon the green
bank of a stream, a wonderful picture stretched before me. The small stream
and the surrounding country were walled in by dense green trees. To the
west the cool, dark depths parted only wide enough for the creek to
disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in the southern
wall, I caught glimpses of the summer cottages on the sandy shore. To the
north stretched the pasture-lands with shade-trees happy to hide their
nakedness with thick foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace.
To the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty outline of
trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the western sky. Two men
paddled a boat out into the light and disappeared under the bridge. Nothing
disturbed the peace of the stream save the dip of the paddles, and the fish
rising to the surface for food. A circle on the surface meant that an insect
had lain at its centre; a fish had risen and devoured it. Circles of this kind
were continually being cut by the circumferences of other circles.... A dark
speck moved down the stream. A turtle was voyaging.
Now, far in the shadows, I saw a man sitting on the bank fishing. His
patience and persistence were remarkable, for he had been there all the
time. But the fish were at play. The occasional splash of the carp, mingling
with the perpetual song of the birds and the distant roar of the waves
breaking on the shore to the south, formed one grand over-tone.
A feeling of awe came over me. I felt my insignificance. I saw the hand
of God. My relation to my surroundings was very clear. My soul bowed to
the God-ness in all things natural. The God-ness in me was calling to be
released. It was useless to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry.
It must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an echoer and

imitator of men, as one whose every thought becomes coloured with others'
views. Like a sponge I was readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be
applied and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by inward
feelings. This was my soul's complaint.
No tree was exactly like one of its neighbours. Each fulfilled its purpose
in its particular way. Yet all proclaimed the One Source. Performing its
function, it was fit to censure me and I took the cup.
... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the little stream;
heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was weeping tears of sympathy for
one so short-sighted and drawn to failure.

10

COMPASSION

I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the difference
between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two of fourteen and
seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be herself. She has never been
patronised; and in the last year or more has been actively encouraged to
express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as stated, she has no particular
talent for writing. She is the one who wants to be a mother. Not in the least
precocious, her charm is quite equal for little girls or her elders. Her
favourite companions until recently were those of her own age.
On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they
want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the
passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech and
reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected thinking, the
endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of existence—had
already begun to clog the ways which, to every old artist, are the very
passages of power.
" ... Except that ye become as little children——" that is the beginning of
significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in religion. The great
workmen have all put away the illusions of the world, or most of them, and
all have told the same story—look to Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac,
Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of the nearer names. In their mid-
years they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be served; and then
they met the lie of this exterior purpose, confronted the lie with the realities
of their own nature, and fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is
so often the unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched
open, as they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and
more like little children at the end.
The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must have
the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality of the
modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation, because the

old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our hearts.... I was
promising an untold something for a future lesson to the little girl yesterday,
just as she was getting to work. The anticipation disturbed the present
moment, and she said:
"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek——"
Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a
song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the
perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me—in the sunlight and
elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it was so
near—every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the
pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I was
already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song was
repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the Old
Mother—that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was gone
—a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this sentence
in the room:
" ... sang four songs and flew away."
It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of
course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression.
However, no after explanations will help—if the art of the thing is not
apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman said
—"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."
And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a
Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights are at
half-mast."
She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child in
on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her reading on
the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all within. If you can
listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get it all. When a man
wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as much as helped if he
knows much about it. He feels called upon to express that which he has
seen—which is so small compared to the big colour and atmosphere."
I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a
picture.

A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a
story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked as if it
had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."
Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment to get started,
as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end of a breakwater,
listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it slaps up against the
heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays upon my arms, bare feet
and legs, turning them from winter's faded white——"
Or:
"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring
beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little woodland
bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering at their
little legs, I felt a part——"
I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to write
it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,—at least, until
after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction that something
prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could get just at that
process in the child's mind, we should have something very valuable for all
concerned. But we can only approximate the inner pictures. The quality of
impressionism in artistry endeavours to do that—to hurl the fleeting things
into some kind of lasting expression. The greatest expressionist can only
approximate, even after he has emerged from the prison-house and
perfected his instrument through a life of struggle. His highest moments of
production are those of his deepest inner listening—in which the trained
mind-instrument is quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to
the greater source within.
The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me,
among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I
find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her expression is
becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I administer a bit of
stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening out the brain. The best
and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart Mill. Weights, measures and
intellectual balances are all honest in his work—honest to madness. He is
the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's ancient essay "On the Sublime" is
hard reading, but has its rewards. You will laugh at a child of ten or eleven

reading these things. I once kept the little girl for three days on the latter,
and when I opened the doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her
Thoreau's "Walking"—there was something memorable in the liberation.
She took to Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full
summer. The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new
receptivity. It was not that I wanted her to get Mill or Burke, but that the
mental exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or
masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams,
playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.
Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child
becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the mind
does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they are
without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith without
works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best developed by
the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes from without, yet I
would not keep the exterior senses closed.
In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the case of
The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even to begin
upon the expression of that within which was mainly inarticulate, but
mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road Girl's mind was
trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the first business was to
re-awaken her within, and her own words have related something of the
process.
The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of
intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is only
because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational systems is
toward mental training to the neglect of those individual potencies which
are the first value of each life, and the expression of which is the first
purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from within-outward amounts
to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an heroic measure is brought,
only because it is so pitifully overlooked in the present scheme of things.
Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly various
plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount to, are all
splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the calibre of the

individual by which his service is made effective to the world. As I have
already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five consciousness through a
twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot get through to the world
except through the brain.
In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe that
the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of the views
stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is naïve, not to have
explained before, that from the view these things are written the brain is but
a temporary instrument of expression—most superb and admirable at its
best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a listener, an interpreter,
without creativeness; an instrument, like the machine which my fingers
touch, but played upon not only from without but within.
If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison,
having been forced to turn their eyes within—you will find a hint to the
possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom solitude
has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the time most men
reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior promptings for
their mental activity—the passage entirely closed between their intrinsic
content and the brain that interprets. Solitary confinement makes madmen
of such—if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.
The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the
current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward, or
from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed
only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to be
powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you powerful in
two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his disciples.... Still I
would not hold the two methods of development of equal importance. The
world is crowded with strongly developed intellects that are without
enduring significance, because they are not ignited by that inner individual
force which would make them inimitable.
A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten
proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take his
place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own
individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any sense
of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a man must

achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the sense of his
separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham and a delusion.
Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the
Unity of all Existing Things (which is literally brooding upon this planet in
these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of the law, and the
greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy. Time has made the
greatest of the sheer intellects of the past appear apish and inane; and has
brought closer and closer to us with each racial crisis (sometimes the clearer
according to their centuries of remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who
were first to bring us the conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the
immortal fire, Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.
Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything
fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant within,
whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this awakening
is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of this greater day,
in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion, the Unity of All Things is
descried.

11

THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK

"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have done
Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of China, I'll
tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to read."
So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future
work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him with
Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries, even in
the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the setting would
form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the monastery would
be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the psychology of this, but to
many there may be a link in it. In any event, the imagination is developed,
and its products expressed.
The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent
along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her lap—
and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:
"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and
now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so good."
"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write until
you begin to dream as you write—until you forget hand and paper and
place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain interpret the
dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."
In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will get a
glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an idea, more
clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy back of the work
here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who come express
themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these papers from the
nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a ray in everything she
does, at least one in a paper. What is more cheerfully disclosed than
anything else, from my viewpoint, is the quickening imagination.
Apparently she did not title this one:

Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build his
civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere—in Germany, in Canada and
California, but the Father is more to be seen with her in the wild places.
In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the Mother.
Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted to, without being
placed in all kinds of star and round and square shapes. Some of their leaves
could be longer than others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great
trees, such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve their
branches without the thought of being cut down for a sidewalk, or trimmed
until they were frivolous nothings. Small stones and shells could lie down
on a bed of moss at the feet of these trees and ask questions that disgraced
Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower fairies could sit in
the sunlight and laugh at the simple little stones.
Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds like some kind of
a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century instead of the Twentieth, but I am
not going to tear it up. The thing I really wanted to write about this morning
was the goodness of being alive here in winter.
After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows
and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes up
over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow, all
through the sky.
Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look like
the fluffy heads of young lettuce.
Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last
shades of night pass out of the sky.
Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot look
at it. A breakfast of toast and jam—just enough to make you feel like work.
A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke
sharpening the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men,
especially of our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman,
and Lincoln. A wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!

So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so
many lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses
are killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous
and vulgar ways—maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end.
Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year these
poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them and then
we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition is never able
to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies and nymphs of
flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of higher Nature, which men
should know.
In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes
going about their work—I mean their own work and affairs. To me it seems
that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't got the
time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering: "Somebody sat
on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."
I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see the
patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery capes and
aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all this, but I
imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are small, but too
big for them, and make a little clatter as they go over the rocks. Their hands
I cannot see; they must be under the cape or somewhere that I do not know
of.
The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The
trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp from
being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh and
talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but if one
moves quickly they all run away.
I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old
gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There
were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must have
floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready. Fairies
were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a friend of
the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and spent a good deal
of time with them, because the memories are still with me. I will spend

most of my spare time with them next summer and learn much more about
them.

... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low
street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was
something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might think
hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep, but I have
heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped short. For instance,
yesterday the little girl began to tell me something with great care, and I
was away until she was in the middle of the story, and the intimate gripping
thing about it aroused me. I told her to write the thing down just as she had
told it, with this result:
" ... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one thing, there is a
voice inside. It seems to be telling me something, but I never know what it
says. I never wanted or tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I
can get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because after the voice
stops these three things run through my mind, just as quick as the voice
came and went away: A thought which is full of mystery; another one that is
terrible; and the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to be
connected with Mother in some way; something she said many, many years
ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and she talked like old country
women, but it was not the voice I asked for."
I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest
things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for fulfilments at
once.
"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not
be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every day, and
perhaps something will come."
These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on
Roses:
If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old Mother
herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot express in words what roses
bring to me when I look down at them or sniff their magnificently shaded
petals. They seem to pull me right out of the body and out into another

world where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose the
red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real tea roses.
I took three roses into a house—a red one, a white one, very much finer
than the first, and the third a dream-rose that takes me into the other world
—the kind of yellow rose that sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the
Chapel room every day.
A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.
"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that is!"
"Which one do you like best?" I asked.
"The red one, of course," the girl answered.
"Why, the other two are much——" I began.
"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one likes them red
ones best?"
I walked away. I believe that city people who never see Nature, know her
better from their reading than country people who are closer to her brown
body (than those who walk on pavements) but never look any higher. And I
think country people like red roses because they are like them. The red
roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow teas; they bloom
just as long and often, and often grow bigger. They are not ashamed.
A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put into the ground.
After a while its leaves all fall off and it is bare and brown, like a little stick
in the snow. Yet down under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy
rose spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have been
waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is fine enough for them, and
it has come—and others. Months afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish
yellow-golden roses come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it
all wonderful?
I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey Day:
Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan shore. The air
is crisp and cool, but there is very little wind. Everything is looking fresh
and green. The train on the crossing makes enough noise for six, with a
screeching of wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the

harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday scene. I started in
this morning to finish an essay I had begun the day before. After a little
while, I opened the window, and the happy working sounds came into the
room. I could not finish that essay; I had to write something about the grey
happy day.
On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always so brimming
full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was on a grey day like this in the
early Spring that "Cliff" made us see the great snow giants on the other side
of the water, cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and
pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see that all the
rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only one. These grey days that
people find so much fault with, if they are not so important as the days
when the sun cooks you, they are far more wonderful! One's imagination
can wander through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the
sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many different faces,
different and strange lands and people. Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles,
birds, beasts and everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see
huge dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away. The sky
is always changing. The pictures never last, but new ones come.
A TALK
What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole
lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time
spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I have
heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to the work
that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short talk from
one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes the wrong
way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally wakes up to
the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from going the wrong
way and passing through the same pain and suffering.
At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the
angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard,
flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange,
wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little brown
and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the fairies well
would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so to me. When I

think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a whole lot of
beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the green gnomes
through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just go right on
laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of brown gnomes a
very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves are on the ground
and brown men are working so hard and so fast their hands and feet are just
a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love them. But that is all, for they
are working hard.
If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be
able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together, and
the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And one
could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any old thing.
What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has
stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all the
wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking up,
and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that woods.
The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy by
fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches would
undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many other
wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.

12

TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT

It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable, the
installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I concluded that I
might begin on that winter and summer dream of a house—in about
Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been seeing it too clearly.
So clear a thought literally draws the particles of matter together. A stranger
happened along and said:
"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take
another look at your little stone study."
I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him
that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He found this
interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped some time to
come true out yonder among the baby elms—the old father fireplace and all
its young relations, the broad porches and the nine stone piers, the
bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass, the brick-paved patio
below and the fountain in the centre.... As he was a very good listener, I
took another breath and finished the picture—to the sleeping porch that
would overhang the bluff, casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down
over the stone-work, even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the
basement.
"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I can
frame it up for you."
When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it
was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came
from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty, and
turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward there was a
tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the afternoon. A contractor and
his friend, the lumberman, were interested to know if I contemplated
building. Very positively I said not—so positively that the subject was
changed. The next day I met the contractor, who said he was sorry to hear

of my decision, since the lumberman had come with the idea of financing
the stone house, but was a bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.
This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my well-
trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in his own
cellar:
"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let me."
He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw—of a poor man's kind, and
spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.
"And it's all paid for?" I asked.
He smiled. "No—not by a good deal less than half."
"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying
for it?"
"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."
That was not to be forgotten.
So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand
under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the
foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house,
because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer
sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner—at times.... When
they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had pinned to
matter in the form of many blue-prints—for a time.
As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down
upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had
ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had learned
the pleasure of nodding to the villagers—bankers, doctors, merchants,
artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores or houses and
as gently as possible refrained from touching the social system of the place.
Our lives were very full on the Shore.
There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have
fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in the village
still, but different.

Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a small
Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched their life a
little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted upon the hard,
gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields for grains. Their
children lived in the sun—a strange kind of enchantment over it all. I stood
high on a rock above the river one evening across from the Indian camp,
with a Canadian official who was a kind of white father to the remnant of
the Indian tribes in that part of the province. We talked together, and as we
talked the sun went down. An old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the
stillness we heard him tap out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he
came down like a dusky patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his
canoe and lifted the paddle.
There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening
and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to
my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from
the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw the
current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it. The canoe
had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and the dog in the
centre of the stream—the point of a rippling wedge.
The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made
the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like a
white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us the
Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of a winter
turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No word.
The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed
him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went
back. It was all uninteresting night to me now—beauty, picturesqueness,
enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't even rise from my seat
on the rock. I had looked too close. That night the Canadian said:
"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to
camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends—young and old,
even the young married people. They point—back and upward—as if one
pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's tuberculosis
mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring anything but a
corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to the houses, batten

the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them, sleep and have their
food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring, the touched ones cough,
and are carried out. They seem to know that the race is passing. They do not
resist—they do not care to live differently."
Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's
nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it would
not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have amounted
to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town, when the
house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups of workmen
that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build the house. I
think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another incident:
... One of the young men here loved the sunlight on his shoulders so well
—had such a natural love for the feel of light and air upon his bare flesh—
that he almost attained that high charm of forgetting how well he looked....
The country people occasionally come down to the water on the Sabbath
(from their homes back on the automobile routes and the interurban lines),
and for what they do not get of the natural beauty of shore and bluff, I have
a fine respect. However, they didn't miss the Temporary Mr. Pan.
They complained that he was exposing himself, even that he was
shameless.
Now I am no worshipper of nudity. I'd like to be, but it disappoints in
most cases. There is always a strain about an object that is conscious of
itself—and that nudity which is unconscious of itself is either shameless, an
inevitable point of its imperfection anatomically for the trained eye; or else
it is touched with divinity and does not frequent these shores.
The human body has suffered the fate of all flesh and plant-fibre that is
denied light. A certain vision must direct all growth—and vision requires
light. The covered things are white-lidded and abortive, scrawny from
struggle or bulbous from the feeding dream into which they are prone to
sink.
It will require centuries for the human race to outgrow the shames which
have come to adhere to our character-structure from recent generations. We
have brutalised our bodies with these thoughts. We associate women with
veils and secrecy, but the trouble is not with them, and has not come from

women, but from the male-ordering of women's affairs to satisfy his own
ideas of possession and conservation. The whole cycle of human
reproduction is a man-arrangement according to present standards, and
every process is destructively bungled. However, that's a life-work, that
subject.
In colour, texture and contour, the thoughts of our ancestors have debased
our bodies, organically and as they are seen. Nudity is not beautiful, and
does not play sweetly upon our minds because of this heritage. The human
body is associated with darkness, and the place of this association in our
minds is of corresponding darkness.
The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a
thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to educate
the countryside by browning his back in public. That did not appeal to us as
a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would frequently be interrupted by
the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one may draw most of the values of
the actinic rays of the sun through thin white clothing; and if one has not
crushed his feet into a revolting mass in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go
barefooted a little while each day on his own grass-plot without shocking
the natives or losing his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this
subject is to express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain
facts in the case of the countryside which complained.
They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without
knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face to
face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is above the
level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all the living lights—
the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not glorify them, as men or
parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to Questing—man's real and
most significant business. They do not know that which is good or evil in
food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in houses, lands or faith. They live in a
low, lazy rhythm and attract unto themselves inevitably objects of
corresponding vibration. One observes this in their children, in their schools
and most pathetically in their churches. They abide dimly in the midst of
their imperfections, but with tragic peace. When their children revolt, they
meet on every hand the hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low
established forces, and only the more splendid of these young people have
the integrity of spirit to rise above the resistance.

As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly
naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find
some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a descending
arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where the vibrations
of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian rather than
individual. The year around, these people wear clothing,—woollen pants
and skirts, which if touched with an iron, touched with sunlight, rain or any
medium that arouses the slumbering quantities, the adjacent nostril is
offended.
They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with as
little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and
legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh and
as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a price for
pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen pleasures are
either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love is made
indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with the sense of
possession.
They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret of
order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of the
day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be conceived by
them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work is for bread; that
bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may the where-with to
purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and the rest a gamble....
They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the many in amusement
and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth. To all above, they are
as if they were not; mediocre men, static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-
burner of vision flickering from childhood, but never igniting their true
being, nor opening to them the one true way which each man must go
alone, before he begins to be erect in other than bone and sinew.
They cover their bodies—but they do not cover their faces nor their
minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, they are not ashamed! They
reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without
complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint of reality,
the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their

abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the world-crowd,
whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and motion-photography.
The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our
ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is ahead.
Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask of its
people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each other. There
is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is deep as the pit.
When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a community, one is
foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is merely an unlettered
thing.
No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one
who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind that
has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's treasures
from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive in its small
conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously furnished, and more
rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have found that the untrained mind
is untrained in the qualities of appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike,
nor spiritual, nor generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its
integrity will hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.
All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The
essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and
understanding—and these are qualities that come from evolution of the soul
just as every other fine thing comes.
We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening—love and
life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter.... But that
is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness is designed to
smother an awakened soul. You have to bring God to him in his own
terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that he is serving
his God. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his sons and daughters
quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of fear or curses them for
straying.
I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos
and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review of life as I
had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact that one little
contract for certain interior installations was strung over five months, and

surprised me with the possibilities of inefficiency and untruth, is long since
forgotten. The water runs. Ten days after peace was established here, all my
wounds were healing by first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at
work on a new contract the day after they left me, the pity that surged
through my breast was strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct
of their days was a drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of
materials, an arriving at something like order against the grittiest odds, and
they must do it again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the
evening—but the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is
knowledge.
I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the
world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve, but
it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead. The paths
behind do not contain them; the simplicity of peasants and lowly
communities is not merely unlettered. One does not need to deal with one
small town; it is everywhere. The ways of the crowds are small ways. We
wrong ourselves and bring imperfection to our tasks when we forget that.
We love the Indian crossing the stream in the great and gracious night—but
God pity the Indian's dog. We must look close at life, and not lie to
ourselves, because our ways are cushioning a little.
All idealism that turns back must suffer the fate of mere sentiments. We
must know the stuff the crowds are made of, if we have a hand in bringing
in the order and beauty. You have heard men exclaim:
"How noble are the simple-minded—how sweet the people of the
Countryside—how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As a
matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the voice of the
people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same
may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called
arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is
not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds
his place in his generation.
The rising workman in any art or craft learns by suffering that all good is
ahead and not elsewhere; that he must dare to be himself even if forced to
go hungry for that honour; that he must not lose his love for men, though he
must lose his illusions. Sooner or later, when he is ready, one brilliant little

fact rises in his consciousness—one that comes to stay, and around which
all future thinking must build itself. It is this:
When one lifts the mask from any crowd, commonness is disclosed in
every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds of
common people are the soil of the future, a splendid mass potentially, the
womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.
All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the
people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First the
dreamer dreams—and then the people make it action....
What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture,
the back of the tapestry.
To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force
of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must
plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing
done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to give could not be
bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise for him, out of the
Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the
other half of his circle.
The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man
who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade
intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked
for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The personal
answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of three kinds: He
may desert his vision entirely and return to operate among the infinite small
doors of the many—which is cowardice and the grimmest failure. He may
abandon the many and devote himself to the few who understand; and this
opens the way to the subtler and more powerful devils which beset and
betray human understanding, for we are not heroically moulded by those
who love us but by the grinding of those who revile. If a key does not fit, it
must be ground; and to be ground, its wards made true and sharp, it must be
held somehow in a vise. The grinding from above will not bite otherwise.
So it is with the workman. He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the
world....

The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world.
Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision—all good
comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely,
which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater failure; or,
intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he may exert a
levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings beat upward.
There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in this latest
struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary victory.
The real workman then—vibrating between compassion and contempt—
his body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his task.
When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to have
wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic levitating force of
the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown here, and gain their
power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.

13

NATURAL CRUELTY

In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first
things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and the
grown man all the states of evolution are vaguely reviewed, as they are, in
fact, in that more rapid and mysterious passage between conception and
birth. Young nations pass through the same phases, and some of them are
abominable. The sense of power is a dangerous thing. The child feels it in
his hands, and the nation feels it in its first victory.... In the Chapel during a
period of several days we talked about the wonder of animals (the little
boys of the house present) and the results were so interesting that I put
together some of the things discussed in the following form, calling the
paper Adventures in Cruelty:
As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain matters of charity
as we used to regard them are vulgar now. I remember when a great sign,
The Home of the Friendless, used to stare obscenely at thousands of city
school children, as we passed daily through a certain street. Though it is
gone now, something of the curse of it is still upon the premises. I always
think of what a certain observer said:
"You would not think the Christ had ever come to a world, where men
could give such a name to a house of love-babies."
I remember, too, when there formerly appeared from time to time on the
streets, during the long summers, different green-blue wagons. The drivers
were different, too—I recall one was a hunchback. These outfits formed one
of the fascinating horrors of our bringing-up—the fork, the noose, the stray
dog tossed into a maddened pulp of stray dogs, the door slammed, and no
word at all from the driver—nothing we could build on, or learn his
character by. He was a part of the law, and we were taught then that the law
was everlastingly right, that we must grind our characters against it.... But
the green-blue wagons are gone, and the Law has come to conform a bit
with the character of youth.

The time is not long since when we met our adventures in cruelty alone
—no concert of enlightened citizens on these subjects—and only the very
few had found the flaw in the gospel that God had made the animals, and all
the little animals, for delectation and service of man. Possibly there is a bit
of galvanic life still in the teaching, but it cannot be said to belong to the
New Age.
Economic efficiency has altered many styles for the better. Formerly
western drovers used to drive their herds into the brush for the winters. The
few that the winter and the wolves didn't get were supposed to be hardy
enough to demand a price. It was found, however, that wintering-out cost
the beasts more in vitality than they would spend in seven years of labour;
that the result was decrepit colts and stringy dwarfs for the beef market.
Also there was agitation on the subject, and the custom passed. City men
who owned horses in large numbers found their efficiency brought to a
higher notch at the sacrifice of a little more air and food, warmth and rest.
There is a far-drive to this appeal, and there are those who believe that it
will see us through to the millennium.
A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country there was an
old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red and white like Stevenson's
cow that ate the meadow flowers. Her name was Mary—Mr. Devlin's Mary.
The Devlin children played with us, and they were like other children in
every way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves disappeared
annually (one of the mysteries) and the Devlin children were brought up on
Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they said, but pure cream. We came to know
Mary, because she was always on the roadside—no remote back-pastures
for her. She loved the children and had to know what passed. We used to
deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting the last circlet
fastened, old Mary would tire of the game and walk sedately out of the ring
—just as she would when a baby calf had enough or some novice had been
milking too long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus
think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we passed her—to
and from school. It was said that she could negotiate any gate or lock.
"Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin house, we
saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they were tying Mary
behind. She was led forth. I remember the whites of her eyes and her
twisted head. Only that, in a kind of sickening and pervading blackness.

