mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in
your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's
button; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in
human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand--and all
about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand,
and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered
itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget
that inner ardency--the virgin unfolding to the sun--born of some great
passion that seemed poised between earth and heaven--and expectant of
its own great passion's maturity.
I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who
would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song
of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things.
I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings--the ecstasy of the little
old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in
the world.
I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose
marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose
corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the
shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a
thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but
the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The
first had great foliages of coarse mane and tail; the other, a splendid
beast that would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.
We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future
in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour
idealism. Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and lustrous we
become, according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It
is the quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto
itself the excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for
his size, longer-lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural
elasticity, capable of infinitely greater physical, mental, and moral
tasks, than the tightly compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere
painter's flourish which adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there
if we see clearly. If the sanctity is radiant, the glow is intense
enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow, to be photographed, even
caught with the physical eye.
16
THE PLAN IS ONE
I was relating the experience of the Columbian. In his case there had
been much time, so there could be no mistake. He had devoted himself to
making and keeping a rather magnificent set of muscles which manifested
even through white man's clothing. He did this with long days of sailing
and swimming, cultivating his body with the assiduity of a
convalescent.... I told him in various ways he was not getting himself
out of his work; explained that true preparation is a tearing off of
husks one after another; that he was a fine creation in husk, but that
he must get down to the quick before he could taste or feel or see with
that sensitiveness which would make any observation of his valuable.
With all this body-building, he was in reality only covering himself the
thicker. If a man does this sort of thing for a woman's eye, he can only
attract a creature of blood and iron whose ideal is a policeman--a very
popular ideal....
For two or three days he would work terrifically, then, his weight
besetting, he would placate himself with long tissue-feeding sports. I
told him that he had everything to build upon; that true strength really
begins where physical strength ends; that all that he had in equipment
must be set in order and integrated with his own intrinsic powers, it
being valueless otherwise. I pointed out that he was but a collector of
things he could not understand, because he did not use them; that the
great doers of the world had toiled for years upon years, as he did not
toil for one week's days successively.... It would not do, except for
short intervals, and it came to me that my best service was to get out
from under. I told him so, and the manliness of his acceptance choked
me. I told him to go away, but to come again later if he mastered
Inertia in part.... It was not all his fault. From somewhere, an income
reached him regularly, a most complete and commanding curse for any boy.
... I do not believe in long vacations. Children turned loose to play
for ten weeks without their tasks, are most miserable creatures at the
end of the first fortnight. They become more at ease as the vacation
period advances, but that is because the husk is thickening, a most
dangerous accretion. The restlessness is less apparent because the body
becomes heavy with play. It all must be worn down again, before the
fitness of faculty can manifest.
If one's body is ill from overexertion, it must rest; if one's mind is
ill from nervousness, stimulation, or from excessive brain activity, it
must rest; but if one's soul is ill, and this is the difference, nothing
but activity will help it, and this activity can only be expressed
through the body and mind. Surplus rest of body or mind is a process of
over-feeding, which is a coarsening and thickening of tissue, which in
its turn causes Inertia, and this word I continually capitalise, for it
is the first devil of the soul.
Before every spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be
overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the
world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their
lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their
sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat
heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times _a great calm_,
another dimension of calm entirely from that which has to do with animal
peace and repletion. It is the peace of intensive production--and the
spectacle of it is best seen when you lift the super from a hive of
bees, the spirit of which animates every moving creature to one
constructive end. That which emanates from this intensity of action is
calm, is harmony, and harmony is rest. A man does not have to sink into
a stupor in order to rest. The hours required for rest have more to do
with the amount of food one takes, and the amount of tissue one tears
down from bad habits, than from the amount of work done. Absolutely this
is true if a man's work is his own peculiar task, for the work a man
loves replenishes.
