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The Hive

by Will Levington Comfort · English · Gutenberg #44208 · 417,015 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Hive

Author: Will Levington Comfort


        
Release date: November 17, 2013 [eBook #44208]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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THE HIVE


      *      *      *      *      *      *

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT


         THE HIVE
         THE LAST DITCH
         CHILD AND COUNTRY
         LOT & COMPANY
         RED FLEECE
         MIDSTREAM
         DOWN AMONG MEN
         FATHERLAND


           NEW YORK

   GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

      *      *      *      *      *      *


THE HIVE

by

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

Author of "Midstream," "Child and Country,"
"The Last Ditch," "Down Among Men," etc.







[Illustration]

New York
George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1918,
By George H. Doran Company

Printed in the United States of America




                                TO MARY


                         ... soft gold and deep
                     fragrance and pomegranate red.




FOREWORD


There is much to say. Many have a part in this story of our days.
Their work is on the table. Yet no manuscript, no chapter, is a real
beginning. One must start a book this way--with a fresh sheet in the
machine and tell what he is going to tell about.... First of all, it
has to do with the unfolding of the child mind; all the Stonestudy work
has been for that, but the brimming wonder of it all is that we have
chiefly been employed unfolding ourselves.

No one can begin upon the sweet and sacred story of life to a child
without taking a stride nearer into the centre of things, and living
it. That's what all telling is about--presently to stop talking and to
catch up on conduct. The fairest culture of all is to become artists in
life.... Thinking of this, thinking much upon this one thing, we have
been lured out of the heaviness of work into the dimension of Play. We
tell here about this particular passage.

Also something about the story of Man and Woman, hinting at what is
contained in pages of the Book of Life not opened heretofore for the
eyes of the many, but preparing now for the eyes of the children of
the New Race--a beautiful story, be sure of that, but one that requires
art in the telling. No one could bring this story to the lovers and the
children of the New Race who had not found out that Beauty belongs to
the divine trinity with Goodness and Truth.

Many seers have not held that well in mind, many sages have forgotten
it, many saints have not learned it adequately at all. We have to build
our own heavens here before we can have them anywhere else. The more of
an artist a man is, the more reverent he becomes about perfecting his
thought-forms. Just a mention now--that we rejoice to make much of the
Beauty side of things in this book; that a thing cannot be beautiful
and bad; that Beauty is the next quest of the many, as they escape one
by one from the bondage of Gold.

We try to express the Soul of things rather than to delineate
boundaries of matter, but a very strong point is made upon the fact
that one cannot deal in the spirit until he has mastered to a good
degree the coarser stuff that bodies and worlds are made of. We do not
care how the young minds aspire mystically, so long as their abutments
hold fast in the bottom-lands. A man must not drag his anchor as he
climbs the hill; he must unfold line all the way--a line made of
strands of himself, woven of his own wisdom, love and power.

Much is made in this book of the fact that we are given _pounds_ for a
purpose--that all here below is symbol and intimation of a globe and
perfection elsewhere--that we cannot look upon the archetype of gold
until we have mastered the imitation in clay.... We come even closer
to this precious subject: For instance, we know that it is only from
the soul of things that one can see materials--that no one can get a
glimpse of the meaning of materials so long as he is lost in the ruck
of them. At the same time we do not believe that we have access, even
to the lesser grades of mysticism, until we have all the power and
force of the material-minded. We believe we must do well that which the
world is doing, even the tasks of the average man, that nothing can be
missed.

We do not encourage that mystic or poet who requires endowment. If we
are to be artists, we believe in supporting our own groups; we have a
suspicion that we are not through with conditions, any conditions no
matter how hateful, so long as they have us whipped.

We aspire to be writers and politicians and painters and heroes; we
aspire to be masters in all the superb productions of life, but we are
content to begin with the ground. We are content with poverty, yet we
believe that very early as workmen, we are entitled to a fastidious
poverty, which is expensive. No possessions--but all possessions. As
writers we are convinced that it is necessary to do--and inimitably
well--the things that the public wants and pays ten cents the word for,
quite as well as to reveal the deeper folds of our growth for which we
have to finance publication. We are not sure yet which is the worthier
achievement.

Perhaps we speak much of Soul in this book, but we mean nothing more
formidable than the better part of every man. This is the Big Fellow
who takes us over when we do that which is worth while--in billiards
or diplomacy, in art or love or trade. I think it is the Big Comrade
which we are really unfolding--the Workman and Player. Much of Soul, we
write, because it is the point of our educational drive--to set It free
in the child or the young workman, to make It speak or write or play,
and not mere brain and hand.

We speak much of love--not as an emotion, not as a sentiment, but as a
cosmic force. You will see much more what we mean by this as you turn
the pages. It is the most challenging thing in the world. It is the
inner white-hot core of the Fatherland that is to be--the great white
Democracy of the future....

_Democracy_--that's the point of inception of it all; that word is
the seed. The more you dwell upon it--you know what the Seamless Robe
of the Christ means--the more you realise that the Master Jesus was
the first Big Democrat.... We have them speak the word softly and
thoughtfully here each day--we like to hear the young ones say it. They
are apt to know as much about it as you do--for the word doesn't mean
exactly what they mean, who have used it most heretofore. It isn't
the name of a political party--yet.... It is government of the people
by the people, but only to those who see the sons of God in the eyes
of passing men. We only ask its magic, not its presence upon these
pages.... They're fighting for it gloriously--every hour. The boys here
thrill with the boys there. We hold our hands high to them. Some of our
boys are there. They are all our boys! Some are waiting the call to
go--but there or here, we are pulling together for the real Fatherland,
for the adequite fraternity, under the endless and thrilling magic of
the word _Equality_.

... I can say no more splendid word to you than My Equal: I know of
no greater adventure than to become one of the Many. It is true that
you and I--the best of us, the Immortal within us each, are of one
house--that this is but a far outpost of the journey, Egypt if you
like, the husks if you like--but that we have arisen and are on our way
home to the Father's House.


  Canyon, Santa Monica, California.




CONTENTS


                            PAGE

  NORTH AMERICANS             17

  QUICKENINGS                 24

  CONQUEST OF FEARS           36

  THE STUFF OF COMRADES       45

  JOHN'S THINGS               56

  VALUES OF LETTER WRITING    70

  THE NEW DANCING             79

  OLD PICTURES IN RED         91

  STEVE                      101

  HEJIRA                     111

  THE SPECTATOR              118

  TOM AND THE LITTLE GIRL    129

  THE ABBOT                  139

  THE ARTIST UNLEASHED       155

  WORK IN SHORT STORIES      164

  VALLEY ROAD GIRL           172

  BEAUTY                     183

  SHUK                       192

  IMAGINATION                205

  BOYS AND DOGS              211

  THE MAN WHO FOUND PEACE    219

  THE MATING MYSTERY         241

  CHAPTER OF LETTERS         252

  ROMANCE                    267

  THE COSMIC PEASANT         277

  RÉSUMÉ                     315




                                THE HIVE




1

NORTH AMERICANS


The thing called the New Race--the passion of poets, the phantom
running ahead and forever calling the dreamer and revolutionist
and occultist, is far from a reality as yet among the commonplaces
of the world. It is the spirit of everything worth while, but that
means nothing to one who has not a breath of it in his own body.... A
story went forth from this shop recently in which certain ideals and
presences of the new social order were carried through to a cheerful
ending. The publisher wrote, "Yes, but what is the New Race?"

It's a fair question, but remember one cannot adequately describe a
spiritual thing in terms of matter. It is only possible of portrayal
where it has broken through into terms of three-space. First you are
apt to get the nearest and most striking picture of the New Race at
your own supper-table--the presence of one of your own children,
especially if the young one is hard to understand.

Parents and children of all times have found confusion and alarm in
each other's ways. But there are rare periods of human history when
the difference between two generations has been not a normal and
superficial crack, but an abyss. It is so now. The Old has reached
its climacteric point of destructivity. All self-passions destroy
themselves in time. Fear, greed, sensuality--all are self-destructive.
Great human numbers and decadent principles have been recently
broken down in the world with a swiftness and abandonment heretofore
unrecorded, except in the traditions of planetary flood and flame....

You may watch closely the child under seven who plays in the Unseen,
whose companions are not in the room for older eyes; watch the one of
fancies and fairies and fragrances which others cannot quite discern.
Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence
by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood, when they were in
reality repressing the imagination--the faculty which master-artists
denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind. Too
coarse and unlit to see what the child saw, the parents again and again
have looked gravely at each other, saying:

"This is a crisis. Our child has begun to lie. We must forget her own
feelings and punish her----"

So often it is _her_--but not always. The boys who are to do the
great tasks of song and prophecy and architecture--they, too, dream
dreams and see visions and have the rapt eyes of Joan in the forests
of Domremy; they, too, are severely questioned by the pharisees; none
escape this scourging; they, too, in many cases shall be put to death.

The new ideals of the parenthood, education, romance, are now being
introduced and promulgated by pioneers long since emerged from the old
litter and humus. Education will mean first of all a turning for power
to the Unseen. The quest of the Swan and the Star and the Beloved, are
never carried along on the levels and inequalities of the earth--always
the uplifted face for the saint and the sage and the seer. Great
parents kneel beside their children and beg to be delivered from the
heaviness which holds them to the dim shadows, where the child sees
face to face. Education will mean finding his intrinsic task for the
child--the intensive cultivation of the human spirit from the Soul
outward, not alone from the brain inward.

The quest of the passing age was for Gold. The real meaning and
symbol and glory of gold, as the highest, smoothest and most finished
of minerals, has been lost in the bulkier products and possessions
it meant to measure and signify. More and more has gold itself hid
away from vulgar hands and been represented by objects intrinsically
inferior. We now behold a civilisation destroying itself for
commodities and destroying the commodities for which the destruction
began.

Gold itself will serve Beauty in the coming age; commerce will serve
æsthetics. The lovers of Beauty begin with the sand, with the clay.
They love nature from the ground up; they are fervent for light and
air, for sun and sky and water, for fruits and grains and bees, for
stars and rains and romances. They say such things are holy. Words are
inadequate for their loves and appreciations. They find the ways to
love God infinite. They see Him in stone and stream; they see Him in
the eyes of the deep down men; they see Him risen and inevitable in the
eyes of their lovers....

Straight goodness will not do for the New Race, nor straight
intellectuality. Artists, singers, painters and idealists will be the
heroes of the generations to come, for they will add the quest of
Beauty to the unwashed goodness of the saints and pilgrims.

These are but flaring points; one is embarrassed in short space because
of a myriad things to say. Free verse is a sign of the New, also the
dream of a free world and the planetary patriotism. The immanence of
the _spirit_ of all things, is a sign; the sense of the underlying
oneness of humanity; not alone the Fatherland, but the Kinterland,
where new Fountains are established and sages and masters come for
inspiration--all these, like a passing train of wonder, a glimpse of
many cars....

I think I can bring the picture in closer by using a few pages of work
from one of the young men with me. His name is Steve. I called him The
Dakotan,[1] in the book, _Child and Country_. We've romped and ridden
together for three years, and I've known Steve better every day--still
far from the end. The rest of the chapter is Steve's writing:

    [1] H.A. Sturtzel.


NORTH AMERICANS

Out of the centuries of moil and mix and fuse of Europe, the orient and
the north countries, a gleaming archetype has emerged here which may
be called the real North Americans. They are scattered here and there
among the younger generation--young people new in name only; in soul
they are as old as Zeus. Often they are strangers in their father's
house. They blend the mind of the occidental with the soul of the east;
splendid firstlings of an untried future. They betray themselves by
their genius. Heredity is the first fetich overthrown by them.

From the first they are a law unto themselves. They cast off churches,
codes, creeds, schools and parents as preliminary steps in their
teens. In the twenties they are prodigies, leaders in the arts or the
revolutions. It is their aim to over-reach themselves, not to further a
type. Very early they conjourn together in secret and obscure places,
revolting against life as it is lived, like a handful of white dwellers
in a foreign city.

There is always an alien, intangible something about these people. One
senses the double life they lead, their own, and others. Conditions
are not yet adjusted for them. They are super-nationalists, the first
mark of the new. They are dreamers who make their dreams come true in
matter, and first among their dreams is of the planet in one piece.
They are naturally intolerant of barriers and partitions. They see
ahead a new social order vast and shining as a devachanic vision--the
real democracy of the future. They see that the new has come in not to
kill, but to build. Theirs will be the spiritual heroics. Yet all this,
of the greater patriotism, must not yet be spoken. It only alienates
them the more from those they must live with. Their arch enemy is
Ignorance, personified so often in their elders.

It is noticeable that these young people are healthier, stronger,
swifter, sharper, tougher, bolder and at the same time lighter and
finer than the passing generation. They have the _new healthiness_.
They belong to the open and are practically immune to disease.
Theirs is the health of sun and wind and spirit--vitality instead of
constitution, something the old can never understand. Constitution
is weight, solid, ungiving. Vitality is volatile, springy, electric,
constantly being given, constantly being acquired, self-refining.
Constitution does not change; it accumulates all it can, then begins to
die....

The young women of this new Race are open, strong, eye-to-eye, free
spoken. They are capable of friendships; they are not adverse to being
wholly understood by males. They are not popular with ordinary women,
who surmise their superiority but comprehend it not. Deceit, jealousy
and such common disturbances evident in the sex are unknown to them.
They have character and are lovely rather than beautiful. They are apt
to go half way in their love-making, for who should know better when
the chosen father of their children arrives.

All of these people are bringers of true love. Love is their philosophy
and religion. They listen to the heart as well as the brain. Others
think them cruel in their discrimination in mating. They take all or
nothing--prodigious riskers, great sufferers, throwing even love's
dream on the board to be played for, and laughing as they play. The
slightest blight on the loved one is deepest agony.

Perhaps the surest way of discovering these young giants is to search
about for the most sorely harassed children. Invariably they are put
to it, to break into this day and generation. They fight their way up
through all the banked-up ignorance and antagonism of unlit humanity.
Often they are solitaires, coming and going with the secrecy of kings
and eagles.

       *       *       *       *       *




2

QUICKENINGS


A few pages of drift first of all with the younger boys.... There
is a lane of Lombardy poplars from the Lake to the interurban
car-line--a half mile. It is a lifting walk at any time, but summer
evenings are wonderful with all the sounds and scents of a true
pastorale--lake-breath and meadow-lands, the whole sky to look at, and
the murmuring dissonance of the poplars. Often we walk to the car with
passing guests. One evening a guest went away whom we loved very much.
A lad of seven, named John, and I walked back from the car alone.

He was ignited. I felt this at last through his hand. I had been
thinking about my own things all too long, missing the beginnings of
his talk.... He hurried forward in the dusk, speaking in a hushed rapt
voice. Because I had missed the first part, I said: "John, I want you
to write that--either to-night or to-morrow."

And this is what came in:


THE MAGIC LANE:

It was at dusk. Two people left their tracks in Nature's dust road.

Love is found on that road. It is the road of the mystics.

They leave their love in it; Nature kisses their feet.

Many horses' feet have been kissed on that mystic road.

That mystic road will last forever.

I long to walk upon that road of love.

Love on that road will last forever.

It is all true love.

Our friends have been met on that road of love.

It leads to the Hills of God.

Certain spelling matters have been corrected. We pay little attention
to spelling in the work here. The young ones learn by reading and get
the proper look of a word altogether too soon in many cases. There was
another high moment from John at the same time. The following three
lines have stood out from the period with memorable magic:


WONDER

The soft breath of the Mother came in through the window of vines.

The stars were shining like the face of the New Generation.

My spirit was away in the Hills. A noise at the door brought me back----

John then fell into a psychological tangle which we found little
profit in following. By the "Mother" he referred to Nature.... The
verse period has passed for the time. Around the age of seven, boys
change. Often, as in this case, they are not so interesting for a while
afterward. John is coming nine now and is writing "action" stories with
all the worn and regulation props and settings. The early tendency will
return with a dimension added. All transitions are times of disorder,
but they are followed by larger areas and truer fulfilments of order. A
cloud falls upon the sanctuary, but when it is dispelled, one perceives
a lifted dome, bright with its new cloth of gold.

I am struck every day in dealing with young boys how wisdom and beauty
and truth can be inculcated in their lives, without pain and strain to
them, and with great profit to the teacher. The young mind is quick to
change. It has not grown its pharisaical ivory....

The sanction of a boy must be won on a physical basis. A man must know
what the boy knows and go him one better. The man must understand boy
points of view, but never expect the boy to be puerile. Parents of the
past generations have had the steady effrontery to expect very little
from children. "Why, they are only children!" has done more to make
for vacuousness and drivel than any other visionless point of view,
none of which has been missed. There is a difference in ages, to be
sure. The child's mind has not massed for use the external impacts
of twenty or thirty years of life in the world, but there is also an
Immortal within--a singer, hero, builder, or a teacher possibly, eager
to manifest through the child's fresh mind, fervid to bring the mind of
the child to its subjection, for the expression of its own revelations.
Indeed, the parents themselves are enjoined to become as little
children. In arriving at this wisdom and humility, they may suddenly
find masters in their own children.

There is also a lad here of seven named Tom. Yesterday I found him
beside me on the sand, down by the water's edge. I began to tell him
about the Inner Light that we all carry. You can talk over a child's
head, if your words are choked with mental complications (which is apt
to be second-rate talk, anyway), but you seldom are out of reach of a
fine child's grasp when you speak of spiritual things. He was sitting
cross-legged, folded hands between his knees--a little six pointed
star--head and shoulders the three upper points, knees with folded
hands between, the three lower. He was bare from the waist up and
thighs down, and brown as the honey of buckwheat.... I told him that
the seventh and perfect point of his star was within; that if he shut
his eyes and kept very still, putting away for the present all his
thoughts about himself, his feelings, his wants and his rights--looking
into himself as one would look ahead for a lamp in the night, listening
deep within, as one would listen for the voice of a loved friend,--I
promised that at last he would see what the three wise men saw--the
Star in the East. He need only follow that Star and be true to its
guidance to come at last to the Cave and the Solar Babe.... After that
I hinted that I would come to _his_ feet and listen.

Tom felt that it was worth trying for at once--shut his eyes, turning
all thoughts and gaze within. He held the posture long.... I have
marvelled again and again at the quickness with which the child-mind
attains to concentration so essential for all original production.
The little ones have no mad emotional lists to sort out and subdue;
their wants are simple "yes" and "no" in so many cases. Indeed, they
are spared the struggle of becoming as little children.... Tom held
the posture, until I was actually tense from the strain of waiting and
keeping my thoughts from calling his.

It was a picture--sun-whitened hair, long yellow lashes, brown body
with a bit of babe's softness left to it, and glorious sunlight. He
opened his eyes at last saying that he had the door, where the light
was, almost opened, when a fly bit him.

I thought of the perfection of the instance of the mind's
waywardness--the coming of the Master spoiled by a fly bite.... Tom
will search for his Star every day. It is strange that he is closer
to the hill-pastures around Bethlehem, under seven, than for years
afterward.

To learn concentration in mid-life after the world "has been put
through a man," is an ordeal at best; and yet we are by no means
masters of ourselves, nor capable of significant achievement until the
brain can be stilled at will of its petty affairs (the first aim of
concentration) and becomes the glad servant of the "giant" within.

A little later I saw Tom on the back of a huge black walk-trot
saddle-horse of show quality--passing up the Lane at a fast clip, his
feet half way to the stirrups, holding on to the saddle with one hand,
the bridle-rein in the other. A year or two ago I should have been
afraid to permit that, but we manage now to relieve the young ones of
a large part of our fears for their welfare. Children have enough to
overcome from their parents. Frequently the New Age young people have
to master their heredity before they begin upon themselves.

Life is a big horse to ride, so often a black horse. It is well to
start children free and unafraid. We do not let them dwell in thought
of pain. We do not permit tears. We inform them early that to be sick
is a confession of uncleanness, that lying is for the use of cowards
only, and that to be cruel marks the idiot.

We are occasionally serious over repeated failures, but we laugh over
things done well. Tennis has unfolded marvellous possibilities in the
training of will force. Children are shown that there is a mystic
quality to all the perfect games--that the great billiardists and
tennis and baseball players perform feats in higher space, whether they
know it or not. There is the essential ideal first in the making of the
athlete as in the making of the poet. The great moments of play require
faculties swifter and more unerring than the human eye or hand or mind.
Ask the master of any game if he had time to think in pulling off the
stroke that won. It is inspiration that he uses quite the same as the
poet in his high moments.

Education is the preparation of the mind to receive and answer to
inspiration from a plane above. The more you develop merely the brain
of a child, the more he is detached from the great principles of being,
the more also is he closed to the real, and subjected to the danger of
actual lesion and sickness. The more you develop the spirit of a child,
or rather give the significant One within an opportunity to come forth
and _be_ the child, the more you make for beauty, health, goodness and
glory of bodily life.... A lucky day when you start really to associate
with your children, luckier still when you undertake the work of
teaching them incidental to your own work. Then and there, you begin to
realise that children are close to a source of things that you cannot
touch. Presently you realise that they are teaching you....

Day after day I have studied and practised the development of the
child from within outward. I have seen the capacity to synthesise and
assimilate mere mental matters developed in a year, by training the
mind from the centre of origins outward, that mental training alone
could never accomplish. The mind itself becomes vigorous and avid and
capacious and majestically swift. It is trained to express its true
self. That is power--that is king-play. This sentence covers the whole
matter:

_The perfect way to develop the mind of the child is to teach him to
sit and listen at the feet of his own master, the Soul._

The right to live and to bring the laughter of power to the days must
be won afresh each morning. No two days alike. We make ourselves
impossible to children of the New Age by trying to confine them in the
laws and rules of yesterday. The young people whom I serve live in
a different intensity. Their interest flags if I repeat, if I fall
into familiar rhythms. Continually they spur me on. I think, after
all, great teaching is the capacity to feel what the younger minds are
thinking. If we are too coarse to catch the first warning of their
resistance, they slip farther and farther from our grasp.

It would not seem possible to hold American young people with spiritual
affairs; yet this is done daily. We call the Unseen--the great gamble.
I have shown how all else betrays--how all matter is a mockery at the
last--that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to
weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out:
The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and
dramatic.

We dwell upon the mystic white lines which connect all things--the
sources of daring and beauty and creativeness. I ask my young people
where they were--when they did any rare and improved bit of work, when
they felt like great comrades, met some magnanimous impulse, arose to
superb instants of play, or when in Chapel the big animation touched
us all and set us free. They always answer that they were _out of
themselves_.

That's a secret of the new teaching again--to lift the students out
of themselves. Men take to drink or drugs for this same reason: men
and women set out on the great adventures, pleasures and quests for
this. We hunger and toil for this freedom; we suffer and adore--to get
out of ourselves. Mental teachings tie us in more firmly. The teaching
here--and no two days alike--is to startle and encourage the young
minds to arise and live and breathe in that lovelier and more spacious
dimension which at least borders upon the Unseen. The doors open and
shut so softly. One does not know he has been out--until he is back
with strange light in his eyes and in his hands a gift from the gods.

The essential spirituality of the new teaching must not be confused
with religious affairs as they are known and exploited in the world.
You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has
its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your
sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your
logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your
life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of
the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from
your _reflected_ light. You must be spontaneous--you must flood them
with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work,
how you come and go into the Unseen.

There is no rest.... One commands his disciples to go forth at last.
The teacher strides forward faster when they cling. He tells them
one day they must race the gamut to follow him; and the next day he
puts another in his place and begs to be allowed a cushion in the
midst of the children.... We hold them by setting them free--the first
law of love. All unions of the future--in trade and friendship and
matrimony--will be founded upon the principle of freedom; and this is
the essence of the new teaching--to liberate the children into their
larger and God-quickened selves.

No rest and no two days alike.

A Bob White called me this morning across the uncut hayfields at the
edge of the lake-bluff.... His two smooth and patient notes seemed
to contain the secret of putting off all fret and fear and unrest.
He seemed to ask if I had not done this already--had not yet put all
boyish and merely temporal things away? "Not yet?... Not yet?" he
called the question.

I answered that I would try again, and I set out straightway to be
honest once more with the world, with the soil and with myself. I would
begin with the clay again to be clean--to rise and think and dwell in
cleanliness, to think no thought, to perform no action second-rate--to
begin with the Laugh again--the warm laugh of conquest that always
opens some inner door to fresh powers--to arise afresh in the glory
and gamble of the Unseen.... I returned and saw the young ones one by
one--from Tom and John up to the men and women--doing their work. I set
about mine with a laugh and called the day good. The teacher knows best
who is taught.




3

CONQUEST OF FEARS


An interesting boy of ten and I have been much together in the open
weather. We have learned many things, but nothing more important than
what a sham Fear is. I do not mean that we take chances or that it is
wise to risk life or limb. Fine discrimination is back of all training
in the arts of life; still we certainly have found that Fear is a
waster and diminisher of beauty and power--and that it can be mastered.

About the most fascinating thing that life has shown me is the way in
which fine examples of the younger generation learn the deeper matters
of life--matters of self-mastery which make the very presence of a
lad significant to a stranger, and which formerly were supposed to be
secrets for the sons of kings alone.

"Do you fear anything?" I ask. "Look deep. Listen deep--do you fear
anything?... It's like the pain that tells you of a weakness or
disease. Fear is an unerring reminder of a task of conquest ahead for
you. That which you fear most is the thing to conquer first."

There had been much of this talk of Fear before a laughable personal
experience showed me how much I asked.

I crossed a mesa and came to an abrupt drop-off--two hundred feet
sheer. It astonished me. I hadn't experienced anything like this quiver
of horror for years. All members and muscles bolted at the thought of
advancing closer to the edge. I sat down to think it out. It never had
occurred before that I _wasn't_ my nervous system, and must not let it
get me down.

The more I thought, the more I perceived that I must do the thing I
dreaded so. In fact, I had told trusting young people that they were
not their bodies, not their emotions, not even their minds--that these
must be made to obey. Here I had a chance to prove if I were less in
action than talk. I forced my fluttering young self to the edge....
Dizziness--wobbly limbs, fancied shoves from behind, the call of the
huge shadowed space below, a queer sense of parting in mid-air, the
body thumping down, another and liberated self gladly spurning the
ground--all these symptoms of panic followed swiftly.

I held until calm came, and I then could study this little coil of
forgotten fears--a civilised mess.... The weakness was absurdly easy to
overcome after the will was once aroused. There's no end or limitation
to will force when awakened. The greater the man, the more awe he has
for this subject. There's a glow that follows conquest of any kind; the
mere call of the will to action brings a sense of power in the heart.
There is no way more speedily to dispel pain, anger, passion, fear, or
any of these tentacles of personality--than to summon the power of will
to instant action. The particular matter of this precipice showed me a
trick about calling up the force--priceless to me afterward in bigger
tests, and for opening the way of self-conquest to boys.

One must decide what one wants to do--then carry it out to the death.
Discrimination, art, all culture and knowledge may be brought to bear
in making the decision--but after that, it must be carried out--just
that.

Fears belong to the abdomen. You can feel them there. They are quicker
than thought. Perhaps you had a twinge of nerves over some sight or
sound or odour, before your mind could tell you what you were afraid
of.... I have often told the young ones here--listening a bit to my own
voice--that there isn't anything living or dead, phantom, shell, or
living soul, that has got the authority to make the spirit of man quail.

Courage is spirit.

Most people don't care to try to deal with it; they let it have its
way.... Do you recall the fears of the dark room as a child--fear
always stealing behind--upstairs alone, the rush to the light, almost
screaming tension?... I heard a patter of steps the other evening and
knew the whole story--a boy of seven. He had been sent upstairs without
a light. I sent him back, told him to stay there until he got himself
in hand--to stay in the dark and think the bogie down. He was well
afterward.

I have known some under-fire work. A man soon gets himself in hand
to look straight at a white-fringed trench. Fear of sharks furnished
another test. From a child the deep-sea devourers had an exquisite
fascination for me--to be cut in two under brine, white belly,
backward mouth, black-rimmed, hairy pig eyes, the double-rows of
teeth.... Pacific Islanders swim in the same harbour with fourteen-foot
scavengers, careless of whole schools of monsters, yet scurry to their
boats at the sight of one solitary, _different_ fin. I had seen the
so-called, man-eating brutes, "grey nurses," dim grey horrors with dull
black spots. A well-fed imagination also came into play.

I went swimming in the surf with a splendid Australian chap--a doctor
home from the trenches.... He left me back in the surf lines and
started out to sea. I finished my swim decently in toward North
America, and lay on the strand. From time to time off in the sunset I
saw my friend's head.... I was glad to grab the beach-comber when he
came in.

"It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have
you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless
all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to
ask--what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?"

"You don't think about them," he said.

That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get
you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of
manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors
succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite.
One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens
all the monsters of the mind....

There's nothing fit to be afraid of, unless it is the _self_. When we
get the ape and the tiger, the peacock and the porpoise, the lizard
and the shark and the carcajou of our own natures mastered, there
isn't anything left to do but to tally them off outside, a friendly
finish with them all. No menagerie is complete as man's, and each of us
favours some species from time to time.

I have thought much about fear. In another place I told how we have
overcome inertia; how we developed senses through the hard administry
of fear and hunger, anger and the rest. Now, however, these must be
overcome.... One of the last physical fears to let go in my case is
that for the hangman's rope. I think Roger Casement really wanted the
axe in preference to the hemp. Steadily facing a repulsion, it surely
vanishes.

The point of it all is that you can teach self-command to the
children.... I took a girl of fourteen to my precipice--left her there
standing on the very edge. After a few minutes I called. Her face was
calm as if she had gazed from a porch....

"Did you feel any fear?" I asked.

"Only yours for me," she answered.

It was very true. I had the thing whipped for myself, but it had been
hard to leave her there.

Finally I took the smaller boys out for a test. They didn't know I was
testing them. Children haven't the fear of height such as we put on. I
recalled a score of episodes of my own boy-days, in which I startled
the elders by Sam Patch imitations. Also I have put the young ones
through some deep water affairs....

You may not be able to get it quite--but all fear is illusion. Every
inner beast mastered makes us stronger. These animals within are our
cosmos to rule. We do not know how beautiful they are until we lose
our fear for them. Boys and girls here are learning these things and
putting them in action.

The kingdom of heaven is also within. Fear, passion, anger, poverty,
and the like--all represent areas of our own kingdom not yet brought
under perfect cultivation.... After the emotional and physical
conquests come the psychic ones--hard matters of mastery pertaining to
the heart and mind--to know, to do, to dare, to keep silent--then the
finding of the hidden treasures of the subconscious, mystic fleets that
sail those dim seas, as yet uncharted for most of us.... After that,
the Soul. At last we must be potent enough to stand eye to eye in the
presence of the King Himself.

From looking steadily over an escarpment of two or three hundred feet
drop, to gazing at the world from the forward cockpit of an airplane
at two or three thousand feet, isn't such a long step as you would
imagine. The fact is, I was in no way terrified in my first flight, and
fear certainly crawled me full length as I stood that time at the edge
of the mesa. Our young people have the call to test the new dimension
of wings. This zeal corresponds in a unique way with the new education.
Intellect stays upon the ground. Intuition is the lifting of the wings
of the mind.

I had already begun to make friendly visits to an aerodrome at the edge
of the Pacific when the following letter came from the Abbot,[2] who
is now seventeen and in New York:

... Perhaps Steve told you that I had a ride in an airplane about three
weeks ago. Man! 'Tis the place for me! Next summer, soon as school
dissipates, I attach my name to the Royal Flying Corps. The psychic
effect of a flight is wonderful--like travelling over a very tall
bridge. The Atlantic coast for many miles lay in profile as a map, the
roads stretched as thin mathematical lines; forests as darker shadows
of the earth; New York as a blotch of smoke and curious patchwork.
For twenty minutes we sailed around and around, just as you've seen a
gull pinion, then we came to earth; waited until it got dark, then up
again.... Lights of the aerodrome lay like jewels upon the earth, but
up, up we went, faster and higher, the roar of the propeller providing
a steady nervous outlet. I could shout my lungs out--I had to relieve
myself of the excess thrill.

Then what should happen? Red, a tiny rim, like the disc of a golden
dollar, the sun began to lift up from the horizon again. The higher
we went, the higher it lifted, until there it hung, as a golden bulb,
a swollen orange off in the mighty stretches,--pure, golden,--while
below twinkled the town's lights. 'Twas the fullest, richest, most
brimming moment I've ever had. The awe of the cosmos overtakes the
heart and lays down its stupendous laws. The distance between sun and
'plane seemed a golden pathway that ever could absorb your flight. I
was aware only of worshipping God, and that roar of the machine made
one think of the roar of the planets, comets, meteors, all the suns,
roa-oa-ring. What a romance! Finding the sun!

... No discussion of the fear element whatsoever in the letter....

    [2] Fred Jasperson.

The old thrills won't do for the new race. I took a pair of
screen-trained young ones to a circus recently and became absorbed at
their mild boredom. Alcohol is too slow and coarse for the wastrel
tendencies of the modern hour. The sad ones of the new generation
use high potency drugs to forget the drag of time and space. A new
dimension is required in all things. The young men of the new race make
light of our old dreads and are learning winged ways to heaven and to
hell.




4

THE STUFF OF COMRADES


I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in
this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things,
and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have
faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer
the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations
of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old....
I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an
intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of
effort, even the sense of thought--and an hour would pass in the joy of
communal blessedness, because we were one.

Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more.
The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain
thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of
the hat-band. There is a continual condensation at work within us
mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the
rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take
just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.

This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food
we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become
harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the
spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the
man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a
crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in
inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit
of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole
hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves
the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly
available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of the
_oil_ of a subject or a breath from its essence.

There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences
of experiences of thousands of lives--yet the refinement of the soul
is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little
organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences
of but one life, but because the soul is so small or so diffused,
the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet,
we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us,
in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the
scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the
fourth dimension--the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well
to-day--I mean well for me--if I rise to the opportunity at all, it
will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.

I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest
evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its
line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each
is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature
and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily
proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through
all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a
review of the evolution of the world.

The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see,
proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate
of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all
knowledge and experience beneath.

The higher man ascends, the more inclusive. To heal another, the
physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual
refinement--the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of
matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a
breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole
summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of
a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the
aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the
spirit of things.

In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact,
that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his
consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic
consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of
the externals of the Plan.

The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must
include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the
rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath,
the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in
containing the Idea of it.

This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great
single, all-including, all-mastering emotion--such as love. And now we
are in a region where there can be no difference of opinion; at least
I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.

There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply--himself,
his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic
consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it
comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed
of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all
experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing
things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours,
and sympathies and tolerances. Its outpouring is action, and is of
itself creative. This is the _OM_. Such a love leavens and impregnates
all things, because it understands and includes all things. It unifies
all separateness; it enfolds all intelligence with intuition; it unites
all parts.

This brings us to that ancient and unassailable premise of all
religions--that God includes every part of the universe in being the
spirit of it; that His idea of creativeness is expressed in one great
single, all-mastering and including emotion,--which is love. We hear
the little children saying it, "God is love."

       *       *       *       *       *

... We awaken the Ideal in ourselves first by imitating the virtues of
others. In the earlier days when to me courage meant physical action,
men passed in different fields, leaving an imperishable remembrance.
I have often seen the expressions of those I loved and idealised as a
boy, live again in the faces of my own children. John T. McCutcheon in
Luzon, filling a reel of films, under a volley of fire at Binan, on his
knees, working the camera with a whole brigade sprawled behind--gave
me one of the finest early building blocks for the courage among men.
He also gave me an ideal of cleanliness: One evening, after a vicious
day's march, and we were all ravenous, John T. left camp to find a
river. There he bathed with government bouquet,--made himself right
with himself, even to shaving, before meat and drink. His constraint
looked like mastery to me then. Grant Wallace was a big star of that
service--ideal in performance of friendship.... Young men at hand now
are different. Not one of them lack in grip and grit. They reveal the
new thing in courage, the courage that begins where the courage of
the soldier ends. These have gone far into the mystery of their own
kingdoms--rapidly becoming kings of themselves.

The world doesn't understand them. The Abbot[3] is a sensation in
literary matters at Columbia, but unplaced. The Dakotan[3] was said
to be unfit for a soldier because he was twenty pounds under weight
for his height. He can leap five feet six, run or hike indefinitely,
exhaust a cement-mixer, say "stick" in all tongues and "quit" in none.
He has the will and wisdom to make himself a new man over night--and
yet his Government wants him served up just so, in pounds. There isn't
any one loves America more than the Dakotan, whom we now call Steve.
Even the young military surgeons will know before long that endurance
is a matter of spiritual culture, that courage is spirit--that a man
is well because of cleanliness of body and thought and organised
will; that he doesn't fail in a pinch because he is evolved; that all
the higher forms of life call for speed rather than strength, the
levitating force of spirit rather than the gravitating force of flesh,
for brain rather than brute.... Comrade stuff is the stuff of souls....
I've studied them long and devotedly. I build my days upon the things
these boys show me. Less and less are we different from those who call
to our hearts.

    [3] These appear in _Child and Country_.

These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by
misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have
perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger
sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance
is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large,
unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements
are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and
one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected
to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own
voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The
things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days
these young men perform automatically.

My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness--the
American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I
observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but
at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know
until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness
above this--where intuitions play and weave causes and effects
together--where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more
like a giant's, perhaps--where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh
comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if
at all.

Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It
became clear as daylight--that a man is at his best only when out of
himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of
self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And
this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments
of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward.
Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love
which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force.

Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools
and materials in black and white--just intimations.... If we are
sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two
words suggest it best. The first is _Comrade_, which has become a
silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to
all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me
with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned
out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army
soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the
years--or avoided using it--until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension
opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear--its meaning in work and world
and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.

It seems to say _Equality_. It's a kind of deep drink of spirit
together, a word spoken at the last moment between men--an
inner-shrine word, spoken with a smile, and a glimpse into the eternal
indestructibility of the human heart. It expresses the love of the
world, not as it is felt in the brain, but in the breast of the soul.
The New Race has already washed it clean. It goes with a Cause fit to
die for. It belongs to men and women who can look at each other with a
kind of prayer in their eyes and face death alone and laugh at it.

There's a fury, too, in the word--fury against the world, against
things as they are. It stands against the world-darkness now, and for
the day that is to be. It means love for the poor, a love for the
peasants, a passion to serve and be tender to them, not to drive them
into the pits of death--a readiness to die for them without _cant_, a
readiness also to dare to live for them.

_Comrade_--there's vision in it to strip off the masks of decadent
nations, to open wide the sepulchres where the priests are still
plotting to crucify the King; its strong magic will uncover the
monotonous crimes of commerce.... It signifies the spirit of the young
men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear
the débris for the building of the New Age.

They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard
part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet
and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the
peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the
soil and the rivers and snows--to build upon them the new heaven and
the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word--the laugh of
youth and power.

The other word is _Democracy_.

       *       *       *       *       *




5

JOHN'S THINGS


Here are some of John's things, mainly letters to the Old Man.
California called hard for the recent winter, and I went out a few
weeks ahead of the Stonestudy outfit. John intended to follow within
three weeks, but overturned a kettle of boiling water in his lap, and
was unable to leave his quarters for three times that period. We all
learned better the hard lesson--to wait. The quoted word "Play" in his
first letter refers to a little slip of paper which I had pasted upon
my typewriter. There has been a big tendency in recent months, in my
case, to let down all tension in relation to literary production--the
idea being that when one has learned all the laws he is capable of, the
time is at hand when it is well to forget them. I have written several
times throughout this book of an ideal emergence of Workman into
Player. We learn many laws, to learn at last that there are none. We
come up through many slaveries to freedom.... I have not corrected all
the spelling in John's documents. The point most interesting is how the
real voice breaks through the mind of a child of nine from time to time.

    DEAR YOUNERVERS[4] PAL:

    We got your letter but it was not like you for it was not
    type-written. Your old machine here is going grand. I am using it
    now. It seems that I am with you all the time. _Comrad_ has meant a
    lot the last four days to me. Comrad is everything in the New Race.
    Masters will be comrads with every one.

    That "Play" has it all, on your machine. "Play" is in all
    somewhere. It is all like a big page and everything is woven on it.
    There is a time when Comrads hafto go apart for a little while, but
    not long. Their thoughts never go apart. They are always pulling
    together, always weaving in thoughts and things that are the same.
    It is wounderful--a parting. No sadness over it. It is the best
    that could come, or it would not. We are held together. The pull of
    the world is nothing to us.

    It is hard to keep high, but we will. Fred[5] and I take a swim
    every day. I go a hundred and fifty feet. Then we come up and rub
    each other.

    True Comrads have it all. Love from Comrad to Comrad.

    [4] Universe.

    [5] The Abbot.



    PAL:

    I woke up this morning kind of blurred, and got Irving and Steve to
    come out and clean up the barn. They came and we worked there all
    morning, and then went in for a swim. It was wounderful, the feel I
    had when I got some clean clothes on and had the old dog[6] feeling
    good. He is meditating over what a wounderful world it is now. The
    stall smells sweet as a hay-stack.

    Fred just got here and is working at your desk.

    How was your morning? I never had a better one, and its the weary
    old Sabbath, too.

    Send for me soon now. It seems that it was a year since we have
    been together. We can not do without each other. Send for me
    _Soon_. I hold my hand high to you.

    [6] The saddle horse.


    DEAR OLD MAGIC FATH:

    I am at Steve's desk in the guest room. It is the first time that
    I have touched the keys of a type writer since the night I was
    berned. It sure does feel good.

    It has been much more wonderful to hafto have Patience for the
    Meeting. It will be twice as great for both. I have needed you so
    since I have been in bed. In pane and sicknes there is nothing that
    you need so much as your Comrad.

    I felt palms up to everything. It is all good. We love it all. It
    all was something for us to get. It puts us higher after something
    comes to us like that.

    I have all the pores poring out love to you. We are always together.

    YOUR SIDE KIKER.


    DEAR OLD PAL:

    Fred and I slept again in the Study. It looked like a storm last
    night, but it did not come. Fred is a real Comrad. I got to his
    heart last night. I do not know how. The roses have been wounderful
    the last few days.

    How is wounderful Mary? We are all sending Thoughts to you. We have
    had wounderful full days lately, all heat. The town is howling
    for rain now; they are never satisfied. We are always ready for
    anything. It is the best. Our wounderful old mailtrain just crossed
    the magic lane. I love trains more and more. They have a pull to my
    heart. We love everything.

    I do not feel on erth. I feel in space. Out of the draw of the
    erth--_Free_.

    Love always in my heart for you. I hold hard for the time that
    Comrads pull together again for the road, us two. Jane is at my
    hump all the time--so I will quit.


    DEAR OLD COMRAD:

    We are close this morning. I can feel your warm wounderful hand in
    mine this morning. We are one. There is the holy breath--such a
    great pull of thoughts and work to California. It seems as if all
    the Comrads were calling me there. Then I hafto think of the one
    thing--_Patience_. When you have mastered Patience, you are free.
    All well here. My sores are getting better fast. I have wanted to
    work lots lately, since I was in bed, but I could not. I lost so
    many ideas in bed. Beds are a curse. I love you, Comrad. We need to
    be together.

    YOUR OLD PAL.


    SUNLIGHT PAL:

    A wounderful sun. A little late in getting up. The sun was out
    full--a wounderful breakfast and a wounderful bowl of roses.

    Every morning gets greater. The coming together again gets closer.
    Separation is a great thing! You find that when it comes. It will
    be so big and wounderful to come together on the shores of the sea.
    The trains on the Pere Marquette line have a draw to my heart; the
    whistle is so wounderful.... To have a bath in the salt water and
    not in old Lake Erie.... It was another wounderful night with
    Fred. He has done so much for me this time that we have been away
    from each other.

    He is so wounderful if you can get to him. I think I have got right
    to him to the heart. I am awful lonesome for you and the sea.

    I walked to the train track with Fred this morning. It was like the
    day you were going away. I felt it was nearing the last walk up the
    old Lane. Fred has the same feel. It swept over us--a free feel; it
    was almost too much.

    How is your Sisity-list coming? Mine is great. It is hard to get
    along without you here. Old Abe was drafted, and we don't know when
    we will see him. The sea and sunlight sweeping in the open door of
    your work room! We will sure have some grand times. We will get
    horses and have some more of them Moonlight rides. It will be great
    to hit the old _Tie path_ Itself--with the[7] Welcome Mulligan
    and the[8] Onerbel Chas. Lipton under our arms. The smell of the
    burning bark and a caben in the Rockies! Oh, the open road. Life is
    Life on the old Road.

    That canyon must be a wounder, and the sea and the misty mountains
    and the brown hills. You have it all. Oh man, that is the country
    for everything.

    I keep high for our meeting, Comrad of the Road.

    [7] Frying Pan.

    [8] Teapot.


PROSE SETTINGS


I

THE RED SUNSET.

The red sunset Died away like the close of a forest fire.

The Dusk ran through the mountains like a scarf of blue.

The Moon and old Jupiter took the Open Road together.

The others came out of the everlasting Blue Deeps.


II

THE DESERT NIGHT.

The man at the camel corral was fixing the camels for the desert. Other
men were waiting at the front of the Temple. Another came forward with
four camels, a pack-beast and two riders. Then all were off over the
Sun Betin Sand.

Nothing but Sand and Harizen. Only the Arab who was ahead on the Old
Camel knew the way.

They went on and on over the Everlasting Sand, the Sun Betin Sand.


III

PINES.

The great wood is the Pines. The very whiff of them gives you the
breath of Nature, the great Mother of the planet, the mother of Love.
Her breath is the breath of life and love, and the Mouziek of the world.


TREAS (_California_)

Treas are grate. They are so wild and wounderful. There is so many
kinds here. The trea I love best of them all, is the U.K. Liptes. It is
fragran; it has the sun and the erth all flowers and the swaying beauty
of its great youth. I loved it from the first. It is beauty that stays.

I went up to a grove the other day and along a little lone path--the
mist and odor of them lingering in deep shadows. My feet broke the deep
silences and a Voice came and spoke soft to me: "If you listen long
enough you can hear----" I think it was my Master speaking, for a glow
came around me, after He had spoke.


THE SONG OF THE SPERIT

Life is not any good until you forget your boddy; then you get all the
power of living, but you can't do anything that you feel like doing.


LETHER:

All lether has a mystery in it. It is the animal's mystery. The misteks
of the other world know it, and try to tell us. I have been told but
my mind has not received it. I will hafto wait until it does. I think
I will know it all in a fue years. I will tell the rest of the world,
if I hear it first. I would like to be the first to hear it.


STONES:

The whole erth was of stone.

God thought that he would make it something good. He sent the Old
Mother Nature down and she spent years and years, but she did not know
what to put on it. She went up to God and He took her to a room, and
showed her the things that He had to put on the Erth.

They were sperits, so she got them one at a time and brought them down.

In the mean time she was making other things. They were seeds and she
planted these and they came up. It was wheat and barley and other
things like that. The sperits became people and took them for food, and
the old Mother is still putting things and bringing her sperits on the
Erth. This world is just about filled.


THE SPERIT

At night the Sperit goes to see God. It gets fresh to make the boddy
fresh every morning. This is what keeps you clean. If you were all
clean, you would not die. You go thru a hard life and what is not
clean is burned off, and then you are pure to go to heaven. You rest
then until you are ready to come and be a saint.


ALONE

The sun beat hard upon the rocks.

I was alone in the Power of the rocks. Nothing was moving.

I was Alone. My Sperit was alone.

It was the loneliest place in the world.

No animal of any kind, not a bird or a snake--alone.

Nature did not even have cells of thought.

The power of the rocks was holden me there.

A thought came over me that I had never known Home.

All of a sudden Nature spoke, and I was free from everything.

I came back to the Father.


EQUALS

There is a greatness in a man that treats his horse like his brother.
A man is a beast when he beats his horse. He is of a lower Brivahen[9]
than the horse. The man who says to his horse that he is his equal, is
a great man, a master of animals.

    [9] Vibration.


BEAUTY

When the New Race comes, there will be beauty--real beauty. Down thru
the ages people have talked of beauty, but they have not seen it
really, yet. It will come with the New Race--beauty in everything--in
the body, in writing, in talk, in love. Not love one, but all. The
younerverse Lovers will not only love each other, but they will love
all. This war is the great clean up of the world. After it is all over,
and the troops come all home together, there will be the great New Race
waiting for them with open arms--then all will be real beauty.


THE HOLD UP AND THE GET AWAY

... It was the first time Denver Bill had come in without a cigarette
in his mouth. They wanted to know why he wasn't smoking, but they
didn't ask.

He ordered the same drink and took it fast.... He chucked the chair
over, grabbed the tellfon off the table and gave "Hlo."

He said, "Horse up here in five minutes."

It was there.

He was out of town in a minute more.

Denver Bill stopped at a cabin where he had made ponmets[10] to rob a
train at 7:45, and it was now 6:10. His friend was there. They jumped
on their horses and rode a quarter of a mile. The train whistled around
the curve.

    [10] Appointment.

There was a shout. Denver called: "Stop that engine!"

It stopped slow.... Bill murdered the engineer, and then flew thru the
train of cars. He grabbed the fifty pound gold box and jumped thru the
window. A shot rang out.

Bill was pincked.

The man that he had come with played dirt on him because he went off
with the gold. Bill crawled across the field and laid in the hay stack.

He rolled the first cigarette of the day.

       *       *       *       *       *


LETTER TO THE ABBOT (from California)

    DEAR OLD WIFE:

    How are you coming? I was just up over the hill behind us, getting
    two wounderful qwortz of golden honey. How is your type mill
    pumping these days? I got a new story in my bean:--Have an old
    fisherman that takes those forks and goes after crabs--have him
    find a pot of pearls instead of crabs.--Think if it is done right
    it would make a wounder.

    When will you be out here? We will lead a pack trane over the
    mountains! Oh, that is the old open road! Pack mules, they mean
    it to me--a line of mules in the mountains and a couple of saddel
    horses! That's the life.

    I hope you have changed your mind about them airaplanes. I do not
    like the Idea. But, old man, it is for the best, and nothing is a
    mistake. Take it as it comes. Write soon, and make the pages fly
    like dust to me. I need all that I can get.

    Last night was our first bit of rain. Slept in an open window where
    my face was sprayed all night with the wounderful cold drops of
    spring. When I got up, I was feeling better than I ever did before.
    I was all relaxed. I lay a long time just in the wounder of the
    wounderful free air and rain. I got up and went down and washed
    in more of the soft rain, and ate and went outside to come down
    to my work shop. I stood in the wind. Everything around me was so
    wounderful. All the trees and flowers were brighter. The hills were
    a little damp. The birds were playing and drinking in the rain. The
    ray of sun was just coming over the hill. I could almost hear the
    breathing of the grass and erth. It was like a song, the great song
    of spring and breathing of the world.

    That is the way that the new generation will come in after the
    world is washed and all countries are _one_. A Boy, young and
    clean, will come in, whistling and breathing a Song of the New
    Race.

    YOUR COMRAD.

       *       *       *       *       *


ANOTHER

    WELL, WIFE:

    Here I am pumping a little more of my vocabulary at you. I think
    that I will go into the ocean and have a swim. It's dulce on
    my wounds. What I want to tell you is about an old sea loafer
    here--a big, black dog. He isn't any kind of a dog--nothing but a
    world-man-dog, he is. He is a lover of the sea and sand. He goes
    down with us every day. He is a pal for the road. He can't follow
    the saddel like Jack, but he can shore be a frend. I have lerned
    him and he has lerned me. We stick close.

    Well, pal of the sea and saddel, I am getting awful lonesome, but
    I am with you all the time. I need your old paw. I shore keep high
    for the Spring Coming. We will have a shack back in the hills all
    alone, and drink tea and talk. Don't it sound good? I won't forget
    it either, not until we have it. We have planned it for many ages,
    and we will hafto have it--old pal of the moonlight rides.

    I am close and always your Comrad.




6

VALUES OF LETTER WRITING


Stonestudy particularly is a shop for writers. A man is at his best in
writing to the one who pulls the most from him. The thing is to pour
out. The pursuit of happiness is a learning how to radiate. Happiness
itself is radiation--incandescence.

You say you write to the world. A composite? An abstraction? These
will not draw forth your best and greatest.... You pass a thousand
faces in the town, and are suddenly torn by one? Do you think that
the unmanifested, upon which the thousand faces sleep so far as you
are concerned, is capable of bringing out your wisest or tenderest
expression, as is this one face pressed against the very window of your
habitation?

As a workman, as an artist, as a player, one must give his best, one
by one, to individuals first, before he arouses the force to set
the table for the world.... It is important for the young writer
to answer exactly certain listening attitudes. I think, in a story
mood, of the shepherd fires--the endless droning tales of Persia and
Palestine--camel bells, bearded men in white hoods, occasional weary
movements of women in the tent openings as the evening passes to dead
of night. The tale-teller is making his listeners see more or less
dimly something _he_ sees--something he has heard and visualised,
better yet, something he has lived. The finer his telling the more
completely he has lived it. The more listeners pull from him, the more
excellent his animation, his art. A speaker, accustomed to give himself
spontaneously to an audience, said: "If I don't give you what you
want--if I am not at my best to-day--remember it's apt not to be _all_
my fault."

Soil and seed in all things.

We prepare ourselves with much misery and massed experience to tell
our story of life. How strange that we should not have reckoned with
the fact that all this preparation is only half.... Really, it is as
important to think to whom one is writing as what to write about. I've
been afield with many young men, soldiers and the like. Their best and
highest moments afield were spent in writing home, or possibly to the
girl they left under the beeches or sycamores. We should write a myriad
or two love letters, before we are ready to write for the world.... By
writing and dreaming and travelling and living toward the one, we learn
how to focalise our forces. Having done that, we are ready to diffuse,
to radiate. Sooner or later the _one_ point will be taken away.

Don't be distressed; it is only for the time. But the love we have
learned with one must be turned upon the many. It's all a love story.
The whole universe is that. The stillness of the sun in relation to the
planets tells the first story of radiation--love a cosmic force, not
a sentiment--all one big, brave tale.... The real priest is trained
to draw out, to furnish understanding,--inclusion. One can talk well
to one who includes him. As professional essayists and story-tellers,
we are only beginning to learn that we must talk or write to some one
greater than ourselves, to set ourselves free.

The wonderful power of letters begins and ends just here.... Write your
story or your essay to one who contains you--to one who draws your
best, to one who sets you free. You can ascertain your relation to
another by your mood as you prepare to write. The more you practise the
art, the more sensitive you are, the more you realise that no two moods
of yours are the same, as you write to different people. One draws
humour, one irony, one a tendency to exaggerate, another deeply to be
serious and reformative. This should reveal the whole secret. Choose
your complement for the portrayal of a mood.

The thing we call our style is merely the evidence of that which
we have chosen to work toward, plus our particular personality. We
should work to that which sets us free. Certainly one cannot be free
in another's form. There are fixed vehicles for expression--novel,
essay, poem, infinite departments of each, but the fact remains that no
workman or artist or player can be utterly himself, who remains in the
forms laid down by those who went before, or in forms prescribed by the
generation he undertakes to express himself through.

No good workman ever accepts things as they are. To be the workman
unashamed, he must be considerably beyond his generation in culture and
acumen. He therefore finds the beaten paths--which are the easy paths
for the many--the most irksome paths for himself. He grinds long and
hideously against the things that are, and thus becomes formidable,
since grinding makes the edge. The dullest part of the axe is held the
longest against the wheel.