The calf cried to her, and Mary answered, and thus they passed.... 'But she
is old. She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin children said.
"Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke to certain
grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy that was mine. No one
criticised Devlin. It was the custom, they said.... Even the butcher had heard
of old Mary.... You see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a
child—but you never can know what it showed me of the world. None of us
who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have not since. I cannot."
Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had
been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and
beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I wanted
butter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted a front-yard
cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady that had eyes the
children would see fairies in——
"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of yours
——"
"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"
"Yes, sound as a trivet."
"A good yielder?"
"All of that."
"What's the matter?"
"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the
milktime, there isn't much left for beef——"
"But I don't want to eat her."
"But as an investment—you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down—they
don't weigh much at the butcher's."
The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good
economy so prevalent as to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's exactly
why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related the episode to a
man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:

"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's
abominations in a city street yesterday—cart with crate, new calf inside, old
moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter—a very interesting tumbril,
but she hadn't conspired against the government. For a year she had given
the best of her body to nourish that little bewildered bit of veal—and now
we were to eat what was left of her.... Also I passed through a certain
railway yard of a big city last holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on
tier of crated live chickens were piled there awaiting shipment—crushed
into eight-inch crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an
atrocious horror like that—a man being held in a torture-cell in such a
position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve, to say
nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this thing before—yet
never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A man must see a thing
like that just right, in full meaning, and then tell it again and again—until
enough others see, to make it dangerous to ship that way. I got the idea
then, 'Suppose a man would make it his life-work to change those crates—
to make those crates such a stench and abomination, that poultry butchers
would not dare use them. What a worthy life work that would be!...' And
then I thought, 'Why leave it for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is
everything," he concluded.
There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about
his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task came
to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see the big
thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then very often a man
sets out to find a passage to India and gets a New World. In any case, to put
four inches on the chicken-crates of America is very much a man's job,
when one considers the relation of tariff to bulk in freight and express.
Yet there is efficiency even to that added expenditure—a very thrilling
one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have ever felt the
heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and suffered the
lassitude and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for you to believe the
demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is another; and the breaking
down of tissue as a result of continued torture is caused by still another
poison. The point is that we consume these poisons. The government is very
active in preventing certain diseased meats from reaching our tables, but

these of fear, rage, blood-madness and last-days-of-agony are subtler
diseases which have so far had little elucidation.
Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed to
forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged in
slaughtering—nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of an opera
cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and bloom. It went
around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in the wild to-day
because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles change—but there is
much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time the Messiah of the
lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens found theirs in the city
yards.
The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression of
cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether clear
the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace, merely because
cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped to spare the
helpless creatures a tithe of their suffering, but that will not suffice now. A
clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work to bring it about.
Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his
beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough for us
to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver, but it has been
found that more is required. You may threaten him with the police, even
with lynching; you may frighten him away from his manhandling for the
moment—but in some alley, he is alone with his horse afterward. His rage
has only been flamed by resistance met. It is he who puts the poor creature
to bed.
The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime,
for the reason that the very passion responsible for the crime masters the
fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely physical basis, for
the ramifications of cruelty are cumulatively intense, the higher they are
carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of knowing things; it is the
coarseness of fibre which resists all the fairer and finer bits of human
reality. Just so long as men fail to master the animals of which they are
composed, the poor beasts about them will be harrowingly treated.
So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied
for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general

education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting the
human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.
On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one of
the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be freezing to
death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these were not
valuable horses. Good stock is not shipped in this precarious fashion. It was
a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed—with a few days' work left in
them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the fields and small towns by
buyers who could realise a dollar or two above the price of the hide—to
meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big city. The hard part is that it
costs just as much pain for such beasts to freeze to death, in the early stages,
at least. The investment would have been entirely spoiled had it been
necessary to furnish blankets for the shipment.
The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought all
that was stopped long ago——"
Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a ship that is
to run a blockade, if the premium is right—so will a certain element of trade
take a chance on shipping such horses, until the majority of people are
awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't being sanctified
to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of manhood proper.
The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the
mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the lethargy which
renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The remarkable part
is that the people are ready, but they expect the stimulus to come from
without instead of from within.
Custom is a formidable enemy—that herd instinct of a people which
causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day
everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out the
lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one expect
effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students when the
bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are children to do
when their parents shout mad-dog and run for clubs and pitch-forks at the
passing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster when the blacksmith does
not know the anatomy of a horse's foot? Ignorance is the mother of cruelty,
and custom is the father.

The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences—upon
astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology—are the results of flashes of
intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof against
intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its burnings, its lancings,
its brandings, its collections of skulls and cadavers, until its particular
enlightener appears. The dreadful thing to consider is that each department
of cruelty brings its activity up into a frightful state of custom and action,
before the exposures begin.
Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to
change—that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to
reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or
calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our relation to children.
The child will change in a day. The child is ready for the beauty and the
mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be closed to sensitiveness and
intuition. If that can be prevented the problem of animal welfare is solved,
and in the end we will find that much more has been done for our children
than for the animals. So often again we set out to discover the passage to
India and reach the shores of a New World.

14

CHILDREN CHANGE

The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction
which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated,
having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief interest
at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he alleged to have
found in my work. After that he intimated that he aspired to write. The
second young man came from Dakota, also a college-bred. A teacher there
wrote to me about him. I looked at some of his work, and I found in it
potentialities of illimitable promise. I was not so excited as I would have
been had I not met this discovery in other cases from the generation behind
us. Their fleets are upon every sea.
The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a
while in the evening on short manuscript matters. In fact, the dollar-end has
not pinched so far; and they help a while in the garden in the afternoons,
designating the period, Track, as they named the little class after mid-day,
Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they really belonged to the
class. It was primarily designed for the younger minds—and I was
unwilling to change that.
You would think it rather difficult—I know I did—to bring the work in
one class for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the young
men:
"Of course it is their hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you like.
Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As for me—the
young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two classes."
They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It
happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.
"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.
They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I
heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been

unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making
inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went
out into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:
"Chapel is the best hour of the day——"
He said more, and it surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This
younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is not
glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever befallen me
is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot brought in a bit of
work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of mis-technicality—an error, I
had pointed out to him before. I took him to task—lit into him with some
force upon his particular needs of staying down a little each day—or the
world would never hear his voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was
no more his than the others in the room—that they were all sustaining him,
their hearts like a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to
stop.... I did. The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far
from any competitive ideal. They were one—and there's something
immortal about that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some
time be. There is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power
bulks even from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow
suffuses all things—and we rise together—a gold light in the room that will
come to all the world.
It is worth dwelling upon—this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has since
come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the reconstruction
write to the Study from time to time—from different parts of the world. I
read the class a letter recently from a young woman in England. It was like
the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from the paper, a glow was upon their
faces. A group of workers in the Western coast send us their letters and
actions from time to time, and another group from Washington. All these
are placed before the Chapel kindred for inspiration and aliment.
"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time shall
come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves from these
days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You will meet the
world in your periods of maturity and genius—at the time of the world's
greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of the elect of the
generation to which you belong. You are watching the end of the bleakest

and most terrible age—the breaking down at last of an iron age. It has
shattered into the terrible disorder of continental battlefields. But you
belong to the builders, whose names will be called afterward."
... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it has
calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give.... We
watch the world tearing down—from this quietude. We have no country but
God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and madness, we
turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New Age—just
children.
... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed—draining,
under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be developed
first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the fruit, but the florists
talk together upon their work before the plants are set. The roses answered
—almost wonderfully. They brought me the old romance of France and
memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This point was touched upon in
the Foreword—how in the joy of the roses that answered months after the
labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred what a marvel is the culture of
the human soul.
The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop
of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the
thoughts I have forgotten—fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They
are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and
again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes, that
for centuries the world has been maiming its children—that only those who
were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as men.
Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds
and they are not the same the next day.
... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to congregations,
which, though edified, return to their same little questionable ways. There
are people in the cults who come to teachers and leaders to be ignited. They
swim away with the new message; they love it and are lifted, but it subsides
within them. In their depression and darkness they seek the outer ignition
again. We must be self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in
the city. We met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and
aspiration. For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long

summer we met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many
caught in their different conventions—world ways, the obvious and the
temporal, as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the
great lessons to me—to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think
the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance of
the Catholic priests' saying—"Give us your child until he is seven only
——"
In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change—to
watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes like a
grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in the world.
We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best
innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground
upon and master. We are held and refined between the two attractions—one
of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We believe that the sense of
Unity is the first deep breath of the soul, the precursor of illumination; that
the great Brotherhood conception must come from this sense. Next to this
realisation, we believe that man's idea of time is an illusion, that
immortality is here and now; that nothing can happen to us that is not the
right good thing; that the farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and
subtle is the system of tests which are played upon us; that our first business
in life is to reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and
regard them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-
and-ten adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand—
they are not. The littlest ones have it—the two small boys of seven and
nine, who have not regularly entered the Chapel.

The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and
without title:
The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to listen. If one
makes his body fine, he can listen better. And if one's body is fine from the
beginning, it is because he has learned to listen before. All that we have
learned in past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept in the
soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people that played around him and
told him queer things when he was first a rock, then flowers and trees, are
still printed in his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the

world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's wonderful old voice will
tell us all things, so that we can write and tell about them. Every thought we
try so hard to get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you know it
is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will find it.
The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can only translate
soul-talk into words. It was not the brain which told Fichte, a long, long
time ago, that Germany was going wrong and that he should fix it by telling
them the right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people not to
listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.
It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly, and learn the
number tables and how to spell words. But these will come themselves,
without a life spent studying them. After a life of this kind, the soul is not a
bit farther ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
baby.
The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps lots of it,
the most terrible thing that can happen to you, unless, as Whitman says,
"you shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve."

15

A MAN'S OWN

The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of
educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting the
individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could not be
handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic impossibility.
The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that
the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and
imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has been
said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to place the
situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these and other
objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.
... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the study
was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the places of
books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a dining-table—the little
afternoon Chapel was of course out of the question for some weeks.... I
used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each week) making wide circles
against the horizon, his head turned this way, like a bird's in flight. And The
Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely, shook her head at me once, though I
had to look close to catch it. The little girl declared, with a heartbroken
look, that the Chapel would never be the same again after cabbage had been
cooked there.
"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And
then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just now. It
is seeing us through these hard days."
But I missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is, my
thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the days, nor
nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about as one does
trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me a joy each day
that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I had been refreshed
daily as a workman; learned each day things that I didn't know; and because

of these hours, I had expressed better in the writing part of the life, the
things I did know. Certainly they taught me the needs of saying exactly
what I meant. All of which to suggest again that teaching is a mutual
service. Just here I want to reprint the first and last thought, so far as I see
it, as regards the first objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former
essay on Work, published in the book called Midstream.
"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a
transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain
manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our
hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate a
man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man who
has found his work—and the splendid discovery invariably follows, that his
work is the best expression of God. All education that does not first aim to
find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising; because, if the
student's individual force is little developed, he sinks deeper into the herd,
under the levelling of the class-room.
"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too
lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work. No
other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation of the
human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.
"I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and
fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the
schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his daily
task—and watching for his own among them.
"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one's
inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the hordes
rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness for buying
cheap and selling dear—if as a race we were lifted into our own work.
"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of
his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one important
thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his work; his soul
breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the lower the evolution of a
man, the harder it is to find a task for him to distinguish; but here is the
opportunity for all of us to be more eager and tender.

"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found
the answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the
Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something sang
all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I had written
Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full, eager and
honest, the answer came—the work of specialists which had moved on
silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in that—for that can
only come to be in a Fatherland.
"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of
his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive
not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the
temperament to choose a work because it is easy.
"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his
instrument, the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a
height and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.
That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities—whether tile-
trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods with
nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such a man
softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.
"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and
brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer receptivity—and this is
a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here and there in the cohering line.
" ... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long hours
in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is ended, the
finished forces turn outward in service. According to the measure of the
giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance of work, the different
reservoirs of power opening so softly; the instrument in pure listening—
long forenoons passing, without a single instant of self-consciousness,
desire, enviousness, without even awareness of the body....
"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher
life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world for
his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor and
Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely from the
plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has mastered himself.
All the folded treasures and open highways of the mind, its multitude of

experiences and unreckonable possessions—are given over to the creative
and universal force—the same force that is lustrous in the lily, incandescent
in the suns, memorable in human heroism, immortal in man's love for his
fellow man.
"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He,
first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the power of the
superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm; this is the cohering
line; this is being the One. But there are no two instruments alike, since we
have come up by different roads from the rock; and though we achieve the
very sanctity of self-command, our inimitable hallmark is wrought in the
fabric of our task."

Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for
money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's
standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable he
will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman for
expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to others. He will
touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and Light comes to the
life that contacts such fine things. He will see the big moments of his life in
a way that he did not formerly understand. Faltering will more and more
leave his expression, and the cohering line of his life will become more
clearly established.
A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has
already answered. Browning stood amazed before a man who had met
Shelley and was not different afterward—a man who could idly announce
that he had met the poet Shelley and not accept it as the big event of a
period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of finding
the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps men had
made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been enacted on
that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of earth there,
the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was just on that
spot that he found an eagle's feather.
I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago—was speechless and
outraged that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather
about afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he

spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in water....
There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are called to the
same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts know each other;
the mystics of the arts know each other.
The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the breasts of the
children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man holds it who
has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a child perceives it
must set out upon soon. The presence of a good workman will awaken the
potential proclivity of the child's nature, as no other presence can do. Every
autobiography tells the same story—of a certain wonder-moment of youth,
when the ideal appeared, and all energies were turned thereafter to
something concrete which that ideal signified. Mostly the "great man" did
not know what he had done for the boy.... I would have the great man know.
I would have him seek to perform this miracle every day.
There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying,
"There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does
not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to bring
him to you—but he would not come. I think he did not dare."
Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom
brought the thing about. A man should say, "Lead me to him now!..." Those
who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put stamps
upon letters they write. God knows they are not ashamed to come and ask
for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their structure of
desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail the letter he has
written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out, full of terror and
torture before you—take him to your breast for he is your own. Children
you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he.... Do you want a slave, a
worshipper—seek out your own. You want nothing of the sort, but you
alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate his worship to the task. He
can learn from you in a week what it would take years of misery in the
world to teach him. You have done in a way the thing he wants to do—that's
the whole magic. You have fitted somehow to action the dream that already
tortures his heart. There is nothing so pure as work in the world. There is
something sacred about a man's work that is not elsewhere in matter.
Teaching is a mutual service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but
because he has reverence, he is potentially great.

The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a
worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all kinds of
workmen; these things are not alone for the artists and the craftsmen and the
professions. There is one boy to linger about the forge of an artisan, after
the others have gone. I would have the artisan forget the thing he is doing,
to look into the eyes of that boy—and the chemist, the electrician, the
florist.
It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written
words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The work here
would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us for several
days. She was so still that I did not know what was happening in her mind.
My experience with the others had prevailed to make me go slowly, and not
to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be glad that she had come. I asked
no expression from her for several days. When I finally suggested
something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror in the room. Her expression
came in a very brief form, and it showed me the bewilderment with which
she had encountered the new points of view in the Chapel. I learned afresh
that one must not hurry; that my first work was to put to rest her fears of
being called upon. I impressed upon the class the next day that we have all
the time there is; that we want nothing; that our work is to establish in due
time the natural expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in
particular, I said that when she felt like it she could write again.
Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl to see
if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All I ever got from
that afternoon was this sentence:
" ... She is going to be a nurse."
I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I
allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting her
surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must have nurses.

... And then the Columbia young man—a big fellow and a soul. I had
talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room class in the city. He took a
cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel began;
then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening, I had

good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his mind and
heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible integrity, a
natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the world's bestowal
—but Inertia.
Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do not
mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that it is of
necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the valuable inner
life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual energy came forth to
intensify the vibrations of the race, to say nothing of their own poundage. It
is less a matter of weight after all than texture; still their fat was a handicap.
These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and
men; all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression of
the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit bring
about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required to express
itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one hundred and
forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression of the spiritual
life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a whole, the great servers
of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole in every fabrication of man and
nature—the finer the work, the finer the instrument.
The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and
continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.
The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought
forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of a
dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of pigment
alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The texture of the
tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You must have gold or
platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the light the finer the
carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live either for appetites or
aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit, in its passionate gifts to
men, incorporates its living light within the cells of our voice-cords and
brain and hands. With every thought and emotion we give ourselves to the
earth or give ourselves to the sky.
The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very nature,
formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of countless ages to

produce the form that we see—the gracious beauties of the older trees, the
contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a Clovelly rose is beautiful.
The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding mystery,
left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in your hand. You
would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's button; and yet it
gave up an individual that long will be remembered in human minds. I saw
that rose in the arch of a child's hand—and all about were hushed by the
picture. For three days it continued to expand, and for three days more it
held its own great beauty and then showered itself with a laugh upon a desk
of blackened oak. We will not forget that inner ardency—the virgin
unfolding to the sun—born of some great passion that seemed poised
between earth and heaven—and expectant of its own great passion's
maturity.
I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who would
come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song of content
came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things. I thought of
the ecstasy of the great givings—the ecstasy of the little old grey woman
who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in the world.
I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties,
whose marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and
whose corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them
the shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of
a thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but
the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The first
had great foliages of coarse mane and tail; the other, a splendid beast that
would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.
We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future
in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour idealism.
Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and lustrous we become,
according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It is the
quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto itself the
excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for his size, longer-
lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural elasticity, capable of
infinitely greater physical, mental, and moral tasks, than the tightly
compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere painter's flourish which

adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there if we see clearly. If the sanctity
is radiant, the glow is intense enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow,
to be photographed, even caught with the physical eye.

16

THE PLAN IS ONE

I was relating the experience of the Columbian. In his case there had
been much time, so there could be no mistake. He had devoted himself to
making and keeping a rather magnificent set of muscles which manifested
even through white man's clothing. He did this with long days of sailing and
swimming, cultivating his body with the assiduity of a convalescent.... I
told him in various ways he was not getting himself out of his work;
explained that true preparation is a tearing off of husks one after another;
that he was a fine creation in husk, but that he must get down to the quick
before he could taste or feel or see with that sensitiveness which would
make any observation of his valuable. With all this body-building, he was in
reality only covering himself the thicker. If a man does this sort of thing for
a woman's eye, he can only attract a creature of blood and iron whose ideal
is a policeman—a very popular ideal....
For two or three days he would work terrifically, then, his weight
besetting, he would placate himself with long tissue-feeding sports. I told
him that he had everything to build upon; that true strength really begins
where physical strength ends; that all that he had in equipment must be set
in order and integrated with his own intrinsic powers, it being valueless
otherwise. I pointed out that he was but a collector of things he could not
understand, because he did not use them; that the great doers of the world
had toiled for years upon years, as he did not toil for one week's days
successively.... It would not do, except for short intervals, and it came to me
that my best service was to get out from under. I told him so, and the
manliness of his acceptance choked me. I told him to go away, but to come
again later if he mastered Inertia in part.... It was not all his fault. From
somewhere, an income reached him regularly, a most complete and
commanding curse for any boy.
... I do not believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play for ten
weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the end of the
first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation period advances,

but that is because the husk is thickening, a most dangerous accretion. The
restlessness is less apparent because the body becomes heavy with play. It
all must be worn down again, before the fitness of faculty can manifest.
If one's body is ill from overexertion, it must rest; if one's mind is ill from
nervousness, stimulation, or from excessive brain activity, it must rest; but
if one's soul is ill, and this is the difference, nothing but activity will help it,
and this activity can only be expressed through the body and mind. Surplus
rest of body or mind is a process of over-feeding, which is a coarsening and
thickening of tissue, which in its turn causes Inertia, and this word I
continually capitalise, for it is the first devil of the soul.
Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be
overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the
world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their
lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their sleep is
brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat heartily more
than once a day; that they reach at times a great calm, another dimension of
calm entirely from that which has to do with animal peace and repletion. It
is the peace of intensive production—and the spectacle of it is best seen
when you lift the super from a hive of bees, the spirit of which animates
every moving creature to one constructive end. That which emanates from
this intensity of action is calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does
not have to sink into a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest
have more to do with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of
tissue one tears down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done.
Absolutely this is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work
a man loves replenishes.
Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying than
to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm of his
task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so continually
tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold this rhythm, we
could not die.
This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full
exercise—soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self
does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a song
from it—that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have heard

from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all selfless
productivity.
One cannot play until one has worked—that is the whole truth. Ask that
restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to polish
the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless cleanliness in a room.
Hold the picture of what you want in mind and detail it to him, saying that
you will come again and inspect his work. Watch, if you care, the mystery
of it. There will be silence until the thing begins to unfold for him—until
the polish comes to wood or metal, until the thing begins to answer and the
picture of completion bursts upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a
hum, and nothing will break his theme until the end.
The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls
differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean things; that
the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested when one enters a
clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't the room, after all, that
gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle or the hum comes from
harmony within.
A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he
"climbed out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened
up when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the
order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away the
litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep on
thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field clean. The
thing is well known in naval and military service where bodies of men are
kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and decks and
accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from softening and
cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose occasional restlessness is
magically done away with, if he is turned loose with sponge and harness-
dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He sometimes rebels at first (before the
task answers and the picture comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed
and at peace, bent upon showing his work.
Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in
athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being
inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for bodily
excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of the larger

faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world expectant of praise. It
is not forthcoming, and his real powers have been untrained to earn the
greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed training for some great
momentary physical stress, in field events, is a body-breaker in itself, a fact
which has been shown all too often and dramatically. Baseball and billiards
are great games, but as life-quests—except for the few consummately
adapted players whose little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or
green-baized rectangle—the excessive devotion to such play is desolating,
indeed, and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.
A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with
it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he loves best
to do—constructive play—giving play to his powers, bringing him to that
raptness which is full inner breathing and timeless.... We use the woods and
shore, water and sand and sun and garden for recreation. In the few hours of
afternoon after Chapel until supper, no one here actually produces anything
but vegetables and tan, yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun,
and some one speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to
the Lake; the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the
stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is all
water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper, the sun-
stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One has found
that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as sunlight can
give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass above—that fallow lands
are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out like a wine, and decide there is
something in it.
There is something in everything.
The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to
bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we don't
get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and that the
birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts to imitate it. An
afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We recall the fact that it
isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get this—if it ever comes to us
—and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he heard his last symphonies,
the great pastoral and dance and choral pieces, and that he wrote them from
his inner listening. Parts of them seem to us strains from that great harmony
that the birds are trying to bring out.

We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat
is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come to it.
There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order begins. Order
should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of surfaces and deeps
in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has come far, and one
does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon in a wheat-field just
before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better for that adventure. She
must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and strong and come naked
and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She must bring down the
spirit of the sun and blend it with her own—for wheat partakes of the
alkahest. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.
The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the
northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a bath of
power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat, thereafter—but
that would be sacrilege.
Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we
saw at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered there—
that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia—so that there is a nobility, even
about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course, then, that all the
aristocrats of Nature—rose and wheat and olives and bees and alabaster and
grapes—must all have their part of the harmony, for Order has come to their
chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in the face of a far-come child—the
brute earth-bound lines of self gone—the theme of life, Service.
I am at the end of Capitals now.
One afternoon we talked about corn—from the fields where the
passionate mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And
another day we found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out
for the nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in
everything.
Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after all
the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first wonder of
man cannot be conceived until this is realised.
There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every
movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is

mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no
detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story—that the plan
is one.

