Chapter III: Part 3

I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in relation to one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis, and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house closes upon the growing child--that more and more as the years draw on, the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are given to utter remains unexpressed.

I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles and the words of even a child significant.

I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening genius is the thing that has made immortal--shoemakers, blacksmiths and the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from the past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.

8

THE ABBOT

He was a still boy--the boy who had first shown us the two cottages on the shore the afternoon his father was ill. You would have thought him without temperament. I often recalled how little he knew about the affairs of prospective tenants that afternoon; and how Penelope rescued me from his silences.... We saw him often, coming down to bathe with another lad during the afternoons throughout that first summer, but drew no nearer to acquaintance. Sometimes as I rode to town for mail in the evening I would see him watching me from his walk or porch; and the sense that his regard was somehow different, I believe, did impress me vaguely. It all happened in a leisurely sort of ordained fashion. I remember his "hello," cheerful but contained, as I would ride by. He was always still as a gull, and seemed natural with the dusk upon him.... One day his father said to me:

"I have to buy everything you write for him."

"Well, well," said I.

I had not looked for market in the little town, and The Abbot was only fourteen. (One of the older boys christened him The Abbot afterward, because he seemed so freshly come from monastic training.) ... Finally I heard he was interested in the stars and owned a telescope. I called him over to the Study one day, and we talked star-stuff. He had done all that I had and more. It appears that in his Sunday School paper when he was seven or eight, there had been an astronomical clipping of some sort that awakened him. He had it read to him several times, but his own reading picked up at that time with an extraordinary leap, as any study does under driving interest. Presently he was out after the star books on his own hook. He suggested bringing his telescope to the Study, and that night I got my first look at the ineffable isolation of Saturn. It was like some magnetic hand upon my breast. I could not speak. Every time I shut my eyes afterward I saw that bright gold jewel afar in the dark. We talked.... Presently I heard that he hated school, but this did not come from him. The fact is, I heard little or nothing from him.

This generation behind us--at least, the few I have met and loved--is not made up of explainers. They let you find out. They seem able to wait. It is most convincing, to have events clean up a fact which you misunderstood; to have your doubts moved aside, not by words, nor any glibness, but leisurely afterward by the landmarks of solid matter. He did not come to the Study unless called for. The little girl brought in word from him from time to time, and the little girl's mother, and the boy's father--a very worthy man. I heard again that he was not doing well in school. I knew he was significant, very much so, having met the real boy on star-matters. I knew that the trouble was they were making him look down at school, when he wanted to look up. His parents came over to dinner one day, and I said:

"You'd better let the boy come to me every day."

It was an impulse. I don't know to this hour why I said it, because at that time I wasn't altogether sure that I was conducting the little girl's education on the best possible basis. Moreover, it seemed to me even then that my own time was rather well filled. Neither his father nor mother enthused, and I heard no more from the subject for many days. Meeting The Abbot finally, I asked him what of school.

"It's bad. I'm not doing anything. I hate it."

"Did your father think I didn't mean what I said--about you coming to me for a time?"

"I don't think he quite thought you meant it. And then he doesn't know what it would cost."

I told him it wouldn't cost anything. There was a chance to talk with his father again, but nothing came of that, and The Abbot was still suffering weeks afterward. Finally his father and uncle came over to the Study. It seemed impossible for them to open the subject. I had to do it after an hour's conversation about immediate and interesting matters of weather and country.

"I would like to try him," I said. "He can come an hour after dinner each day. He is different. They can't bring him out, when they have to deal with so many."

"He's a dreamer," they said, as if confessing a curse.

It appears that there had been a dreamer in this family, a well-read man whose acres and interests had got away from him, long ago.

"That's why I want him," said I.

"But the thing is, we don't want him--a----"

"I know, you don't want an ineffectual. You want some dreams to come true--even if they are little ones----"

"Yes."

I had my own opinion of a boy who could chart his own constellations, without meeting for years any one who cared enough about the stars to follow his processes, but one can't say too much about a boy to his relatives. Then I had to remember that the little Lake town had only touched me on terms of trade. They did not know what sort of devil lived in my heart, and those who were searching my books to find out were in the main only the more doubtful. Especially, I bewildered these men by not asking for anything in the way of money.

