Stonestudy particularly is a shop for writers. A man is at his best in
writing to the one who pulls the most from him. The thing is to pour
out. The pursuit of happiness is a learning how to radiate. Happiness
itself is radiation--incandescence.
You say you write to the world. A composite? An abstraction? These
will not draw forth your best and greatest.... You pass a thousand
faces in the town, and are suddenly torn by one? Do you think that
the unmanifested, upon which the thousand faces sleep so far as you
are concerned, is capable of bringing out your wisest or tenderest
expression, as is this one face pressed against the very window of your
habitation?
As a workman, as an artist, as a player, one must give his best, one
by one, to individuals first, before he arouses the force to set
the table for the world.... It is important for the young writer
to answer exactly certain listening attitudes. I think, in a story
mood, of the shepherd fires--the endless droning tales of Persia and
Palestine--camel bells, bearded men in white hoods, occasional weary
movements of women in the tent openings as the evening passes to dead
of night. The tale-teller is making his listeners see more or less
dimly something _he_ sees--something he has heard and visualised,
better yet, something he has lived. The finer his telling the more
completely he has lived it. The more listeners pull from him, the more
excellent his animation, his art. A speaker, accustomed to give himself
spontaneously to an audience, said: "If I don't give you what you
want--if I am not at my best to-day--remember it's apt not to be _all_
my fault."
Soil and seed in all things.
We prepare ourselves with much misery and massed experience to tell
our story of life. How strange that we should not have reckoned with
the fact that all this preparation is only half.... Really, it is as
important to think to whom one is writing as what to write about. I've
been afield with many young men, soldiers and the like. Their best and
highest moments afield were spent in writing home, or possibly to the
girl they left under the beeches or sycamores. We should write a myriad
or two love letters, before we are ready to write for the world.... By
writing and dreaming and travelling and living toward the one, we learn
how to focalise our forces. Having done that, we are ready to diffuse,
to radiate. Sooner or later the _one_ point will be taken away.
Don't be distressed; it is only for the time. But the love we have
learned with one must be turned upon the many. It's all a love story.
The whole universe is that. The stillness of the sun in relation to the
planets tells the first story of radiation--love a cosmic force, not
a sentiment--all one big, brave tale.... The real priest is trained
to draw out, to furnish understanding,--inclusion. One can talk well
to one who includes him. As professional essayists and story-tellers,
we are only beginning to learn that we must talk or write to some one
greater than ourselves, to set ourselves free.
The wonderful power of letters begins and ends just here.... Write your
story or your essay to one who contains you--to one who draws your
best, to one who sets you free. You can ascertain your relation to
another by your mood as you prepare to write. The more you practise the
art, the more sensitive you are, the more you realise that no two moods
of yours are the same, as you write to different people. One draws
humour, one irony, one a tendency to exaggerate, another deeply to be
serious and reformative. This should reveal the whole secret. Choose
your complement for the portrayal of a mood.
The thing we call our style is merely the evidence of that which
we have chosen to work toward, plus our particular personality. We
should work to that which sets us free. Certainly one cannot be free
in another's form. There are fixed vehicles for expression--novel,
essay, poem, infinite departments of each, but the fact remains that no
workman or artist or player can be utterly himself, who remains in the
forms laid down by those who went before, or in forms prescribed by the
generation he undertakes to express himself through.
No good workman ever accepts things as they are. To be the workman
unashamed, he must be considerably beyond his generation in culture and
acumen. He therefore finds the beaten paths--which are the easy paths
for the many--the most irksome paths for himself. He grinds long and
hideously against the things that are, and thus becomes formidable,
since grinding makes the edge. The dullest part of the axe is held the
longest against the wheel.
Bit by bit, as the consciousness of the chosen workman expands under
years and ordeals, he casts off all the shackles, forms and prescribed
nonsense of the trivial and material-minded. He breathes deeper with
each unbinding, until he reaches the fair eminence upon which lies the
priceless secret of all expression:
_That there is no law for the pure in heart._
He reaches this point through many slaveries, and yet a child can
be taught the secret. The child must also be taught, at the same
time however, that the world is wrong and inferior in all its views;
otherwise the child will not have stamina enough to stand against the
opinions of all elders of all times, much less those who sit at the
same breakfast table. Verily, the thing that Rodin and Balzac and
Carpenter and Hugo and Chavannes and Nietzsche and Whitman gave their
prodigious vitalities to learn, before their real work began,--can
be taught to the child, but the child must find his faith in his own
spirit and some true teacher to set him free.
In the later aspirations beyond professional workmanship for the world,
the Players achieve that master freedom which detaches itself entirely
from causes and effects in materials. They work as do those who are
ambitious, yet refuse to tie themselves in the least way to results.
They work to their Masters, to the Unseen.... All of which is pure and
perfect liberation, but requires one trained in building with spiritual
causes and effects. We seek to furnish this training for a few who are
ready. It is the way to the inmost and the uppermost in all art and
mysticism. We are set free here as expressionists of various kinds by
writing or painting or playing to those we hold dearer than ourselves.
We wouldn't be writing if we could be with them in the flesh--how clear
that is! The fundamental processes of our picture-making are quickened
by our yearning. Here we touch an old and curious law, that you must
have separation for the true romance.
We learn to mass life into pictures or tones or tales.... All that we
do well shortens the grade for those who receive. If they are quite
ready, they won't have to make the mistakes we did--mistakes painful at
the time, but out of which we make humour now.
A man brings a gift when he brings forth a good tale. He has done
something with the worn-out tools of incident and experience which
hasn't been done before. To do it well his telling is dependent
upon his audience. His telling will be different for each listening
group. The greater the artist, the less alike will be his methods of
approaching different friends or comrades. Each will bring from him a
different tone, a different look to his eyes, a different grip of hand,
and different order of unfolding his genius....
The most perfect bits of writing we have from the group of our greatest
novelists--is either in the form of letters or parts of work inspired
by the influence of a woman's heart--some romantic and one-pointed
outbreathing of their souls to one.... The great creative producers
rarely found steady human companionship in one woman. No flesh was
starry enough to endure their idealisation; the break of their picture
was often the shattering of life itself. Experience forces us all at
last to take our idolatry from that which changes--to continue our
lessons of love toward the Unseen. Lovers of the New Race seem to have
learned the agony of trying to find all in each other, of trying to
find the universe eye to eye. They realise at once that man and woman
are but the two earth points of a triangle; that they safely may rear
their passions and their transfigurations only to the pure point of
union above....
* * * * *
A man has found something when he cries "Eureka!" He loves something,
when he pours out his heart to it. The first great struggle of the real
workman is to find a form that contains him--a form of expression that
will not maim his dream. It is never the form that has held another,
that has sufficed for another artist. A letter is one way to freedom. A
writer's style should set him free.
The enduring aphorisms and tablets and discourses of the Masters have
been spoken to their beloved few. A man's sealed orders in the world,
his occult transcriptions from above the world, come in the form of
personal messages. Great documents of the future shall be written this
way. We write many personal letters. One of my young comrades has the
idea to gather together names of a score of mill-girls in New York or
somewhere, and write her heart to them--less to try to help them, than
to ease her own heart, to tell her love for them. Radiation--that is
happiness. Mill-girls have been a dream of hers. She is full of force
to pour out.
Incandescence is happiness. All expression is happiness. Happiness is
creative. To work, to express, that is to radiate. The object is as
important as the thing that aches to go forth. Choose the form that
sets you free. To each his form.
A tireless woman asked how she might serve. Her lover was lost in
Flanders. We told her to write to the soldiers--to write her heart
out in letters to soldiers--that she would save lives and start great
dreams and bring the gold back to many grey mists--to be Mary the
Mother, the saint, the dream of the film-eyed fighting men--to love
them through the heart of her beloved. That is what focalisation leads
to--to draw forth the great energies from our souls, to set us free,
first to one, then to the world.
We learn to love the one--in order to give this love to the world. We
learn to love in matter for the moment, in order to become consummate
artists and players in the soul stuff that cannot die. Again and again,
through possessions and personalities--missing, destroyed or moved
away--we learn to take the force of our outpouring from the mutative to
the changeless--making a divine bestowal at last of a clinging human
need--lifting from the idolatry of the flesh, which encloses all pain,
to the love of souls which sets us free.
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