The end of Varsieff is satisfying to us, and yet I wonder if I can
make this sort of romance clear. Martyrdom--they call it a short cut.
There is a saying that the soul of a man who dies for something, goes
marching on. The Irish become hopeless of their cause, if some one
dies for the opposition. All revolutionists have reckoned with this
subtlety--no propaganda like martyrdom; all the sacred writings refer
to it, our Bible several times, once in the sentence, "Greater love
hath no man----"
A deluge of phenomena from "the other side" has come in during the
present war, all the old martyrs of nationalism said to be called to
the cause of their empires....
What is the romantic haunt that lifts a man to such a pitch of
exaltation that he transcends pain, and goes singing down to die?
These are matters much better known among the young dreamers and
workers of Russia and the Orient than of America.... Varsieff reveals
the child under the man of action; the lover above the intellectualist.
His love story unfolds certain passages which we are making a point of
in these chapters. The woman, Paula Mantone, represents a loved type
in our sort of story-making. She brings, vaguely, at least, into terms
the romantic ideal so calling to us in these days. She means more than
three-score and ten. Her love goes on and on. She becomes a priestess,
in a sense, and conducts her lover through the critical passage of
finding his own Soul. External battles then take his body, but she is
not altogether bereft. An intuitional woman does not always know what
she is doing in her heart story, even when she does greatly. If the
physical action had broken different, if the body of Varsieff had not
been required in martyrdom, for instance, he might have emerged from
the final stress of action in a state of spiritual exaltation, from
which, I can imagine Paula Mantone calling him back to the gardens of
the senses.... Martyr, priestess, revoltee, but always a woman. Every
year of devotion to the feminine in fiction, compels a more fluid, yet
more mystic handling.
We have been very close to the young students and poets and players of
Russia. In the Fall of 1914 we published the following paragraph:
There[19] are men in Russia who have heard the mighty music of
humanity. They will sing their dream and grave their message upon the
peasant soul.... Not the Russia of Nicholas Romanoff. His passing and
all the princes of his tainted blood will prove but an incident of the
Great War. Very low in the west among the red blinking points of the
falling constellation, is Nicholas and that Russia. In the east is the
Russian _novi_ before the dawn, commanding the dark before the sun.
[19] _Fatherland._ George H. Doran Company, New York.
* * * * *
The young men of India, the young men of China, the young men of
Russia, the young men of America--I see them working together in the
wondrous story of life, as it reels off in the years to come--mating of
the East and West, the planet seen in one piece, the communal spirit of
the Hive around the globe.
* * * * *
... I find myself getting up a rather serious intensity over what
_Romance_ means, a signal to tame down.... _Not to stay_--to drain
nothing, to leave all cleaner, more orderly and richer for one's
tarrying, to glance but lightly, yet with a deep smile of understanding
at the torrent of detached and unmatched things which apparently makes
the world--to love it all better than those caught in detachment can
possibly love one another--to belong to the many by remaining apart
from separate movements--at last to be the Spectator....
One may deal lightly with crowds, but never with _man_ or _woman_....
One may say he has all that civilisation has for any human creature; he
may reasonably be bored by all departments of life, but there is enough
for an eternity of reverent study and adoration in the nearest human
face. The lovelier the human face, the more easily we can discern the
divine in it.... You get nowhere without loving something. This is the
hardest kind of material gospel.... We are all incognito--the greater
we are, the less perfectly disguised.
* * * * *
First and last our dream of Romance means Motherhood--mysterious
enactments that the mere male can never know, no longer the motherhood
of the mammal, but the coming of the Guest, the Shining One--the
giving of body and mind and soul, no fear, no stipulation, no impeding
form of thought--more than that, it means a giving of the child to
the world.... The Valley Road Girl expresses it in this sharp, short
picture:
Once a woman lived in a dense forest, and had a man-child alone
there. As it grew, the woman impressed upon it the greatness of God
and the wonder of all things. Then one day, she led him by the
forest-paths to the Highway, and left him there.
It means the Madonna who looks up, rather than down, at the head upon
her breast.
The creative force is never wasted. Man and woman, in love or lust, are
never alone--rather startling, but sooner or later to be accepted. The
point of the triangle is either turned downward or upward. The creative
force feeds either the abominations of the underworld, or is used in
its designed order and loveliness as a point of inception for soul into
form.... The mother-nature of the New Race must be quickened by the
ideal of the coming of a World-teacher, of development a cycle ahead of
this race. Women must partake of this dream in their maternities. It
is the light of such an advent, shining upon the upturned face of the
mother, that touches the brow of the child with light.
Absolutely the concept of the new Democracy demands the coming of a
great Unifier--a focal point for all world movements and interests
and aspirations. The story of a Master's coming is the ultimate
Romance--the finest story in the world--for that in itself is the story
of Regeneration.
The work of this particular volume seems to be ended. Much that is
prepared need not be used. Right here is the breathing-space that
always comes in a life or a book.... _Not to stay_.... Some of our
boys are off to the trenches; others may go. Part of the original
group has been unable yet to follow the centre to the West. Our good
Gobind[20] who belonged to the pith of things, arose from one breakfast
and went off to join the cavalry. There's a group in Chicago that we
see all too little of--a diffusion time truly, but only to make more
certain the time of integration again.
[20] Ben Poteat.
* * * * *
There is one who came, changing all. We thought we knew much about the
world. We thought mainly that things were settled for us. It was not
words she brought, but a subtler quickening. I cannot tell it exactly.
There was a day in which I was bored, not satisfied, and another when I
was a child again--breathless, questing, listening for some one to tell
me stories of another and better country. All that I had done and been
and lived was diminished; more, all behind was utterly done, leaving
scarcely any criteria for that which was to be.... No inland lake would
do after that; we wanted a continental headland, the sweep of the earth
and sky--sidereal time, sidereal space. We could only tolerate the
quest of the Impossible after she came.
... She came and wrote her book through the summer days and then she
went away.... Somehow after that we knew what rains and sunlight
meant--what all nature was saying and doing. At least, we knew
better.... _Not to stay._ We could not follow continually, but at last
out of loneliness, the big new laughing wonder of life came to us ...
and when we told her, she seemed to have known all the time....
We teach by making pictures. She brought new pigments and freshened
all the oils. We loved the tints and half-tones before she came, but
she restored us to the virgin beauty of the primal rays. We liked the
blends before she came--the blend of rose and gold, but she brought us
length of vision and redemption of taste to know the meaning of the
Ultimate Red, the red of the Pomegranate, the red of the Inspired Mary,
to whose knees at the last all artists and little children find their
way--the passionate red of the Quest and the Cross and the Son. She was
not surprised when we told her what her gifts mean to us.
* * * * *
An artist gives himself full-heartedly to the emotions. Keen and
poignant afterward, is the battle to straighten them out, to comb
them down. The mind holds the truth about it all, the spirit sings
all around, but the heart holds fast to its agonising play of passion
settings.
Desire is like an old King, sitting in the midst of his dogs, a King
by the fire in his tower. The Shining Heir is born, but the old King
is slow to die. He sits thinking of his old hunts, his rides to kill,
old wars and faces at the window.... He rode well; he thought he loved
very well; a great name, he was, in the hunts, and in all the games of
getting. He meditates now upon his one-time conquests, and forgets his
pain. It is his memories that hold him fast to life a little while. But
at last the head of old King Desire sinks to his breast, the fire fades
from his last memory. The door of the tower room opens, the Shining
Prince is standing there, and the criers run through the palace crying
aloud, "The King is dead. Long live the King!" Desire has ended; the
Bestower takes the throne.
When we told her of this new breath of life which she had brought,
our Mary seemed to know all about that, too. She smiled and looked
away when we showed her this book (and the inscription to her), so
many pages of which she had read before--our dreams for the New Race
unfolded in letters to her.
* * * * *
The instant one perceives the inner meaning of _Equality_, glimpsing
the great Seamless Robe of humanity as one;--he realises that what
is best for him is best for all others--what is best for the many is
his own highest behest.... One must grasp this to know what Democracy
means, to know what is behind the word, a meaning which those who use
it most haven't dreamed of. You must grasp the spirit of the hive--that
winged myriads of golden atoms never stray so far as to break the
spirit-cord that binds them into one--that the one knows all, contains
potentially all goodness and beauty and truth, that all action, art and
thought, come from the spirit of the one--that the fruits of these go
back. I love to tell it again and again. I saw it all afresh to-day.
The sun plays tricks with the earth at high noon. One feels superbly
well--a kind of seething in the veins. It pulls him away from the great
quest for the Father's House, in gusts of Mother Nature's magic. All
the fragrance of fallow fields is in the hot light and blowing hay and
deathless azure and high noon. Glorious swarms of bees were breaking
out from the Spirit of the hive, all one in Spirit at the top--the
Spirit brooding at all times over all the workings of the hive....
It was the same with the millions of men who walk the earth, one at
the top--all one, coming and going in the Spirit, replenished and
replenishing always, learning the fusions here in friends and lovers,
each finding his one, and then the new quest together for the Great
Companions.
Then it came to me that we are only sick and blind and lame and
evil--in the sense of detachment. We must kill that out. Hate spoils
everything. Hate binds us to the object. We mustn't despise another's
coat. It may have been ours yesterday--may be ours to-morrow. We must
kill out the sense of separateness from any creature, for we are
destined to become one spirit with him and all others. Something like a
cloud--all one, as a cloud is one.
Every morning on the grass--on millions of blades of grass--a globe of
dew at the tip of each.... The Lord Sun arises. The dew warms a little
and slips down the track of the blade into the root. There it breaks
up into infinite fragments. The sun rising higher weaves his warm
magic over the fields; invisibly, like prayers ascending, the drops
of dew, all diffused into a thousand fragments each, thin as steam,
and carrying the perfumes of roses and lilacs and honeysuckles and
meadow lands and fallow lands and lake and ocean shores,--like prayers
ascending, the dewdrops of yesterday return as one to the cloud. Broken
into the farthest diffusion, but not an atom lost. All the richness of
earth in essence returning to the Spirit....
The same with bee and dewdrop and man--the same with swarm and cloud
and tribe--each fragment and division lifting to a greater, unto
the Shining Source at last.... The point of it all is that man is
spiritually woven to his brother and to the race; giving himself and
his service to his brother and to the race he glorifies the texture and
stature of his own soul.
Christmas, 1917.
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
The book contains many words spelt to reflect the accent of the
speaker. The spelling has not been changed.
There are two instances of unmatched ending quotation marks. The
missing opening quotation marks were not added because their
locations were uncertain.
The following changes to printing errors have been made.
ouselves is now ourselves
though is now through
unlifted is now uplifted