Chapter V: Part 5

It is worth dwelling upon--this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the reconstruction write to the Study from time to time--from different parts of the world. I read the class a letter recently from a young woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and another group from Washington. All these are placed before the Chapel kindred for inspiration and aliment.

"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius--at the time of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the end of the bleakest and most terrible age--the breaking down at last of an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called afterward."

... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give.... We watch the world tearing down--from this quietude. We have no country but God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New Age--just children.

... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed--draining, under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants are set. The roses answered--almost wonderfully. They brought me the old romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This point was touched upon in the Foreword--how in the joy of the roses that answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.

The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the thoughts I have forgotten--fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes, that for centuries the world has been maiming its children--that only those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as men.

Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds and they are not the same the next day.

... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in the city. We met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration. For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in their different conventions--world ways, the obvious and the temporal, as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great lessons to me--to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance of the Catholic priests' saying--"Give us your child until he is seven only----"

In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change--to watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in the world.

We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground upon and master. We are held and refined between the two attractions--one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul, the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now; that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand--they are not. The littlest ones have it--the two small boys of seven and nine, who have not regularly entered the Chapel.

* * * * *

The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and without title:

The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to
listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And
if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he
has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in
past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept
in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people
that played around him and told him queer things when he was
first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in
his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the
world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's
wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can
write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to
get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you
know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will
find it.

The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can
only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the _brain_
which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was
going wrong and that _he_ should fix it by telling them the
right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people
not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.

It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly,
and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these
will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.
After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther
ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
baby.

The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps
lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you,
unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand
all that you earn or achieve."

15

A MAN'S OWN

The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic impossibility.

The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.

... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a dining-table--the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way, like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely, shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.

"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just now. It is seeing us through these hard days."

But _I_ missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is, my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work, published in the book called _Midstream_.

"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man who has found his work--and the splendid discovery invariably follows, that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising; because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.

"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work. No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.

"_I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his daily task--and watching for his own among them._

"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness for buying cheap and selling dear--if as a race we were lifted into our own work.

"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager and tender.

"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full, eager and honest, the answer came--the work of specialists which had moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in that--for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.

"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the temperament to choose a work because it is easy.

"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument, the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close. That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities--whether tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.

"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer receptivity--and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here and there in the cohering line.

"... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is ended, the finished forces turn _outward_ in service. According to the measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the instrument in pure listening--long forenoons passing, without a single instant of self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even awareness of the body....

"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the mind, its multitude of experiences and unreckonable possessions--are given over to the creative and universal force--the same force that is lustrous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.

"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He, first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the power of the superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm; this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the rock; and though we achieve the very sanctity of self-command, our inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."

* * * * *

Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand. Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line of his life will become more clearly established.

_A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has already answered._ Browning stood amazed before a man who had met Shelley and was not different afterward--a man who could idly announce that he had met the poet Shelley and not accept it as the big event of a period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of finding the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps men had made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been enacted on that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of earth there, the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was just on that spot that he found an eagle's feather.

I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago--was speechless and outraged that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather about afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in water.... There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are called to the same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts know each other; the mystics of the arts know each other.

The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the breasts of the children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story--of a certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal signified. Mostly the "great man" did not know what he had done for the boy.... I would have the great man know. I would have him seek to perform this miracle every day.

There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying, "There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to bring him to you--but he would not come. I think he did not dare."

Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom brought the thing about. A man should say, "_Lead me to him now_!..." Those who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put stamps upon letters they write. God knows they are not ashamed to come and ask for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their structure of desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail the letter he has written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out, full of terror and torture before you--take him to your breast for he is your own. Children you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he.... Do you want a slave, a worshipper--seek out your own. You want nothing of the sort, but you alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate his worship to the task. He can learn from you in a week what it would take years of misery in the world to teach him. You have done in a way the thing he wants to do--that's the whole magic. You have fitted somehow to action the dream that already tortures his heart. There is nothing so pure as work in the world. There is something sacred about a man's work that is not elsewhere in matter. Teaching is a mutual service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but because he has reverence, he is potentially great.

