Children of the new social order love strange creatures; they are
passionate about the care and protection of animals, but until they are
made to suffer, they are apt to be sceptical about the infallibility
of their elders. They are usually forced into silence early. I have
noted that their ideas are intrinsically at variance with parental
ideas--about purity, sunlight, dancing, foods, religion, odours....
It takes a good man to break a horse or a dog. In a sense _break_ is
the word, although I would accomplish it with enchantment rather than
a gad.... This is invariable: "When the pupil is ready--the Master
appears----" an old occult saying, and another: "The first thing the
Master does, is to break the back of his disciple----"
Stiffness of opinion, rigidity of holding to that which one has,
preconception, deep-rutted habits of mind--all these are fatal to that
swift and splendid growth of the disciple when he first finds his
teacher. For days the child is in a bewildering series of changes--made
over new each fortnight--reviewing lives of experience--razing the
old structures to the very footings for new temples of mind and soul.
The child must be ready to give himself--must give himself utterly.
The essential reverence is first required; the self is broken for all
births; one gives one's self to gain all. I would not try to quicken
a child who doubted what I was saying; and yet I have never sought to
make myself unerring or infallible. I like to have the young ones make
humour of my frailties, and at the same time believe there is something
priceless in our better moments together. There is no possibility of
front or acting.
I seek to make them practise the presence of the Divine in themselves.
I tell them never to do anything alone that they would not do before
me. I take away all sense of sin from them. I sometimes congratulate
them on being especially close to us, because of mistakes. I seek to
set them free in all their ways, stripping the last attraction from
evil, jockeying them higher from a humorous and artistic point of view.
I show them the banality of many popular and obvious evils, the dulness
of paying the price for something _off_ form and of questionable taste.
* * * * *
There is a lot of humour and nobility about a good dog and a good boy
together. John has been sleeping for a few nights in a bit of a cabin
with an open door. He picked up a friend down on the beach somewhere,
the same that he described as "World Man Dog" in one of his letters.
I liked the tone of his voice as he talked with this old loafer named
Seaweed.... One evening I was sitting on the hill above the cabin,
so still that even a bird would have mistaken me for a part of the
landscape.
World Man Dog came up the cabin grade. His head was down--thinking. His
tail was straight out behind him, as a dog's tail is when very much
engaged with his own thoughts. You could see that he was going to keep
an appointment; it was evident that he was afraid he might be late. He
did not see me, so completely was he engrossed in his own affairs. He
went right on up to John's door, entered, gave a look round the shack,
first eagerly, then to make sure. His face fell, his body sagged--down
he slumped in the middle of the floor--utterly dejected. As plain as
day:
"Hell,--he ain't here!"
* * * * *
A real dog trainer is a wise man. I used to raise collies and was
around the benches some--watching the champions come and go. One old
trainer talked to me:
"Styles change in dogs," he said, "but a good dog doesn't change. He
goes on and on. You don't get the good collies here on the benches any
more. This year they want the collie so fine that we have to pinch the
brain out of his head and break his lung-room in two. Last year we bred
for hair, not for body and brain. Look at that one----"
He pointed to an old sire that had three seasons of the bench and
blue, a sweeper of prizes. I remember the time when such a head would
have started a stealer anywhere. The old collie had not lost form,
but styles had changed. A most stupid dog with a straight, narrow
head had won--not the shepherd type at all, but the head of a Russian
wolf-hound--a bit of the monster left in it, a drugged look in the
small black eyes; hysteria there, and not fealty--madness and not soul.
"We breed them for the cities now--for porches and parlours," the
trainer added. "Yes, those great collie strains that we have been
nurturing for centuries to all that is brave and hard and useful--we
are putting the hair of the lap-dog on them now--long silky stuff, not
for snow and sleet. The collie walks by himself these days. No, we
won't altogether ruin the strain. Many individuals are spoiled, but the
race had come too far and too long to be broken down by a few years of
fancyfying."
Of course, I was thinking of the children at every stage of the
talk--of city people and children. As a race, the city-bred have become
too fine. Life has worn them thin--given them the drugged look about
the eyes. The race will never get far in the art of living until it
comes home to the land and the restful distances and free flowing airs.
This is so true that it seems to risk wearing the eye and the mind--to
say it again....
It's good to see them--a boy and a dog together in the hills or down
by the edges of the land. There was a piece of decent collie in a
dog named Jack back on the lake shore. He was long in strength and
courage, but a bit shy in obedience. As a work-dog, he was ruined by
a man who knew less than he did, frequently the case in bringing up
dogs and men--whipped at the wrong time, every forming endeavour in
the pup-brain broken by that. He is seven or eight years old now ...
a clean dog, a very wise and kind dog, with a sly and quiet humour
that seldom is cruel and never falls into horse play--a lover of many
children and confident of an open door in many homes.
I remember the dignity and beauty of his first appearance over the
bank from the shore, almost timed to our arrival. We were tender to
the collie in general, having passed years with them. Jack moved from
one to another accepting embraces with a kindliness that mellowed
that cloudy day. There was joy about it all. I stood back waiting my
turn with much self-control. He submitted to the welcome--to the last
detail, and a little later refused refreshments with perfect courtesy.
When we came back the second summer, we found that a bullet had broken
Jack's right front leg. He had wintered out at times, had known much
pain. It was not that he did not have good friends who would have taken
him in, but I think Jack lost faith a bit in the pain and stress. There
was grey about his muzzle. One day he sat in the centre of the little
Chapel class.
"I'd like to be as good a man as Jack is a dog," one of the boys said.
"You'd be one more man," said another.
The fact is Jack has filled his circle rather well. This thought came
to me presently with fuller meaning. I regarded him with knowledge of
three seasons. A clean dog, a gentleman, a master of himself, very
courageous and slow to anger, impossible for small children to anger--a
dog among dogs, but more than dog among men.
"He _has_ filled his circle," I said aloud. "What makes a man look less
in these very virtues that Jack has mastered, is that a man's circle
is larger, and he has not reached the time of fulfilment as Jack has.
If the dog's accomplishments were suddenly lifted from his circle
and placed in a larger one, we would not be conscious of the fine
integration of virtues that keep us interested now."
Men, lost in the complications of cities, yearn for the simplicity of
their early days on the farms; and yet they could not go back. The
simplicity they yearn for is ahead. That of the old country days is but
a symbol of the cosmic simplicity in store for us. Tolstoi turned back
to the peasants, yet the simplicity he craved was not there.
The peasants are merely potential of what the New Race will be; the
peasants themselves must suffer the transition--must have their circle
widened and feel their little laws and their little sense of order
suddenly diffused over broad, strange surfaces. Their cosmic simplicity
will appear when the larger dimension is put in order. That which is
lovely in any plane of being, is that which is in flower--when it
has about filled its present circle. We are not less, intrinsically,
because our values are placed in a larger vessel, though we have a
renovating sense of our own insignificance. There is an order of small
men, so obviously a part of their very narrowness, that it becomes
instantly repulsive to larger souls. Many of the latter have flashed
off to the end of their tether for the time, preferring chaos, to the
two by two neatness of small-templed men.
A secret of growth lies in these observations. We fill a certain
circle, restoring a kind of order in the chaos; and then the circle is
suddenly widened and that which was our order and mastery is loose and
diffused within the larger orbit. Herein are the pangs of transition.
We lose our way for the time in the vaster area, like a man who is
unfamiliar with an estate just purchased. There is but one thing to
do--to begin to work upon the new dimension. As we work, courage and
patience steal in. Presently comes the vision of the completed circle.
When this comes, our labour is pinned to a fresh ideal, and we are safe.
In a hundred ways I have found it true that the vision comes in the
labouring hours. One may move for weeks about his new estate (or
manuscript), planning this and that, but the glimpse of the cohering
whole is denied him, until he has actually begun upon the nearest or
most pressing task. This is the miraculous benefit of action again. In
giving ourselves forth in action, the replenishment comes. The sense of
self ceases to clutter the faculties as we bend and toil.
The days that are added to our experience each bring this story in a
different way: that the sense of self impedes reality on every hand;
that the loss of the sense of self in labour and service renders us
instantly quick to the animations of the spirit, without which at least
from time to time, a man belongs to the herd, and is lost, like all
gregarious creatures, in the will of his superiors.
* * * * *
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