The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories.
Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction
work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist
within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner
life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development
of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to
arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange
and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be
prepared.
There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger
consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another
age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of
consciousness--before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be
that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated
experience are open to his every-day working mind. That may really
be what sumptuous artistic equipment is--the capacity to open up the
old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is
explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the
coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to
peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.
Certainly intellect alone will never make a great drama of life and
love, yet action and romance of the present hour draw hard upon one's
present life training and the faculties and tastes of his immediate
culture--actual brain possession and the ordering thereof. A child can
portray superbly well some ancient imprint upon the Soul, even the
passages of his own initiations through earth, water, air and fire,
his brain not conscious of the real nature of what is coming forth;
yet, the same child cannot put the cohering line through a series of
episodes occurring under his own notice. Something of this mental
grasp is necessary to make the artful effect required in a short
tale. The child's mind, in the first place, is trained to listen and
interpret the experiences of the larger consciousness; in the second
set of conditions, he is forced to rely upon actual brain tissue which
requires the training and culture of the years.
Art is composition. The farther you go, the finer the tools. It is
difficult to train the fingers to intricate tricks of weaving, or
the brain to sort and place the facts and colours and surprises of
a present-day narrative or tale, but the soul may be called upon to
express through the narrow temples of an awakened child its cosmic
understanding, its ordered firmament.
Decades of observation and reporting; firm and verified actuality of
knowledge and opinion; to these, added experience and the excellence
of order--such is the training of the intellectual artist who times
his production to his own generations. He pays the price in pain and
subjection to the things that are; he knows well the meaning of labour;
often, though he may still laugh as an artist, he has forgotten how to
laugh as a man.
My desk here is covered with papers and poems of a beauty this
intellectual artist cannot reach, of a freedom he can never know, until
he lifts the torch of his consciousness out of and above the brain,
making that serve quite as his knees bend and serve. Thinking of these
things to-day, the door of the Study opened and the Little Girl gave
me her work. She writes things of the larger consciousness without
effort, but finds it hard and wearing to narrate the immediate matters
of life. To her, the fine short story of the present hour is the great
accomplishment, the ideal she is working toward.
With another she goes often to the cities--rambling among the
rooming-houses, cheaper restaurants and mills. She means to work in
the mills soon--to forget herself and forget us for a time, to be
with the harder-lucked girls whom she loves with thrilling passion.
She has brought home from these little adventures wonderful stories
of the patience and the laughter and the heroism crowding like hidden
sacred presences about the duller lives. She brings a humour to the
telling of the divine secrets of the poor--the clutching pang for food,
the soldier going, his baby coming, the tortured spine, the stunted,
the darkened, the wasted--an irresistible divinity about it all--pain
impermanent, joy enduring. Back of the lacking eyes and leaking lives,
she sees wonders that Zola never saw, that none can see with mere
intelligence, that none can dream, who sees only the here and now,
who has not learned to laugh at the so-called injustices of men, who
cannot see the greater order to come because the present chaos is so
devastating.
One may report minutiæ of torments, mass the items of degradation and
bring forth a great document of the underworld--but these are mere
foundations. The Builders bring the dream, they live the hope, they
open the long-road consciousness, they substantiate their visions of
better days, bring order and coherence to all the splendid toil of the
intellectualist; they raise their edifice upon _all_ that is done....
Here is the Little Girl's work of to-day's writing: