the time. Three-score-and-ten--that is but an evening camp in a vast
continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour,
but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone.
Art--those who talk art in the temporal--have not begun to work. If they
only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose
lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived
beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the
illusion of one life being all.
There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and
science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks
loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the
universe. That thing known as _psychology_ taught to-day in colleges
will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the
preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can
become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually
changed into new forms.
Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not
change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as
you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on
the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing
machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh
is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and
changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in
your heart--that sleeping one--is dynamic with all that you have been.
Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an
immortal being. You may be workers in magic.
Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does
not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its
dictates and learned its wants--its taste will change and leave you
nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of
the many is not the voice of God--it is the voice of the temporal and
its destiny is swift mutation.
Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that
is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to
see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us
sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who
have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country--have walked
with God alone against the crowd--until they were given the power to
master their way into authority.
The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its
choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.
26
THE ROSE CHAPTER
I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became
irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and
old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a
tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature--a white lid that had been on quite
long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her
talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot
began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though
outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of
other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs
and woodland places--of the gardens we would make presently.
"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man,
"I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and
little beside--vines, of course. I know men who fall like this into the
iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will
have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in
his front yard with unvarying resolution--oh, for many years. He knows
just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with
the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies.
They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad--the single ones, dry and
thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed
place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful--born of evil
thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear
innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative
effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him,
and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.
"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than
the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care.
Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that
forgets to bloom--like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human.
Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see
deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."
Which remarks were accepted without comment.
"Again," the old man added, "some of the accepted things are not so far
along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see
it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were
to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen
anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is
raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the
whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in
their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an
exhalation that is like a love-potion--earthy things that ask so little,
do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the
bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance
is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage
is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency
goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."
"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.
"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the
voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their
odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot
express his gratitude for--like the mignonette. Their colouring and form
warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each
year--not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the
way. Then I may betray a weakness of my own--and I am glad to--but I
love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the
white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of
its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown
like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has
never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the
lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can
only be endured in my case from a distance."
"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.
"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me
that people raise so many _just roses_. Here is a world by itself. There
is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and
saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and
sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are
roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are
delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human
heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for
Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that
one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so
far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women
of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, as thousands of
other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past
against which to measure their romances.
"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and
woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world--of
all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at
length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be
veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits
for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all
great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since
greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through
expression. A great romance will out--through a child or a book or some
mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One
looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest
deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of
woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's
arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his
actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her
energy that quickens his conceiving....
"Roses--how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and
women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of
themselves? Do you think that the actual _hurt_ of their beauty--the
restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their
silent leaning over the rim of a vase--is nothing more than a product of
soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as
moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist
before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has
come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think
as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like,
that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic
influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening--something that makes a
flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.
"... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have
reached roses--have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they
linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses.
In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which
has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the
white to the pink roses--and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the
search ever more passionate--until we begin to discover that which our
hearts are searching for--not upon any plant but in ideal.
"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about
producing the flower--as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of
the thought. At least we think so--as the universe is evolving to
fulfil at last the full thought of God....
"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes,
until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy
Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste
as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him,
and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his
listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news
of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the
performance of the lesser ones.... But roses--so many by-paths, because
roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell
is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.
"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens
which are at the bottom. There are good greens--the green of young elms
and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of
yellow may be--and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The
greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging--the
water-colours--the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature
brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the
rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like
ninety degrees of evolution--the full quarter of the circle that is
similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect
spine of man.
"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or
less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are
laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These
improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for
instance, to represent all stages--roses that are specialising in their
present growth, one might say, in form _or_ colour _or_ texture; but in
the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our
window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this
distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but
when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in
little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of
evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body,
then a mind, then a soul--and growth in the dimension of soul unifies
and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who
see--that the plan is one....
"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved
according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper
reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the
path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture,
the sun began to paint a new beauty upon them--not the pink that is a
diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl.
The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a
white base.
"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral.
We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is
steadily upward--always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our
valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a
transition--an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.
"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The
greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose
with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it.
There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this
particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have
fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that
have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort
of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland
maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and
colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost
in the same illusion....
"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a
few spots of red on the outer petals--like the persistent adhering
taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys--they are the
best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty.
Like some saintly lives--they seem to have come all but the last of the
ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the
flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in
due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have
turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas
is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of
all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products.
