things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in
material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the
lie that we prosper by adding _things_ unto ourselves.... A certain
automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within
a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the
maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a
commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means,
the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual
lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of
children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear--to
say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built
nothing.
There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot,
or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others
screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and
pluck it forth--eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have
a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do
again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of
the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages
could pay for these hells of routine.
Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his
individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And
for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a
marvel for efficiency.
The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage
here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down
another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes
who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since
they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property--but
the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than
mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.
* * * * *
A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is
never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task
well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own
centres of being, puts his enduring self in it--a self said to be
fashioned not of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind.
You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or
friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes
to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price--matter yields unto
you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or
the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You
possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.
I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought--and he
didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but
bark and green, shade and sun--a kind of twilight curtain dropped before
his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.
"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.
"Why?"
"Why, they're just stones----"
I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his
landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the
bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance--that it was a
challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient
presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal
with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction--the rest of
his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a
septic-tank where air and light must be excluded.... This man had
another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I
would point out merely that he did not truly own them.
Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion
with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any
beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.
I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of
two distinct emotions--the first a wearing tension lest some one should
come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I
had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely
evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that
money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius
for the assembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent
years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as
life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it
all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more
designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I
found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes
for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing
he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many
decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that
charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the
making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by
men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they
were fine; then they received.
It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when
the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he
realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand.
Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a
spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation
of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the
whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe
and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing
but jingle and tinkle and din.
I didn't know the buttons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain
slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the
instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in
every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and
exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the
genius of the machine. It answered, not in _tempo_ and volume alone, but
in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young
musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch
the _Waldstein_ or the _Emperor_, and that I had now merely to
punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....
A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor
cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not
true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured
objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by
methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the
motor or the assembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played
upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one
hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to
the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of
manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and
mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and
more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and
selling.
Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness,
break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices
through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and
acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable
in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue
for such productions, which is advertising.
You will say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A
people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and
sated with inferior objects. The whole _art of life_ is identified with
our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses
and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current
style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of
stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the
cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true
appreciations--in clothing, house-building and furnishing--following the
heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.
We have lost the gods within; we have forgotten the real producers, the
real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and God knows
that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily
spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his
name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter
inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming
an incentive of the many.
There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful
character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the
man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our
national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of
each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the
many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple
theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling
dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes,
and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of
the eternal things--just so long will we have war and governmental
stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.
24
THE FRESH EYE
Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as
possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs
our neighbours sing--this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that
we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness
to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as
true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each
man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit
of pioneers to come into his own.
A few years ago I passed for a square or two along the main avenue of a
large city--a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the
hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most
hideous shades--the reds of blood and lust and decadence.
"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.
A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft. I saw something about
America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't
know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the
season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans
was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence
of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to
ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking
and horror-bound peoples--bloody as the Balkans--because Trade had
brought them in.
These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain
colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye
that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not
know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short
steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a
street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood.
I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy
with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency
of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be
there.
He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a
certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying
set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward
to the shoulders of the motorman; and from his figure my mind wandered
to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon
the _juice_ and upon the passing force of steam--through tunnels and
trestles at this moment--driving trains and cars and ships around the
world.
It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this
motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving
passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each
day--his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his
faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos
again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this
motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The
average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not
too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the
roads of production to those who are ready.
Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding
his trousers.
They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual
every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear
white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that
change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the
more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer
clothing winter and summer for months at a stretch. One must accept
this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not
want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its
threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.
... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the
cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wide _W_ that a
child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I
suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and
conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these
things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the
Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for
us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we
seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had
we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the
debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this
good man should be shamed so.
And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the
tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season,
widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the
abdomen as from a tightened stem the next--these are the real
obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is
frank and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human
beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If
I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me
do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the
bringing up of children _not to revolt_.
* * * * *
I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall
man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he
loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before
your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be _alone_ is
to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and
warm.
It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their
freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see
things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as
they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker
who brings up anything worthy, has done just this--reproduced the thing
more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or
because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute
need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him.
It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's
work in the Chapel.
Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of
character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect
of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time
of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an
important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play
or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This
is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial
settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth--_white_ because
it contains all colour--is not dominant and flaring enough for the
wearied and plethoric eye.
We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A
writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the
story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character,
the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of
fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes
through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These
forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our
own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as
it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion
that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no
matter how consummate we become as artists.
It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his
study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under
London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk
for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary
grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a
more perfect expression in words.
In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all
observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the
work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of
acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of
character portrayal--the facility with which we are able to lose
ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known
delight when some one said, "You must _be_ that person when you are
writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer
through a book and presently begins _to do himself_. After that one goes
over the early part of the book during which the character is being
learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished
conception."
It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a
shiftiness which must pass.
The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is
cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The
expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near
a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The
instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because
it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by
actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells
us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit
of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the
truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par
with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal
is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love
of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle,
Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the
fiction sense--that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to
enflesh their literary efforts in story form.
This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors
above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were
interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the
years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own
minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the
whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and
more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind
draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its
expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and
fictioning of any form is impossible.
Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that
charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to
encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its
centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and
the actual.
The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their
inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely
mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become
more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form
their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of
the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task
of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.
I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way
is first--all the great companions have taken that way at first.
Solitude--that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism.
The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of
God--then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two
worlds--that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings--and a time for
great migratory flights.
25
THE CHOICE OF THE MANY
A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it
had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation--a patriotic
meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be
ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national
integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new
civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems
divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly
bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in
themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material
vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe
gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their
spines touched with death.
The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and
the like. It has been a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the
larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it--as if they had
been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and
understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and
conception _for them_, they find it mainly out of accord with things as
they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build
forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.
This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us,
the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their
distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation
is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his
spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many
or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to
understand him better than their fathers.
I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect
significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as
mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you--new
thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic
age.
You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you
long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it is here
and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever
divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the
three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein
the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset,
are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no
universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer
you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you
will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the
lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a
lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may
live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that
which is static is dead.