However, the thing came to be.

My first idea was to take him alone--the little girl coming in the morning with me, and the boy after dinner, during an hour that I had been accustomed to read and doze. The first days were hard for us both. I sat down in a big chair before the fire and talked with him, but there was no sign. He stared at the stones and stared out of the window, his eyes sometimes filmy, his body sometimes tense. I seemed to require at first some sort of recognition that I was talking--but none came, neither nod of acquiescence, look of mystification nor denial.... They said as he passed the house farther along the Shore after leaving the Study, that his head was bowed and that he walked like a man heavy with years.

I tried afresh each day--feared that I was not reaching him. I told him the things that had helped me through the darker early years, and some of the things I had learned afterward that would have helped me had I known enough. I tried different leads, returning often to the stars, but couldn't get a visible result. He was writing little things for me at this time and, though I detected something in the work more than he showed me, sitting opposite in the Study, his writing was turgid and unlit--like one playing on an instrument he did not understand; indeed, it was like a man talking in his sleep. At the end of one of the talks within the first week, at wit's end as to what I was accomplishing, I said:

"Write me what you remember of what I said to-day."

I touched upon this earlier. The result shocked me--it came back like a phonograph, but the thoughts were securely bound by his own understanding. I once listened to a series of speeches of welcome from members of the Japanese Imperial court to a group of foreigners in Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days later--just to be sure. The result was the same.

I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his belongings, when called upon to do something with his hands for another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind. One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces them.

However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little, the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving--that he could grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the ground--that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant, however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters of fact and technicality.

Finding that he listened so well--that it was merely one of the inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me--I, of course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should say to him until the hour came. I was sleepy from old habit at first, but that passed. Presently it occurred to me that things were happening in the Study with the boy, that the little girl could ill afford to miss; and also that he would feel more at ease if I could divide my attention upon him with another, so I rearranged her plans somewhat, and there were two.

As I recall, The Abbot had been coming about three weeks, when I related certain occult teachings in regard to the stars; matters very far from scientific astronomy which conducts its investigations almost entirely from a physical standpoint. You may be sure I did not speak authoritatively, merely as one adding certain phases I had found interesting of an illimitable subject. The next day he slipped in alone and a bit early, his "hello" hushed. I looked up and he said, almost trembling:

"I had a wonderful night."

The saying was so emotional for him that I was excited as in the midst of great happenings.

"Tell me," I said, drawing nearer.

"It's all here," he replied, clearing his voice.

His own work follows, with scarcely a touch of editing. The Abbot called his paper--

A VOICE THROUGH A LENS

Some people say that by thinking hard of a thing in the
day-time, you may dream about it. Perhaps this that I had
last night was a dream, but it was more than a stomach dream.
I like to think it was a true vision. Before bedtime I was
reading out of two books; a little pamphlet on astronomy
containing the nebular theory, and another that told about
the planetary chain.

The planetary chain was a continuation of the nebular theory,
but in the spiritual form. It was that which threw me into
the vision. I was away from the world; not in the physical
form but in another--the first time I have ever lost my
physical body. When I awoke from the vision, I had my clothes
still on.

As I drifted off into that mighty sleep, the last thing I
heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The
Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly
drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could
drift off in a more beautiful way than that?...

I was gradually walking up the side of a large mountain to an
observatory of splendour. The turret was crowned with gold.
As I opened the door and stepped inside, I saw a large
telescope and a few chairs. The observer's chair was
upholstered with velvet. It was not a complicated observatory
like the worldly ones.... I removed the cap of the great
telescope, covering the object-glass, and then uncovered the
eye-piece. As I looked around the heavens to find the great
spiral of planets (the planetary chain told about) I heard a
voice from the lens of the telescope saying: "This is the
way. Follow me."

I looked through the lens and there I saw a long spiral of
planets leading heavenwards. The spiral gradually arose, not
making any indication of steps, but the close connection of
the rise was like the winding around of the threads of a
screw. Towards the top, the spiral began to get larger until
it was beyond sight. Presently I heard the voice again: "This
no doubt is a complicated affair to you."

"Yes."

"Focus your telescope and then look and see if it is any
clearer."

I did so, and upon looking through the glass, I saw a large
globe. It was cold and blank-looking. It seemed to be all
rocks and upon close examination I found that it was mostly
mineral rocks. That globe drifted away and left a small trail
of light until another came in sight. On this globe, there
was a green over-tone, luxuriant vegetation. Everywhere there
were trees and vegetable growths of all kinds. This one
gradually drifted away like the preceding. The third was
covered with animals of every description--a mass, a chaos of
animals. The fourth was similarly crowded with hairy men in
battle, the next two showed the development of these
men--gradual refinement and civilisation. The seventh I did
not see.

I was staring into the dark abyss of the heavens, when I
heard the voice again:

"I suppose you are still amazed."

"Yes."

"Well, then, listen to me and I'll try to explain it all. The
great spiral of planets represents the way man progresses in
the life eternal. Man's life on this earth is the life of a
second, compared with the long evolution. In these six globes
you saw when the telescope was focussed, is represented the
evolution of man. The rocks were first. As they broke up and
melted into earth, vegetable life formed, crawling things
emerged from vegetable life and animals from them. Man grew
and lifted out from the form of lower animals. The lower
globes represented the development of man. In the long cycle
of evolution, man continues in this way. After he finishes
life on the seven globes, he starts over again on another
seven, only the next group he lives on, his life keeps
progressing. It is not the same life over again. Now you may
look at the Seventh, the planet of Spirituality."

When I looked through the telescope again, I saw a beautiful
globe. It was one great garden. In it there was a monastery
of Nature. Overhead the trees had grown together and formed a
roof. Far off to the north stretched a low range of hills,
also to the east and west, but at the south was a small brook
which ran along close to the altar of the monastery. It
seemed to be happy in its course to the lake as it leaped
over rocky shelves and formed small cascades while the
sunbeams shone through the matted branches of the trees whose
limbs stretched far out over the brook, and made it appear
like a river of silver. I was admiring the scenery when I
heard the voice again:

"You must go now, tell the people what you saw, and some
other night you will see the globe of spirituality more
closely."

I awoke and found myself sitting in the big arm-chair of my
room. "Can it be true, am I mistaken?" I pinched myself to
see if I were awake; walked over to the window and looked
out. There the world was just the same. I was so taken with
the wonderful vision that at the hour of midnight I sit here
and scratch these lines off. I have done as the great mystic
voice commanded me, although it is roughly done, I hope to be
able to tell you about the rest of the vision and more about
the seventh globe some time again.

9

THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL

The Abbot had been with me about three months when he said:

"We were out to dinner yesterday to a house on the Valley Road, and the girl there is interested in your work. She asked many things about it. She's the noblest girl I know."

That last is a literal quotation. I remember it because it appealed to me at the time and set me to thinking.

"How old is she?"

"Seventeen."

"What is she interested in?"

"Writing, I think. She was the best around here in the essays."

"You might ask her to come."

I heard no more for a time. The Abbot does not rush at things. At the end of a week he remarked:

"She is coming."

It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the lane together.... She took a seat by the door--she takes it still, the same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell back upon the theme of all themes to me--a man's work, the meaning of it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered the ultimate heresy--that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one reaches the top, the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and integrating the life that lasts.

I have said this before in this book--in other books. I may say it again. It is the truth to me--truth that the world is in need of. I am sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is production. Handling the production of others in some cases is production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.

The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own early essay classes. Old friends were here again--Introduction, Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where they would make very good in a school-room, such as I had known. Her work was spelled and periodic, phrased and paragraphed. The eyes of the teachers, that had been upon her these many years, had turned back for their ideas to authors who, if writing to-day, would be forced to change the entire order and impulse of their craft.

She was suffused with shyness. Even the little girl so far had not penetrated it. I was afraid to open the throttle anywhere, lest she break and drop away. At the end of a week, The Abbot remained a moment after she was gone, and looked at me with understanding and sorrow.

"I'm afraid I made a mistake in asking her to come," he said.

Just then I was impelled to try harder, because he saw the difficulty. We had missed for days the joy from the session, that we had come to expect and delight in. Yet, because he expressed it, I saw the shortness and impatience of the point of view which had been mine, until he returned it to me.

"We won't give up," I said. "It didn't happen for nothing."

When he went away I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger." There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The Valley-Road Girl's discussion of Addison was scholarly in the youthful sense.

The day that she brought in this paper we got somehow talking about Fichte. The old German is greatly loved and revered in this Study. He set us free a bit as we discussed him, and I gave to the newcomer a portion of one of his essays having to do with the "Excellence of the Universe." The next day I read her paper--and there was a beam in it.

I shut my eyes in gratitude that I had not allowed my stupidity to get away. I thanked The Abbot inwardly, too, for saying the words that set me clearer. The contrast between Addison and Fichte in life, in their work, in the talk they inspired here, and in The Valley-Road Girl's two papers--held the substance of the whole matter--stumbled upon as usual. We had a grand time that afternoon. I told them about Fichte losing his positions, writing to his countrymen--a wanderer, an awakened soul. And this brought us the hosts of great ones--the Burned Ones and their exaltations--George Fox and the Maid of Domremy--the everlasting spirit behind and above mortal affairs--the poor impotency of wood-fire to quench such immortality. Her eyes gleamed--and all our hearts burned.

"We do not want to do possible things," I said. "The big gun that is to deposit a missile twelve miles away does not aim at the mark, but at the skies. All things that are done--let them alone. The undone things challenge us. The spiritual plan of all the great actions and devotions which have not yet found substance--is already prepared for the workmen of to-day to bring into matter--all great poems and inventions for the good of the world. They must gleam into being through our minds. The mind of some workman is being prepared for each. Our minds are darkened as yet; the sleeping giant awaits the day. He is not loathe to awake. Inertia is always of matter; never of spirit. He merely awaits the light. When the shutters of the mind are opened and the grey appears, he will arise and, looking forth, will discover his work.

"Nothing common awaits the youngest or the oldest. You are called to the great, _the impossible_ tasks. But the mind must be entered by the Light--the heavy curtains of the self drawn apart...."

That was the day I found the new, sweet influence in the room. It was not an accident that the boy had gone to dinner at her house. I saw that my task with The Valley-Road Girl was exactly opposite to the work with The Abbot--that he was dynamic within and required only the developed instrument for his utterances, and that she had been mentalised with obscuring educational matters and required a re-awakening of a naturally splendid and significant power; that I must seek to diffuse her real self through her expression. The time came that when she was absent, we all deeply missed her presence from the Study.

Months afterward, on a day that I did not give her a special task, she brought me the following which told the story in her own words of something she had met:

WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN

Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can
you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing
made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with
me the things I am struggling to explain.

I like to look back at those times when everything to me was
new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very
own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick
raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me
that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to
indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for
each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to
school.

There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its
head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul.
The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man
must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not
keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop
and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came
to learn.

At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I
had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was
accused of copying; that was the first wound. How I would
have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is
trusted.

At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One
of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have
some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was
intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation
for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged
competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more
studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well
as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school
friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our
hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's
misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends.
Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school
we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I
have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my
school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child
filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his
egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is
hard for such a one to love his neighbour.

The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is
the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the
miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.

The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me
how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own
eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work
all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing
well that the teacher would praise his perfect reflection.
Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut
that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.

Unless the school can trust children, show them that they
should also be interested in their less fortunate
school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular
work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A
child had much better remain at home, a simple but
whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and
wise books.

* * * * *

... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes. This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender and wise:

MAY EVENING

A spirit of restlessness ruled me. Each night I retired with
the hope that the morning would find it gone. It disturbed my
sleep. It was not the constant discontent I had hitherto felt
with the world. This was a new disquietude.

One May evening I followed our little river down to the place
it flows into the Lake. Slowly the light of day faded. From
my seat upon the green bank of a stream, a wonderful picture
stretched before me. The small stream and the surrounding
country were walled in by dense green trees. To the west the
cool, dark depths parted only wide enough for the creek to
disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in
the southern wall, I caught glimpses of the summer cottages
on the sandy shore. To the north stretched the pasture-lands
with shade-trees happy to hide their nakedness with thick
foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace. To
the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty
outline of trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the
western sky. Two men paddled a boat out into the light and
disappeared under the bridge. Nothing disturbed the peace of
the stream save the dip of the paddles, and the fish rising
to the surface for food. A circle on the surface meant that
an insect had lain at its centre; a fish had risen and
devoured it. Circles of this kind were continually being cut
by the circumferences of other circles.... A dark speck moved
down the stream. A turtle was voyaging.

Now, far in the shadows, I saw a man sitting on the bank
fishing. His patience and persistence were remarkable, for he
had been there all the time. But the fish were at play. The
occasional splash of the carp, mingling with the perpetual
song of the birds and the distant roar of the waves breaking
on the shore to the south, formed one grand over-tone.

A feeling of awe came over me. I felt my insignificance. I
saw the hand of God. My relation to my surroundings was very
clear. My soul bowed to the God-ness in all things natural.
The God-ness in me was calling to be released. It was useless
to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It
must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an
echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought
becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was
readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be applied
and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by
inward feelings. This was my soul's complaint.

No tree was exactly like one of its neighbours. Each
fulfilled its purpose in its particular way. Yet all
proclaimed the One Source. Performing its function, it was
fit to censure me and I took the cup.

... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the
little stream; heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was
weeping tears of sympathy for one so short-sighted and drawn
to failure.

10

COMPASSION

I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the difference between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two of fourteen and seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be herself. She has never been patronised; and in the last year or more has been actively encouraged to express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as stated, she has no particular talent for writing. She is the one who wants to be a mother. Not in the least precocious, her charm is quite equal for little girls or her elders. Her favourite companions until recently were those of her own age.

On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech and reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of existence--had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old artist, are the very passages of power.

"... Except that ye become as little children----" that is the beginning of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the world, or most of them, and all have told the same story--look to Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior purpose, confronted the lie with the realities of their own nature, and fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is so often the unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched open, as they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and more like little children at the end.

The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must have the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality of the modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation, because the old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our hearts.... I was promising an untold something for a future lesson to the little girl yesterday, just as she was getting to work. The anticipation disturbed the present moment, and she said:

"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek----"

Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me--in the sunlight and elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it was so near--every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I was already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the Old Mother--that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was gone--a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this sentence in the room:

"... _sang four songs and flew away._"

It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression. However, no after explanations will help--if the art of the thing is not apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman said--"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."

And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights are at half-mast."

She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to express that which he has seen--which is so small compared to the big colour and atmosphere."

I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a picture.

A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."

Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment _to get started_, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded white----"

Or:

"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering at their little legs, I felt a part----"

I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,--at least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do that--to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression. The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his deepest inner listening--in which the trained mind-instrument is quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater source within.

The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me, among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his work--honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's "Walking"--there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer. The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It was not that I wanted her to _get_ Mill or Burke, but that the mental exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams, playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.

Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth. Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.

In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have related something of the process.

The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in the present scheme of things.

Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount to, are all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot get through to the world except through the brain.

In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is naive, not to have explained before, that from the view these things are written the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression--most superb and admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without but within.

If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison, having been forced to turn their eyes within--you will find a hint to the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior promptings for their mental activity--the passage entirely closed between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary confinement makes madmen of such--if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.

The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward, or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.

A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take his place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any sense of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham and a delusion.

Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the Unity of all Existing Things (which is literally brooding upon this planet in these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy. Time has made the greatest of the _sheer_ intellects of the past appear apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire, Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.

Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this awakening is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of this greater day, in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion, the Unity of All Things is descried.

11

THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK

"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to read."

So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries, even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event, the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.

The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her lap--and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:

"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so good."

"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write until you begin to dream as you write--until you forget hand and paper and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."

In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:

Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build
his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere--in Germany,
in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen
with her in the wild places.

In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the
Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted
to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and
square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than
others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees,
such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve
their branches without the thought of being cut down for a
sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings.
Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at
the feet of these trees and ask questions that _disgraced_
Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower
fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple
little stones.

Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds
like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century
instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up.
The thing I _really_ wanted to write about this morning was
the goodness of being alive here in winter.

After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow, all through the sky.

Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.

Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last shades of night pass out of the sky.

Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam--just enough to make you feel like work.

A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!

* * * * *

So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous and vulgar ways--maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end. Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of higher Nature, which men should know.

In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes going about their work--I mean their _own_ work and affairs. To me it seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering: "Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."