17

THE IRISH CHAPTER

There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars—the
Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old man.... It
was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to tell stories
instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true Arabs around a fire on
the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake received and loved it. I
asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.
"It isn't—it's listening."
It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata,
called Appassionata. There is one here who plays that, and because it tells
him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the others see....
The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems to go out of the
sonata after that, but of the first movement we never tire, and the drama is
always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a woman—of love and life and
death. She wants the earth in her love—but her lover is strange and hears
persistently a call that is not of earth. The woman tries to hold him. All
earth beauty is about her—her love a perfume, a torrent. The voice of
destiny speaks to her that it must not be. She rebels. The story rushes on,
many voices coming to her re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.
The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's Departure—to us the most
magic of all the great little poems. But in Departure it is the woman who is
called.
... Again and again in the Appassionata, the word comes to the woman,
saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will not
hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty—all the wonder that Mother
Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have told her that
it must be, but she does not obey—and then the Master comes down.
It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone. The
chelas have spoken and have not availed. Now the Guru speaks. Out of
vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out of the

deeps and heights of compassion, the Guru speaks—and suddenly the
woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is expressed
in the treble—a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a cup held forth—or
palms held upward. The Guru speaks. His will is done.
And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was
listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked of
Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always brings; or it
may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just been slaughtered in a
cause that had far less significance to Ireland than our child talk by the fire;
or it may have been the South Wind that brought us closer to the fairy Isle,
for it is the Irish peasants who say to a loved guest at parting:
"May you meet the South Wind."
" ... There isn't really an Ireland any more—just a few old men and a few
old, haunting mothers. Ireland is here in America, and the last and stiffest of
her young blood is afield for England. Her sons have always taken the field
—that is their way—and the mothers have brought in more sons born of
sorrow—magic-eyed sons from the wombs of sorrow. Elder brothers afield
—fathers gone down overseas—only the fairies left by the hearth for the
younger sons to play with.... So they have sung strange songs and seen
strange lights and moved in rhythms unknown to many men. It is these
younger sons who are Ireland now. Not a place, but a passion; not a country,
but a romance.... They are in the love stories of the world, and they are
always looking for their old companions, the fairies. They find the fairies in
the foreign woodlands; they bring the fairies to the new countries. They are
in the songs that hush the heart; they are in the mysticism that is moving the
sodden world. Because they played with fairies, they were taught to look
past and beyond the flesh of faces—past metals and meals and miles. Of the
reds and greys and moving golds which they see, the soul of the world loves
to listen, for the greatest songs and stories of all are from the Unseen——"
It was the old man dreaming aloud.
"Ireland isn't a place any more. It is a passion infused through the world,"
he added.
"But the fairies are still there," the little girl said.

"Some are left with the old mothers—yes, some are left. But many have
taken the field, and not for the wars."
A four-day moon was dropping fast in the low west. Jupiter was climbing
the east in imperial purple—as if to take command.... The littlest boy stirred
in the arms of the Dakotan and began to speak, staring at the fire. We all
turned and bent to listen—and it was that very thing that spoiled it—for the
sentence faltered and flew away.
We all wanted to know what had been born in that long silence, for the
firelight was bright in two eyes that were very wide and wise—but the brain
was only seven.... I left the circle and went up the cliff to find a book in the
study—a well-used book, an American book. Returning, I read this from it,
holding the page close to the fire:
OLD IRELAND
Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother,
Once a queen—now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground,
Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders;
Long silent—she too long silent—mourning her shrouded hope and heir;
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.

Yet a word, ancient mother;
You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with forehead between
your knees;
O you need not sit there, veil'd in your old white hair, so dishevel'd;
For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave;
It was an illusion—the heir, the son you love, was not really dead;
The Lord is not dead—he is risen, young and strong, in another country;
Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the grave,
What you wept for, was translated, pass'd from the grave,
The winds favoured and the sea sail'd it,
And now with rosy and new blood,
Moves to-day in a new country.
One by one they dropped off asleep, the little ones first, as the moon went
down—their thoughts so full of stars, asking so dauntlessly all questions of
world and sky. What I could, I answered, but I felt as young as any. It

seemed their dreams were fresher than mine, and their closeness to God....
The little girl touched me, as we drifted away——
"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.

18

THE BLEAKEST HOUR

It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are, a
voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without
penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may
become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle fanatic
on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find certain friends and
sterling enemies—and either lose or win, ultimately, according to change in
the styles of his time.
Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may reach
the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are wrong,
because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He sees one
body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing earnestly at a
certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the dead colour from a
patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed. He blesses them all,
but his soul cries out for a new carpet—at least, a wholesome and vigorous
tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning over of the whole afterward.
Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the bosom
of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are moving about
our business of house and country and world in a most stupid, cruel and
short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine of life, that the hearts of
men are tender and lovable, naturally open and subject by nature to beauty
and faith; that the hearts of men, indeed, yearn for that purity of condition
in which truth may be the only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as
revolting as bad air to the nostrils.
But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the world
of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving—but with an evil
covering, the integument of which is the lie born of self-desire, and the true
skin of which is the predatory instinct which has not remotely to do with an
erect spine.

Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is
no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them along,
find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may be said that
wars have brought great benefits to the race; that materialism has taught us
our place here below as no other passion could; that trade has wrought its
incomparable good to the races of men; that Fear has been the veritable
mother of our evolution, its dark shadow forever inciting us, breaking our
Inertia, bringing swiftness and strength first to the body, then to brain. Even
desire for self, on the long road behind, has been the good angel of our
passage, for we had to become splendid beasts before the dimension of man
could be builded.... All good; mistakes nowhere in the plan.
But the trouble is, the passage of the many from grade to grade is
intolerably slow. We had thought the many had finished with war. The few
already are many grades ahead of that; the few have seen the virtues die out
of patriotism and trade; they have watched the desire for self turn reptile,
and hearkened to this truth which is beginning to reverberate around the
world: What is good for beasts is not of necessity good for men.... One
recent caller here, male, middle-aged, smilingly discussed all things from
the philosophical point of view. I was saying:
"From the nursery to world-clutched retirement from public affairs, a
man nowadays is taught more and more to keep his heart-principle locked
——"
He smiled: "We have all the time there is. It will all come out right. You
fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others of us
think them over quietly by our fires. That is the whole difference. Scratch
off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of God-yearning animal
underneath."
Few sayings ever have hit me harder.
I studied the years' offerings from this man—to his house, to his
acquaintances, to the world in general. An irony filled the room, and so
intense was it that it seemed to have a colour, a kind of green and yellow
vapour. It emanated from the centre of his face. I think the point that
animated me especially was that he was in the habit of talking to young
men. He had no children of his own. I changed the subject and opened the
door—not to hasten his departure but because the air was close.

By every law which makes us hold fast to the memory of saviours and
great men, the finest fabric of any race is its pioneers. We are living and
putting into action now the dreams of brave spirits who have gone before.
Philosophically, even they may have found that the plan is good, but that
did not prevent them from giving their lives to lift the soddenness and
accelerate the Inertia of the crowds. They took their joy in the great
goodness of the plan—only after they had done their best to bring the race
more swiftly into its higher destiny. A man does not sit back and allow his
children to spend years in learning that which he can explain in a moment
from his own experience.... I did not answer the philosopher, but many
things that occurred from that little talk were brought out in Chapel during
the days which followed—matters that had to do with America and literary
workmanship in particular. Certain of the matters we discussed have been
written down for expression here:

If some one announced that there lived in the Quattuor Islands a man
who knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
action of brotherhood and fatherland, there would be some call for maps
and steamship passages. If the Quattuor Islands were not already on the
maps, they would presently appear, but not before the first pilgrims had set
out. And if some one should add that all expression of the arts so far in the
world is addled and unsightly compared to that which is about to be, if a
certain formula is followed, and that this man in the Quattuor group has the
formula—many more would start on the quest, or send their most trusted
secretaries.
And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again and
again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.
The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give to
the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander said:
"It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live it,
than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will not come
to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The passion to

give to others must be established within you before you can adequately
receive——"
You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older than
that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the law works
the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts. There is an
adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good for the part;
but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought,
not self-good, but the general good. One nation, so established in this
conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare of the
world, could bring about the true world-fatherland in a generation; and one
human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the
profound significances of life.
Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is beginning
to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a patriot. It is not my
country that is of interest, but humankind. America's political interests, her
trade, all her localisations as a separate and bounded people, are inimical to
the new enthusiasm. The new social order cannot concern itself as a country
apart. American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at
neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her
deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared
her for the outright demoralisation of war, just as surely as Europe is
meeting to-day the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
invariably follows the thought.
Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a
people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
movement. Within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have
recently been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most
significant fact since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau and Lanier took pen
in hand, forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar
strength upon American production of all kinds as a result of the very act of
getting out from under European influence.

England and France and Germany have fallen into mere national voices.
The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble, against the basic rumble of
war. War in this century is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every
act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the
human mind.... If you received letters from friends in England or Germany
or France during the war—friends whom formerly you admired for their
culture and acumen—you were struck by the dulness and misery of the
communications, the uncentred points of view, the incapacity of human
vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed,
you read the newspapers and periodicals of those countries, you required no
further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its
consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect
from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.
Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and the
unclean. The new social order does not recognise the rights and desires of
any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in
destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the sun's rays and in
character of country, environment, race, colour and structure of mind—
these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential
grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in
the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of
infinite diversity, but the harmony is one.
The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic
whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern
of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and each
nation bringing his labour.
If a certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic
force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring parasite, or
formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time there
is war to the death.
In a doctor's office in Canada, I saw the picture of a bull-dog standing
large against the background of the accepted flag, and beneath was this line:
"What we have, we'll hold."

I found that the picture had a national popularity. Yet a child stopping to
think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things,
as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a
great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of achievement,
he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung him.

It is a conviction held here that the darkest period of American
materialism came to its end with the beginning of the war. The generation
of literary producers in manifestation at that time was responsible for the
bleakest products which America will ever have the shame of showing to
future generations.
It was not so devoid of genius as would appear; the first cause was the
difficulty in getting the best work "through." This again was not because the
public was not ready for the good, but because the public taste was
brutalised by men who stood between the public and the producers. These
middlemen insisted, by the right of more direct contact, that the public
should have what they fancied the public desire to be.
I sat in Union Square recently with a beggar who studied me, because it
appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was a
great story—sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance of
life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from him. Rather
he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was a whine in it.
He chose to act, and he was not a good actor. His offering hurt, not because
he was filthy and a failure, but because he lied to himself and to me,
because he did not dare to be himself, though the facts were upon him, eye
and brow and mouth. So I did not get his story, but I got a thrilling picture
of the recent generation in American letters—I, being the public; the truth
of his story representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I
was ready for, being the middleman's part.
All workmen of the last generation—all who would listen—were taught
to bring forth their products with an intervening lie between the truth and
their expression—the age of advertising heavy in all production.
I recall from those days what was to me a significant talk with an
American novelist who wanted sales, who was willing to sacrifice all but

the core of his character to get sales, and who found himself at that time in a
challenging situation. As he expressed it:
"Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the
woman's soul wakes up."
"A woman's novel?" I asked.
"Meant to be," said he. "Study of a woman all through. Begins as a little
girl—different, you know—sensitive, does a whole lot of thinking that her
family doesn't follow. Tries to tell 'em at first, but finds herself in bad. Then
keeps quiet for years—putting on power and beauty in the good old way of
bumps and misunderstanding. She's pure white fire presently—body and
brain and something else asleep. She wants to be a mother, but the ghastly
sordidness of the love stories of her sisters to this enactment, frightens her
from men and marriage as the world conducts it——"
"I follow you," said I.
"Well, I'm not going to do the novel here for you," he added. "You
wouldn't think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of telling. A man
who spends five months of his best hours of life in telling a story, can't do it
over in ten minutes and drive a machine at the same time——"
"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.
"Well, she wanted a little baby—was ready to die for it, but had her own
ideas of what the Father should be. A million women—mostly having been
married and failed, have thought the same thing here in America—pricked
the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover, they're the best women
we've got. There are——"
He purposely shook the hat from his head—back into the seat—at this
point.
"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America
—God bless 'em—who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for
the Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did.
He was a young man doing his own kind of work—doctoring among the
poor, let us say, mainly for nothing—killing himself among men and
women and babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind
of madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They

were two to make one—and a third. She knew. There was a gold light about
his head which she saw—and some of the poverty-folk saw—but which he
didn't know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.
"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying anything
about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it came to me
was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall down in the
handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm not going to tell
you what happened. Only this: a little afterward—along about page two
hundred of the copy—the woman's soul woke up."
"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.
He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead when his car is
pressing the limit.
"Ever have a book fail?" he asked.
"Seven," said I.
He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes:
"They tell me at my publishers' that I slowed up my last book badly—by
taking a woman's soul out for an airing—just a little invalid kind of a soul,
too. Souls don't wake up in American novels any more. You can't do much
more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas—I mean movie canvas.
You can paint soul but you can't photograph it—that's the point. The movies
have put imagination to death. We have to compete. You can't see a soul
without imagination—or some sort of madness—and the good people who
want imagination in their novels don't buy 'em. They rent or borrow. It's the
crowds that go to the movies that have bright-coloured strings of American
novels as the product runs—on their shelves—little shiny varnished shelves
—red carpets—painted birds on the lamp-shades and callers in the
evenings."
There was a good silence.
"Do you know," he added presently, "I've about come to the conclusion
that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd.
Look at the big movie pictures—the actors make love like painted
animals.... I'm not humorous or ironical. It's a big problem to me——"

"Why, you can't touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until
you are off the sensuous," I offered. "The quest only begins there. I'm not
averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings—in part. But I am
averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a romance when
a woman's soul wakes up. There's a hotter fire than that which burns blood-
red——"
"I know," he said quickly. "I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest
thing in the world.... I'm sure of this story until her soul wakes up. She stirs
in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead—the kind of a woman who could
whistle to me or to you—and we'd follow her out—dazed by the draw of
her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up—but I can feel the
public dropping off every page after two hundred—like chilled bees—
dropping off page by page—and the old familiar battle ahead for me. I can
feel that tight look of poverty about the eyes again——"

"Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?" I asked, as we turned
again into the crowd.
I wasn't the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and
something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen—how easy it is
to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise—when the very
passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.
"She's beautiful—even asleep," he said. "I'm afraid I'll have to give her
something. I'm building a house. She's in the comprehension of the little
varnished shelves—asleep."
"Doesn't a tight look come about the eyes—from much use of that sort of
anæsthetic?" I asked.
"Let's get a drink," he answered.

