Chapter 7

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.

"Oh," she shouted, after a moment, "what a grand red one that is!"

"Which one do you like best?" I asked.

"The red one, of course," the girl answered.

"Why, the other two are much----" I began.

"No, they ain't," said the girl. "Don't you know every one likes them red ones best?"

I walked away. I believe that city people who never see Nature, know her better from their reading than country people who are closer to her brown body (than those who walk on pavements) but never look any higher. And I think country people like red roses because they are like them. The red roses do not know they are not so beautiful as the yellow teas; they bloom just as long and often, and often grow bigger. They are not ashamed.

A mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is fine enough for them, and it has come--and others. Months afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses come out, loosening as many fairy spirits again. Isn't it all wonderful?

I enjoyed the first reading of this which the little girl called A Grey Day:

Small, cold, happy waves constantly rolling up on the tan shore. The air is crisp and cool, but there is very little wind. Everything is looking fresh and green. The train on the crossing makes enough noise for six, with a screeching of wheels and puffing of steam. The tug and dredge on the harbour are doing their share, too. All is a happy workday scene. I started in this morning to finish an essay I had begun the day before. After a little while, I opened the window, and the happy working sounds came into the room. I could not finish that essay; I had to write something about the grey happy day.

On a grey day I delight in studying the sky, for it is always so brimming full of pictures. Pictures of every kind. It was on a grey day like this in the early Spring that "Cliff" made us see the great snow giants on the other side of the water, cleaning away all the snow and ice with great shovels and pick-axes. It was on a grey day that a Beech tree made me see that all the rocks, bugs, flowers, trees, and people are only one. These grey days that people find so much fault with, if they are not so important as the days when the sun cooks you, they are far more wonderful! One's imagination can wander through the whole universe on grey days. The pictures in the sky give one hints of other worlds, for there are so many different faces, different and strange lands and people. Far-off houses, kingdoms, castles, birds, beasts and everything else. Such wonderful things. Sometimes I see huge dragons, and then the cloud passes and the dragons go away. The sky is always changing. The pictures never last, but new ones come.

A TALK

What wonderful things come of little talks. I mean the right kind. Whole lives changed, perhaps by a half-hour's talk, or the same amount of time spent in reading. Man comes to a point in life, the half-way house, I have heard it called, when he either takes the right path which leads to the work that was made for him or he goes the wrong. Oftentimes a short talk from one who knows will set a man on the right track. One man goes the wrong way through many a danger and pain and suffering, and finally wakes up to the right, goes back, tells the others, and saves many from going the wrong way and passing through the same pain and suffering.

At breakfast this morning we were talking about the universe from the angels around the throne to the little brown gnomes that work so hard, flower fairies, and wood and water nymphs and nixies. Such a strange, wild, delightful feeling comes over me when I hear about the little brown and green gnomes or think of them. One who does not know the fairies well would think they were all brothers, but it doesn't seem so to me. When I think of the green gnomes, a picture always comes of a whole lot of beautiful springy-looking bushes. I can always see the green gnomes through the bushes. They pay no attention to me, but just go right on laughing and talking by themselves. But when I think of brown gnomes a very different picture comes. It is Fall then, and leaves are on the ground and brown men are working so hard and so fast their hands and feet are just a blur. They give you a smile if you truly love them. But that is all, for they are working hard.

If one were well and could master his body in every way, he would be able to see plainly the white lines which connect everything together, and the crowns that are on the heads of the ones who deserve them. And one could see the history of a stone, a tree, or any _old_ thing.

What wonderful stories there would be in an old Beech tree that has stood in the same place for more than a hundred years, and has seen all the wonders that came that way. Their upper branches are always looking up, and so at night they would see all the Sleep-bodies that pass that woods. The beech trees would make the old witches feel so good and happy by fanning them with their leaves and shading them that the witches would undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.

12

TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT

It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable, the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a house--in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:

"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take another look at your little stone study."

I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass, the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff, casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work, even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.

"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I can frame it up for you."

When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty, and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.

This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in his own cellar:

"When I started to build I went in debt just as far as they would let me."

He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.

"And it's all paid for?" I asked.

He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."

"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for it?"

"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."

That was not to be forgotten.

So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house, because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.

As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors, merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.

There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in the village still, but different.

Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted the paddle.

There was no sound from that, and the stream was in the hush of evening and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it. The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.

The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No word.

The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went back. It was _all_ uninteresting night to me now--beauty, picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night the Canadian said: