We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing third.
Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous paintings.
Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in fatness)--but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the promise of the fruit. It was the globe again--the union of the strong and the fragile for a finer dimension of power--bow and cord, ship and sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine--yes, and that which surprised me at the beginning--that gleam of red in the wash of water upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of beauty in a wet, worn brick.
Firelight in a room is just the same thing--a grey stone fireplace with red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....
Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is invariably safe and replete. There are a thousand analogies for every event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul.
The plan is one.
The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say, without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can arrive at the truth of any subject, I need have no worry about sleepy heads or Inertia. A disclosure of truth, and the process of it made clear, is the perfect awakener, for truth is the aliment of the soul. It is not what I say, but what a truth suggests to them, that determines the value of their expression of it.
Expression is the triumph. Every time the brain gives expression to the real self, there is a memorable vitality, not only in the expression, but strength and authority added to the brain itself. This is training for writers, but words are the natural implements for us all.... So the ardent aim of the classes here is to awaken the deeper vitalities of those who listen. When one awakens a soul interest, you may rely upon it the brain is open to its full zest and capacity. Pattering of uncohered facts upon the temporal surface of the brain in the effort to lodge them in the tentacles of memory, does not construct the character of man or woman.
The superb flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire an ancient facility or proclivity in the breast of a boy or girl--the rest is but following the gleam.... The world finds us significant, even heroic, only in so far as we give expression to a power intrinsic.
Another day we found more water-worn bricks. An old brick house long ago had rubbed itself into the falling bank, and now its parts are spread along certain portions of the shore and buried in the sand. The boys brought in a half-bushel of this red treasure, and we set about constructing a narrow cement walk of quality. Our idea was to carry out and make perpetual the affinity of the red gleams as insets in a grey pebble walk.
We worked raptly, even through the hard, dull labour of levelling, setting the frames and laying the concrete foundation. The finishing was the absorbing part. The idea was not for a fine-grained sand walk, but a mixture of all sizes from a penny large down to the finest sand.
The cement makes the most lasting bond in a mixture of this kind; moreover, the pebbly finish was effective and darker for the insets.
The walk was less than two feet wide and roughly squared by pieces of shingle laid in the concrete, tip to tip. The final dressing, two inches of pebble mortar, looked unpromising on account of its coating of white.
It would have hardened a dingy cement colour, instead of the deep, sparkling grey desired, had we not thought of turning a fine spray from the hose upon the newly trowelled surface to wash away the top cement.
To make sure, the surface was then lightly sponged until the pebble-tops were absolutely without the clinging white. The water also erased the least mark of the trowel.
The red insets were now tamped in with the trowel-handle, the unique round edges appearing without a touch of stain. The rapidly hardening mortar was not packed about the brick pieces, but the natural edge of the grey preserved, as if they had been hurled in. They were placed without immediate regularity, but with relation to the walk in its length.... We regarded it afterward in the rain--all frames and shingles removed, the loam and humus of the rose-soil softening the border--the red rounded edges of the brick-insets gleaming out of the grey--a walk that seemed to have been there a thousand years, the red pieces seemingly worn by the bare feet of centuries.... It satisfied, and the thought, too, that those who helped to do the work could not be quite the same after that afternoon.
21
THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS
One day at Chapel, neither the Abbot nor the Dakotan appeared. The Columbian had left us. I looked up to see two young girls and another there. One of the papers brought in that day was upon the joining of two rivers. Where they came together was a whirlpool, a tremendous vortex that hushed all surrounding Nature. In the lowlands that lay about the place of that mighty meeting, a deep verdure came, for the winds carried the spray from the vortex. Nature loved the sounds of that pouring together. From the whirlpool, where two met, one great river emerged, white-maned with rapids for a way--then broad and pure and still, so that only birds and poets could hear the harmony deep as life. From time to time it gave forth its tributaries, yet seemingly was undiminished.
Always on, always one, carrying all, making all pure, through the silent places, past the great mountains--to the sea.
It was not until I had read of this mating of waters that I realised the slightly different conditions in the Chapel, the young men not being there.
... The strangest humility stole over me. It had become the life-theme--to bring a breath from the open splendour of the future to the matings of men and women. I have never been able to understand how anything can be expected of men, if women are not great. I have never been able to understand how men and women can take each other as a matter of course. Most of all, I have been unable to understand how women can accept the man-idea of things.
The great killing in Europe was brought about because women have accepted the man-idea of life. Women are in this sense immediately responsible for the war, because they have not been true to the limitless potentialities of their being. Still from the very hour when man realised his greater bodily strength, continual pressures have fallen upon woman to break her dream. The Hebrew Scriptures show best the processes that have been brought to bear upon women--from the establishment of the patriarchal idea to the final going down into Egypt.
It is in the nature of women to please men, but they have not been allowed through the centuries to please men in their own way. Man wanted to be pleased according to his idea--and women, in accepting that, have prostituted themselves. Men have united with submissive women to bring forth children farther and farther from the dream. Man's idea is possession; that which is possessed is not free. Man's thought is to make woman conform to his ideas; and that which conforms, at once betrays the first law of the growth to greatness--that of being true to one's self.
The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this conception.
Would you like to know where man's ideas--man's plan of Conception--is most utterly outraged? _In the coming of Messiahs._ The Josephs are mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do neither with heights nor depths.
One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of the miracles that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the transition is on....
The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within her--submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream--indeed, the fruits of these dreams have come to be--but more often the heart is filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but the fire they burn with is red and not white.
Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of motherhood--and his words were wise and pure enough--that not one of the women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen, and to answer the dream....
I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When I thought that some time they would be mothers, it came with a rush of emotion--that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these; dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the things said that day are written here without quotations:
... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity--the handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment upon the many--the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.
The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in aspiration--the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services of Romance. As a race we have only touched our lips to the cup of its beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own great being--rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?
I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world....
And then we see the great stony fields of humanity--the potential mass in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer world turns its eyes.
... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought was easily to be comprehended--that it had but to be spoken to be embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and we were strong to answer any call.
It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me so often and so strangely in your coming--but those mysteries within, those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together--all her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the day in Europe of late--the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish these losses.
Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature.
This physical being of ours which the Old Mother has raised from the earth that a God might be built within it--even the beauty of this is not yet fulfilled--much less the powers of the mind which we have touched--much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest moments together so memorable.
... You would be mothers--that is the highest of the arts. The making of books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men--that is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us; suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails.
Again and again we fail--that is the splendid unifying force, working upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods.
Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind for any noble action--that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In the summit of our strength, the voice begins to speak--the _Guru's_ voice.
We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away.
But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.
... You would not do less than this to bring forth men--you who have the call.... You must learn the world--be well grounded in the world. You need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay--but you must have the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother--yet it is only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose, the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.
There is a _different_ love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface ecstasies--that the Old Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous bewilderment of sex-opposites--different from all save the immortal romances.
I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the sepulchre rolled away.
I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no respiration of the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on that fairy slope.
The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here--in the deep gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our physical sight.
Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in beautiful deeds?
The willow burns with quiet meagre warmth, like a lamb led to slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...."
Each with its fragrance--the elm, the silentest and sweetest of all. The elm has forgotten her body in spreading her grace to the stars; the elm for aspiration, loving the starlight so well that she will not hide it from the ground; most beautiful of all, save the beech in winter, a swift and saintly passing of a noble life. The maple warms you in spite of herself, giving up her secrets which are not all clean--a lover of fatness, her shade too dense, a hater of winter, because she is bare, and the secret of all ugliness in her nudity. (The true tree-lover is never a stranger to the winter woods.)
And the mothering beech, with her soft incense, her heart filling the room with warmth and light, her will to warm the world; the mothering beech, a healer and a shelterer, a lover like that Magdalen whose sin was loving much. She gives her body to Gods and men--and most sweetly to the fire, her passing naked and unashamed.
The different love of Nature that the child knows instinctively; that young men and maidens forget in the heat of themselves--but that comes again to us if we grow decently older; in rock and thicket, in the voices of running water, in every recess of woodland and arch of shore--not the Pipes of Pan, but the mysteries of God, not sensuousness, but the awakening of a spirit that has slumbered--the illumination, sudden and splendid, _that all is One_--that Nature is the plane of manifestation for the infinite and perfect story of God; that Nature is the table which God has filled to overflowing--this is a suggestion, a beginning of the lifted love of Nature....