brought me the following which told the story in her own words of
something she had met:
WHAT THE SCHOOLS DO FOR CHILDREN
Try to remember some of your early ideas and impressions. Can
you recall the childish thoughts that came when a new thing
made its first impress on your mind? If so, try to feel with
me the things I am struggling to explain.
I like to look back at those times when everything to me was
new; when every happening brought to me thoughts of my very
own. Just now I recall the time I first noticed a tiny chick
raise its head after drinking from a basin of water. To me
that slow raising of the head after drinking seemed to
indicate the chick's silent thanks to God. It meant that for
each swallow it offered thanks. This was before I went to
school.
There I learned the plain truth that the chick must raise its
head to swallow. School had grasped the door-knob of my soul.
The many children taught me the world's lesson that each man
must look out for himself. If the simpler children did not
keep up, that was their look-out. There was no time to stop
and help the less fortunate. Push ahead! This is what I came
to learn.
At school I met for the first time with distrust. At home I
had always been trusted; my word never doubted. Once I was
accused of copying; that was the first wound. How I would
have those all-powerful teachers make the child know he is
trusted.
At school there were many other lessons for me to learn. One
of the chief was competition. I learned it early. To have
some of the class-stars shine brighter than I was
intolerable. To shine as bright, was sufficient compensation
for any amount of labour. The teachers encouraged
competition. It lent life to labour; made the children more
studious. Our motto was not to do our best, but to do as well
as the best. Competition often grew so keen among my school
friends that rivalry, jealousy and dislike entered our
hearts. I am afraid we sometimes rejoiced at one another's
misfortunes. Yet these competitors were my school friends.
Out of school we were all fond of one another, but in school
we grew further apart. My sister would compete with no one. I
have often since wondered if that is why she, of all my
school companions, has ever been my closest friend. The child
filled with the competitive spirit from his entrance to his
egress from school, enters the world a competitive man. It is
hard for such a one to love his neighbour.
The one thing I consider of great benefit from school life is
the taste of the world it gave me. For school is the
miniature world. A man is said to benefit from a past evil.
The school did not teach me to express myself; it taught me
how to echo the books I read. I did not look through my own
eyes, but used the teacher's. I tried to keep from my work
all trace of myself, reflecting only my instruction, knowing
well that the teacher would praise his perfect reflection.
Sometimes I feel that the door of my soul has so far shut
that I can but get a glimpse of the real Me within.
Unless the school can trust children, show them that they
should also be interested in their less fortunate
school-mates, try to do always their best at the particular
work to which they are best adapted, it must go on failing. A
child had much better remain at home, a simple but
whole-souled creature, learning what he can from Nature and
wise books.
* * * * *
... I had talked to them long on making the most of their misfortunes.
This also which came from The Valley-Road Girl, I thought very tender
and wise:
MAY EVENING
A spirit of restlessness ruled me. Each night I retired with
the hope that the morning would find it gone. It disturbed my
sleep. It was not the constant discontent I had hitherto felt
with the world. This was a new disquietude.
One May evening I followed our little river down to the place
it flows into the Lake. Slowly the light of day faded. From
my seat upon the green bank of a stream, a wonderful picture
stretched before me. The small stream and the surrounding
country were walled in by dense green trees. To the west the
cool, dark depths parted only wide enough for the creek to
disappear through a narrow portal. Through small openings in
the southern wall, I caught glimpses of the summer cottages
on the sandy shore. To the north stretched the pasture-lands
with shade-trees happy to hide their nakedness with thick
foliage. Here, too, a large elm displayed all its grace. To
the east was a bridge and a long lane. From behind a misty
outline of trees, the sun's crimson reflections suffused the
western sky. Two men paddled a boat out into the light and
disappeared under the bridge. Nothing disturbed the peace of
the stream save the dip of the paddles, and the fish rising
to the surface for food. A circle on the surface meant that
an insect had lain at its centre; a fish had risen and
devoured it. Circles of this kind were continually being cut
by the circumferences of other circles.... A dark speck moved
down the stream. A turtle was voyaging.
Now, far in the shadows, I saw a man sitting on the bank
fishing. His patience and persistence were remarkable, for he
had been there all the time. But the fish were at play. The
occasional splash of the carp, mingling with the perpetual
song of the birds and the distant roar of the waves breaking
on the shore to the south, formed one grand over-tone.
A feeling of awe came over me. I felt my insignificance. I
saw the hand of God. My relation to my surroundings was very
clear. My soul bowed to the God-ness in all things natural.
The God-ness in me was calling to be released. It was useless
to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It
must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an
echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought
becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was
readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be applied
and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by
inward feelings. This was my soul's complaint.
No tree was exactly like one of its neighbours. Each
fulfilled its purpose in its particular way. Yet all
proclaimed the One Source. Performing its function, it was
fit to censure me and I took the cup.
... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the
little stream; heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was
weeping tears of sympathy for one so short-sighted and drawn
to failure.
10
COMPASSION
I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the
difference between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two
of fourteen and seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be
herself. She has never been patronised; and in the last year or more has
been actively encouraged to express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as
stated, she has no particular talent for writing. She is the one who
wants to be a mother. Not in the least precocious, her charm is quite
equal for little girls or her elders. Her favourite companions until
recently were those of her own age.
On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they
want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the
passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of
matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech
and reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected
thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of
existence--had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old
artist, are the very passages of power.
"... Except that ye become as little children----" that is the
beginning of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in
religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the
world, or most of them, and all have told the same story--look to Rodin,
Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of
the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied
men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior
purpose, confronted the lie with the realities of their own nature, and
fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is so often the
unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched open, as
they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and more like
little children at the end.
The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must
have the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality
of the modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation,
because the old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our
hearts.... I was promising an untold something for a future lesson to
the little girl yesterday, just as she was getting to work. The
anticipation disturbed the present moment, and she said:
"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek----"
Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a
song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the
perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me--in the sunlight and
elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it
was so near--every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the
pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I
was already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song
was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the
Old Mother--that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was
gone--a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this
sentence in the room:
"... _sang four songs and flew away._"
It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of
course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression.
However, no after explanations will help--if the art of the thing is not
apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman
said--"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."
And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a
Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights
are at half-mast."
She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child
in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her
reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all
within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get
it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as
much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to
express that which he has seen--which is so small compared to the big
colour and atmosphere."
I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a
picture.
A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a
story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked
as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."
Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment _to get
started_, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end
of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it
slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays
upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded
white----"
Or:
"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring
beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little
woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering
at their little legs, I felt a part----"
I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to
write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,--at
least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction
that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could
get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something
very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner
pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do
that--to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression.
The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has
emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a
life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his
deepest inner listening--in which the trained mind-instrument is
quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater
source within.
The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me,
among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I
find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her
expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I
administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening
out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart
Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his
work--honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's
ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You
will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept
the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the
doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's
"Walking"--there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to
Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer.
The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It
was not that I wanted her to _get_ Mill or Burke, but that the mental
exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or
masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams,
playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.
Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child
becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the
mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they
are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith
without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best
developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes
from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.
In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the
case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even
to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly
inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road
Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the
first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have
related something of the process.
The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of
intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is
only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational
systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual
potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of
which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from
within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an
heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in
the present scheme of things.
Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly
various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount
to, are all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the
calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the
world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five
consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot
get through to the world except through the brain.
In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe
that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of
the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is naive, not
to have explained before, that from the view these things are written
the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression--most superb and
admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a
listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the
machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without
but within.
If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison,
having been forced to turn their eyes within--you will find a hint to
the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom
solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the
time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior
promptings for their mental activity--the passage entirely closed
between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary
confinement makes madmen of such--if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.
The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the
current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward,
or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed
only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to
be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you
powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his
disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of
equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed
intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not
ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.
A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten
proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take
his place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own
individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any
sense of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a
man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the
sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham
and a delusion.
Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the
Unity of all Existing Things (which is literally brooding upon this
planet in these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of
the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy.
Time has made the greatest of the _sheer_ intellects of the past appear
apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each
racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of
remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the
conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire,
Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.
Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything
fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant
within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this
awakening is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of
this greater day, in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion,
the Unity of All Things is descried.
11
THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK
"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have
done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of
China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to
read."
So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future
work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him
with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries,
even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the
setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the
monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the
psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event,
the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.
The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent
along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her
lap--and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:
"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and
now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so
good."
"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write
until you begin to dream as you write--until you forget hand and paper
and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain
interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."
In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will
get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an
idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy
back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who
come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these
papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a
ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more
cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the
quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:
Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build
his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere--in Germany,
in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen
with her in the wild places.
In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the
Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted
to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and
square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than
others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees,
such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve
their branches without the thought of being cut down for a
sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings.
Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at
the feet of these trees and ask questions that _disgraced_
Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower
fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple
little stones.
Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds
like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century
instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up.
The thing I _really_ wanted to write about this morning was
the goodness of being alive here in winter.
After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows
and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes
up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow,
all through the sky.
Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look
like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.
Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last
shades of night pass out of the sky.
Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot
look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam--just enough to make you feel
like work.
A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening
the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of
our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A
wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!
* * * * *
So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many
lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are
killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous
and vulgar ways--maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end.
Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year
these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them
and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition
is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies
and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of
higher Nature, which men should know.
In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes
going about their work--I mean their _own_ work and affairs. To me it
seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't
got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering:
"Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."