The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all kinds of workmen; these things are not alone for the artists and the craftsmen and the professions. There is one boy to linger about the forge of an artisan, after the others have gone. I would have the artisan forget the thing he is doing, to look into the eyes of that boy--and the chemist, the electrician, the florist.

It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The work here would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us for several days. She was so still that I did not know what was happening in her mind. My experience with the others had prevailed to make me go slowly, and not to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be glad that she had come. I asked no expression from her for several days. When I finally suggested something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror in the room. Her expression came in a very brief form, and it showed me the bewilderment with which she had encountered the new points of view in the Chapel. I learned afresh that one must not hurry; that my first work was to put to rest her fears of being called upon. I impressed upon the class the next day that we have all the time there is; that we want nothing; that our work is to establish in due time the natural expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in particular, I said that when she felt like it she could write again.

Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl to see if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All I ever got from that afternoon was this sentence:

"... She is going to be a nurse."

I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting her surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must have nurses.

* * * * *

... And then the Columbia young man--a big fellow and a soul. I had talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room class in the city. He took a cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel began; then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening, I had good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his mind and heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible integrity, a natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the world's bestowal--but Inertia.

Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do not mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that it is of necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the valuable inner life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual energy came forth to intensify the vibrations of the race, to say nothing of their own poundage. It is less a matter of weight after all than texture; still their fat was a handicap.

These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and men; all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression of the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit bring about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required to express itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression of the spiritual life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a whole, the great servers of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole in every fabrication of man and nature--the finer the work, the finer the instrument.

The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.

The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of a dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live either for appetites or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit, in its passionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.

The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of countless ages to produce the form that we see--the gracious beauties of the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a Clovelly rose is beautiful.

The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's button; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand--and all about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand, and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget that inner ardency--the virgin unfolding to the sun--born of some great passion that seemed poised between earth and heaven--and expectant of its own great passion's maturity.

I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things. I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings--the ecstasy of the little old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in the world.

I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The first had great foliages of coarse mane and tail; the other, a splendid beast that would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.

We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour idealism. Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and lustrous we become, according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It is the quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto itself the excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for his size, longer-lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural elasticity, capable of infinitely greater physical, mental, and moral tasks, than the tightly compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere painter's flourish which adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there if we see clearly. If the sanctity is radiant, the glow is intense enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow, to be photographed, even caught with the physical eye.

16

THE PLAN IS ONE

I was relating the experience of the Columbian. In his case there had been much time, so there could be no mistake. He had devoted himself to making and keeping a rather magnificent set of muscles which manifested even through white man's clothing. He did this with long days of sailing and swimming, cultivating his body with the assiduity of a convalescent.... I told him in various ways he was not getting himself out of his work; explained that true preparation is a tearing off of husks one after another; that he was a fine creation in husk, but that he must get down to the quick before he could taste or feel or see with that sensitiveness which would make any observation of his valuable. With all this body-building, he was in reality only covering himself the thicker. If a man does this sort of thing for a woman's eye, he can only attract a creature of blood and iron whose ideal is a policeman--a very popular ideal....

For two or three days he would work terrifically, then, his weight besetting, he would placate himself with long tissue-feeding sports. I told him that he had everything to build upon; that true strength really begins where physical strength ends; that all that he had in equipment must be set in order and integrated with his own intrinsic powers, it being valueless otherwise. I pointed out that he was but a collector of things he could not understand, because he did not use them; that the great doers of the world had toiled for years upon years, as he did not toil for one week's days successively.... It would not do, except for short intervals, and it came to me that my best service was to get out from under. I told him so, and the manliness of his acceptance choked me. I told him to go away, but to come again later if he mastered Inertia in part.... It was not all his fault. From somewhere, an income reached him regularly, a most complete and commanding curse for any boy.

... I do not believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent because the body becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the fitness of faculty can manifest.