Bit by bit, as the consciousness of the chosen workman expands under
years and ordeals, he casts off all the shackles, forms and prescribed
nonsense of the trivial and material-minded. He breathes deeper with
each unbinding, until he reaches the fair eminence upon which lies the
priceless secret of all expression:

_That there is no law for the pure in heart._

He reaches this point through many slaveries, and yet a child can
be taught the secret. The child must also be taught, at the same
time however, that the world is wrong and inferior in all its views;
otherwise the child will not have stamina enough to stand against the
opinions of all elders of all times, much less those who sit at the
same breakfast table. Verily, the thing that Rodin and Balzac and
Carpenter and Hugo and Chavannes and Nietzsche and Whitman gave their
prodigious vitalities to learn, before their real work began,--can
be taught to the child, but the child must find his faith in his own
spirit and some true teacher to set him free.

In the later aspirations beyond professional workmanship for the world,
the Players achieve that master freedom which detaches itself entirely
from causes and effects in materials. They work as do those who are
ambitious, yet refuse to tie themselves in the least way to results.
They work to their Masters, to the Unseen.... All of which is pure and
perfect liberation, but requires one trained in building with spiritual
causes and effects. We seek to furnish this training for a few who are
ready. It is the way to the inmost and the uppermost in all art and
mysticism. We are set free here as expressionists of various kinds by
writing or painting or playing to those we hold dearer than ourselves.
We wouldn't be writing if we could be with them in the flesh--how clear
that is! The fundamental processes of our picture-making are quickened
by our yearning. Here we touch an old and curious law, that you must
have separation for the true romance.

We learn to mass life into pictures or tones or tales.... All that we
do well shortens the grade for those who receive. If they are quite
ready, they won't have to make the mistakes we did--mistakes painful at
the time, but out of which we make humour now.

A man brings a gift when he brings forth a good tale. He has done
something with the worn-out tools of incident and experience which
hasn't been done before. To do it well his telling is dependent
upon his audience. His telling will be different for each listening
group. The greater the artist, the less alike will be his methods of
approaching different friends or comrades. Each will bring from him a
different tone, a different look to his eyes, a different grip of hand,
and different order of unfolding his genius....

The most perfect bits of writing we have from the group of our greatest
novelists--is either in the form of letters or parts of work inspired
by the influence of a woman's heart--some romantic and one-pointed
outbreathing of their souls to one.... The great creative producers
rarely found steady human companionship in one woman. No flesh was
starry enough to endure their idealisation; the break of their picture
was often the shattering of life itself. Experience forces us all at
last to take our idolatry from that which changes--to continue our
lessons of love toward the Unseen. Lovers of the New Race seem to have
learned the agony of trying to find all in each other, of trying to
find the universe eye to eye. They realise at once that man and woman
are but the two earth points of a triangle; that they safely may rear
their passions and their transfigurations only to the pure point of
union above....

       *       *       *       *       *

A man has found something when he cries "Eureka!" He loves something,
when he pours out his heart to it. The first great struggle of the real
workman is to find a form that contains him--a form of expression that
will not maim his dream. It is never the form that has held another,
that has sufficed for another artist. A letter is one way to freedom. A
writer's style should set him free.

The enduring aphorisms and tablets and discourses of the Masters have
been spoken to their beloved few. A man's sealed orders in the world,
his occult transcriptions from above the world, come in the form of
personal messages. Great documents of the future shall be written this
way. We write many personal letters. One of my young comrades has the
idea to gather together names of a score of mill-girls in New York or
somewhere, and write her heart to them--less to try to help them, than
to ease her own heart, to tell her love for them. Radiation--that is
happiness. Mill-girls have been a dream of hers. She is full of force
to pour out.

Incandescence is happiness. All expression is happiness. Happiness is
creative. To work, to express, that is to radiate. The object is as
important as the thing that aches to go forth. Choose the form that
sets you free. To each his form.

A tireless woman asked how she might serve. Her lover was lost in
Flanders. We told her to write to the soldiers--to write her heart
out in letters to soldiers--that she would save lives and start great
dreams and bring the gold back to many grey mists--to be Mary the
Mother, the saint, the dream of the film-eyed fighting men--to love
them through the heart of her beloved. That is what focalisation leads
to--to draw forth the great energies from our souls, to set us free,
first to one, then to the world.

We learn to love the one--in order to give this love to the world. We
learn to love in matter for the moment, in order to become consummate
artists and players in the soul stuff that cannot die. Again and again,
through possessions and personalities--missing, destroyed or moved
away--we learn to take the force of our outpouring from the mutative to
the changeless--making a divine bestowal at last of a clinging human
need--lifting from the idolatry of the flesh, which encloses all pain,
to the love of souls which sets us free.




7

THE NEW DANCING


I have found true North Americans. A woman of twenty-seven, a mother
(with a mysterious man somewhere) and a girl-child with the calm and
power of Joan come again.... I needed a change, was tired of my house
and my voice--close to the end of all human interest that morning as I
set out for a walk up the edge of the Lake. On and on walking, until I
came to the little girl on the shore. She was making a frowning man in
clay. She asked me if I were the Crusader, but answered herself while
I was hoping to fit the dimension of that fascinating title. She had
decided that I wasn't.

_North Americans_--I think of them so again and again--something great
and calm and deep and beautiful, something arrived, at last, from all
the fusion--en rapport with nature, children of the light, living and
abiding constantly in the essences of sunlight--with the humour and
certainty of Mother Earth about their ways--the cleanliness of earth
and the sweetness of golden light in their house and mind....

Mind you, I had walked forth as one would wade out to sea in the path
of the moon--actually yearning for a better land than this.... There on
the shore, after hours, was the child--her eyes turned to mine, putting
me into the enchantment of the wise--stilling hate and ennui. We had
words together, the great awe of life stealing over me again after
many days. Her hand stretched forth to take me to her mother (this day
called the Lonely Queen, for they live in an enchanted story-book).
A climb to the top of the bluff and into the most fragrant and godly
lane, a low house in the distance in the shelter of beeches--solitary
and isolate beeches sheltering a human house, built for sunshine long
ago. Many pages would not tell of the lane and the house, the lawn and
the hives.... I want to touch the core of this inimitable pair that
took me in--poor but dining upon the perfect foods, so poor that they
make and dye the lovely things they wear--a kind of holy handiwork
everywhere--perfume of summer in the house and in the heart of it a
deepdelved peace where broods a sort of lustrous dream.

The child is but seven--that is, her body and brain are but seven.
Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheat
bread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning--a last
jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on
top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray--all
miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking
sombre and wrathful in the distance.

Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the
head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a
grove of white beeches--lingering gold on the vines at the window, the
murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing
their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that
is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle
begins to sing, and the mother hovers over--a kind of sacred rite, all
this--then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room
softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and
France are in the room. Tearoses--some daughter of poetry must have
named them.

... Still I am telling you about _things_--not about _them_. I thought
I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more
testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw
farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ...
sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the
hushes between.... I must get down to earth again. I must begin with
the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned
up to me from the frowning clay....

I should like to report them moment by moment--to make you see, but
there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that
first night, I contemplated the North America of the future--a kind of
dream that nestles within a dream--the Great Companions, superb men and
women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new
dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light
that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to
the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made
cigarette--not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned
drowsy--opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the
lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and
sweet as a new-woven basket.

... I awoke to low singing. The room was grey and seemed to lift
with me, and the walls to widen. It was as if I had caught the old
house just waking from a sleep of its own. The phenomenon of the
singing lived in my mind. I don't know the song--a rapid bird-like
improvisation possibly--two voices hushed, but a vibration of clear
liquid joy. I went to the window. The earth was still asleep--a
pearl-grey world of dripping trees in a kind of listening ecstasy--two
beings below on the lawn--a lawn that was grey with dew. It was like
looking down upon a cloud from the Matterhorn. These two beings--one
in a veil of rose, one in a veil of gold--were dancing upon the cloud,
dancing bare-armed and limbed, their voices interpreting some soft
harmony that seemed to come from the break of day upon the sphere.

It was not for me--yet I could not draw back from the vines. I brought
only thankfulness to it--sharing the joy in the dim of a room, in the
dim of a mere man's heart. Yet all I could contain came to me from
the mother and child. They knelt in the grass, the song more hushed,
bringing up to their faces and shoulders hands that dripped with the
holy distillations of the night--a wash in dew and day, their song a
prayer, their dance a sacred rite.... I should have thought it the gift
of dreams, but there was a starry track of deep green across the lawn,
where their bare feet had broken the sheen of dew.

... I dwelt with souls--that was the truth. I sat at breakfast with
souls, dew-washed, speaking to each other and to me from that long road
of life which we lose for a squalid by-way when we put on the garments
of the world.... They talked again about what the birds hear in the
morning. They said that what the birds sing is their interpretation
of the great song of daybreak--that the earth does not meet her Lord
Sun in silence.... And then I knew that the song I heard was their
interpretation--think of it--a child of seven eating buttered toast.

And I knew that power is a song--that the singing of the kettle is the
song of steam, that the inimitable _t'sing_ of an electric burner when
the current first charges through, is the awakening song of steel and
carbon to their native capacity and direction. The same is in the heart
of a boy when he finds his task--the same is in the order of a master
and in the making of his poem.... These two hear it--the song of Mother
Earth as the floods of light pour out and over her from the East.

Here was a mother who knew how to play. She had launched somehow
into a sphere of her own making--doubtless having found life of the
world insupportable. I had thought much about bringing up children,
about unfolding the child, and here it was being worked out with
brimming joy.... It was all too natural to be called education. It
was nature--it was liberation, rather--a new and higher meaning of
naturalness.

I was almost afraid to speak. The life here seemed so delicate
and delightful that comments would bruise the fine form of it....
They played together--that was the point. Play is a liberation of
force--great play is ecstasy. In it one rises to the _stillness_
of production, wherein one bathes in mystery and potency and all
commonness is cleansed away. Those who reach this stillness are the
great beings of the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

When we finally open ourselves to any subject, we find intimations of
it everywhere. I found presently that all the voices of the New Age
had designated the magic of the dance. It seems almost dull to declare
that I do not refer now to the dance as it is taught and used and
exploited as a social accomplishment, but that in which the personality
is subdued and quiescent, quite as absolutely as it is in all great
moments of production. One must give oneself. Music carries the
sensitive soul into its own mystic region. A rhythm within answers to
the external rhythm--the two meet and mate--the fusion is bewildering
beauty.

As in all creativeness, the first law is spontaneity.

The great dancers of the future will _hear_ their own music--possibly
give voice to it as they give their body to the rhythm. There shall be
no exact interpretation of song or sonata--at least, not until absolute
genius interprets the exact figure of each tone-set. This is impossible
in a world of mutation. Accordingly, one who establishes a series of
movements to accompany a certain harmony, misses the meaning of the
divine improvisations which is the essential beauty of the New Age
dances. One should dance as freely as one called upon to speak. And one
will neither speak nor dance greatly by prearrangement or following any
arbitrary form.

The very tone of the voice is different and deeper when one is caught
in the spirit of spontaneity. The prime object of the new education,
which includes dancing, is to set the soul free. Music is one of the
master-lures to call forth the sleeping giant.

       *       *       *       *       *

One night a stranger[11] came to Stonestudy. She said she was called by
the way we were doing things, and that she hoped she had something to
bring to us.... The next morning at daybreak, down on the shore, I saw
stars and circles of young women and girls folding and bending together
in exquisite tones of colour and song. Her gift was the new dancing.
Over night she had captured the young people, bringing them a new joy
in the world. For two or three months she remained with us and has
since established classes east and west--life given to the message of
beauty. With us her expression and magic has endured.

    [11] Helen Cramp.

There is no way more swift to merge in the universal, than by the
response to music through movement. Not dancing, which is a response to
time in music more than to rhythm, but the actual blotting out of self,
a spiritual exaltation which many religionists have sought and few
attained.

The means is very simple; nothing strange or peculiar. It is the
dropping of the human will so that the music may flow through. One
does not move to the music then; one is moved by it. The objective
mind ceases to operate and through the larger consciousness absolute
Beauty streams. The response to the music may be totally different
with several pupils, but where the dancer is really lost to the
objective world, the movement is always true and satisfying to those
who watch. This is easy for those who are close to Nature and God, but
it is fraught with difficulties for those who are over-mental or who
have been terribly repressed. In many ways the will is man's highest
asset and it requires a supreme effort of the will itself to drop the
objective consciousness.

There is a technique of the dance to be sure, but it is designed only
to free the body so that it may be a purer channel for the music, and
to facilitate the effacement of self. Physical strength, agility,
beauty as mere beauty, are never sought, but only the revelation of
eternal harmony.

There is rhythm throughout Nature. Man often moves less gracefully
than the higher mammals. He has opposed his will to the law of the
universe, for centuries abusing his ancient right, but through music he
may realise again the harmony of all. The dancer is radiant with the
splendour of the infinite and there comes an ecstasy into the spirit,
of those who witness the transfiguration--the hush that one feels only
before the highest art and purest religion.

It is reasonable to suppose that those who dance must bring back with
them into every-day living something of the beauty of those exalted
moments when they touch "the white radiance of eternity." Here is
natural education, natural religion--a practical mysticism, the merging
of self in the Infinite with a consequent fitness for daily living.

So the dancing of the New Age is but a different form of contemplation
and production, by which the Soul becomes the creature--for the period
achieving that blessedness which is above time and space, and dwelling
in that dimension, where goodness, beauty and truth are one.

       *       *       *       *       *

The new dancing is "in the air." Like vers libre and all New Age
realisations and creations, its first essential is freedom. This is the
meaning of the word Democracy--equality, liberation. The very spirit
of all that is new demands freedom. The deeper one penetrates, the
lovelier the folds of this marvellous conception. There is no title for
friend or comrade, for child or lover--comparable to the assumption of
equality.

Equality--its power sings. It dances. When the last is said and done,
we all want the same thing, if we really knew,--goodness, beauty
and truth, one at the top. There is joy in the fine new conception
appearing now in all the arts--freedom first and last, even to
lawlessness at first, but that will right itself more swiftly than
smugness, which has had its age-long and hideous trial.... To me, the
house in the beeches slowly unfolds it all--the mystery of the cosmic
peasantry of the future--that fastidious poverty, that delicate plenty
which is perfection. These two, mother and child, mean the new dancing
to me, and the New Race beside. I have not dared to go again, because
I build incorrigible dreams, and this one especially is dear.... Yet I
often recall their loveliness together.

The mother's beauty had turned to loveliness. It had more than the
mystic chiselling of sorrow--it had passion, it had humour.... I feel
the need of telling you from time to time that I am not rhapsodising,
the need of reminding you, how weathered and drab my mind was, when
I went up the shore that day. She made me think of grapes and olives
and laurel-boughs; she seemed the sister to the child. All about the
two were subtle, pervasive, ever-changing tests of the power of the
soul. The country people around did not think her extraordinary, much
less beautiful. How much is revealed in that? Loveliness requires
certain vision, an interpretative spirit, and thus it is protected
from the vulgar gaze. These good country people carry upon their faces
and hands and persons picture-writing of secret sins and dreamless
stolidity, and yet they are scandalised by this woman. You cannot
imagine how sweetly it came to me that she had utterly lost the sense
that she was outcast.

A lamp burns at her door every evening. I don't suppose it is seen
three times a month--yet the lamp burns.... There's a big wooden Cross
in the room where they sleep--the child led me to it--a mat of grass
before it, _kusa_ grass, who knows?... A great Cross, a much-worshipped
Cross, with spike-holes, the broken edges worn smooth.... The child
whispered to me that _she_ had been brought (when she was too small to
know) and placed on the mat at the foot of the Cross for her mother to
find; also that she came when the white clover bloomed.

       *       *       *       *       *

... It is only this way, bit by bit, that I can make the picture. I
have never before been so disturbed by the sense of inadequacy. The
light about their heads is all diffused like morning upon a cloud.

       *       *       *       *       *




8

OLD PICTURES IN RED


There was a period between the second and third year of the war, when
it seemed that the guiding, shielding spirits of the planet were slowly
being withdrawn--leaving only the mockery of goods, the chaos of
multiplied things. But at the blackest, in the very hush of desolation,
the new breath stole in upon us, a breath of lilacs on the chill, dank,
wintry air. Many now stand arisen, waiting the flash that changes the
world.... Five men were gathered in Stonestudy one evening; we talked
of our parts, the best we could do in the clean-up. It was hard to look
over the barriers at first; hard for an American to accept the fact
that he dare not say what he thought, nor write what he thought. It was
hard to realise that we were prevented from expressing what we thought,
by the very forces that had drawn us into this deep trouble. We who are
the distant generation of a party of pilgrims and voyagers who came to
America to find a free country, were strange and intolerant at first,
when we felt the yoke of Europe settle upon ancient scar-tissue.

We discussed.

A country is superb when one is unconscious of it, we said. One's
country should be like one's health, part of the song of life. Suddenly
to find the freedom of the past unremembered, the freedom of the
future unglimpsed, to hear the loathly low beat of talk from groups
of frock-coated Appetites, with heavy half-dead legs and heads like
pitching-quoits, settling our sacred future on the basis of steel
and coal and margin and murder market; to feel ourselves clutched
and borne forward with stub-nailed fingers in the stench of big
business; black-garbed shopmen pointing the way to the ports, urging
and shouldering other people's children to the ports of the gunboats,
advising the efficacy of "Nearer My God to Thee," as a song for sinking
ships,--we forgot at first in our own pain that this was merely the
body of the Old strained to a cracking point by the resistless growth
of the New.

Presently we grew kinder.... In a way, the Old was the grim stepmother
in whose house we learned how _not_ to do most things; in whose kitchen
we learned cleanliness, because of the vile example of her organic
sloth; in whose walled garden we learned the peril and the passion of
Quest, because we loathed her long snoring of afternoons; from the
death of whose sects and schism-shops we set forth to find the unity of
life; from the obscenity of whose loves we came into the first great
cleansing hatred of ourselves....

No hatred now. Hatred is part of the Old. It has no part to unsteady
the hands of the reconstructionists. This New Race has come up in
strong soil. The Old nourished and fertilised all its vitalities. The
new green beneath the litter of dead leaves cries out under the decay,
"You are stifling me!" but the plan of it all is wiser, for there is
warmth still in the humus of the old to protect the new and the frosts
may not be finished.

More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home
to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also
appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe
that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war
with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest
dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives
and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of
the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed.
That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect
on the constructive side, and will continue to destroy itself against
itself as all such forces do in their madness.

If any one concludes that we were a group of religionists gathered in
Stonestudy that night it will be well to point out that this planet
will be a whole lot more religious before war ends, and no one will be
louder about it than the trade-mind everywhere.

War brings death, and death enforces the faith of the human heart,
and faith is one of a trinity (as we learned in Sabbath School and
variously since) that inclines the heart of man to God. You take a
loved object from the Seen and place it in the Unseen (thousands each
day the soldiers pass) and faith is born of the agony of separation.
The human heart forces a bridge across the abyss from the Seen to the
Unseen. It's the old story of the bereaved turning to God. Saints are
thus made--thus tenderness and purity come to be.

Within the next ten years there will be heroisms before our
eyes--heroisms such as seers and saints and sages have dreamed of as
the consummation of the human heart. And those who have lost most and
mourned most will read the eternal joy of the Plan from the Book of
God's Remembrance.

       *       *       *       *       *

When you see the remnant of a race of people crying out that there
is no God--then you begin to know what war means. When a country has
given its tithe of human blood, _or one in five is gone_--then you
begin to know what an Austrian woman meant, when she spoke of the
"horrible grinding of war and the answer of the women to man's cries
of pain afield." ... When peace brings a worship of materials and a
dulness that cannot look beyond existing institutions--the end is war,
and after that a sitting in black upon the ground.

We didn't know what death meant before this war--but many have learned.
The very word death has the sweetest sound of all uttered names to many
a lonely heart to-day. We didn't know enough about death. We had the
habit of thinking this was all. The end of such thinking is war, and
after that, a sitting in black upon the ground.

When your heart is cleft in twain and one part stays on this side, and
the other over the dim borderland--there's a straining of eyes into the
Unseen, a picture making out of the creative materials of human spirit.
Life of the soul begins again--out of pain--always out of pain.

We have not yet learned to accept life from the higher masters, Joy and
Beauty. We still learn through Pain. We forget the meaning of death,
even as we gather our things of death about us, and war comes along to
remind us again. Always those who answer to Master Pain must look to
death to find their relation to God. The faith that comes with peace
at last to the human heart, is energised by a love that crosses the
abyss of life and death.... A grand old teacher, Master Pain. When we
know all his lessons, and take his hand from our shoulder, and touch it
to our lips (for we shall know well his wonderful work when the time
comes for us to part with him), then we shall find that he is not a
black man at all--but a Sunburnt God....

       *       *       *       *       *

Four at a supper table--a little child, its young mother, and the old
father and mother of a grown son, who has just died for France. The old
man's eyes roved from the child to its mother, back to the old woman,
and lingered there, something rough and deep and wise in his look. The
child suffered vaguely. There was much suffering in the house.... The
young mother asked coldly if they could feel _him_ in the room. Then
just as coldly she asked if there were a God. Then she ran from the
room with a cry like a night animal. The silent child began to weep.
The old man and the old woman stared at each other and wondered what
their daughter-in-law meant about _him_ being in the room.

A picture of the chastened world.

The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies
that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed
forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or a breath of
God. The old man and the old woman looked so long at each other in the
darkness--that the soul of the son of their flesh stood for one healing
instant between them. Thus the enduring figures of the Unseen reveal
themselves to those who have suffered to the end.

The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for
humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with
surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything.

       *       *       *       *       *

The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a
street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man
learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never
be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no
human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when
the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever
suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European
war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most
challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. Profound and
tragic impressions followed each other. It became icy clear that the
greater nations, as well as the pawns of the Balkans and the Levant,
were puppets alike, churned together in a great planetary cleansing.
Every partisan path was found to be increasingly crooked the farther
one advanced--and a sheer descent at the last. Any national point of
view used to dupe the people into greater destructive energy, proved
in itself, no matter how sincerely offered, as short-sighted and
ill-founded as the hatred of two soldiers who meet between trenches and
discover, as they gore each other to death, that their only basis for
hostility is a different colour of coat.

Studying Europe in those dark days, the unprejudiced eye was in danger
of having some truths torn down with the host of illusions. It was
hard to hold fast to the fact that there was anything magic or holy
about nations at war. Indeed, they seemed entities formed of groups of
greedy men who wanted their way--in the main, groups of leaders devoid
of vision and the spirit of fraternity, and careless of the welfare of
the people, quite the same as many great commercial organisations....
The real enemies of any people are groups of men who want things for
themselves. The real issue of the war has nothing to do with entities
of this kind, nor with alliances of such entities, but with the painful
groping consciousness of the peasant mind--its slow and torturous
awakening to the fact that royalty in its utmost pomp and glow does not
enfold God.

The people must learn before they can be free. Hitherto they have
been duped by the nations; and the nations are now being duped by each
other; but there is a greater plan at work--using men and nations
alike,--a plan to do away with boundaries and hatred and preying,
to strike the spear from the hand of man and leave it free to help
his neighbour, to establish democracy in the place of imperialism,
and fraternity upon the solid footings of the earth in the place of
separateness and strife.... The new volume of human spirit already
has been opened. We felt it that night in Stonestudy before lights
out,--the first beauty as of a song across still waters.

       *       *       *       *       *

An American correspondent going home from the field in Europe "the
long way around," met an old Persian Master on the road to Damascus.
With the sage was his nearest disciple, also a Persian; in fact, the
young man was so loved that he had been changed from discipleship into
sonship. This young Persian became very devoted to the American. They
stood together for a moment in silence, when the time for parting came.
The old Master drew near and said:

"It is good to see you place your hands together. To me it is a symbol
of the marriage of the East and West, for the East and West must mate.
Long ago the East went up to God and the West went down to men. The
East has learned Vision and the West has learned Action. These two
must meet and mate again for the glory of God and the splendour of
earth. The East has lifted its soul to the hills and held fast to
its memory of the Father's house. The West has descended into the
folds of the valley, and won from agony and isolation its efficacy in
material things. And now the mystic is looking down and the materialist
is looking up. Soon their hands shall join--like your two hands in
mine--and there shall be great joy in the Father's House."

       *       *       *       *       *




9

STEVE


Steve and I were camping together for a few weeks on the Southern
California strand. One morning he looked up from the pages of a book in
his hands and remarked:

"This fellow is one of us."

The book was _Youth_, by Joseph Conrad.

"I haven't read a book for a long time," Steve added. "There are three
stories in this. I've read only one--_Heart of Darkness_--in fact, I
haven't finished that.... You have to fall into this Conrad and be
his--to get him. You let your mind open into a cup, and presently after
six or seven pages, you find it brimming. If you fall into him deep
enough, you get almost what he sees--not quite though. No reader ever
does. But you get something intense, fascinating, a restlessness, a
terror. You find that all your somnolence and inertia has caught fire."

There had been a ten minutes' rain at dawn. The smell of the tropics
moved over the sterile sand. It was cool, but there was no wind. The
day promised heat. We had been up in Canada for the winter, and it was
hard to believe that hot sunlight was free. A broad quilt of gulls and
plover sat together on the shore waiting for the drying light or for
the mist to rise, or the tide to ebb....

Steve resumed:

"He tells about a boy who loved maps--who used to look for hours at the
continents--thrillingly attracted to the darkest places, the patches
still unprotected. There was one heart of darkness with a river winding
through. He doesn't tell you the continent or the river, but there were
elephants there. He should have called the story _Ivory_.... Years
afterward, the man, worn to the bone from the world's lies, sets out to
penetrate this deepest black of the planet. He reaches the river and
follows it for endless days, but the world has arrived. Some nation is
there colonising for Ivory--you don't know which. The story is told
like that--unplaced in time and space. Really it doesn't matter what
particular imperialistic tendency is at work. The fact is, he climbed
the river into the ghastliest chaos....

"You get the deep green of the heart of the continent, the mournful
brooding leafiness--the natives herded and distracted, more afraid of
the blast of a river-steamer's whistle than of any kind of violent
death. Death was familiar to them. They were chained to labour,
cast loose to die. Vultures swept the sky waiting for their limbs
to fall still. There was the salty pester of fever in the air--men
foolish with fever and heat--a haze of flies--white men burning out
inside--oxidisation of human souls--a steady and hideous beat of
death--devils of hate and violence and acquisitiveness--clerks making
entries of Ivory--a nation's young men running through the jungles
for Ivory--carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for
Ivory--all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory--murder
for that--lives lost, tribes shattered--the leafy heart of a fresh
continent seared with the civil flame of greed--commodities dumped
in river beds--mails that men would die for torn open by vandal
hands--waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible
non-initiative of the middlemen.... All this told with patient
exactitude, but with indescribable intensity; told by a master-hand
that trembles; with the control that one can only know who is sensitive
enough to tremble. You feel a big man bending forward to make you see
something that all but killed him to find out. You feel him scarred
and sick, his heart leaking, because he found it all so hideously and
stupidly rotten. It's a little picture of a trade war--that's the
point--the war of middlemen--middlemen turning to rend each other....
Heart of darkness--after that the light comes."

Steve opened and shut his fingers in the sunlight. The warmth was
sweeter every minute.

"This fellow sees it all," he went on. "He's done a big job for me--for
anybody who gives himself to the book. There's something immortal about
being a workman like that--about any workman. That's why one wants to
cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work.
They don't even see the fog of human agony they've painted the world
with. They are _it_. It is the old against the old. It's all about
Ivory. They crucify for fossil."

Steve was lighting up.

"This Conrad brought back to me to-day a bigger love for the workman.
The starved and scorned inventor gets the best of it, after all--not
in Ivory--but he builds something in himself. He quickens something in
himself that goes on in freed consciousness when the body falls. No, I
don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep
moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a
nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to
be alive to-day. I believe there are secret agencies at work behind all
the governments--that they are one at the top. I don't mean detectives,
not intelligence or espionage bureaus. Potent, mystic, infallible
forces. It doesn't matter. _Some person or some group is holding the
plan of the New Age._

"We're learning life as never before--plucking the deeper fruits and
mysteries of pain. But one must go apart from the crowd to see. One
must cease to be a partisan. The real seer sees the whole, not the
part. All the war-lands are in pain. One sees only the part, when one
is in pain. Not one man out of a million sees it all. A few Russians
see it all--a few in China--a few in India. Romain Rolland sees it all.
This fellow, Conrad, sees it all.... It's a pity if America doesn't
soon get the full picture. It's worth seeing----"

Ocean and sunlight and mountains. The world was a brimming cup. If a
man could take all the beauty there was for him, he could never die....
We went over to the post-office of the little town. The business men of
the place were coming in. The first mail had just been distributed....
Grocers, butchers, the hardware man, the real estate men, the man
who ran the newspaper, fishermen, barbers, lawyers--mainly fat and
pleasant--children on the way to school.

They were short-breathed and short-armed. They dressed in wool and wore
heavy dark hats. I had never noticed before how short-armed the race
of tradespeople are. Labourers and peasants are not so; painters and
musicians have a tendency to be long-armed. I mentioned this to Steve.

"The middlemen," said he. "They are tightened throughout--ligaments
contracted--contraction taking place in the deeper weaves of
mind, a drying up of the deeper sources of life. Contraction,
self-centering--that's what madness is. A man must sing, or weave, or
build or make bricks. The ways of competitive life are paltry ways.
They hide their ways from one another, and afterward from themselves.
They pluck no fruits; they contrive no short cuts; they do not become
intimate even with the commodities of the earth--the very things
they worship and pare margins from. They eat infamously, filch from
each other.... It's all here--all that Conrad pictured in the heart
of darkness. These are the sick, the maimed, the blind of the earth.
They live in the realm of fear, pain, anger, desire. These are the
war-makers.... Their arms are twisting and shortening in to their
navels----"

Sunlight streamed in through the open doors of the post-office. Motors
going by drowned the soft rustling from the sea. The hell of the
outer world trickled in through bits of conversation. Everybody had
read the morning paper at the same time. No one thought of telling
anything that his neighbour did not know.... Europe was starving--the
President was ill--railroads in strike, coal famine, prohibitive cost
of staples--France cracking with the dry-rot of exhaustion--England ...
a voice--Germany choking in her own blood.

The tradespeople of the little town by the sea gathered in their bills
and orders and advertisements and hurried back to their shops. Nothing
astonished any more. There were no words for the world's woe--no ears
for lamentations--no mind but to buy cheap at the right time and sell
dear all the time. We walked back to the shore.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I once saw a little town on a hill-side," Steve said. "A grand
boot-maker was there, and a man who made clocks with such tools as he
had--big noble clocks that ran unvaryingly eight full days. Another
man made furniture--perfect woods from the forest drying in his kilns
and sheds. There was a sweet smell about his shop. There was a weaver
and a potter there. The days were long and singing, full of labour and
peace. No one multiplied by mechanical means. Every artisan had his
apprentices. The age of the apprentices will come back--with a new
dimension added----"

"Switzerland or dream?" said I.

Steve smiled. "They are starting communities all along this coast," he
said. "Many are on the quest of the town I saw."

We sat down upon the sand again. The sun was higher. White clouds
brooded in heaven's own daylight; white wings moved upon the sea, I
was thinking about Steve and all he had said. What Conrad pictured in
the dark continent existed here in one of the cleanest small towns
of America--an earlier stage of the same malignant disease. From the
broad and beautiful vantage points of democracy and fraternity--every
shop here was a lair, the products, exposed and secreted, a spectacle
of moral decay and insensate devouring; every schoolhouse a place of
dismal enchantment where competition was not only taught but enforced.
Steve knew deeply well when he spoke, that the creative artist, the
producer of every real and true and beautiful thing, comes into the
power to express himself, in spite of such education, not because of
them.

One can laugh at all mediocre men occupying seats of the mighty and
calling their dead gods to witness that they are right--but one
who knows that the intrinsic gift of each child is the one thing
in sunlight to be promoted, turns away a bit dismally from the
spectacle of the standardisation of the child mind--from the wholesale
manufacture of middlemen by school system.

Steve loves America. I know of no one who loves America more. He
doesn't rise and cheer when the orchestra plays a questionable bit
of verse and tune in a movie-hall where imagination is being put to
death--_but he believes in the vision of the Founders of America_. He
believes in the spaciousness and splendour of the American spirit; that
the dream of a few mystics will triumph at the last, and that the many
will follow the dream of the few. He does not believe that the voice of
the middlemen is the voice of God.

It's hard to credit, but this young man does not hate one country to
love another. He loves America because the dream of a new heaven and a
new earth has a quicker chance for breaking through into matter here
than elsewhere. He perceives the tissues of the senile and the obscene
breaking down in America, under intense civil and martial and moral
processes. He believes that this breaking down is essential before the
building begins. He believes that the future will be built upon the
thoughts of men who are great enough to stand apart from the dumas,
from the cabinets and the senates, just now. As Steve sees it, all
partisans have to do with the parts, and the parts of the partisans
have to do with the Old, which is destroying itself--sense against
substance, limb against limb, organ against organ.

The young men of the New Race are born of a mating of the East and
West. They are naturally intolerant of partitions. Steve is one of
these. He isn't a spirit alone. He is a body and brain. He has stayed
awake through the full night and day. He sees the planet in one piece.
He has crossed all the rivers. He knows the young men of America. He
is one of them. He loves America because he knows the rest of the
world. He has friends among the Chinese young men--among the young
men of Russia and India. He says that all three have greater obstacles
to overcome in getting the dream through, than we of America--that
everybody will be singing it after the wreckage is cleared away.

"America, Russia, India, China--they are lands, not pavements," Steve
declared.

He was looking across and to the south. The sun was a glory about
us--all the background a tentative, swiftly passing thing, all but
forgotten now, stilled by the rustle of the long, low white lines of
the sea.

"The New Age will redeem all the broad lands," he said, with a trace of
a smile--"lands for meadows and fields and gardens--meadows for milk,
fields for wheat, gardens for honey--the New Race is particular for the
perfect foods--foods for the giant and the child--broad lands for the
toilers--the great sea coasts for the dreamers.... It's all a matter of
taste," he added.

       *       *       *       *       *




10

HEJIRA


We found we were a bit tied in the Middle West, caught somewhat whether
we liked it or not, in the meshes of possession. Steve and I had liked
it much out on the Southern California strand.... When one reads in the
earlier book,[12] the stress that we put on building that big stone
house on Lake Erie; this felicitous hejira may disconcert.

    [12] _Child and Country._

The fact is, we wearied of possession. We found ourselves yearning
for that beauty which is unconfined. We were athirst for new things,
a different break of seasons and taxes.... The world was so full of
people who could build and buy and own and insure, that we decided we
should be doing the things that the others could not. We were glad to
have built the house for the other fellow. We had to do it. We learned
how to run it well, in and out--but it was a stone house. When a man
builds a stone house with walls eighteen inches thick, he must leave a
hole to get out; also he must be sure that he isn't building on his own
chest.... In true Hive spirit, we renounced at the highest moment of
possession.

The crowd cannot be seen by one who stands in the crowd. On the same
basis a man cannot see the relation of his house to the road or garden
from the inside of the house. The world must be regarded from outside
to be seen as a whole. The New Race is determined to see it so. This
_outside_ is none other than the mystical viewpoint of all world
artists and builders.

One does not know what friends are, until one discovers that the secret
of friendship is not in getting but in giving. No one knows what love
is until he reverses all the laws that the many follow now. I do not
mean lawlessness. I mean the higher law that is found at last by the
quester after goodness, beauty and truth. We have to finish with the
world as it is before we set out in quest of a better country.... We
found that we had to become active servants of a finer ideal than
householding at its highest. We determined to do more than to dream
this ideal; we set about to make a better country. At worst, we work
for our children.

It came to us many times before we moved that we were forever
done with things as they are; that we had come to the end of show
and property-measure and hoarding; to the end of the love of self
which destroys the vision for friendship; to the end of domesticity
which holds one's neighbour as prey or rival; to the end of civic
identification, or relation with any federated commonwealth, which
fancies its existence threatened by the prosperity of other political
bodies. No heat about it.

We came to the edge of the Lake in vanloads; we went away with bags....
I turned from the eastern distance on the bluff, on one of the last
days, and looked at the vined study and the big stone house, the elms
so strong and green about it. I remembered the early picture of all
this. It began from Stevenson's _Treasure of Franchard_, many years
ago,--how old Dr. Duprez went out in the morning and tried grapes and
plums with the dew on them, sniffing the perfumes of his own yard,
dwelling in his own orchards.

I remember one day before building that the man came to us about the
young trees. He had pictures of them in books--blooms and fruits of
such colours that nature would never be guilty of--all the fruits I
heard of as a boy--white grapes that never grow in this country, purple
ones that grow whether you care or not....

The trees were coming on now, many with ripening fruit. The grove of
elms was a matter of collateral, as the bank would say. The break-water
had caught up thousands of yards of sand. It worked--the old struggle
of wasting banks forgotten until a greater storm. The honeysuckles that
were planned to climb the bars of the study windows, had to be trimmed
now for any light at all. The wistaria trailed admirably and imposed
upon the front the sense of years.

... We had planned to have all the fruits; some of the finest were now
in flower. We came with many clothes, underwear and outerwear, wool and
dark things. We left with a few light effects in our hands--to find a
place where white garments might be worn in peace. We came with a great
idea of food--game and fishes, meats, poultry, many cans and vegetables
and desserts. We went away with a taste for graham bread and butter--a
spread of honey, a glass of milk. We came with a fear of disease for
the children, fear of colds, fear of losing something, or having
something taken away, doubtless having the fear of death and accident.
We went away with a clear idea of what death is and the advantage of
it, children and adults alike.