Desire tears down tissue. There is no pain more subtle and terrifying
than to want something with fury. To the one who is caught in the rhythm
of his task, who can lose himself in it, even the processes which so
continually tear down the body are suspended. In fact, if we could hold
this rhythm, we could not die.
This is what I would tell you: Rhythm of work is joy. This is the full
exercise--soul and brain and body in one. Time does not enter; the self
does not enter; all forces of beautifying play upon the life. There is a
song from it--that some time all shall hear, the song that mystics have
heard from the bees, and from open nature at sunrise, and from all
selfless productivity.
One cannot play until one has worked--that is the whole truth. Ask that
restless child to put a room in order, to cleanse a hard-wood floor, to
polish the bath fixtures. Give him the ideal of cool, flyless
cleanliness in a room. Hold the picture of what you want in mind and
detail it to him, saying that you will come again and inspect his work.
Watch, if you care, the mystery of it. There will be silence until the
thing begins to unfold for him--until the polish comes to wood or metal,
until the thing begins to answer and the picture of completion bursts
upon him. Then you will hear a whistle or a hum, and nothing will break
his theme until the end.
The ideal is everything. You may impress upon him that the light falls
differently upon clean things, that the odour is sweet from clean
things; that the hand delights to touch them, that the heart is rested
when one enters a clean room, because its order is soothing.... It isn't
the room, after all, that gets all the order and cleansing. The whistle
or the hum comes from harmony within.
A man who drank intolerably on occasion told me that the way he "climbed
out" was to get to cleaning something; that his thoughts freshened up
when he had some new surface to put on an object. He meant that the
order came to his chaos, and the influx of life began to cleanse away
the litter of burned tissue and the debris of debauch. One cannot keep
on thinking evil thoughts while he makes a floor or a gun or a field
clean. The thing is well known in naval and military service where
bodies of men are kept in order by continual polishing of brasses and
decks and accoutrements. A queer, good answer comes to some from
softening and cleansing leather. There is a little boy here whose
occasional restlessness is magically done away with, if he is turned
loose with sponge and harness-dressing upon a saddle and bridle. He
sometimes rebels at first (before the task answers and the picture
comes) but presently he will appear wide-eyed and at peace, bent upon
showing his work.
Play is a drug and a bore, until one has worked. I do not believe in
athletics for athletics' sake. Many young men have been ruined by being
inordinately praised for physical prowess in early years. Praise for
bodily excellence appeals to deep vanities and is a subtle deranger of
the larger faculties of man. The athlete emerges into the world
expectant of praise. It is not forthcoming, and his real powers have
been untrained to earn the greater reward. Moreover the one-pointed
training for some great momentary physical stress, in field events, is a
body-breaker in itself, a fact which has been shown all too often and
dramatically. Baseball and billiards are great games, but as
life-quests--except for the few consummately adapted players whose
little orbit of powers finds completion in diamond or green-baized
rectangle--the excessive devotion to such play is desolating, indeed,
and that which is given in return is fickle and puerile adulation.
A man's work is the highest play. There is nothing that can compare with
it, as any of the world's workmen will tell you. It is the thing he
loves best to do--constructive play--giving play to his powers,
bringing him to that raptness which is full inner breathing and
timeless.... We use the woods and shore, water and sand and sun and
garden for recreation. In the few hours of afternoon after Chapel until
supper, no one here actually produces anything but vegetables and tan,
yet the life-theme goes on. We are lying in the sun, and some one
speaks; or some one brings down a bit of copy. We listen to the Lake;
the sound and feel of water is different every day. We find the
stingless bees on the bluff-path on the way to the bathing shore. It is
all water and shore, but there is one place where the silence is deeper,
the sun-stretch and sand-bar more perfect. We are very particular. One
has found that sand takes magnetism from the human body, as fast as
sunlight can give it, and he suggests that we rest upon the grass
above--that fallow lands are fruitful and full of giving. We test it out
like a wine, and decide there is something in it.
There is something in everything.
The Dakotan said (in his clipped way and so low-voiced that you have to
bend to hear him) that the birds hear something in the morning that we
don't get. He says there is a big harmony over the earth at sunrise, and
that the birds catch the music of it, and that songs are their efforts
to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We
recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get
this--if it ever comes to us--and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he
_heard_ his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral
pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them
seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are trying to
bring out.
We thought there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat
is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come
to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order
begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of
surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has
come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden afternoon
in a wheat-field just before cutting. One loves the Old Mother better
for that adventure. She must give high for wheat. She must be virgin and
strong and come naked and unashamed to the sun to bring forth wheat. She
must bring down the spirit of the sun and blend it with her own--for
wheat partakes of the _alkahest_. Wheat is a master, an aristocrat.
The Dakotan said that once when he was on the Open Road through the
northwest, he slept for two days in a car of wheat, and that it was a
bath of power.... We thought we would make our beds in wheat,
thereafter--but that would be sacrilege.
Then we talked of that mysterious harmony from the beehives, and we saw
at once that it has to do with Order, that Inertia was mastered
there--that the spirit of wheat has mastered Inertia--so that there is a
nobility, even about the golden husk. It occurred to us, of course,
then, that all the aristocrats of Nature--rose and wheat and olives and
bees and alabaster and grapes--must all have their part of the harmony,
for Order has come to their chaos. Their spirit has come forth, as in
the face of a far-come child--the brute earth-bound lines of self
gone--the theme of life, Service.
I am at the end of Capitals now.
One afternoon we talked about corn--from the fields where the passionate
mystic Ruth gleaned, to our own tasseled garden plot. And another day we
found the ants enlarging the doors of their tunnels, to let out for the
nuptial flight certain winged mistresses. There is something in
everything.
Each of us sees it differently. Each of us can take what he sees, after
all the rest have told their stories, and make a poem of that. The first
wonder of man cannot be conceived until this is realised.
There is an inner correspondence in the awakened human soul for every
movement and mystery of Nature. When the last resistance of Inertia is
mastered, we shall see that there is no separateness anywhere, no
detachment; that the infinite analogies all tell the same story--that
the plan is one.
17
THE IRISH CHAPTER
There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars--the
Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old
man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to
tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true
Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake
received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.
"It isn't--it's listening."
It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata,
called _Appassionata_. There is one here who plays that, and because it
tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the
others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems
to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never
tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a
woman--of love and life and death. She wants the earth in her love--but
her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth.
The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her--her love a
perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not
be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her
re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.
The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's _Departure_--to us the most
magic of all the great little poems. But in _Departure_ it is the woman
who is called.
... Again and again in the _Appassionata_, the word comes to the woman,
saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will
not hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty--all the wonder that
Mother Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have
told her that it must be, but she does not obey--and then the Master
comes down.
It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone.
The _chelas_ have spoken and have not availed. Now the _Guru_ speaks.
Out of vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out
of the deeps and heights of compassion, the _Guru_ speaks--and suddenly
the woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is
expressed in the treble--a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a
cup held forth--or palms held upward. The _Guru_ speaks. His will is
done.
And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was
listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked
of Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always
brings; or it may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just
been slaughtered in a cause that had far less significance to Ireland
than our child talk by the fire; or it may have been the South Wind that
brought us closer to the fairy Isle, for it is the Irish peasants who
say to a loved guest at parting:
"May you meet the South Wind."
"... There isn't really an Ireland any more--just a few old men and a
few old, haunting mothers. Ireland is here in America, and the last and
stiffest of her young blood is afield for England. Her sons have always
taken the field--that is their way--and the mothers have brought in more
sons born of sorrow--magic-eyed sons from the wombs of sorrow. Elder
brothers afield--fathers gone down overseas--only the fairies left by
the hearth for the younger sons to play with.... So they have sung
strange songs and seen strange lights and moved in rhythms unknown to
many men. It is these younger sons who are Ireland now. Not a place, but
a passion; not a country, but a romance.... They are in the love stories
of the world, and they are always looking for their old companions, the
fairies. They find the fairies in the foreign woodlands; they bring the
fairies to the new countries. They are in the songs that hush the heart;
they are in the mysticism that is moving the sodden world. Because they
played with fairies, they were taught to look past and beyond the flesh
of faces--past metals and meals and miles. Of the reds and greys and
moving golds which they see, the soul of the world loves to listen, for
the greatest songs and stories of all are from the Unseen----"
It was the old man dreaming aloud.
"Ireland isn't a place any more. It is a passion infused through the
world," he added.
"But the fairies are still there," the little girl said.
"Some are left with the old mothers--yes, some are left. But many have
taken the field, and not for the wars."
A four-day moon was dropping fast in the low west. Jupiter was climbing
the east in imperial purple--as if to take command.... The littlest boy
stirred in the arms of the Dakotan and began to speak, staring at the
fire. We all turned and bent to listen--and it was that very thing that
spoiled it--for the sentence faltered and flew away.
We all wanted to know what had been born in that long silence, for the
firelight was bright in two eyes that were very wide and wise--but the
brain was only seven.... I left the circle and went up the cliff to
find a book in the study--a well-used book, an American book. Returning,
I read this from it, holding the page close to the fire:
OLD IRELAND
Far hence, amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother,
Once a queen--now lean and tatter'd, seated on the ground,
Her old white hair drooping dishevel'd round her shoulders;
Long silent--she too long silent--mourning her shrouded hope and heir;
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.
Yet a word, ancient mother;
You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground, with forehead between
your knees;
O you need not sit there, veil'd in your old white hair, so dishevel'd;
For know you, the one you mourn is not in that grave;
It was an illusion--the heir, the son you love, was not really dead;
The Lord is not dead--he is risen, young and strong, in another country;
Even while you wept there by your fallen harp, by the grave,
What you wept for, was translated, pass'd from the grave,
The winds favoured and the sea sail'd it,
And now with rosy and new blood,
Moves to-day in a new country.
One by one they dropped off asleep, the little ones first, as the moon
went down--their thoughts so full of stars, asking so dauntlessly all
questions of world and sky. What I could, I answered, but I felt as
young as any. It seemed their dreams were fresher than mine, and their
closeness to God.... The little girl touched me, as we drifted away----
"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.
18
THE BLEAKEST HOUR
It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are,
a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without
penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may
become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle
fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find
certain friends and sterling enemies--and either lose or win,
ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.
Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may
reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are
wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He
sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing
earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the
dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed.
He blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet--at least,
a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning
over of the whole afterward.
Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the
bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are
moving about our business of house and country and world in a most
stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine
of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open
and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men,
indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the
only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to
the nostrils.
But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the
world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving--but
with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of
self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which
has not remotely to do with an erect spine.
Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is
no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them
along, find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may
be said that wars have brought great benefits to the race; that
materialism has taught us our place here below as no other passion
could; that trade has wrought its incomparable good to the races of
men; that Fear has been the veritable mother of our evolution, its dark
shadow forever inciting us, breaking our Inertia, bringing swiftness and
strength first to the body, then to brain. Even desire for self, on the
long road behind, has been the good angel of our passage, for we had to
become splendid beasts before the dimension of man could be builded....
All good; mistakes nowhere in the plan.
But the trouble is, the passage of the many from grade to grade is
intolerably slow. We had thought the many had finished with war. The few
already are many grades ahead of that; the few have seen the virtues die
out of patriotism and trade; they have watched the desire for self turn
reptile, and hearkened to this truth which is beginning to reverberate
around the world: _What is good for beasts is not of necessity good for
men_.... One recent caller here, male, middle-aged, smilingly discussed
all things from the philosophical point of view. I was saying:
"From the nursery to world-clutched retirement from public affairs, a
man nowadays is taught more and more to keep his heart-principle
locked----"