19

THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER

But the stroke of death has fallen upon such pandering, and the war put it
there. The big names of the last generation are now magazine and movie
men; all save the few whose sutures have not entirely closed, and they are
making their last frenzied turn to meet the new social order, as they met the
floating vogues and whims so long. But this is a difficult turn for panderers
and caterers, because it does not have to do with the surface matter, nothing
to do with dance and dress and appetite, but with the depths of the human
spirit, quickened to animation afresh by the agony of the world.
Only the rarest few of the greatest names of England and Europe have
escaped the fatal partisanship. They have become little national voices, and
in the coming years this will be remembered against them bitterly. The truly
liberated soul does not fall into lying attempts at national exoneration. The
truly liberated soul is no longer a nationalist. A few of the young men have
escaped this curse, but the older had their training, as has been told, in the
blackest age of man. Men have been diminished in more spacious times
than these by becoming laureates; they cannot but be degraded by becoming
nationalists in these abandoned hours.
Genius, in the last generation, met a destructive force in the material
world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by Copernicus.
The voices of very few heralds were even heard, but there is a battle-line of
genius in the new generation, timed for the great service years following the
chaos of war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon;
they will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a
mere suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their
children unaccursed.

... There's always a squeaking when a wagon climbs out of a rut, which is
another way of saying that a time of transition is a time of pain.

This is a notable and constructive generation now beginning its work in
America, and joining hands with the few remaining Undefiled of Europe.
They are not advertisers, nor self-servers. They do not believe in intellect
alone. Their genius is intuitionally driven, not intellectually. Just as steam
has reached its final limitations as a force, and is being superseded by
electricity (the limitations of which have not yet been sensed so far even by
the most audacious), so the intellect, as a producing medium, has had its
period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-
service, of parading, of surface-show and short-sightedness, without parallel
in the world.
For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
blood, a temporal heat. Intuition is driven from the fountain-head of
spiritual energy. Its great conception is the unity of all nature. The intellect
is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from sleep in the
breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
In all times, second-class artists have dealt in the form and matter of the
age, talked of its effects and paraded its styles. Only the very greatest above
them have realised that the true story of the thing, as any given man sees it,
is the one important thing in the world for him to produce; that the nearness
of the expression to the thought is the measure of his success; in a word,
that his thought must be put into words (or tones or paint or stone) without
an intervening lie from the medium.
The race of men and women in their twenties, now at work in America,
are doing these things. Especially in the new poetry is the fine
consummation apparent. These are the leaders of the new social order.
Before the war, such as had developed a voice had to shout through shut
doors. The war has beaten down the doors. A comparable race of young
workmen (more men than women there; more women than men here) has
appeared in Russia and raised its voice. It is not altogether a dream that a
unifying span will stretch across the pillars raised by these two groups of
builders.
In America this rising generation shall return to us the prestige which
Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Lanier so superbly attracted. Indeed,
Whitman is the master of the new poetry; his free verse lives in every line
of the modern production, a point that would not be significant if it were

alone of manner; but his broad human spirit, the infusing brotherhood
which was his passion, and the same universal toleration, are the inspiring
energies of the new workmanship.
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.
There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things
so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean autographs.
Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to make reply
very easy; nor do I mean those who have habits. There seems to be a class
of men and women who want to "do" literature for money, and who ask
such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a publisher?" "What
should a writer expect to make from his first novel?" "Do you sell outright
or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a first book, if the
arrangement is made this or that way?"
I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of
producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of
meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet, again
and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much money
has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in fact,

who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and written
books that brought much money.
But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to
the driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write
to one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a letter
on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big finishing
schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably restless, that her
room-mate was restless. They were either out of all truth and reason, or else
the school was, and their life at home as well. They had been brought up to
take their place in that shattered world called Society—winter for
accomplishments, summers for mountain and shore. They were very
miserable and they seemed to sense the existence of a different world....
Was there such a world? Was there work for women to do? Was it all an un-
mattered ideal that such a world existed? This letter achieved an absolute
free-hearted sincerity in the final page or two—that most winning quality of
the younger generation.
... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world.
Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is not of
our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all that I learned of
the powerful corrective force, which is being established against American
materialism along the Western coast. There is to-day an increasingly finer
surface for the spiritual things of art and life, the farther westward one
travels across the States. It is a conviction here that the vital magic of
America's ideal, promulgated in the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if
at all, by the final stand of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.
All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is
becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of
tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the
entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that is
living spirit is being driven westward before gross Matter—westward as
light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.
The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In California, if
anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be builded. Many strong
men are holding to this hope, with steady and splendid idealisation.

But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes
lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter day,
was a communication from San Francisco—the last to me of several
documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The
documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They
reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above
flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the brain
faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society reckoned, too,
with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from a material basis in
schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a purely physical being, relate
himself to mental processes; nor can one approach the super-mental area by
the force of mentality alone.
But I found the turning in these documents with alarm; that the purpose
divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black business—
known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black before the
Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism. I recalled that
psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this letter:
"I have received some of your early papers and plans, and thank you. I
want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse running
through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read—to play to
commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough without
bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces. They will
work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin will result. For
these forces which you show in operation are the real vitalities of man,
which used other than in the higher schemes of life—call in the bigger
devils for man to cope with. When one begins to use the dimension of the
inner life, before the lower phases of the self are mastered, he becomes a
peril to himself and to others. I feel that I do not need to be explicit to
psychologists. I want to be on record as strongly urging you to be sure that
the animal is caged before you loose the angel. Also that I have a conviction
that there are ten times too many tradesmen in the world now; and that
office-efficiency is not the kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I
know you are in the way of real work, and that's why I venture to show my
point of view; and please believe me energetic only toward the final good of
the receptive surface you have set out to impress."

28

THE ABBOT DEPARTS

One day in March, the Abbot said:
"You know that woods I was telling you about?"
"Yes."
"Well, my father bought it the other day."
... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that
had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the
Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was
natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was cleared,
and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and beech—clean, vast,
in-their-prime forest-men—with thorn and dogwood growing between. It
had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane. The cattle had made a path
on the clay and the grass had grown in soft and blue-green in the shade. In
sapling days, the great trees had woven their trunks on either side of a rail-
fence that had stood for a half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house
that an artist would have named an estate after—or a province.
Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found
men and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I
turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either side of
the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too much shaded
so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was there that the
cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest impression. God bless
the fodder—but what a price to pay. They had burned the thorn and
dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under that sacred cattle-path.
Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of
cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and hard-
wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and the
pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The story of the struggle for life
on Mars came to me—how the only water that remains in that globe of

quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the canals draw down
from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply for the midland
zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.
It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer of
the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I hadn't seen it,
and certainly I didn't want to enter now.
"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.
"Use it for a pasture."
"Isn't going to cut it—any of it?"
"No."
Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's No and Yes.
I took hope.
"Is it thin enough to pasture?"
"The main piece is. Better come and see."
A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the
wan light of March outside.
"There's everything there—a virgin beech wood—a few acres of second-
growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers—then the stream and the big
hollow where the cattle move up and down."
"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.
"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have
thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw the way
I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."
There was a healing in that never.... The Abbot was not the kind to ask
his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and had
studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father had merely
to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that we were alone in
the Chapel at that time. I reached for the rubber-boots.
"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the far-
end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."

He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey, clouds
yellowish-grey and watery.
We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a
stream running across—a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still held
fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not get at
them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an oak-tree without
working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to punk, the bark gone,
having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for thirty or forty years, but
still holding fast to its unmistakable grain and formation, though you could
rub it to powder between the fingers. For quite a little way, we followed the
stream which was swollen with melting snows, and then straight toward the
wooded horizon line, the afternoon hastening so that we marched with it,
hot under our sweaters, presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The
sun appeared at times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was
the first time I saw the Amphitheatre.
We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and
looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream winding
through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of the Fall days,
and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire bottom, so that the
lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed and washed. I looked
up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside me, holding fast to her
leaves of paper white on wide and pendent branches; a smooth and
beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like kine carved upon it. Then I
saw that this was but one of a sisterhood—the mother-tree fallen. Across
were oaks and hickories, and through the naked branches, a log cabin.
An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had
made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the cabin,
and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched it fill
with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a fine blowing
rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the moist air was a
Presence. The cabin had been built for many decades—built of white oak,
hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and floor was gone, but the walls
needed only chinking. They were founded upon boulders.... I saw in days to
come a pair of windows opening to the north, and a big open fireplace on
the east wall, a new floor and a new roof.... It would be a temple. I saw

young men and children coming there in the long years ahead.... Across the
open field beyond was a forest.
"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.
"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.
"It is different. This is a grove—thinned for pasture land. Over there it is
a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of woods—everything
small but thick. You can see and take things right in your hand——"
We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about
the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different
angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main timbers
only—beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and
ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the
Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.
"It won't be so another Spring," he said.
Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the
future years—for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were
torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.
"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I
repeated.
"No."
There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling dusk—
across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town came closer,
and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every odour. It is a clean
little town as towns go, but we knew very well what the animals get from
us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said to me in Newchwang. He
had travelled in the States, and reported that it was a long time before he
could get accustomed to the aroma of the white man's civilisation.
Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment, but he did not get
that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do not sense. Our surfaces are
only open to that which we are not. We must depart from our place and
ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting glimpse, or scent, of our being.
The Abbot and I lifted our noses high. The post-office was thick with

staleness that held its own, though chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel
as I did, and clear out for the edge of the Lake where we belonged.
... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We
were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their
highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their orchids
and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes. I love the
colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on choosing its own place
to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day, and the beech leaves come
forth from their wonderful twists of brown, formed the Fall before.
Everything about the beech-tree is of the highest and most careful selection;
no other tree seems so to have forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost
the need of insisting its demands and making its values known, having long
since called unto itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of
high northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest
lengths of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the
beeches gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own,
too slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women
of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no holier
place than a beech-wood....
The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us—put in the fireplace and the
windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent there, in
part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days of our Spring
Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost intolerable for the
resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a place some day for many of
the great little books of all time—the place for the Stranger to lodge and for
Youth to come into its own. The Abbot's father who has made it all possible
seems to like the dream, too.
... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only temporary....
He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to me quite coldly:
"They have decided to make me go back to school——"
"Sit down," I answered.
As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of sitting
down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at first,
immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic; full day

was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the worldly sense.
Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you somewhere. One
overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount. He takes you to the
piled places where the self may satisfy for the moment all its ravishing
greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One sickens of this; all agony and
disease comes of this. The red horse takes you as far as you will let him, on
a road that must be retraced, but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not.
The point is, one must not slay the red horse of ambition until one has
another mount to ride.
The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his
hand on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The
white breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others.
The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once—and away.... He is but
fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful things
have happened to him.
They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early and
regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from habitual before.
They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is new in their house; that
he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he was doing here from day
to day, and that he was giving me a great deal of that joy which cannot be
bought, and to which the red horse never runs.
But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former
teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I asked
his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they did not come.
A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The appointment was
made in such a way that I did not know whether he was for or against the
Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the story of the Abbot's
coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I would be glad to keep him
by me until he was a man, because I thought he was a very great man within
and believed the training here would enable him to get himself out.
My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop
an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told them
how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and steadily-
working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of order through

geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one of the college men
was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and ordered plane.
The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I
used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely
answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples that
they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of Transfiguration.
Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted one must bring stone
tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he shatter the tablets, he
has done ill toward himself and toward men, and must try once more.
It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy, believing
that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against his work here
had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the next day that the boy
told me that the decision had gone against us. I cannot quite explain how
dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a kind that did not quickly
lift. I was willing to let any one who liked hold the impression that the
obligation was all my way, but there was really nothing to fight. I went to
see the Abbot's father shortly afterward. We touched just the edges of the
matter. As I left he assured me:
"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm in
your Study."
There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up
in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth from
this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the books we
read in the main are not from the local library. One should really rise to a
smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to the Abbot:
"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into
competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through
the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come.
You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy—live it.
This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an honour—a hard
task for which you are chosen, because you are ready. Make your days
interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might. Feel us behind you—
rooting strong—and hurry back."

29

THE DAKOTAN

It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large
bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he had
walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over grassy
hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's shelf of
shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns that much
labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use. Incidentally, it is
worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the joy of hoeing flowers
and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about finished the work of the
evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The Dakotan sat down on the
floor before the fire and was still as a spirit. He has no sense of time nor
hurry; he would have waited an hour or two, or passed along quite as
genially as he came, without my looking up.
But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too fine,
of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them until one
has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a desecration to try to
put such things into words; in fact, one cannot touch with words the heart of
the mystery. One merely moves around it with an occasional suggestive
sentence and those who know, smile warmly over the writer's words.
The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless
gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few pictures,
bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left the desk and came
to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there. I think I had been
watching him intently for several seconds before he looked up.... I had not
been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for days, but it suddenly came to me
that this was extraordinarily like Thoreau, who had come in so silently
through the darkness to share the fire. I found that he had just been writing
of the relations of men, the rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I
found that night more of the master of Walden in his work.
The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original
thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the big

voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness that
Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent the last
few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the sources of life.
Things have been made easier for him here. He took to this life with the
same equableness of mind that he accepted the companions of hardship and
drudgery on the open road. Throughout the last summer he has moved
about field and wood and shore, between hours of expression at his
machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have found myself turning to
him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons together, little was said, but
much accomplished. A few paragraphs follow from the paper brought in on
this particular night:
"Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its energy is the
great primal Breath. Vibration is life and light, heat and motion. Without it,
there would be blackness and universal death. From the almost static state
of rock and soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the first four
senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of Sound-vibration yet to be
experienced by us is beyond our wildest imagination.
"Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things. As yet we know
Sound as we know most other things, merely on the dense physical plane.
The next great discoveries in higher phenomena will be made in the realm
of Sound. The most marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from
vibrations as yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over telepathy is merely
the start of far greater phenomena to come.
"It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we know and hear
are injurious, lowering, disquieting and scattering to all higher thought, to
intuition and all that is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice
in a thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to higher
aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of shortages of intellect and
intuition. More and more, among fine people explanations are out of order.
A man is silent in proportion to what he knows of real fineness and
aspiration. Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to give
out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of his inner being, or its
vacantness and slavery, by the depth of his listening silences, or the
aimlessness of his filling chatter. It is only those few who have come to
know, through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and draw

away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that become gifted with
all-knowing counsels.
"There is a sound born from every thought, action, or aspiration of man,
whether of a high or a low order, a sound not to be heard but felt, by any
one fine and sensitive enough to receive the impression. From the
collective, intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or working
as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which is to be felt as a fine
singing tingle by all in the vicinity. The work here proves this. At times
there is an exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be felt, and
a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all lean forward. The voice
and thought of one has become the voice and thought of all; what is to be
said is sensed and known before it is uttered; all minds are one.
" ... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing, conceiving hours
of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves a long deep sigh of perfect
peace, content and harmony. It is something of this that the wild birds
voice, as they greet the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and
melancholy notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are impressed
from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic, spontaneous, giving voice as
accurately and joyously as they can to the vibrations of peace and harmony
—to the Sounds, which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are
conscious of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide that
birds generate their songs within; that they reason and study their singing,
we must grant that they hear and imitate from Nature, as human composers
do. The process in any case has not to do with intellect and reason, but with
sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire intellect and
reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness, and spirit. It is the childlike
and spontaneous, the sinless and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic
inspiration.
"Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening, inspired look of
the head of a wild bird in flight? Has anything fine and pure ever come to
you from a deep look into the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free
open?
" ... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are low-pitched,
seeming to issue from deep within the man; one strains to catch what is
said, especially if he be used to the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant

speech of the West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of
sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the magic pronunciation
of Aum, Amitabha, Allah, of certain chants and spirit-invoking incantations
of old, and one draws a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the
injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are surrounded by....
"Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken rhythm,
would call the Vina, that Oriental harp-string of the soul, a relic of barbaric
times. But Vina's magic cry at evening brings the very elementals about the
player. The voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of
thunder, the wind in the pines—these are sounds that bring one some slight
whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of the Universe. These are the
voice of kung, 'the great tone' in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to
F, the middle note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern
China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening raptly to kung, the
'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho rushing by.' One longs to be the
intimate of such meditations."

30

THE DAKOTAN (Continued)

I first heard of the Dakotan[3] at a time when I was not quite so interested
in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country wrote me, and
sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially, though the work was
good. She tried again, and I took the later manuscript to bed with me, one
night when I was "lifted out," as the mason said. It did not work as
designed. Instead of dropping off on the first page, I tossed for hours, and a
letter asking him to come to Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the
morning.
He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was
established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since he
is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a childlike
directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants the popular
market; the quality of his bent precludes that for the present. Moreover, he
can live here on what thousands of men in America spend for cigars, but our
ideal of writing has to do with the straight line between the thought and the
utterance.
A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the sentence,
paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a man's style has to
do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and the implements of
writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the run of thought, the
better the work.
One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a
continual changing and refining production about our truest friends—the
same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest—that quickens us
always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we must
change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must always
be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and do not
yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in our breast—
it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have arrived somewhere

—in profession, in trade, in world-standing—know that death has already
touched you, that the look of your face is dissolute.
I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to
come—but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go....
When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual
reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what
I am to do and say next, because you know it well already—arise and come
no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle
of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to
tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for
another voyage—that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go
forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the
deep moans round with many voices."
Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I
think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:
"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water dreams that
have come to me. In their thrall as a child I learned the deeps of fear. I do
not know why dreams of mine are so often associated with water, unless at
some time, way back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has
been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in consciousness. As a
child, water and strong winds drove me to tears. I can remember no other
things that brought marked fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat
going to Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to this
day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at the time. Every one
wondered at these peculiar fears, but the explanation is plainer if one can
look either back or beyond.
"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the
condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and memory are only
of the immediate present, only as old as our bodies, but once in a long time
we fall by chance into certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or soul—
conditions that are invoking to great reaches of consciousness back into the
past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of
our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to
interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or

littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener,
and the voice of the inner man is ever a hushed whisper.
"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the immediate cause
of this dream. Here is a conviction that I brought up from it: I believe that
any one by putting himself into a state of very low temperature and
vibration, almost akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in
consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is wholly of
man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the blood seem to be related
to the cold-blooded animals and hence to the past. Under conditions, such
as sleeping on the ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles
may be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red corpuscles.
This accomplished, the past may be brought back.
"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind
blowing along the lake-shore, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the
tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind
and rain. It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing away
from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state of very low circulation.
The last thing I was conscious of, as I drifted off, was the cold, the low
sound of the wind, and the rain beating upon the roof....
"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail stamped
upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it upon awaking was
almost as vivid as when I was immersed.... It began very slowly with a
growing perception of a low monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight
heaving, lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro. It was
very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank, lifeless, penetrating cold
of water and darkness.... The manner of my own form was not clear to me; I
was of too low a consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I
merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact, during the
dream I had hardly a sense of being, except through the outer stimuli of
cold and danger. These were horribly plain. That I was a creature of the
depths and dark, a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion
from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I seemed of vast
size, and I believe all little creatures do, since they fill their scope as tightly
as we. The spark of consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part
of the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of self or

body in comparison to outer things, was existent, except when a larger form
instilled me with fear.
"My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings, in form,
consciousness, state of being, perception and instinct—everything—so that
I actually lived, in infinitely dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.
"All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life that
contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering; I seemed too low
and numbed to sense to the full the unpleasantness of my condition....
Presently there came a dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did
not seem to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through the
walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan filter of grey. It was
light shining through water, a light which would have been no light to a
human being. To me it was intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres
of me that were sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob,
boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what it was to
cringe.
"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream exactly from the
point of the Cell. These things that I write I could not know then, except in
smallest measure. As our greater forces are diminished by passing through
the brain, these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's waking
faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it appears to me from this
distance:
"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into the depths. The
bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing, undulating fashion and settled
softly on the water-bed, beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black
in the depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay there numbed
into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a torpid inertia, doomed to be
everlasting, had settled upon me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the
slightest will to move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the
dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect hibernation. I had
descended into too low a degree of temperature and vibration to feel the
need even of nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was
a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to move again
had not extraneous influences affected me after seeming ages had passed.

"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were
rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the
slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake,
mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were
festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed out into the
water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of whitish green, half-vegetable,
half-animal, grew on the bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but
were lithe and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and contracting
into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey manner. Their heads were like
white-bleached flowers, with hairy lips, which contracted and opened
constantly, engulfing the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.
"Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly phosphorescent
lights, which winked on and off at intervals as the stems waved gently to
and fro. I did not have an instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly.
They lit up the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they
feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the bottom when these
enemies approached. There were certain permanent spots about me that
gave off other lights at intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region
of many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of blue,
green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in the blackness.
They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders that possessed them. Each
glow lit up a circle in the depths and seemed to attract food to the watcher
who waved it. They were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams
without the searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first felt, and
they did not bother me.
" ... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept me alive. It
increased until all above was a wan grey. One by one the many-coloured
lights of the bottom winked off, the long feelers and contractile stems were
drawn in, and the whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey
world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the gorging not begun,
kept alive by the whip of fear. The low life would have gone on to death or
dissemination had it not been for exterior forces which reached me in the
shape of Fear. I shall never forget it—the Fear of the Black Bottoms.
"There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and the thing
that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with it. In the midst of a kind of
freezing paralysis, the struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without

means of locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then
there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre against the forward
wall of the sack. It was the most vital part of me that was thrust forward, the
heart of a rudiment, so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of
flow. The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the terror
to escape.
"Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of Danger I
had started forward. There had been no forward nor backward before, nor
any sides or top to me. Now a back, a dorsal aspect, came into being, and
the vital centre was thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away
from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre of an organism
came to be in the front, in the head, looking forward and always pointed
away from the danger—protected to the last.
"As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body sucked into
the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as possible, seeming to press the
tenderest parts closest to the bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts
of organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect, protected from
above by the sides and back. As the Fear increased, I gained in strength and
speed of locomotion, the same parts of my form protruding rhythmically,
faster and easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon the
moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the dream. It is in this
way through the stimulus of Fear that the rudiments of organs of
locomotion were begun. And they came in the Beginnings on the ventral
side, because that side was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition,
reasoning power—everything—was generated and fostered by Fear in the
Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our first overcoming of Inertia.
"I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray; and yet it
seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was clutched in the torture of that
danger. The other half was gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased
appetite, body bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me, the
larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but literally enclosing their
prey with the walls of their bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger.
And often the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....
"There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born of
gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive surfaces, a sort of

emanation, not from the gorgers, but born from the engrossing intensity of
the gorging act. I shall always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,'
constant, and rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower pitch.
"Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a stoppage of
the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the bottom, and a rising again.
Also there were Shadows, sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about
the rocky bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and
instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that passed above. The
drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on and on forever. Repletion
would never have come to the Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.
"I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths. About the rocks,
the long snakelike stems and feelers were extended, and the luring decoys
waved and glowed again at the ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the
feeding, began the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It
was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible—the winking and waving of the
blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless prey, a sudden
extinguishing of the light, devouring—then the nodding gleam again. No
mercy, no feeling, no reason existed in this ghost-region of bleached and
bloodless things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a
thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.
" ... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all unconscious. With
life there is movement. The first movement takes the form of sucking-in
that which prolongs life. Then there is the driving forward by Fear from
without. Low life is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every
movement is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the Law
of life.
"I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining In my
face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of water on the foot of
the bed. The blankets lay heavily about my limbs, and circulation was
hardly sufficient to hold consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed
me the rest of that day and for long afterward."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] H. A. Sturtzel.

31

THE HILL ROCKS

Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was thinking
this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over the
intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and explainers—back to the
sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there that we find the flame. We
linger and return to such men as Boehme, Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Fröbel,
Swedenborg. We delight in the few great and isolated names of Greece and
Rome that are above style. We turn continually to the perpetual fountains of
India, but seldom to Egypt.
We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at
every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are
stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and
precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the strange
splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its chief significance is
that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a Master.
The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has
been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the
misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh,
instead of refuting many of them—yet the New Testament stands highest
above all hands pointing heavenward.
In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that
accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove
him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and the
Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier Arrival,
that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage and the
passion of Jesus.
Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical
generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the
novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us that
the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as Luther's.

Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and penetrative
gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise to declare that
it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus. Still the man matters less
than his influence. His story is emphatically in the world; the spirit of it
lives above all dogma and vulgarity, even above nationalism. It is the breath
of Brotherhood and Compassion. It is nearer to us and less complex than
the story of the Buddha.
Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world.
The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of first
importance in the education of children is the institution of an ideal of the
imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. Children become starry-
eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake ourselves clear of the
temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in our hearts, a strange
expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these things:
"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."
When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at
once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest, one
immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a reproach in
finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to clear corners and
hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the reorganisation is more
than a passing thought. To make the ordering of one's house a life-habit is a
very valid beginning in morality.
We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter,
and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about the
Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had
poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were
always different from other children. They suffered more than the others
about them, because they were more sensitive.
They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child—misunderstanding;
often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they could
not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew apart.
Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think of the
education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect analogies of
the forest and stream and field, by which a child with vision can gain the
story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the maiden who sustained

France—her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It was a forest eighteen
miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies that the priests had to come to
the edge and give mass every little while to keep them in any kind of
subjection. That incomparable maiden did not want the fairies in subjection.
She was listening. From the centres of the forest came to her the messages
of power.... Once when the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this
maiden; and queerly enough, my mind turned presently to something in St.
Luke, about the road to Emmaus—the Stranger who had walked with the
disciples, and finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other
after He had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked
with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"
... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found
work to do—work that people could not understand. The people invariably
thought there must be a trick about the giving—that the eager one wanted
hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious workers, men of
incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and invariably, too,
they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often they had passed
before the fact was truly appreciated.
First of all, they were honest—that was the hill-rock. Such men come to
make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves. They
stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they stopped lying to
themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand that they had
something good to give—those closest to them, not always seeing it first....
You couldn't buy them—that was first established; then they turned the
energies of their lives outward instead of in. The something immortal about
them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found their particular
something to do. They found their work—the one thing that tested their own
inimitable powers—and that, of course, proved the one thing that the world
needed from them. As self-men they were not memorable. Self-men try to
gather in the results to themselves. The world-man wants to give something
to his people—the best he has from his hand or brain or spirit. That's the
transaction—the most important in any life—to turn out instead of in....
Here I am repeating the old formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill
of the absolutely new—the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.

Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can
happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The best
thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The man
who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea of God
and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally valuable
in his particular work, integrates the character that finally realises its own
religion. The greatest wrong that has been done us by past generations is the
detachment of work and religion—setting off the Sabbath as the day for
expressing the angel in us, and marking six days for the progress of the
animal.
All good work is happiness—ask any man who has found his work. He is
at peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire.
Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be well is
to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full powers, we are
replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving forth, we
automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe inbreathing
physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper source of things——
not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A man's own work does not
kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the tension and complication of wanting
results for self, that kill.
Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that
drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse in to self, he
becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source, nor
can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle and
snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward, he
gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their energy
through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying capacity of
his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the work he does.
A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full before it
spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according to the size of the
outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the vessel. All life that does
not run is stagnant.
There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments, but
if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It

should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of an
axe is a poem.
We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as men,
found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother Earth
who turns to her God for light and power, and from that pure impregnation,
brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all destruction and
greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values of woods and
coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would perceive that
they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is service; that they have
no relation to great individual fortunes. These are the free gifts from our
Mother. As good workmen we would realise that greed and competition
pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all that is insane within us.
The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in
Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat, and
sometimes brings the smart to the eyes—is the quality of men who have
found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the
conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow their
thoughts in action afterward, as water follows the curve of a basin. They go
after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter passages to India; they
sense the new power in the world; their faces are turned to the East for the
rising of new stars. Often they die to make us see, but others spring to finish
their work. Our hearts burn within us when we speak of their work.

32

ASSEMBLY OF PARTS

Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must
close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book—each a
different book. Fascination attends the work. I assure you a teacher gets
more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every professional
man should call for his own. A man's work in the world should be judged by
his constructive contacts with the young minds about him. A man should
learn the inspiration which comes in service for the great Abstraction, the
many, from which there is no answer; but he can only become powerful and
unerring by trying out the results of his offerings face to face with his own
group. It should be as natural for a matured man to gather his mental and
spiritual familiars about him as it is for him to become the head of a
domestic establishment.
There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a little from ledger and margin,
to the faces of the young about them—those who have come for the wages
of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on stone, as great
givers to the public. The public will not take these things personally; the
public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who have nothing but money to
give away cannot hope to receive other than calculating looks and laughter
that rings with derision.
The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted
nationally and municipally. The business of man is to produce something.
The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's
goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a man
moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is the same with
a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing transactions
of merchandise and whose business it is to take a proprietary bite out of
each. He develops a perverted look at life, and a bad bill of moral health.
There is no exception to this, though he conduct a weekly bible lesson for
the young, even move his chair to a church every seventh day.

The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story; the
figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular story if done
well.
The time is not far off, except to those whose eyes are dim, when
countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense—in the sense of realising that
the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not even electrified matter,
but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure of the Fatherland. The
development of youth is the first work of man; the highest ideal may be
answered first hand. Also through the development of the young, the father
best puts on his own wisdom and rectitude.
The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is
pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming in. It
would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten in action.
Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to supply a great
variety of attractions. There is that hum in the room. It is not dissonance.
The child is encouraged to be himself and express himself; never to
impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose himself in the objects that
draw him most deeply.
I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who
worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a
hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the education of
man. I have not read this of Fröbel's work. I wanted to do these studies my
own way, but I know from what I have seen of kindergartens, and what
teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the work is true—that "The
Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it have lived a hundred years
otherwise.
The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught. The
process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the deeper powers,
their organisation and direction. At the end of the year, the child is sent into
the first grade, where the barbaric process of competitive education and
brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as it was in Fröbel's time.... A
kindergarten teacher told me in that low intense way, which speaks of many
tears exhausted:
"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently
by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are wide

open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast. Their
little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand the
change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed children.
The little dreamers—the sensitive ones—are hurt and altered for the worse.
Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You do not know
how we have suffered."
Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten
teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because they
have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very little
ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great ideal that is
carried out through their first year were continued through seven years, the
generation thus directed would meet life with serenity and without greed.
They would make over the world into a finer place to be.

I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in Chapel
just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something of man's
ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I am putting
down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest way to write
anything is as you would tell it:
" ... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The
world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to the
utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the Emanation, the
Dream, the Universal Energy—philosophers have called it by many names,
but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in Spirit, since God is
spirit.
"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed,
but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world is
lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one—that the parts of
matter must be assembled into a whole—that a replica must be made in
matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men are identified
with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth, a pulling apart
instead of together.
"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This
is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present planetary

brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves with parts.
Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars—all have to do with the making of
parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do with the
assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is good for the
one; and that which is good for the one is good for the many—the instant
we leave the part and conceive the whole.
"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that the
plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers—voices of men in
every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and meaning, that
the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music in place—but the
players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own little parts. The baton of the
leader is lifted, but they do not hear. In their self-promulgation they have
not yet turned as one to the conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its
highest, yet the hour has struck for the lift of harmony.
"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual plan
all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to be, is
there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has touched and
taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the parts into matter,
making his dream come true. Thus have come into the world our treasures.
We preserve them—every gift from a spiritual source. Often we preserve
them (until they are fully understood) against our will. The mere matter-
models break down and are lost, for matter changes endlessly until it is
immortalised, as our bodies must be through the refinement of spiritual
union.
"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have
made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished
plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see—step by step—the song
into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and the saints
have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the pictures of the
dream somehow in matter—and their own bodies often to martyrdom....
"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest
disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an inspiration to
every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts; above, the plan as
a whole and the missing parts. Man stands between—the first creature to
realise that there is an above, as well as a below. All creatures beneath man

are driven; they look down. Man alone has looked up; man has raised
himself erect and may take what he will from the spiritual source to
electrify his progress. Man becomes significant the moment he realises that
the plan is not for self, but for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.
"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more. There
are endless analogies. Thousands before me have written and sung and told
the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in these wrecking
days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And what has this to do with
education?
"Everything. The brain sees but the part. The development of brain will
never bring to child or man the conception of the spiritual plan. There is a
man to come for every missing part. Each man, as he develops, is more and
more a specialist. These missing parts shall be taken down from spirit and
put into matter by men whose intrinsic gifts are developed to contact them.
Thus have come the great poems and inventions so far, the splendid
sacrifices of men, and all renunciation for the healing of the nations.
"I would first find the work for the child. The finer the child the easier
this part of the task. Then I would develop the child to turn to a spiritual
source for his inspiration—his expectation to a spiritual source for every
good and perfect thing. The dream is there; the other half of the circle is to
produce the dream in matter.

"Education is thus religion—but not the man-idea of religion. It has
nothing to do with creeds or cults, with affirmations or observances. It has
to do with establishing connection with the sources of power, and bringing
the energy down into the performance of constructive work in matter.
Religion isn't a feeling of piety or devoutness; it is action. Spirituality is
intellect inspired.
"The mountain is broad at the base only. There are many paths upward.
These paths are far apart only at the base. On the shoulder of the mountain
we hear the voices of those who have taken the other paths. Still higher, we
meet. The Apex is a point; the plan is one.
"I would teach the young mind to find his own voice, his own part, his
own message. It is there above him. True training is the refinement, the

preparing of a surface fine enough to receive his part. That is the
inspiration. The out-breath—the right hand of the process—is action,
making a model in matter of the thing received.
"All training that does not encourage the child to look into the Unseen for
his power, not only holds, but draws him to the commonness of the herds.
" ... Many men to-day can believe in angels who cannot believe in fairies;
but the child who sees the changes of light in the lowliest shadows, whose
fancy is filled with little figures of the conservers and colourers of nature,
shall in good time see the angels—and one of that host shall come forward
(which is more important and to the point) bringing a task for the child to
do.
"I say to the children here: 'I do not see the things you do, and in that I
am your inferior. They shut the doors upon me when I was little, not
meaning to, but the world always does that. That fineness of seeing went
out from my eyes, but it is so good a thing that I do not want you to lose it.
And always I am ready to listen, when you tell me what you have seen.'"

THE END

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

MIDSTREAM

... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to
remain in American literature:
Boston Transcript: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that Comfort's
account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in literature. It amounts to
revelation. Really the only parallels that will suggest themselves in our
letters are the great ones that occur in Huckleberry Finn.... This man
Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced its full length. One wonders
whether the interest, the skill, the general worth of it, the things it has to
report of all life, as well as the one life, do not entitle Midstream to the very
long life that is enjoyed only by the very best of books.
San Francisco Argonaut: Read the book. It is autobiography in its
perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of god
and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.
Springfield Republican: It is difficult to think of any other young
American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the
"market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own terms
of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation,
Midstream, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story of

regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will he
go?
Mary Fanton Roberts in The Craftsman: Beside the stature of this book,
the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with a
poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude. There is
something strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of
philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The
message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever
receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us
feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage,
the inspiration of a quickened life.
Ida Gilbert Myers in Washington Star: Courage backs this revelation. The
gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr. Comfort's
rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is a tremendous thing
—the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.
George Soule in The Little Review: Here is a man's life laid absolutely
bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has done it before—
this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made uncomfortable by
intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more important than truth—
these will not read Midstream through, but others will emerge from the
book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort's frankness.
Edwin Markham in Hearst's Magazine: Will Levington Comfort, a
novelist of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with
passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over words. He
has been a wandering foot—familiar with many strands; he has known
shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He tells it all
without vaunt, relating his experience to the large meanings of life for all
men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of which we come, to whose
great deep we return.
12mo., Net, $1.25

Transcriber's Note

Typographical errors corrected in the text:

Page 59 Ile changed to He
Page 81 quiesence changed to quiescence
Page 132 blurr changed to blur
Page 161 unforgetable changed to
unforgettable
Page 243 became changed to become
Page 261 spirtual changed to spiritual
Page 262 posessions changed to possessions
Page 285 apear changed to appear
Page 287 blossome changed to blossoms
Page 288 enviroment changed to environment

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