while he made the thing I wanted, which was not an ornament simply. He
will always be identified there in the oak, an excellent influence; just
as I think of him when I save the wood in the open fireplace, because of
the perfect damper he made for the stone chimney. Monte was still there
when I went back. The problem of him returned to mind after the
freshening of the forge.
He belongs to us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did
not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the
weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the
impoverishment of his line. We are not finding their work for his
children. We have sent them home from school because they were not
clean. We complain that they waste what we give them; that they are
harder on the shoes we furnish, than are our own children. We do not
inquire with wisdom into their life, to learn on which side of the human
meridian they stand--whether their disease is decadence and senility of
spiritual life, or whether their spines are but freshly lifted from the
animal levels.
As a purely physical aggregate--if our civilisation be that--our
business is quickly to exterminate Monte and his whole breed. He
embarrasses us, as sleeker individuals of the herd and hive. He is
tolerated to the diseases with which he infects us, because we have
weakened our resistance with cleanliness. But by the authority of our
better understanding, by our sacred writings and the intuitions of our
souls, we are men and no longer an animal aggregate. As men, our
business is to lift Monte from his lowly condition, and hold him there;
to make him and his children well first, and then to make workmen of
them. _There are workmen in the world for this very task of lifting
Monte and his brood._ We do not use them, because the national instinct
of Fatherhood is not yet profoundly developed. We are not yet brothers.
* * * * *
In the recent winter months in the city it came to me that I had certain
things to tell a group of young men. The class was arranged. In the
beginning I warned them not to expect literary matters; that I meant to
offer no plan to reach the short-story markets (a game always rather
deep for me); that the things which I wanted to tell were those which
had helped me toward being a man, not an artist. Fifteen young men were
gathered--all strangers to me. When we were really acquainted, weeks
afterward, I discovered that seven of the fifteen had been writing for
months or years--that there was certain stuff in the seven that would
write or die.
They had not come for what I meant to give. As a whole they were
indifferent at first to my idea of the inner life. They had come for the
gleanings I would drop, because I could not help it, having spent twenty
years learning how to learn to write. The name that had called them from
the different parts of the city was identified for good or bad in their
minds with the work they meant to do. And what I did for them was done
as a workman--that was my authority--a workman, a little older, a little
farther along in the craft that called.
And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know,
not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a
store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why,
to the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more
than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself,
because the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had
told them austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do;
but I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not
elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned
to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do
just that for a larger class, and in this effort I stumbled upon the
very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal--for they
are one and the same.
A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to
him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most
hours each day--that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth
the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions
and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure
instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it--that
man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts.
It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are
not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug
and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very
long in coming to the end of their fineness.
They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is
exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each
workman finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He
is an illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he
is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self.
Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is
on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service of
humanity.
... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is
caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it.
He feels for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens
to the forge that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his
bench, but in his mind--in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk
to my daughter. She knows about these things," he says. "I must go....
Yes, it is a fine day."
It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him
so long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has
perfected his task. The world laughs at its betters with the same
facility that it laughs at the half-men. Our national and municipal
fathers should teach us first that the man who has found his work is one
of the kings of the earth. Children should be taught to know a workman
anywhere. All excellence in human affairs should be judged by the
workmanship and not by the profits.
We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some
strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came
at last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is
nervous and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at
that; asks himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of
laughter, for he cannot forget the grinding and the rending of the early
years--when there were days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps
his has been a divided house all these years; it may be that he has lost
even Her for his work.
The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the
shop again. A man's work lives with him to the end--and beyond--that is
the eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all
doubts sink into the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life
is awake; the heart of reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to
an identity which cannot grow old.
He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come to
him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his
lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below:
That nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship;
that the world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money
for a life's task. The workman can only be paid in kind.
It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They
may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross
seas and continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did
it. His bench was just there--his house over yonder. Here is where he
stood, and there he hung his coat." But these are only refinements of
irony.... They may say, "This is his grandson." But that will only
handicap or ruin the child, if he find not _his_ work. A thousand lesser
workmen may improve his product, lighten it, accelerate its potency,
adapt it to freight rates--but that is no concern of the dream.
The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman
finds himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has
lost the love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness
of the source of his being. He does not need to state it
philosophically, for he lived it. He found the secret of blessedness, if
not of happiness. At his bench, he integrated the life that lasts. He
could have told you in the early years, if the world had not laughed. He
would have learned himself more swiftly, had he been encouraged to tell,
as he toiled--if the world had not shamed away the few who were drawn to
his bench.
But alone, he got it all at last--the passion and power of the spiritual
workman which sustains him now, though his body has lain under the hill
for fifty years. His shop is the place of a greater transaction than his
task. The breadth and essence of it that lingers makes it a sacred place
to the few who would take off their shoes to enter--were it not for the
misunderstanding of the world.
Out of the artificial he became natural; out of the workman, he emerged
a man, a living soul.
I would support every plan or dream of education, and none other, that
seeks to find for the youth his life work. I would call upon every
workman personally to help; and urge for every community, the goodness
of its products and not the richness of its markets. I would put the
world's premium upon fine workmanship of the hand or brain or spirit;
and a stiff pressure upon the multiplication of these products by
mechanical means, for we have too many common things, and so few fine
things. I would inculcate in the educational ideal, first of all, that
in every man there is a dream, just as there is a soul, and that _to
express the dream of the soul in matter_ is the perfect individual
performance. I would impress upon the youth that in all arts and crafts,
the dream fades and the spirit of the product dies away, when many are
made in the original likeness. Nature does not make duplicates; her
creative hallmark is upon every leaf and bee; upon every cliff and cloud
and star.
I would not endow the young workman while he is learning his trade or
art; but I would have the State intensely watchful of him, and
impassioned with parental conviction that her greatness is inseparable
with his possibilities of achievement. I would not make his ways short,
but despise and crush all evidences of facility. I would keep him plain
and lean and fit, and make him earn his peace. All fine work comes from
the cultivation of the self, not from cultivated environment.... I
dreamed for twenty years of a silent room and an open wood fire. I shall
never cease to wonder at the marvel of it, now that it has come. It is
so to-night alone in the stillness. The years of struggle to produce in
the midst of din and distraction, while they wore as much as the work
itself, were helpful to bring the concentration which every decent task
demands; and in the thrill of which a man grows in reality, and not
otherwise.
7
THE LITTLE GIRL
It was determined that the children should try the country-town school
that Spring from April to June. This school was said to be of
exceptional quality, and I talked with the master, a good man. In fact,
there was none but the general causes for criticism in this
establishment--the same things I found amiss in city schools. The
children accepted the situation with a philosophy of obedience which
should have taught the race many things it does not yet know. The
journey was considerable for them twice daily in warming weather; and
from little things I heard from time to time, words dropped with no idea
of rebellion, I was reminded of the dark drama of my own "Education,"
written explicitly enough elsewhere and which I am glad to forget.
The schools of to-day are better, no doubt about that, but the
improvement is much in the way of facility and convenience; the systems
are not structurally changed--facility and convenience, speed of
transit, mental short-cuts, the science of making things not more plain,
but more obvious, the science of covering ground....
I read a book recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual
child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from
fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of
whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how
the child was nourished on all things that only specialists among men
cared to litter their minds with. Then there was a supplement of
additional assimilations, and how to get them in. With all this, the
child had been taught to dance; and there was a greed of learning about
it (the book being designed to show the way to others) that struck me as
avarice of the most violent and perverse form; the avarice of men for
money and baronial holdings being innocent compared, as sins of the
flesh are innocent compared to the sins of mind. This book and the
tragic child form to my idea one of the final eruptions of the ancient
and the obscene.
The word education as applied in this woman's book, and through the long
past of the race, represents a diagram of action with three items:
One, the teacher; 2, the book; 3, the child. Teacher extracting fact
from book and inserting same in child's brain equals education.
I suffered ten years of this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage
aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and
immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague
failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of
puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife,
designed to smother that which was real in the heart.
Very securely the prison-house had closed upon me, but please be very
sure that I am not blaming teachers. Many of them met life as it
appeared, and made the best of conditions. There were true teachers
among them, women especially who would have ascended to genius in their
calling, had they been born free and in a brighter age. They were called
upon, as now, to dissipate their values in large classes of children,
having time to see none clearly, and the powers above dealt them out the
loaf that was to be cut. The good teacher in my day was the one who cut
the loaf evenly--to every one his equal part. The first crime was
favoritism....
I sat here recently with a little class of six young people ranging in
age from eleven to twenty. Side by side were a girl of seventeen and a
boy of fourteen, who required from me handling of a nature diametrically
opposite. The approaches to their hearts were on opposite sides of the
mountain. Yet they had been coming for three months before I acutely
sensed this. The girl had done very well in school. She was known to be
bright; and yet, I found her all caught in rigidities of the brain,
tightly corseted in mental forms of the accepted order. Her production
was painfully designed to meet the requirements of her time and place;
the true production of her nature was not only incapable of finding
expression, but it was not even in a state of healthful quiescence. It
was pent, it was dying of confinement, it was breathing with only a
tithe of its tissue.
The wonderful thing about youth is that it answers.
The boy next had not done well in school. The word _dreamer_ was
designated to the very thought of him. Yet this boy had awed me--the
mute might of him. One day I talked for fifteen minutes and abruptly
told him to bring in the next day, written, what had struck him, if
anything, in what I had said. He brought me in two thousand words of
almost phenomenal reproduction--and yet he had listened sleepily. Of
course, I did not care to develop his reportorial instinct after this
display. My work was to develop his brain to express the splendid inner
voltage of the boy, just as certainly as I had found it necessary to
repress the brain and endeavour to free the spirit of the girl. I will
come to this individual study again. It is my point here merely to show
how helpless even great vision must be to the needs of the individual,
in classes of youths and children ranging as they do in crowded
schools.
I had been one who thought my own work most important--to the exclusion
even of the rights of others. For instance when the Old Man (as he is
affectionately designated) went to the Study, he was not to be
disturbed. All matters of domestic order or otherwise must be carried on
without him in these possessed and initialed hours. After dinner the Old
Man had to read and rest; later in the afternoon, there was the Ride and
the Garden, and in the evening, letters and possibly more production. At
meal-time he was available, but frequently in the tension of food and
things to do.... As I see it now, there was a tension everywhere--tension
wherever the Old Man appeared, straining and torturing his own tasks, had
he only known it.
The little girl dared to tread where the older ones had been so
well-taught to hold back. One of the first vacation mornings she joined
him on the path to the Study and lured him down to the beach. It was the
time of day for the first smoke, the smoke of all. Now the Old Man was
accustomed to enter the Study, sweep the hearth with his own hands,
regard the bow of shore-line from the East window--the Other Shore--for
a moment; scrutinise the copy of the day or night before, for the
continuity of the present day, light the pipe and await the impulse of
production. Many years of work had ordained this order; many hard
lessons resulting from breaking the point of the day's work before
sitting down to it; many days that had been spoiled by a bite too much
breakfast, or by a distraction at the critical moment.
However, the Old Man was down on the beach with a little girl of ten who
wanted to talk. She wanted to know about the shells and waves, what
ridged the sand, and what the deep part of the Lake was paved with. The
answers were judicious. Presently he was talking about things nearer the
front of mind, about the moon and tides, the tides of the sea, in this
Lake, in teacups, in the veins of plants and human blood--the backward
and forward movement of everything, the ebb and flow everywhere--in
short, the Old Man was discussing the very biggest morsel of all
life--vibration. He arose and started up the bank.
"Don't go yet," the little girl called.
"Wait," said he. "I'm coming back. I want to get my pipe."
There was a mist in the morning, and the big stone where she sat was
still cool from the night before. The South Wind which has a sweetness
of its own was just ruffling the Lake; there had been rain, and it was
Summer. The smell of the land was there--the perfume of the Old Mother
herself which is the perfume of the tea-rose--the blend of all that
springs into being.
"Sometimes you catch her as she is," the Old Man said. "Now to-day she
smells like a tea-rose. I don't mean the smell of any particular plant,
but the breath of all--as if old Mother Nature were to pass, and you
winded the beauty of her garments. At night, sometimes she smells like
mignonette--not like mignonette when you hold it close to your face, but
when the wind brings it."
He found this very interesting to himself, because he had not thought
about it just so. He found also that a man is dependent for the quality
of his product upon the nature of his listener, just as much as the seed
is dependent upon the soil. It is true a man can go on producing for
years in the quiet without talking to any one, but he doubles on his
faults, and loses more and more the wide freedom of his passages. Here
was a wrinkled forehead to warn one that the expression wasn't coming
clearly, or when the tension returned. The Other Shore was faintly
glorified in her morning veil.
"We'll go back to the Study and write some of these things we've seen
and talked about," the Old Man said at length. "You see they're not
yours until you express them. And the things _you_ express, as I
expressed them, are not yours either. What you want to express is the
things you get from all this. The value of that is that no one else can
do it."
She went willingly, sat in a corner of the Study.
The Old Man forgot her in a moment.
That was the real beginning.
Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again)
had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a
distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other,
but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference,
however. I had no fewer _good_ mornings than formerly; and yet, any
heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and
intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her
happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged
there.
She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently
with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation
of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:
"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves
as below. It might happen that in a few years--this relation might be
changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us
now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come
in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than
I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one.
I sit in the midst of you--telling you from day to day of the things I
have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan.
My first years here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently
the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When
you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much
I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days,
for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must
reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of
Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow
filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with
the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old
become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate
matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in
relation to the long life--the importance only of one bead on the
endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us
that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight
moment--that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the
lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned
to tell."
I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I
believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the
more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to
bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent
generations did not possess, and from the absence of which much
deformity and sorrow has come to be.
The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her
own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to
one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the
organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it
never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be
at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture
of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in
the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter
a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the
thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face--a mistake
of meaning impossible.
Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail
purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting
her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I
wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul--if the expression
can be forgiven.