"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering at their little legs, I felt a part----"
I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,--at least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do that--to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression.
The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his deepest inner listening--in which the trained mind-instrument is quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater source within.
The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me, among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his work--honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's "Walking"--there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer.
The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It was not that I wanted her to _get_ Mill or Burke, but that the mental exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams, playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.
Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth.
Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.
In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have related something of the process.
The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in the present scheme of things.
Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount to, are all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot get through to the world except through the brain.
In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is nave, not to have explained before, that from the view these things are written the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression--most superb and admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without but within.
If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison, having been forced to turn their eyes within--you will find a hint to the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior promptings for their mental activity--the passage entirely closed between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary confinement makes madmen of such--if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.
The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward, or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.
A man must achieve that individuality which is not a threescore-ten proposition, and must begin to express it in his work before he can take his place in the big cosmic orchestra. In fact, he must achieve his own individuality before he has a decent instrument to play upon, or any sense of interpretation of the splendid scores of life. In fact again, a man must achieve his own individuality before he can realise that the sense of his separateness which he has laboured under so long is a sham and a delusion.
Until a man has entered with passion upon the great conception of the Unity of all Existing Things (which is literally brooding upon this planet in these harrowing but high days of history), he is still out of the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy.
Time has made the greatest of the _sheer_ intellects of the past appear apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire, Compassion, which is to be the art of the future.
Finally, a man must achieve his own individuality before he has anything fit to give the world. He achieves this by the awakening of the giant within, whom many have reason to believe is immortal. Inevitably this awakening is an illumination of the life itself; and in the very dawn of this greater day, in the first touch of that white fire of Compassion, the Unity of All Things is descried.
11
THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK
"We will do a book of travels," I said to the little girl. "You have done Holland; you are on China. After you have made your picture of China, I'll tell you what I saw there in part, and give you a book to read."
So often her own progress has given me a cue like this for the future work. I put The Abbot on this travel-work for a few days, starting him with Peru. He found a monastery there. In India he found monasteries, even in the northern woods of Ontario. He would shut his eyes; the setting would form, and after his period of imaginative wandering, the monastery would be the reward. I will not attempt to suggest the psychology of this, but to many there may be a link in it. In any event, the imagination is developed, and its products expressed.
The little girl was asked to write an essay on a morning she had spent along the Shore. She sat in the Study with a pencil and paper on her lap--and long afterward, perhaps ten minutes, exclaimed:
"Why, I began at the beginning and told the whole story to myself, and now I've got to begin all over and write it, and it won't be half so good."
"Yes, that's the hard part, to put it down," I said. "Write and write until you begin to dream as you write--until you forget hand and paper and place, and instead of dreaming simply make the hand and brain interpret the dream as it comes. That is the perfect way."
In these small things which I am printing of the little girl's, you will get a glimpse of her reading and her rambles. Perhaps you will get an idea, more clearly than I can tell it, of the nature of the philosophy back of the work here, but there can be no good in hiding that. All who come express themselves somehow each day. I have merely plucked these papers from the nearest of scores of her offerings. There seems to be a ray in everything she does, at least one in a paper. What is more cheerfully disclosed than anything else, from my viewpoint, is the quickening imagination. Apparently she did not title this one:
Nature is most at home where man has not yet started to build his civilisation. Of course, she is everywhere--in Germany, in Canada and California, but the Father is more to be seen with her in the wild places.
In the beginning everything belonged to Nature. She is the Mother. Flowers, then, could grow where and when they wanted to, without being placed in all kinds of star and round and square shapes. Some of their leaves could be longer than others if Nature liked, without being cut. The great trees, such as beeches, elms, oaks and cedars, could coil and curve their branches without the thought of being cut down for a sidewalk, or trimmed until they were frivolous nothings.
Small stones and shells could lie down on a bed of moss at the feet of these trees and ask questions that _disgraced_ Mr. Beech. (But of course they were young.) The flower fairies could sit in the sunlight and laugh at the simple little stones.
Oh! dear, I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up.
The thing I _really_ wanted to write about this morning was the goodness of being alive here in winter.
After a long, lovely sleep at night, in a room with wide-open windows and plenty of covers, you wake up fresh and happy. From the East comes up over the frozen Lake, the sun sending streaks of orange, red, yellow, all through the sky.
Here and there are little clouds of soft greys and pinks, which look like the fluffy heads of young lettuce.
Venus in the south, big and wonderful, fades out of sight when the last shades of night pass out of the sky.
Dress, every minute the sky growing more brilliant, until you cannot look at it. A breakfast of toast and jam--just enough to make you feel like work.
A short walk to the Study with the sweet smell of wood-smoke sharpening the air. Then in the Study, reading essays by great men, especially of our favourite four Americans, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. A wonderful Nature essay from Thoreau!
So many things of Nature are spoiled to make more money for men; so many lambs and horses and birds are killed to make coats and hats. Horses are killed and sold as beef, and the animals are slaughtered in such hideous and vulgar ways--maddened with fear in butchers' pens before the end.
Wise people know that fears are poison. Day by day and year by year these poisons are being worked into our bodies until we get used to them and then we find it hard to stop eating meat. A person in this condition is never able to associate with the mysteries of earth, such as fairies and nymphs of flowers, water and fire, nor with the real truths of higher Nature, which men should know.
In among the rocks and mountains I can imagine cross, ugly little gnomes going about their work--I mean their _own_ work and affairs. To me it seems that gnomes are not willing to associate with people; they haven't got the time to bother with us. They go grumbling about, muttering: "Somebody sat on my rock; somebody sat on my rock."
I would like to see them and find out what they are so busy about; see the patterns of their leathery little clothes; their high hats, leathery capes and aprons. Some time I will see them. I am not familiar with all this, but I imagine very thick leather belts and buckles. Their feet are small, but too big _for them_, and make a little clatter as they go over the rocks. Their hands I cannot see; they must be under the cape or somewhere that I do not know of.
The Spring, I think, is the best time for the little green woodsmen. The trees are beginning to get pale-green buds, and the ground is all damp from being frozen so long. The woodsmen sing a great deal then and laugh and talk. They come to the edge of the river when a boat comes in, but if one moves quickly they all run away.
I think there must have been many happy little fairies and cross old gnomes in the northern woods where I stayed a week last summer. There were so many great rocks, so many trees and all. Many mysteries must have floated around me wanting me to play with them, but I wasn't ready.
Fairies were only a dream to me then. But some time I must have been a friend of the fairies, for it seems to me that I have seen them, and spent a good deal of time with them, because the memories are still with me. I will spend most of my spare time with them next summer and learn much more about them.
... She could get no further on the Chinese picture, except that the low street lamps were shaped like question-marks. I told her there was something in that street if she could find it, suggesting that she might think hard about it the last thing at night before she went to sleep, but I have heard nothing further. On occasions I have been stopped short. For instance, yesterday the little girl began to tell me something with great care, and I was away until she was in the middle of the story, and the intimate gripping thing about it aroused me. I told her to write the thing down just as she had told it, with this result:
"... Every little while, when I am not thinking of any one thing, there is a voice inside. It seems to be telling me something, but I never know what it says. I never wanted or tried to know until a month ago, but it stops before I can get the sense of it. It is three things, I am sure, because after the voice stops these three things run through my mind, just as quick as the voice came and went away: A thought which is full of mystery; another one that is terrible; and the third which is strange but very funny. The third seems to be connected with Mother in some way; something she said many, many years ago.... I asked Mother to talk that way, and she talked like old country women, but it was not the voice I asked for."
I have read this many times, unable to interpret. One of the loveliest things about the child-mind is its expectancy for answers, for fulfilments at once.
"I do not know what it means," I said. "If some answer came, I could not be sure that it was the perfect one, but I am thinking about it every day, and perhaps something will come."
These are serious things.... Here is one of her more recent products on Roses:
If one wants to have perfect beauty and the odour of the Old Mother herself in his yard, he will plant roses. I cannot express in words what roses bring to me when I look down at them or sniff their magnificently shaded petals. They seem to pull me right out of the body and out into another world where everything is beautiful, and where people do not choose the red ramblers for their garden favourites, but the real tea roses.
I took three roses into a house--a red one, a white one, very much finer than the first, and the third a dream-rose that takes me into the other world--the kind of yellow rose that sits in a jet bowl leaning on the cross in the Chapel room every day.
A girl that was in that house looked at the roses.