Young children rode the horse that had a reputation for being
wild-spirited and very much a man's mount. We had seen the deep places
of the Lake fill with sunshine. We came with parasols and awnings and
protections against the sun. Most of us would like to have worn nothing
but a breech-clout had the town permitted; and the only time we had
found the world hard to bear, was the long grey Spring days of rain.

Sunlight--it is closer to God and happiness and manhood and every
delight than words can suggest. The more you know of it, the more you
need; the more you love it, the more its mysterious excellence unfolds.
I know what sunstroke is, and what the sickness from heat is. It's a
vile state of the body, or vile clothing that stifles the body. When
one is well and has learned to come back to the Father of Lights--there
is no fear in his heart. I used to wear a helmet and dark glasses, but
no more--eyes stronger than ever. I look for the sun in the morning and
stare up from the sand into his face at high noon. There is nothing the
matter with sunlight. The sadness and the sickness is with those who
bring their quilts and cloaks to hide it from their flesh....

It's all in synthesis. The end of bulk possession is pain.... We
started in with many flowers. We ended with roses. It's all in the
tea-rose.... By careful selection of thoughts over a little period, we
can come into the joy of flowers in other people's gardens. There are
brave men who allow you to walk in their orchards; and there are many
who work hard to raise fruits for a price. There is much joy, if you
really look at it, in building a house for another fellow.

We start with the brute materials--beginning with the clay itself.
Our cultivations become more intensive through the years. All life is
so. We take the extract of a thing at last--a shelf of books where
formerly we wanted a roomful--somebody's else little rented bungalow,
where formerly we wanted an estate. We realise, at last, that there is
an essence to be obtained from the extract, an oil from the essence--a
spirit at last from the oil. The whole story is in that--synthesis.
Slowly, at last, we begin to set ourselves free. We descend into
matter; learn its lessons and laws, rise like a plant through the
darkness to the light, integrating force to meet and cope with the new
and lighter element. I held up seven little books in one hand--weighing
no more than a new novel.

"It's all in these," I said to the Chapel. "One could put these in his
bag and have it all."

... And then at last, I went down alone and empty-handed to the shore,
meditated on God with sun and sand and flowing airs.... All matter
is scaffolding which falls away. A man thinks he builds a house for
himself, but no sooner has he put on the last tile than death or the
open road calls. He chooses his climate and grows out of it. He thinks
he must possess, that he must hoard against a rainy day, and he gathers
the stuff of death about him. If he cannot rise, death covers him
for the time. Dr. Duprez didn't speak of the care of his orchard, or
his garden. It was all _story_ to me. Dear R.L.S. He didn't dream
of the work of the hand necessary to keep up an orchard, and have a
connoisseur's joy for a few summer days of the year. He didn't tell
of the parasites, the sprinklings, the arsenates and pumps, nor of
the little winged migrators that sit on the hills, waiting for the
potatoes to come up. The call comes to possess nothing. It had better
be answered.




11

THE SPECTATOR


Some of us here have swiftly reviewed certain old slaveries, that we
may set free the children of to-day.... They do not have to make the
same mistakes we did. I, at thirty-nine, say to those ten and twenty
and thirty years younger:

"Start where I leave off. I do not relieve you of pain or error or
shortsightedness, of passion or pleasure, or anything that arouses
or wears down body and soul. Only this I ask you--don't make the
same mistakes I did. Let me give you the answer to a few petty and
pestiferous lures. I can put you right on them. Begin now to learn
your lessons by doing things wrong at first, a holy way to get
somewhere, but be a pioneer in your evils; be daring and fastidious
and full-powered and discriminating in your faults! Above all, be
impersonal in them as soon as possible. Let the winds of the world
breeze through. It's all a Laugh."

Every process of the world to-day is designed to take away that
adorable love and listening of the child to its own soul. Streets,
schools, trade, neighbours, houses in rows, priests, pastors,
charlatans, all standardise. A thousand teachers in technic for one
in the spirit of things; ten thousand teachers of the health of the
body (and every one wrong) for one who shows the way to the single and
sacred fountain of youth; innumerable voices lifted in fly-dronings
of instruction, how to fill the bin and the brain, the bank and the
bourse--how to have and to hold and to die holding, and to bury oneself
in the midst of--for one who laughs and plays and dares to watch the
world go by.... At last to be the Spectator!

I tell you now from much living that there is nothing here in the world
that is worth fighting for, but the glad tolerance of events, sheer,
laughing joy in the Plan.... Every time you adjust your life to the
standard of the world, you are doing something that is beneath your
soul, and you will suffer for it, and be forced to retrace. Dress for
the world, and the world will find its flaws in you. Work for the world
according to its specification, and it will defile you. Enter into any
of the competitions of the world and your face and your hands and task
will be constricted by visible and invisible impediments and barriers,
less than the real of you in every detail. Search for health according
to the laws of flesh alone, and it will elude you at every point,
showing you all vanities and pits and pains. Search for beauty of face
and body, and it will be the first thing taken. There is nothing in the
world but to make the human divine--that is the job we are here for.

To cease to hold is the beginning of invincible attraction; want
nothing and the treasures of the world are yours. You cannot have
health until you are ready to give up life here. Cease to cling,
and that which was a body held apart from you, is suddenly a winged
creature returning.... There is nothing here but the love story, and
the power of that must be spiritual. The madonna of the future will
look up, not down at the head upon her breast. Man must overcome
mammon; Woman must overcome the mammal. The lovers of the future will
look a little time in each other's eyes and much above to a Third who
will come nearer and nearer for their adoration.... The friends of the
future will sing in their Partings; they shall know the spirit and the
breath of _camaraderie_ which knows no death.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is a tendency on the part of our young associates to be
extravagant in their speech. Much that they see is beyond their
capacity decently to express. A group of us was looking down from a
high balustrade. Flowery vines were woven intricately against the face
of the stucco below. We became conscious of an incredible whirring, so
low that it was difficult to hear, and yet so intense as to give the
thought of a distant seismic disorder. It was the invisible wings of a
humming-bird, flashing from cup to cup in the vines below. The child
standing next to me said:

"The sound has texture."

It expressed something very real to me; yet there is not power in words
to portray the exact feeling. All the objects of nature have their
spiritual dimensions also for those who dwell much in the Unseen. These
unusual children see the material object merely as an outpost for a
challenging mystery; while, to the material mind, the outpost is all,
and the lavish adjectives and expressions of the former are deplored as
gush or affectation. As a matter of splendid truth, the most marked and
potent of all adjectives and expressions are pitifully inadequate to
express the lustre and radiance which begins at the point where three
dimensions end.

The Valley Road Girl came into the Study one day, saying that this
chapel book should be called _The Hive_. We all thought it a wonderful
name to work toward, yet the unfolding of possibilities has been
steadily interesting since that day.

The inner sanctuaries of occult literature commend the students to look
to the bees. The pattern of much that man has still to unfold from his
own soul, for his personal and communal uplift, is already expressed
in the hive. There is a period of larva, and a period of wings to each
cycle. Such matters call to those of spiritual discernment. One feels
on the verge of great revelations for humanity, beyond the thing called
death, as he studies this miniature model of a great democracy.

The most fascinating love episode I ever read was the Nuptial Flight in
Maeterlinck's _Life of the Bee_. The majesty of winging to the sun, the
falling back of the weaker-winged suitors, the commanding isolation of
sun and sky, fusion under the mighty beat of the wings of the queen,
the broken body of the male, the mother's return to the shadow and the
labour of the generative wheel--magically, it all opened a vista to
the great renunciations, the great passions and aspirations ahead for
the human soul, great fusions of the future, marriages truly made in
heaven, the inevitable trinity of all matings--the drama of love and
death.

For her one high noon flight in June, the queen toils through years.
She brings back from that superb instant the swarming cities of the
future. On and on, she unfolds her fecundity in the dark, a prodigious
and Herculean labour; from the human standpoint a task of intolerable
pain and monotony. The queen's labour is scarcely more difficult than
the tasks assigned to the hosts of workers, which appear to be denied
any separate episode of emancipation. Yet, equally with the queen,
they share the communal spirit; and no one who has stood among the
hives at the end of a long summer day, and heard the song of bounty and
deep-hearted content, can deny the peace that dwells among the myriad
of skilled artisans, each with his perfectly appointed task.

Bees appear to remember the light, while working at the opposite side
of the wheel. Men, as yet, are detached, lost in the heresies of self
and strife. Only a few visionaries have peered beyond the petty reach
of the optic nerve, to perceive that this, which we make so much of, is
but the hell-portion; that this appearance of ours in pounds is a mere
dressing up in materials of earth to endure the dark and low vibration
of the wheel's most downward sweep. These few visionaries, always
singing the joy of the other arcs of the cycle, somehow keep the dream
alive,--the dream that appears already to be the essential blessedness
and magic of life in the hive.

All mysticism seeks to teach us this single point which the bees seem
to have learned so well--to transcend time and space in labour; to put
off the sense of separation and strife, to hearken to the soul's own
song of equality and sufficing days. We must be pushed to the last
reaches of pain before we learn this secret. We have to penetrate the
darkness before we earn this flash which swings wide the portals of joy.

Joy is the most potent thing in the universe. The bee-queen mother
weaves race after race of progeny out of the incredible dynamics of an
instant's joy. Each cell that she fills with life is a living fragment
of her nuptial feast. Fusion is ecstasy, parturition is pain. The many
become one; that is heaven. The one becomes many again; that is earth
and hell. Integration and diffusion--the same story told in the hives
and ant-hills, in the strolling winds and swinging seas, in the hearts
and marts of men, in matings everywhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

The original idea was to use the title, _The Hive_, in relation to the
happy intensity of Stonestudy days, but our ideal grew to adapt to the
name, because of its revelations in regard to the new social order; the
pure and instant abnegation of the self to the community; the active
acceptance of the precept: _That which is good for the one is good for
the many, and that which is good for the many is good for the one_.

We cannot lose ourselves long in our own misery when we realise the
glory of yesterday, and the more spacious solar adventure of to-morrow.
We cannot continue to feel our own isolation when we perceive a brother
in the eye of a stranger, when we perceive the sons of God in the
eyes of passing men. At length appears the task ahead--the great
Fatherland, the Planetary Hive.

I have taken the hint from the new race children, that to transcend
pain we must make joy of it. Given the hint, one realises that the
masters of all ages have told the same story--how to make light of
human shadow, how to make lustrous our own darkness. No matter what
science says to the contrary, the quest for the Absolute means the same
thing; this is the marriage at Cana, the turning of water into wine;
this is the passion of the ancient alchemists, to transmute base metals
into gold; this is healing; this is regeneration.

To make joy out of pain is still more: it is power for world's work;
it is the light that one carries among men; it is the fire that makes
man remembered by his fellows, that makes man significant in any
task. It is loss of the sense of self; the death of the lower for the
birth of the higher life; the subjugation of three-score-and-ten for
immortality; an _adios_ to the hands that cling, for the stride and
rhythm of the Great Companions on the long road. It is not for the
saint any more than for the soldier, not for the sage any more than
for the politician, not for the poet any more than for the parent. It
is not piety, it is power. One learns it best from the children. One
becomes as a little child in learning it well.

We are learning rapidly these days. These are the days of humanity's
passion and pilgrimage. The soul of humanity is passing along the dusty
roads of Palestine, for the healing of its own weaknesses, the casting
out of its own demons. One who is not carrying a part of the world
burdens now, as well as his personal pack, seems forgotten of the gods.
It has come to many of us that we dare not take more than a glimpse of
our own allotted happiness--that we may not have more than a touch of
the beloved's hand in these days of parturition everywhere.

But personally and nationally we shall come to that significant
crossing where nothing else can be taken from us, where death seems the
highest boon, and Master Pain has driven home his most pointed shaft.

That is the moment of laughter. Driven to the last ditch we turn and
laugh. That is the moment of our expansion for a new kind of heroism.
One builds from that deep hour.

The ultimate secret is not to identify oneself with that which changes.
When these objects shift or break down, or some one takes them away, we
suffer the old savage rent. The day comes when we disentangle from the
final mesh of possession--cease the idolatry of things; then, and only
then, are we rich--possessing the spirit and essence of all things,
tallying the universe within according to its objective arrangements
with the universe without.

Finally, to master the world, one must learn actually to enjoy the
mutation of material things, as one of an audience watches the
movements on the stage. No longer torn here and there in the small
fury of detached affairs, one laughs richly at the progress of the
Play. Possessing the spirit of all things within, he realises that
nothing he has can really be taken away. No longer identifying himself
with material objects, he is at last in touch with the perfect and
changeless archetypes. This dispassion, so difficult to reach, at last
extends over all world-forms. One ceases to love bodies; one loves
souls. The son at the front, the daughter taken to a different house,
the empty seat at the table, crash of finance or romance--all but
a passing of symbols--Godspeed and a smile. Bit by bit the valiant
reaches that profound and almost divine indifference to the external,
having bound himself to the real, the enduring, the inner cosmos.

First passion, then dispassion, then compassion--conquest of pairs of
opposites until night and day are seen as separate sides of the same
globe. So with pain and pleasure and all fluctuations. Day by day,
while learning this great secret, the aspirant is forced to die to
the thing he loves most. Day by day the thing that he hates and fears
most--for that he must live. At last, loves and hates merge together.
One is no longer focalised upon a point, but upon a universe. He
arrives at the great silence in himself, the static momentum. He no
longer moves with the world--the passing show goes by. He transmutes
pain into joy--not lying to the self, but because pain of the body is
joy of the soul--joy of union, joy of birth that comes from pain.

At last to be the Spectator! To possess the world, to realise the
divinity of others, the ineffable equality of Souls. To have all,--the
mothering winds of the hills and the holy breath of the sea; to move
and laugh and die with all the world.




12

TOM AND THE LITTLE GIRL


The younger boy with us--Tom, now seven, does not find it easy to
express himself through writing. He draws well, but that is a talent
which I would not recognise so quickly as the expression through words.
I mean to send him away to an artist for a time. Tom's imagination is
fertile and expansive. He dictates well--wonderful play of colours
through his mind. He talked the following to an amanuensis, a year or
more ago as he conned over a handful of coloured stones:

"There's a wonderful mystery about stones.... One like a mountain that
the fire comes up out of--with white on top ... another like a cap of
honey.... Another: this is like a great big mountain, and this is a
dog full of food, and he's standing on a dragon, one of those devilish
dragons; his tail is curved under him, and a spot on him near his neck.
He looks down and he sees the sky, floating. He wonders if he should
leap down and get some. There's a great big lake under him. He thinks
he has more power than anything in the world--he's looking for more
power. He's wondering where it is. See him thinking.

... Here's a volcano at night--see the force, and then the rain beating
down behind it--even see fairies dashing by there. Here's a man with
his jaw knocked in. Mystery here--a forest at night. This is like a
coloured man that's been in a prize-fight, and he's gritting his teeth
because he didn't win; he's got a mug-nose too. There's a fried-cake.
Another: Here's 'Agra Falls and fairies dashing, and sparkling stones
at night. That's in Japan--that's true, look at all the lanterns up
there. There's some India--water dashing over a cliff, another like a
smooth cliff, nothing to hurt it, just fairies to fly around it--and a
door-knob, and there's a hole where owls live...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Many interesting things appear in these dictations provided Tom's
helper effaces himself sufficiently to permit the boy to forget
externals. The remaining pages of this chapter is a sketch of Tom's
case written by the Little Girl[13] who furnishes an interesting
surface of understanding for the complications of this lad.
Incidentally her own development is one of the big winnings of
Stonestudy work. The Little Girl is now fourteen and this essay will
show something of her awakening:

    [13] Jane Levington Comfort.


TOM

He is seven, restless as the sea, and just as full of mysteries. Many
times I have felt a strong spirit in the body, a healer, a great lover,
a dear and compassionate comrade. For a time Tom meant India to me.
I could see the blue hills and the wide dusty roads, the cows coming
home through the dusk, and the little Indian mothers bringing food and
their babies to the feet of a withered, white old man in a big Sannysin
robe. Always I seemed one of the mothers, and Tom the master. I used
to sit at his feet when he was very small, and listen carefully to his
wandering, yet deep and wise words. He seemed to unfold many things to
me about myself, and in that way helped me as a teacher would, though
he did not know.

For a while Tom's quest was in healing--his small hands were always
laid upon our hurts, serious eyes staring upwards. It seemed to awaken
the past in his soul. Gradually his bent turned to other things. When
we went to the country to live, he saw Nature for the first time. Tom
was very much at home with the old Mother. He loved the living things
that most children fear; the bees and beetles, the blind little beings
that live in the earth and the small, red-tongued garter-snakes. He
often spoke of a life he had lived with the snakes--of the big ones
that used to love him and curl around his neck. I never could help
shuddering a little at the thought, but Tom would explain, "They won't
hurt you if you love them. Then they will love you too. Snakes feel
just what you feel--if you're afraid of them, they get mad."

Again I would think of India--the great cobras that sit before a pure
master, opening their hoods to listen to his chanting. Tom knew what
purity meant, a deep-down purity like the earth itself. Why should
anything hurt him?... He used to hold the bees in his hands and walk
through a cloud of double-winged beetles with utmost carelessness. Many
times he has led me through a cloud of them, murmuring, "They won't
hurt you." Once he disturbed a honeybee in the late afternoon, drunken
and senseless on the fragrant flowers. It stung him. He shook it off
his hand and said in a disgusted voice, "That wasn't my bee!"

A little later Tom discovered the Unseen of Nature. I mean that it
ceased to be the unseen to him. The fairies opened their mysterious
arms, and we saw little of him for a time, so lost was he in their
wonder. There was a small rock in the front yard that he used to sit
on when he was looking for them. The busy brown gnomes appeared to
him first--often rolling pebbles down the cliff, or gathering leaves
in their little aprons. Then the tree-nymphs would come to him; so
green and fresh and sweet--with bright eyes and coaxing hands. He
would follow laughingly what they said and did, always explaining to
us later what they _meant_. And he saw the spirits of the water, far
out over the lake, mingled with the sunlight. They gave him much, he
said, but he would like to have gone out to them. He said that burning
wood unlocked the fire fairies--let them out into freedom and light.
He loved to build fires on the beach, watching carefully the leaping
and spreading of the flames. The salamanders were responsible for the
spreading, he thought, and used to watch their little red hands at
work. His eyes seemed to melt as they stared so far and deeply into
things--way past the _seen_ into that which is nothingness to most of
us. And he would come back slowly as though it were hard to detach
himself from the enchantment. Always we kept very still at such a time,
for fear we hurry him.

Out of the magic and mystery of that summer, out of the warm nights
full of stars and peace, and the days of sunlight spent with the
beckoning fairies, Tom's soul unfolded another big quest. The fairies
were only the start of the Unseen, though we thought at the time that
he saw all that a human being could. At last the Master's voice reached
his open ears. He answered immediately.

It began with old Indian philosophy. He heard certain reading in the
Study one day, and later asked for the book. It was a little book,
written in words of one syllable by a Hindu boy, telling how to reach
the Feet of the Master. The next morning I found him on his knees
before it in the sunlight. At that time Tom was just learning to read.
It was hard for him, but he wanted to be alone with the spirit of it.
He handed me the book saying, "Please read this page aloud to me."

The young Master was speaking of Discrimination and Onepointedness.
Tom's face filled with the wonder of one who has found the thing he
has been wanting for a very long time--for ages perhaps. He said, "If
you asked me to go and get you a book, and I went, but instead of
bringing the book back to you, I took it to the shore and commenced
to read, forgetting that you wanted it, that would be the opposite of
onepointedness, wouldn't it?" A little later, he said:

"The Master watches you from the hills, all the way up. He knows all
that you do. When you do small things, you are taking Him away from
yourself; you are not being the _Soul_. Each time you do something
great and brave, the Master comes a step nearer. When you become your
soul, the Master comes all the way down the hill and tells your brain
which way to go--tells you the path, the way home. _Then_ you have
earned it. You have got to earn everything, everything that comes to
you.... I think that the Master comes and takes you away at night,
shows you many things--tries to help you. But pain has to teach the
brain, and pain is the lack of soul. It hurts your soul to have you
suffer. It hurts the Master too, but they both know that you are
learning to be their comrade through your pain."

Tom paused. In his eyes there was that wonderful melting again, and a
joy so deep and pure that it made my heart sing.

"It is all meant," he added. "All is meant, but men do not know that
the Master is watching. For ages and ages the Master waits so patiently
for his _friend_ to come."

"His friend?" I asked.

"Yes. Souls are always comrades. The Master is greater than you are
only because he has been longer on the path. He started before you did.
He has come up through all that we have. Just think how long my Master
has been waiting for me, and I have not even found Him yet."

I looked at the little body of him, at the innocence of the eyes and
mouth, all untouched by the world--so pure and yet crying out in pain
because he had taken so long on the quest.... His eighth year brought
Tom into regular boyhood. The young brain, always before silently
giving way to intuition, began to speak for itself. This stage is as
important perhaps, but not so beautiful as when the hushedness and
glowing of the Unseen touches a child. Here we turned from Tom, and the
things that creep into the heart of almost every boy of the same age,
crept into Tom's heart. He forgot the fairies--they ceased to call. He
forgot the wide roads of peace and purity. He seemed to forget that the
Master was still waiting so patiently on the hill for him to open and
receive. But we knew better than that.

The development of the brain always robs a child of the inner glowing
for a time, but it all comes back again with a great dimension added;
the instrument is then keen and direct--a power in itself. We turned
from Tom--a young brain standing alone, very conscious of itself,
is anything but interesting. At the time we were in the turmoil of
departure, each of us thinking in different ways about the long journey
just ahead, and the wonder of being at last in California. Tom was more
or less his own director those days.

He fell into crime, looted the house of a friend, denied everything. He
was sent to his quarters to stay until he found himself again. It took
a week exactly, but he found a deep happiness in being alone in the
little room before he left it. It did him as much good as the long days
in the sunlight ever could; he came out pale and wide eyed, and the
breath of a soul was in the room when he entered.

One day out of his long week, I went to him. The sun had gone down
behind a nest of grey clouds. Dusk had almost deepened into darkness,
but there was no light in his room. He sat there, his eyes staring
ahead of him, his hands folded tightly in his lap. I walked in quietly
and sat down beside him. I was not even noticed; he was lost in his
thought. At last I asked,

"Tom, what did you find so interesting in that cheap business?"

"I haven't found out yet," he said grimly.

"Have you been thinking about it?"

"Sure have. Been thinking all day."

"Has nothing come?"

"No, but it's coming soon. It can't take long if I stay here like this,
wishing and pulling every minute."

"Of course it can't."

He continued to stare into the darkness ahead.

"What does it feel like, Tom?" I asked.

"Your soul leaves you.... Your soul won't stay if you are going back."

"Going back?"

"Yes. I mean if you have been big and listened to its voice, and then
stop. If you are _less_ than yourself after you've been _more_, your
soul won't stay."

"What do you do when your soul leaves you?"

"You walk the Black Path."

He looked a child seraph.

"That path is not interesting, is it?"

"No. You have got to know what it is, got to walk up it a little ways,
so that you are not afraid of it any more. When you know a thing, you
are not afraid of it any longer. Before you know, it looks all dark to
you. Nothing can hurt you when you are not afraid.... It's just the
same as with the animals. All the black things that come into you are
animals. If they find nothing but love and whiteness inside, they will
go away and not even look at you again; but if fear and darkness are
there, they get mad and bite."

Leaning forward with a laugh, he added, "You can't cut across from the
black path to the white. You've got to go all the way back and start
over."

       *       *       *       *       *




13

THE ABBOT


The Abbot is now seventeen. He is doing well at Columbia. Classes and
routine there are mere externals. The Abbot is living a life far more
real than appears--a life that few men in America have learned how to
live. He has actually arrived at the conviction of the unfathomable
riches that lie within. Many occultists and a few great artists have
a working knowledge of this kind. We hoped the Abbot could remain at
Stonestudy, but his parents wanted some letters after his family name
as well as before. Our young man was enjoined to make the best of it.
As a matter of fact, he is putting on a lot of brain things that work
admirably with the inner activity which we made much of in our work
together.

In another book,[14] I told of the Abbot's awakening--how we called
him from mysterious regions of silence and mystification, to a more
or less adequate expression of material facts. Here was a boy almost
overshadowed by his own soul at times, inclined to be half out of the
body and not altogether present in the mind, when moving among the
sordid affairs of the world--a lad who knew the arrangement of planets
and the flow of meteoric matter better than the geography of our own
continent; who swung very readily back into memories of other lives,
mainly monastic, rather than into the episodes of his own kid-days.

    [14] _Child and Country._

I forget just how it was that we first sensed the giant in this boy.
In any case, we struck one. The ordinary training that I would give an
American youth to breathe the soul of him, was not at all necessary
with the Abbot. Rather, pressure was exerted from the first to make him
come down into our world, to make him be one of us, to make him see
streets and alleys, doorsteps and servant-stairs. They have succeeded
better at Columbia in this regard than we were able to do, but the
wonder and satisfaction of it all is, that the aroused mystic, the
aroused artist, has not receded--but dominates his days and work. I
understand that he is considered a sensation in a literary way.

He is not different from his fellows. It is part of our ethics to
belong where we happen to be; to do the things that others do, better,
if possible, than the customary performance; to begin after that to be
our inimitable selves. It is our ideal to move about the world, not
to attract attention, to be quiet and calm and efficacious, to be
helpful and humorous and wise, to furnish the swift, unerring word or
hand or lift in the midst of affairs; to deny ourselves to no one; to
hold ourselves superior to no one; to strive laughingly toward the big
workmanship, to become Players after the essential apprenticeship, to
win the Laugh at last, and that perfect consummation which only comes
with utter and instant detachment when the task is accomplished.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Abbot was sprawled in a Study shadow one summer afternoon, when I
suddenly saw him in relation to big sea-tales. Usually we tale-tellers
carry our packs. I saw the Abbot with a sea-chest that day. His was
not the way of the Arabian fires and the Assyrian camel paths--the
word-spinner's usual evolutionary line. He came overseas with his
narratives.... I saw him in the next few years making a circle around
all the capes, touching all the ports of Asiatic and insular water
fronts--a bit of Conrad, a bit of Melville, a bit of Stevenson ... a
most sumptuous sea-chest full of shells, corals, coins and trinkets
from all the Islands; feather of a woman's fan perhaps, here and there,
silks hazy from sea water, crooked knives from Malay Isles, whale-bone
and shark's teeth, pearl of the mollusk, a bit of ambergris--just a top
tray of the Chest! Deep mystic parchments farther within, a corner for
the sacred writings of all the world, a small type mill, a great wad of
white paper, the rest mainly traces of a long glide across the ocean
floors.

I have learned to go very slow in building a matrix of my own thought
about any young man's mind, yet I told the Abbot that day what I saw
for him--how he was bound to do the big sea-tales, how we were sick of
steam, sick already of the big hydroplanes, sick of all that hurries,
all that explodes, all that has the taint of gas; that the world
presently would be so sick of noise and explosions and show and speed,
that professional soothers would be in great demand, like the Japanese
masseurs who wait upon the sleepless; that the sick world would want
to read of long, loose, lazy days under canvas, of the few ports left
where they haven't set up recruiting offices;--that the world would be
in desperate need of sunlight and surf and wide swinging seas--that he
must be one of those to usher in the old romance of the sailing craft
again.

I told about his sea-chest better than I have told it here, but the
Abbot's eyes didn't bulge. Presently, however, he began to grow that
way.... His Saturdays and Sabbaths now are spent, not in Morningside
Heights, but down among the shipping and across the harbour, where the
big world tramps hang out. You will see these things in his letters. I
have several of his yarns here, but I am not going to run any of them
in this book. They are good yarns, but too intrinsically big yet for
the handling of a boy of seventeen. He has too much calibre for his
brain so far to carry ten thousand words to superb consummation. I want
to spring a big tale presently. I have a lapful of his random letters
from days spent down on the water front, and nights under the study
lamp:

    DEAR OLD WASP:

    Morning mists over the lake, the _Pelee_ coming up out of them.
    Just had a night with John and a corking good run of work. We've
    been watching the sun go down from Lynster's[15] back lately, and
    breathing the planetary heave under the stars, with the milky
    way dipping to the lake before us. This inland place is heavy
    to take. The weight of agriculture is like a blanket over all.
    It takes three or four pages to bore up through the cuticle. Me
    for a get-away to the world soon--to feed up on the hum of feet
    and voices and cars.... Blackbirds are beginning to blacken the
    mornings and nights again; touch of Fall and Pine-smoke this
    morning. Real itchings in the ankles--to you! A wonderful synthesis
    for us all when we meet up again.... I'd like to roam the world
    with John. He is a grand pal. Could joke over an oven made out of
    a tomato-can, as well as eat from a banquet table....

    [15] The saddle horse.

A day or two later:

    ... Black forces strong around Stonestudy last night.... About
    eight-thirty I rode over on Lynt, to sleep with John. Decided to
    have a debauch with tea. While I worked on, he gathered the cups
    and tea and electric tea-kettle together and got things going.
    He called for me to come and make the tea. He was seated in the
    big chair with a tableleaf in front of him, and on that was the
    tea-kettle, boiling.... One leg slipped, and the whole boiling
    collection went in his lap.... A prince, the way he stood it. The
    bunch was just coming back from town. Penel' rushed over, and the
    next was a turmoil right, cries, olive oil, lint, rags, confusion
    of voices and footsteps--too many people and the little guy sort
    o' lost his control--but it all came back again. Almost any minute
    I am looking for the laugh from him. All night I was with him.
    Penelope, the finished heroine as always. One could see the shades
    of pain pass over John's face time and again. His nerves jump--but
    his mouth and eyes are certainly getting a grand hue of steel....
    Yours right along.

Another:

    Hazy summer about. Blue over the lake with shadows deepening in the
    distance. Crops drying beneath the sun. Leave it at its height--am
    headed back for Columbia--where I'll let time shape the winds for
    farther "going."

    School is not harmful to one who _is_ himself. I'll take
    philosophy, and then be over to tell you who stole your
    washboard.... It is no struggle, no test, for one to be lit among
    his own as we are. One's depth of listening is best tested in
    crowds. We've got to separate--go out and change the continents
    into tablelands of democracy.

    War seems settling on the world for years longer, but there is a
    bigger order coming out of the incredible chaos. Each must see God
    and worship through his work to shape the master beauty. Every
    one's art breaks new roads which lead to one place.

    Stories are coming freer every day--I've gotten across. Don't
    know whether it's the best thing for me. But I've done it, and
    that's what I wanted to know. It is all preparation. Results are
    beginnings. I look back now on the summer of '14. It _was_ heaven.
    It _was_ peace. To look at the cottage lights and hear the voices
    of rowers through the dusk was a breath from God. It was peace, it
    was relaxation, a deep resting of tissue for turmoil. Depth and
    mastery to you.

THIS TO JOHN:

    The thought of your scarred legs has been with me on the borderland
    of sleep for many nights, also our hours together on the pine
    needles. To-night, with the sun falling sadly over the iron mills,
    I walked along the Heights and cast an eye down into brilliant
    Harlem. The voices of the bargemen, the wheeze of tugs, the low
    growl of outpassing vessels, an occasional curse from a freighted
    barge, came up with the hum of the city. There seemed to be
    some goddess entwined with sea-weed standing over the ocean of
    structures. She held a finger to her lips for silence, and pointed
    to the Lord knows where--well, where I felt a tumult to go, to
    satisfy some hot quest.... I was lost to the multitude of faces
    that sent up a passionate and incomprehensible hum ... savour of
    youth singing in the veins.

    Presently a drizzle drove me back to the room.... I reached up and
    flicked out the lights.... In an apartment across the street lives
    an old man who always comes to his window at dark and gazes up and
    down the streets. His head is grey--his eyes are deep and old. The
    light from his shaded reading lamp falls in a pool of dim yellow
    about his carpet. Sometimes he turns out the lamp, and leaves the
    fire-place alone. Sometimes his head falls forward on his chest,
    and he dreams--I suppose, of boundless seas, for he was once a
    sea-captain.

    His wandering days are over--no more quest. The houses rise to his
    eyes like one long, bleak, uncrested wave from the Arctic Sea....
    He means old days, but we--we must never grow old; we must live
    and ever be full of creation as the cloud is full of lightning. We
    must, old pal, ride the deserts, drift over seas; we must spill our
    work as we go, as night spills its stars from a casket. Fill me
    up with the Pacific in your letters--the big sunlight--the colour
    of the mountains where they dip and rise to clouds. I have a dry
    palate for it all. Fill me--eye and ear and soul.

    Yours deep in those scars----

       *       *       *       *       *

    DEAR OLD MAN:

    The Hudson is very still this morning; a few battleships have swung
    out with the tide; gulls seem to be forever passing up and down the
    river in white eddies; smoke from the factories rises straight and
    white. The morning sun strikes like a sledge upon the Palisades.
    How grand that old river is, and how untiring in its endless ebb
    and flood--almost like a solar system in the serene way it deals
    with human traffic.

    A great new sense of words has come over me lately. At the very
    birth of language lies a chest of rich obsolete words--quite like a
    Spanish treasure chest, with its doubloons, bezoar stones and "pots
    of Arica bronze." The artists go treasure hunting in language, and
    a few do startle the world with their wealth. The live-long day
    seems to me now like a shuttle driving back and forth, weaving from
    soul to matter, a golden fabric.

    This word-chest means much to me because it deals with the sea.
    Lift up the lid, and tucked away in those little drawers lies the
    seaman's religion in bits of turquoise, in coils of fish line
    and hooks, in pink sea-shells, perhaps in an old violin, or in a
    few stray books of Carlyle, Goethe, Dante and Melville's _Moby
    Dick_. The point is we all bungle along through our world-term
    somehow; we have our work and religion and pleasures and tales in
    a camphor-wood chest with a brass band around it. Sometimes we
    bring out the violin and make God-awful discords, calling it music
    of the sea; we brighten people's eyes with our bits of turquoise;
    terrorise them with the philosophy that Carlyle and Goethe and Moby
    Dick have given us; we make them feel that endless _wroom, wroom,
    wroom_ of the ocean that is washing in our souls.

    Yes, we must first learn the futility of life before we can live.
    The war teaches this lesson well, but won't it be great when
    everybody is singing over his golden shuttle and laughing? Won't
    it be great when the chastened New Race springs up, like green
    shoots at the passing of winter? Won't it be great when the world
    has grown serene and wise enough to sit down beside a blazing
    bark fire, with the shadows of pine trees about, or near the dim
    breakers, and consider it profitable to talk about the stars?

    ... There are times when one feels he must be alone--when he wants
    to be connected with nothing--when he wants to go to a distant and
    high altitude, and there boil his pot of alchemy--there, where the
    air is dust free, and the incense of one's devotion goes straight
    up. He must listen and listen, until he believes that he hears the
    stars humming in their courses; then the sun drawing like a magnet,
    then a crescendo of song up to a deafening roar,--that all things,
    all stars, are headed towards one point of balance among that whole
    mass of sapphires we see above.

    Man, but the joy of telling tales, of recording the warmth of human
    hearts, of loving men and their ways--to fill out a morning with
    that golden shuttle! One has but to sit and the sun on the walls
    and the shadows in the corners, or if at night, the flame on the
    stones of the hearth turn to words!... The old sea is full of that.
    The heart within her breast sounds the footfalls of quest; the
    ecstasy of life tears in her storm and in still hours she sits in
    her glitter....

    Some day we shall be together on the blessed Pacific coast. We
    shall have bookshelves and packages of dates, bottles of cream and
    combs of honey. We shall work with that rugged lunge of mountains
    in our products; and that endless and insistent _wroom, wroom,
    wroom_ of the ocean in all. Listen, here is a day as we shall have
    it:

    The sun lifting up the depth of Canyon shall awake us. After
    we have cooked and eaten of crisp toast and honey and coffee,
    we shall go to our desks and bring out a most rigid problem in
    mathematics,[16] and dwell perhaps for an hour in drawing all
    forces of thinking into play--awaking the mind--shaking off that
    inertia of body. After that we shall penetrate the thing which
    we wish to work upon that particular morning. We shall see its
    functions and logical action, then begin the shuttle and weave back
    and forth with that pliancy that sees the deepest of metaphysics in
    an old man lighting a pipe or loitering over a pork-pie. To top the
    morning, we'll have a meal of milk and dates. The afternoon shall
    mean an isolation with the books--perhaps on the sand with the sun
    tanning our backs. Both healthfully and mentally an efflux of soul.
    At about five in the afternoon comes the humming calm--the poise
    of mind and soul and body. Another meal of the simple foods and
    once more, production, as the sun goes into the sea--giving one's
    soul the might and expanse that the planets use in weaving their
    ways. Perhaps, at ten or eleven we shall reach up, switch out the
    electric bulb and open the door. That shall be a day mastered. Side
    by side, we'll walk over to the cliff at whose base mumbles the
    mighty Pacific. We shall pass no words--the earth'll be good to
    feel and smell. We'll honour the still night of stars.

    [16] Help!

    That day is a privilege to earn--our bodies must suffer and become
    scarred and jostled by the currents of people, and cursed upon
    by foul mouths. All pleasant presently. We must know the heart
    of a bartender as we would want to know the heart of the Christ.
    Do you know that Masefield was a bartender? The secret of the
    real artist is sanity. One must grow hair the medium length--keep
    a well muscled and full lunged body--and if chronic fishermen
    should happen in on us for a meal we must be able to argue that a
    hickory pole is better for a pound-net than pine; or if a devout
    pastor--that we would much rather praise God's work outside on the
    beach....

       *       *       *       *       *

TO JANE:

    Your letter this morning after a long, wonderful run of work. This
    is really the highest day I've had--real rugged work--bronze moving
    pictures before me--faces--open shirts on sunburnt breasts--and,
    of course, the eternal sea. Your letter came like a sudden bag
    of sunlight emptied into a mist. The water became blue and the
    promontories sharp like ink lines.

    And about Steve. I understand all. The draft explains his not
    writing. And this war--it's like a maelstrom rising higher and
    higher. Next summer for certain, possibly this Christmas, it
    means I go. But rather than go as a private I'm going to enlist
    voluntarily in the aviation corps. Flying only would have as much
    thrill as doing the climax of a story. That's like the sea. And I'm
    not panicky or worried about it. I feel in some unconscious way
    that the balance of the cosmos demands it. God, nobody should drag
    now! It's just like a marshfire that grows and grows to let the new
    green shoots come under in spring. It's like a big song. I would
    not go to fight Germany, or France or England or America. I'd go
    because it's a cleanser. One must play with the song of many feet
    and express with the original song. One must flash pictures to the
    many eyes of their own being. Oh--it's a song, the whole thing! And
    I'm looking forward to it.

    Only the ones such as John and Tom shall escape. Don't you see the
    joy, the peace, the grandeur in owning a scar, in being bled white?
    The first year of the war, England was black with mourning. Now,
    she is white.... The work is on me with talons.

    I am looking only at the impossible heights--of a portrayal of
    life--the rugged life in endless volumes. I have made an oath
    silently with myself that in three years I shall do a book.... The
    work comes now just as if I were to sit down before a fire-place
    with shadows and light around stones, and were to grow interested,
    with stars low on the horizon like live sparks.

    And friends? A foolish question! I mean that I must be alone in
    the formative thrall of work. I _did_ want your letter. But forget
    pity. That is a thing that stifles soul. I do not ask, by all the
    stars, I do not ask for anything. The highest of all things to you
    all.

    And Steve? He has too much of the Song to be trodden or be lost or
    be ground in mud. You are all friends--but I must be alone now. The
    work is rising....

       *       *       *       *       *

TO JOHN:

    There ain't no sun beatin' in my doorway, and there ain't none of
    your sacred seas and canyons around; but there is a socialist's
    riot in the street below--kerosene torches a-going--one shaggy
    haired enthusiast is standing on a soap box and is wagging his
    jaw in an athletic way.... How's the fire burning under your
    type-mill? What's the brand of smoke it gives up--poetry, action,
    lumps of granite or ladles of ocean? I'm all lit up in this place
    here--because things are moving--real issues are gathering--and
    the pulse of living is so close that I can almost feel it
    occasionally. Last Saturday, went to a place called Rockaway--and
    oh man--rocks--rugged grey and eroded--surf bitten--gnarled,
    twisted--and they tossed the sea's white jaws about like bits
    of cotton. Real sea coast it was--with a little smack in the
    purple way, her sails bellied, her mouth lapping the brine--an
    old fisherman browsing around the shores for clams while his wife
    hauled up the nets, basketed the cod and upturned their boat.

    Put an extra stick under the machine and line a few of your
    aphorisms.

       *       *       *       *       *




14

THE ARTIST UNLEASHED


The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories.
Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction
work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist
within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner
life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development
of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to
arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange
and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be
prepared.

There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger
consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another
age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of
consciousness--before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be
that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated
experience are open to his every-day working mind. That may really
be what sumptuous artistic equipment is--the capacity to open up the
old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is
explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the
coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to
peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.

Certainly intellect alone will never make a great drama of life and
love, yet action and romance of the present hour draw hard upon one's
present life training and the faculties and tastes of his immediate
culture--actual brain possession and the ordering thereof. A child can
portray superbly well some ancient imprint upon the Soul, even the
passages of his own initiations through earth, water, air and fire,
his brain not conscious of the real nature of what is coming forth;
yet, the same child cannot put the cohering line through a series of
episodes occurring under his own notice. Something of this mental
grasp is necessary to make the artful effect required in a short
tale. The child's mind, in the first place, is trained to listen and
interpret the experiences of the larger consciousness; in the second
set of conditions, he is forced to rely upon actual brain tissue which
requires the training and culture of the years.

Art is composition. The farther you go, the finer the tools. It is
difficult to train the fingers to intricate tricks of weaving, or
the brain to sort and place the facts and colours and surprises of
a present-day narrative or tale, but the soul may be called upon to
express through the narrow temples of an awakened child its cosmic
understanding, its ordered firmament.

Decades of observation and reporting; firm and verified actuality of
knowledge and opinion; to these, added experience and the excellence
of order--such is the training of the intellectual artist who times
his production to his own generations. He pays the price in pain and
subjection to the things that are; he knows well the meaning of labour;
often, though he may still laugh as an artist, he has forgotten how to
laugh as a man.

My desk here is covered with papers and poems of a beauty this
intellectual artist cannot reach, of a freedom he can never know, until
he lifts the torch of his consciousness out of and above the brain,
making that serve quite as his knees bend and serve. Thinking of these
things to-day, the door of the Study opened and the Little Girl gave
me her work. She writes things of the larger consciousness without
effort, but finds it hard and wearing to narrate the immediate matters
of life. To her, the fine short story of the present hour is the great
accomplishment, the ideal she is working toward.

With another she goes often to the cities--rambling among the
rooming-houses, cheaper restaurants and mills. She means to work in
the mills soon--to forget herself and forget us for a time, to be
with the harder-lucked girls whom she loves with thrilling passion.
She has brought home from these little adventures wonderful stories
of the patience and the laughter and the heroism crowding like hidden
sacred presences about the duller lives. She brings a humour to the
telling of the divine secrets of the poor--the clutching pang for food,
the soldier going, his baby coming, the tortured spine, the stunted,
the darkened, the wasted--an irresistible divinity about it all--pain
impermanent, joy enduring. Back of the lacking eyes and leaking lives,
she sees wonders that Zola never saw, that none can see with mere
intelligence, that none can dream, who sees only the here and now,
who has not learned to laugh at the so-called injustices of men, who
cannot see the greater order to come because the present chaos is so
devastating.

One may report minutiæ of torments, mass the items of degradation and
bring forth a great document of the underworld--but these are mere
foundations. The Builders bring the dream, they live the hope, they
open the long-road consciousness, they substantiate their visions of
better days, bring order and coherence to all the splendid toil of the
intellectualist; they raise their edifice upon _all_ that is done....
Here is the Little Girl's work of to-day's writing:


MEDITATION

In the night the Master came down to a woman who lay sad and sleepless
in a dark house. He came so near that she felt his holy radiance. Her
soul breathed; her body ceased to tremble; she felt within his sacred
circle. The Master smiled and said:

"Why do you not sleep?"

The woman answered, "I am carried away by thoughts that will not hush.
Night after night I lie here so bitterly close to old dreams. I realise
that they are not worthy, but my brain is full of them."

The Master smiled again. "There is a way to compel the silence of the
brain."

"I have not found it," said the woman.

"Learn to be the soul," the Master said. He suggested a way to
begin--then was gone.

The rest of that night the woman thought of his words. Deeper and
deeper his words sank into her heart. When morning came, a happiness
brooded within; she dressed quickly and went out.... Back of her
little house rose the golden brown hills. She climbed, and at the top
of the nearest, sat down. The peace and purity and fragrance of the
sun-steeped hills filled her soul. For a long time she thought in
silence, then slipping off her loose white sandals, said: "I begin with
the grass. Yes, I begin with my _feet_.... How wonderful you are--so
ready to obey, to give your service at any time! What would happen
if you carried me other than my will? Supposing some day I should be
walking fast to the house of my beloved, when you suddenly took me the
other way!"

She laughed, and added: "You stay with me all my life, and little by
little are carrying me up the shining path to the Father's house. And
yet--how strange! I am not you.... And my knees, how wonderful and
willing--all limber and full of life--helping me in all ways to do all
things--bending gently when I bow in holy communion, expressing joy
through free, easy movements, mute, yet strong before pain! There is
nothing more wonderful in the world than you. Yet--I am not my knees.

"And you, old heart," she added. "You have endured the keenest pain;
you have loved and given yourself, have hated and become black only
through pain to whiten again--old heart of many rendings--until
all life was tragedy, and you almost ceased to beat. Little heart,
sanctuary of the soul--room for _his_ rest.... Yet I am not the heart!

"And the white throat in which the lotus unfolds its mystic petals of
light--I am not the throat!... And the mind, stream for the soul's
fulfilment--listener, runner, interpreter of light--mate of the soul in
all things, ever ready, sparkling with the inner fire,--I am _not_ the
mind. You can hurt me no longer. I am _free_!"

The woman sitting alone upon the hilltop, paused again. "What am I?"
she almost cried.

It was as though the hills, the air and the rising sun joined her in
the answer--"_I Am_, ... Longer than the living flame leaps within, _I
Am_. Longer than sun and planets radiate light, _I Am_. Longer than
worlds give birth to form, _I Am_. I am one with the rocks and the sea,
one with the warmth and light, one with the earth, one with Humanity.

"I am Humanity. _I Am._"

       *       *       *       *       *

It is only when the Little Girl brings in a bit of fiction that we
remember her years. The brain that even now can polish a detached
incident, or clip into firing-form a bit of humour of the street,
cannot as yet order the narrative to a culminating effect. She is in
her brain, which is only fourteen, struggling with the matters of time
and space, wherein only lie pain and bewilderment.

Art is long. The training of the hand and intellect requires the
years--but not the labour, not the agony, not the mad strain supposed
to prepare one for an artistic career by those who believe mental
equipment to be all.... The key to this whole discussion is the fact
that the brain can be developed more in a year through inner awakening
than in a decade by the usual methods of external impacts alone.... The
ideal education is the balancing of the without with the within--the
tallying of the world without with the world within--the same old
story of the kingdom without clearing its correspondences with the
kingdom within.

The Little Girl's ideal is to do great stories. They challenge her by
their very difficulty. When I see where she stands now, and think of
the far ways we elders went to learn the game; when I see what the
twenty-year-olds are doing now, how they command their mysticism--a
harder task for me than the accomplishment of physical results; when I
see the inner bloom and co-ordination and the inimitable surfaces which
come to all the arts by the development of the soul life first, the
listening for the Master within--I want to get my hands on them all,
upon all the young builders of the New Race. I want at once to awaken
within them the Spectator--the One who cannot be swung back and forth
in the pairs of opposites, who cannot give himself to the partisans,
who has glimpsed the Plan and offers it full adoration, who says
accordingly that the best possible thing that can happen is the thing
that happens next. These are the young Players who will reveal life by
living it--portray life as naturally as breathing, whose equipment is
not possessions, not even brain possessions, but spiritual _en rapport_
with all, oneness with all life.

I remember struggling for effects. These young people breathe
effects. I remember style as a studied attainment. These young people
acknowledge but one style--that is being one's self.... I want to set
many of them free from within outward. In their gladness at the finding
of themselves, they will go forth to include the world; they will bring
to it the compassion which enfolds all, reveals all.... Love the world
well and you will understand it. Love the world well, and you will
write well to it. Give it yourself, and the world is yours.

       *       *       *       *       *




15

WORK IN SHORT STORIES


The Little Girl sketched this impression of an Indian Summer Dusk:

       *       *       *       *       *

... Just now the great blue dusk, after an Indian summer day. It
deepens and seems to laugh, then all is night. Huge black clouds roll
up, promising a storm. Against them, tall, selfish, unafraid, stand
the poplar trees. The great Mother of the dusk is singing, the God in
Nature is singing, and Nature's belongings, all of them, sing in this
magical moment. One feels it all in one's self, feels the glory, the
romance, the very core-life of the Universe. The matings too, taking
place in the grass and air; the matings of the two streams, the two
grains of sand; the matings of butterflies, birds and bees. It all
flows through one's body like music and honey and sunshine....

Nothing but space is around me. I feel all hollow inside. Power and
beauty and all things else flow through ... and out, like a sieve.
My body is far below me, yet it will be taken care of. It does not
stumble, nor make any clumsy, unnecessary movement. Finding it alone
and forgotten, Rhythm catches it in her gentle arms. Slowly, softly,
gently, Rhythm carries it along, the same that carries the deer so
swiftly in the forest, the mountain sheep from ledge to ledge and over
valleys, and that which waves the trees' long arms so gracefully....
The night moves on its way, the threat of storm is passed. I am back
again--an untellable freshness has sweetened hair and clothing. I am
all glowing inside.

       *       *       *       *       *

This was done two years ago. There was a kind of dream story which she
recently finished, gratifying the artistic sense entirely, but in a way
that ruined it for the general reader. It was all new to her that there
could possibly be two ways to regard a bit of workmanship. Five or
six story-writers were present for the reading, and out of the fruits
of that evening, we surely saw the lesser beauty give way before a
greater. We forecasted the readers of the future, who would prefer the
more spiritual, more challenging story texture and dénouement.

There has always been The Few--glad to discover the real, answering
to interior order and clarity, "straight grain,"--but the fact for
enthusiasm now is that the world is being peopled with the awakened.
These young moderns are recognising each other from day to day, pulling
together for better social order, utilising the wisdom of the East,
and the drive of the West--labouring in new paths, daring new leaps,
working out philosophies as fresh and ancient as the dawn and, what
is straighter to the point, demanding modern books, written out of an
integrity to match their own....

Short story writing in America is less a trade and more of an art
since Edward J. O'Brien, the poet, took his chair in the flow of the
output and began to say which was which. There are a number of people
in America who know a good short story when they see one; this is
true among those who buy short stories, but editors cannot always buy
what they want. A deal of mechanism in a magazine has to be oiled and
energised by different kinds of minds from those who paint the pictures
and write the tales. O'Brien knew both ends--also he knew that big,
unobtrusive part of the market that looks long and pointedly for the
real tale.

He is a queer boy--from the bleak fishing grounds north of Boston.
He is in no hurry. You couldn't tell if he really wants anything. He
doesn't seem to want much--for O'Brien.... After he had his main line
and most of the ramifications of his idea laid, he told the editors to
send on the stories. Most of them did. O'Brien did a lot of work in a
few weeks, did it startlingly well. He started something.... Now, if a
writer sits down, suddenly struck with a fine idea for a tale, and this
fine idea precludes the possibility of selling it for a high price--the
writer dares go ahead and finish the task, because he knows O'Brien
will get to the thing in due time, and that if it is really what it
seems and the performance of the idea adequate, then the work will not
be utterly lost.

As a matter of fact, this is a bit of self-placation, since no work is
lost; no one gets the value of a big thing to anything like the degree
of the man who does it; no big thing is lost from the world, not even
if dropped in a sewer, if it is really important for the world to
have it. We are all a bit too heavily handicapped with our own idea
of what the world should have from our own shops--at the same time,
when we are young, we pant for the quicker return, the answering hail
within reason--at least, within time and space. Now O'Brien has come,
strangely arrived, his proper phylacteries in place, the touch of
tinted haze about his head, the right man.

Back of all, however, is the workman's own spine. That's the best
thing to lean on; and when the going is heavy, to learn to do without.
We often remind each other in Chapel of the modern artist Cezanne,
who moved about his painting for many years, painting _the thing_,
satisfying his soul, and leaving his canvasses around in the fields for
the peasants to laugh at or mull over.... They have long since been
brought in out of the rain--those canvasses. I forget the incredible
thousands his littlest sketch brings now.... But Cezanne got the films
out of himself--tallied them off--the landscapes within and without,
when it did him most good. It never fails. What was good for the artist
is good for the rest of us afterward.

Meanwhile much is still to do in the story world. The big smash of
the moving pictures hasn't cleared from our game yet. It will be the
cause of greater tales before the end is seen, for you can't portray
the realities of romance upon a flat screen. For a time the many
thought it was no longer necessary to learn to read, because there was
such a torrent of pictures everywhere, but it was only through the
pictures that the few has finally managed to realize how marvelously
pictorial mere words are, and how few words are required when they are
imaginatively driven. One day in Stonestudy we discussed these story
and screen affairs, looking ahead somewhat to better times than these.
One of our young men, whose story is told in a later chapter, put down
the things we talked about. This is Shuk's writing:

       *       *       *       *       *

A fresh and different vitality is manifest to-day in American
literature. At various points around us, dealing with words, colours
and the subtler tools, are active young workmen who for the first
time, in the fullest sense, may be termed "North American." The first
characteristic of this new element, these young flexible and vigorous
minds, is that they are workmen--not labourers, not professionals, not
primarily artists in anything unless it be life--but workers first, and
after that novelists, poets, musicians, painters or politicians. They
are not competitors. They have not forgotten the warm side of justice,
but they know well the stern face of compassion--they know that it
takes Christ and anti-Christ to make a world. They are neither modest
nor egotistical, being for the most part busy and intensely alive. This
implies their joy.

The great love story has not been written. The few great love stories
of the world have to be pieced out by the imagination. We find that
we have been told that certain are great love stories, but they do
not stand examination. The classic form will not do for the New Age.
There is to be a new language--for literary handling. It may be called
American, to distinguish it from English in the accepted form. It is to
be brisk, brief, brave and ebullient--to meet the modification all must
reckon with--the screen-trained mind.

American-mindedness of itself, cannot yet accept a great love-story. It
would be called "sentimental" if not lascivious. The average American
is an impossible lover, making it incident to business. The real and
the sham are equally above him. He would not know when to be exalted
or when to be ashamed. He thinks his own passion is evil, and thus
makes it so. The great love-story can only be written with creative
dynamics, and can only be accepted as yet by the few of corresponding
receptivity. There is nothing soft about true romance. Some passionate
singer of the New Age will likely appear right soon, his story to have
the full redolence and lustre of the heart, his emotions thoroughbred,
his literary quality at the same time crystalline with reality.

The big adventure-story has not been done so far. The day of guns,
horses and redskins is over. Photoplays have developed these fiction
resources to the limit, proving to those writers born to be modern
that their full tales can never be shown on a flat surface. There
will be undercurrents, overtones, invisible movements, tensions upon
the reader, not only from between the lines, but between words.
The story-teller of the New Age may handle his theme in words of
one syllable, but his tale will have an intensity scarcely to be
explained--only responded to by minds which cannot be satisfied by
two-plane production--minds which demand more of life than the camera
sees.

The real war-story of to-day, even for to-morrow, ought to arrive soon.
This is an age for an epic. Some keen and comprehens

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