If one's body is ill from overexertion, it must rest; if one's mind is ill from nervousness, stimulation, or from excessive brain activity, it must rest; but if one's soul is ill, and this is the difference, nothing but activity will help it, and this activity can only be expressed through the body and mind. Surplus rest of body or mind is a process of over-feeding, which is a coarsening and thickening of tissue, which in its turn causes Inertia, and this word I continually capitalise, for it is the first devil of the soul.

Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times _a great calm_, another dimension of calm entirely from that which has to do with animal peace and repletion. It is the peace of intensive production--and the spectacle of it is best seen when you lift the super from a hive of bees, the spirit of which animates every moving creature to one constructive end. That which emanates from this intensity of action is calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does not have to sink into a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest have more to do with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of tissue one tears down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done. Absolutely this is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work a man loves replenishes.

Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying than to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm of his task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so continually tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold this rhythm, we could not die.

This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full exercise--soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a song from it--that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have heard from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all selfless productivity.

One cannot play until one has worked--that is the whole truth. Ask that restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to polish the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless cleanliness in a room. Hold the picture of what you want in mind and detail it to him, saying that you will come again and inspect his work. Watch, if you care, the mystery of it. There will be silence until the thing begins to unfold for him--until the polish comes to wood or metal, until the thing begins to answer and the picture of completion bursts upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a hum, and nothing will break his theme until the end.

The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean things; that the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested when one enters a clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't the room, after all, that gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle or the hum comes from harmony within.

A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he "climbed out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from softening and cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon showing his work.

Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as life-quests--except for the few consummately adapted players whose little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized rectangle--the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed, and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.

A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he loves best to do--constructive play--giving play to his powers, bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan, yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake; the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper, the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass above--that fallow lands are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out like a wine, and decide there is something in it.

There is something in everything.

The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get this--if it ever comes to us--and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he _heard_ his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to bring out.

We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own--for wheat partakes of the _alkahest_. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.

The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat, thereafter--but that would be sacrilege.

Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered there--that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia--so that there is a nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course, then, that all the aristocrats of Nature--rose and wheat and olives and bees and alabaster and grapes--must all have their part of the harmony, for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in the face of a far-come child--the brute earth-bound lines of self gone--the theme of life, Service.

I am at the end of Capitals now.

One afternoon we talked about corn--from the fields where the passionate mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in everything.

Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.

There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story--that the plan is one.

17

THE IRISH CHAPTER

There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars--the Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.

"It isn't--it's listening."

It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata, called _Appassionata_. There is one here who plays that, and because it tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a woman--of love and life and death. She wants the earth in her love--but her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth. The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her--her love a perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.

The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's _Departure_--to us the most magic of all the great little poems. But in _Departure_ it is the woman who is called.

... Again and again in the _Appassionata_, the word comes to the woman, saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will not hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty--all the wonder that Mother Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have told her that it must be, but she does not obey--and then the Master comes down.

It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone. The _chelas_ have spoken and have not availed. Now the _Guru_ speaks. Out of vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out of the deeps and heights of compassion, the _Guru_ speaks--and suddenly the woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is expressed in the treble--a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a cup held forth--or palms held upward. The _Guru_ speaks. His will is done.

And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked of Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always brings; or it may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just been slaughtered in a cause that had far less significance to Ireland than our child talk by the fire; or it may have been the South Wind that brought us closer to the fairy Isle, for it is the Irish peasants who say to a loved guest at parting:

"May you meet the South Wind."

"... There isn't really an Ireland any more--just a few old men and a few old, haunting mothers. Ireland is here in America, and the last and stiffest of her young blood is afield for England. Her sons have always taken the field--that is their way--and the mothers have brought in more sons born of sorrow--magic-eyed sons from the wombs of sorrow. Elder brothers afield--fathers gone down overseas--only the fairies left by the hearth for the younger sons to play with.... So they have sung strange songs and seen strange lights and moved in rhythms unknown to many men. It is these younger sons who are Ireland now. Not a place, but a passion; not a country, but a romance.... They are in the love stories of the world, and they are always looking for their old companions, the fairies. They find the fairies in the foreign woodlands; they bring the fairies to the new countries. They are in the songs that hush the heart; they are in the mysticism that is moving the sodden world. Because they played with fairies, they were taught to look past and beyond the flesh of faces--past metals and meals and miles. Of the reds and greys and moving golds which they see, the soul of the world loves to listen, for the greatest songs and stories of all are from the Unseen----"

It was the old man dreaming aloud.

"Ireland isn't a place any more. It is a passion infused through the world," he added.

"But the fairies are still there," the little girl said.

"Some are left with the old mothers--yes, some are left. But many have taken the field, and not for the wars."

A four-day moon was dropping fast in the low west. Jupiter was climbing the east in imperial purple--as if to take command.... The littlest boy stirred in the arms of the Dakotan and began to speak, staring at the fire. We all turned and bent to listen--and it was that very thing that spoiled it--for the sentence faltered and flew away.

We all wanted to know what had been born in that long silence, for the firelight was bright in two eyes that were very wide and wise--but the brain was only seven.... I left the circle and went up the cliff to find a book in the study--a well-used book, an American book. Returning, I read this from it, holding the page close to the fire:

OLD IRELAND

Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty, Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother, Once a queen--now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground, Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders; Long silent--she too long silent--mourning her shrouded hope and heir; Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.

Yet a word, ancient mother; You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with forehead between your knees; O you need not sit there, veil'd in your old white hair, so dishevel'd; For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave; It was an illusion--the heir, the son you love, was not really dead; The Lord is not dead--he is risen, young and strong, in another country; Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the grave, What you wept for, was translated, pass'd from the grave, The winds favoured and the sea sail'd it, And now with rosy and new blood, Moves to-day in a new country.

One by one they dropped off asleep, the little ones first, as the moon went down--their thoughts so full of stars, asking so dauntlessly all questions of world and sky. What I could, I answered, but I felt as young as any. It seemed their dreams were fresher than mine, and their closeness to God.... The little girl touched me, as we drifted away----

"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.

18

THE BLEAKEST HOUR

It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are, a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find certain friends and sterling enemies--and either lose or win, ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.

Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed. He blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet--at least, a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning over of the whole afterward.

Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are moving about our business of house and country and world in a most stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men, indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to the nostrils.

But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving--but with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which has not remotely to do with an erect spine.

Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them along, find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may be said that wars have brought great benefits to the race; that materialism has taught us our place here below as no other passion could; that trade has wrought its incomparable good to the races of men; that Fear has been the veritable mother of our evolution, its dark shadow forever inciting us, breaking our Inertia, bringing swiftness and strength first to the body, then to brain. Even desire for self, on the long road behind, has been the good angel of our passage, for we had to become splendid beasts before the dimension of man could be builded.... All good; mistakes nowhere in the plan.

But the trouble is, the passage of the many from grade to grade is intolerably slow. We had thought the many had finished with war. The few already are many grades ahead of that; the few have seen the virtues die out of patriotism and trade; they have watched the desire for self turn reptile, and hearkened to this truth which is beginning to reverberate around the world: _What is good for beasts is not of necessity good for men_.... One recent caller here, male, middle-aged, smilingly discussed all things from the philosophical point of view. I was saying:

"From the nursery to world-clutched retirement from public affairs, a man nowadays is taught more and more to keep his heart-principle locked----"

He smiled: "We have all the time there is. It will all come out right. You fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others of us think them over quietly by our fires. That is the whole difference. Scratch off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of God-yearning animal underneath."

Few sayings ever have hit me harder.

I studied the years' offerings from this man--to his house, to his acquaintances, to the world in general. An irony filled the room, and so intense was it that it seemed to have a colour, a kind of green and yellow vapour. It emanated from the centre of his face. I think the point that animated me especially was that he was in the habit of talking to young men. He had no children of his own. I changed the subject and opened the door--not to hasten his departure but because the air was close.