In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they
are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in
their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own
heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the
Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the
nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the
inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the _fragrance itself_ to
our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the
fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose,
on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a
rain."
27
LETTERS
Outside, as I have said, it was cracking cold. We talked thirstily by
the big fire, discussed the perfect yellows in Nature--symbols of purest
aspiration--and the honest browns that come to the sunlight-gold from
service and wear--the yellow-brown of clustered honey bees, of the
Sannysin robe, of the purple martin's breast. We were thirsting for
Spring before the fire. The heart of man swells and buds like a tree. He
waits for Spring like all living things. The first months of winter are
full of zest and joy, but the last becomes intolerable. The little girl
had not let us forget at all, and so we were yearning a full month too
soon.
"I know a bit of woods," said the Abbot. "It is only two miles away. A
creek runs through it, and there are hills all 'round--lots of hickory
and elm and beech. There's one beech woods off by itself. Maples and
chestnuts are there, too, and many little cedars. There is a log house
in the centre, and right near it a Spring----"
He was talking like an old saint would talk of the Promised Land.
"You are breaking our hearts," I said.
"The hills are dry, so you can go early," he went on. "The cattle have
been there in season, as long as I can remember, so there are little
open meadows like lawns. The creek is never dry, and the Spring near the
log house never runs dry. I could go there now----"
"So could I," said the little girl.
They almost trapped me. I stirred in the chair, and remembered there was
but an hour or two of daylight left in the afternoon.... Besides there
was a desk covered with letters.... People ask problems of their own,
having fancied perhaps that they met a parallel somewhere in the
writings from this Study. I used to answer these perfunctorily, never
descending to a form but accepting it as a part of the labour of the
work. I shudder now at the obtuseness of that. I have met people who
said, "I have written you several letters, but never mailed them."
"Why?" I would ask.
Answers to this question summed into the reason that they found
themselves saying such personal things that they were afraid I would
smile or be bored.... Letters are regarded as a shining profit now, a
fine part of the real fruits. The teaching-relation with young minds has
shown me the wonderful values of direct contact. The class of letters
that supplies sources of human value are from men and women who are too
fine ever to lose the sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest
to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who
have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their
minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike
aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons
disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man
is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied
with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest criticism,
the criticism that is constructive because the spirit of it is not
criticism. Letters, however, critical or otherwise, that are heady, do
not bring the beauty that we seem to need, nor do they draw the answers
they were designed for. The pure human impulse is unmistakable.
There are letters from people who want things. Some people want things
so terribly, that the crush of it is upon their pages. I do not mean
autographs. Those who have a penchant for such matters have learned to
make reply very easy; nor do I mean those who have _habits_. There seems
to be a class of men and women who want to "do" literature for money,
and who ask such questions as, "What is the best way to approach a
publisher?" "What should a writer expect to make from his first novel?"
"Do you sell outright or on royalty, and how much should one ask on a
first book, if the arrangement is made this or that way?"
I think of such as the eighty-thousand-the-year folk. The detail of
producing the novel is second to the marketing. The world is so full of
meaning to the effect that fine work is not produced this way; and yet,
again and again, this class of writers have gotten what they want. Much
money has been made out of books by those who wrote for that. People, in
fact, who have failed at many things, have settled down in mid-life and
written books that brought much money.
But such are only incidents. They are not of consequence compared to the
driving impulse which one man or woman in a hundred follows, to write to
one who has said something that quickens the heart.... There was a
letter on the desk that day from a young woman in one of the big
finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably
restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all
truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as
well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered
world called Society--winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain
and shore. They were very miserable and they seemed to sense the
existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there
work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world
existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the
final page or two--that most winning quality of the younger generation.
... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world.
Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is
not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all
that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being
established against American materialism along the Western coast. There
is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art
and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a
conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in
the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand
of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.
All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is
becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of
tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the
entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that
is _living spirit_ is being driven westward before gross Matter--westward
as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.
The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In
California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be
builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and
splendid idealisation.
But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes
lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter
day, was a communication from San Francisco--the last to me of several
documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The
documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They
reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is above
flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the
brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society
reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from
a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a
purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one
approach the super-mental area by the force of mentality alone.
But I found _the turning_ in these documents with alarm; that the
purpose divulged was to master matter for material ends. This is black
business--known to be black before the old Alexandria, known to be black
before the Christ came. They had asked for comment, even for criticism.
I recalled that psychology is the science of the soul, and wrote this
letter: