Part 4
You say you write to the world. A composite? An abstraction? These will not draw forth your best and greatest.... You pass a thousand faces in the town, and are suddenly torn by one? Do you think that the unmanifested, upon which the thousand faces sleep so far as you are concerned, is capable of bringing out your wisest or tenderest expression, as is this one face pressed against the very window of your habitation?
As a workman, as an artist, as a player, one must give his best, one by one, to individuals first, before he arouses the force to set the table for the world.... It is important for the young writer to answer exactly certain listening attitudes. I think, in a story mood, of the shepherd fires--the endless droning tales of Persia and Palestine--camel bells, bearded men in white hoods, occasional weary movements of women in the tent openings as the evening passes to dead of night. The tale-teller is making his listeners see more or less dimly something _he_ sees--something he has heard and visualised, better yet, something he has lived. The finer his telling the more completely he has lived it. The more listeners pull from him, the more excellent his animation, his art. A speaker, accustomed to give himself spontaneously to an audience, said: "If I don't give you what you want--if I am not at my best to-day--remember it's apt not to be _all_ my fault."
Soil and seed in all things.
We prepare ourselves with much misery and massed experience to tell our story of life. How strange that we should not have reckoned with the fact that all this preparation is only half.... Really, it is as important to think to whom one is writing as what to write about. I've been afield with many young men, soldiers and the like. Their best and highest moments afield were spent in writing home, or possibly to the girl they left under the beeches or sycamores. We should write a myriad or two love letters, before we are ready to write for the world.... By writing and dreaming and travelling and living toward the one, we learn how to focalise our forces. Having done that, we are ready to diffuse, to radiate. Sooner or later the _one_ point will be taken away.
Don't be distressed; it is only for the time. But the love we have learned with one must be turned upon the many. It's all a love story. The whole universe is that. The stillness of the sun in relation to the planets tells the first story of radiation--love a cosmic force, not a sentiment--all one big, brave tale.... The real priest is trained to draw out, to furnish understanding,--inclusion. One can talk well to one who includes him. As professional essayists and story-tellers, we are only beginning to learn that we must talk or write to some one greater than ourselves, to set ourselves free.
The wonderful power of letters begins and ends just here.... Write your story or your essay to one who contains you--to one who draws your best, to one who sets you free. You can ascertain your relation to another by your mood as you prepare to write. The more you practise the art, the more sensitive you are, the more you realise that no two moods of yours are the same, as you write to different people. One draws humour, one irony, one a tendency to exaggerate, another deeply to be serious and reformative. This should reveal the whole secret. Choose your complement for the portrayal of a mood.
The thing we call our style is merely the evidence of that which we have chosen to work toward, plus our particular personality. We should work to that which sets us free. Certainly one cannot be free in another's form. There are fixed vehicles for expression--novel, essay, poem, infinite departments of each, but the fact remains that no workman or artist or player can be utterly himself, who remains in the forms laid down by those who went before, or in forms prescribed by the generation he undertakes to express himself through.
No good workman ever accepts things as they are. To be the workman unashamed, he must be considerably beyond his generation in culture and acumen. He therefore finds the beaten paths--which are the easy paths for the many--the most irksome paths for himself. He grinds long and hideously against the things that are, and thus becomes formidable, since grinding makes the edge. The dullest part of the axe is held the longest against the wheel.
Bit by bit, as the consciousness of the chosen workman expands under years and ordeals, he casts off all the shackles, forms and prescribed nonsense of the trivial and material-minded. He breathes deeper with each unbinding, until he reaches the fair eminence upon which lies the priceless secret of all expression:
_That there is no law for the pure in heart._
He reaches this point through many slaveries, and yet a child can be taught the secret. The child must also be taught, at the same time however, that the world is wrong and inferior in all its views; otherwise the child will not have stamina enough to stand against the opinions of all elders of all times, much less those who sit at the same breakfast table. Verily, the thing that Rodin and Balzac and Carpenter and Hugo and Chavannes and Nietzsche and Whitman gave their prodigious vitalities to learn, before their real work began,--can be taught to the child, but the child must find his faith in his own spirit and some true teacher to set him free.
In the later aspirations beyond professional workmanship for the world, the Players achieve that master freedom which detaches itself entirely from causes and effects in materials. They work as do those who are ambitious, yet refuse to tie themselves in the least way to results. They work to their Masters, to the Unseen.... All of which is pure and perfect liberation, but requires one trained in building with spiritual causes and effects. We seek to furnish this training for a few who are ready. It is the way to the inmost and the uppermost in all art and mysticism. We are set free here as expressionists of various kinds by writing or painting or playing to those we hold dearer than ourselves. We wouldn't be writing if we could be with them in the flesh--how clear that is! The fundamental processes of our picture-making are quickened by our yearning. Here we touch an old and curious law, that you must have separation for the true romance.
We learn to mass life into pictures or tones or tales.... All that we do well shortens the grade for those who receive. If they are quite ready, they won't have to make the mistakes we did--mistakes painful at the time, but out of which we make humour now.
A man brings a gift when he brings forth a good tale. He has done something with the worn-out tools of incident and experience which hasn't been done before. To do it well his telling is dependent upon his audience. His telling will be different for each listening group. The greater the artist, the less alike will be his methods of approaching different friends or comrades. Each will bring from him a different tone, a different look to his eyes, a different grip of hand, and different order of unfolding his genius....
The most perfect bits of writing we have from the group of our greatest novelists--is either in the form of letters or parts of work inspired by the influence of a woman's heart--some romantic and one-pointed outbreathing of their souls to one.... The great creative producers rarely found steady human companionship in one woman. No flesh was starry enough to endure their idealisation; the break of their picture was often the shattering of life itself. Experience forces us all at last to take our idolatry from that which changes--to continue our lessons of love toward the Unseen. Lovers of the New Race seem to have learned the agony of trying to find all in each other, of trying to find the universe eye to eye. They realise at once that man and woman are but the two earth points of a triangle; that they safely may rear their passions and their transfigurations only to the pure point of union above....
* * * * *
A man has found something when he cries "Eureka!" He loves something, when he pours out his heart to it. The first great struggle of the real workman is to find a form that contains him--a form of expression that will not maim his dream. It is never the form that has held another, that has sufficed for another artist. A letter is one way to freedom. A writer's style should set him free.
The enduring aphorisms and tablets and discourses of the Masters have been spoken to their beloved few. A man's sealed orders in the world, his occult transcriptions from above the world, come in the form of personal messages. Great documents of the future shall be written this way. We write many personal letters. One of my young comrades has the idea to gather together names of a score of mill-girls in New York or somewhere, and write her heart to them--less to try to help them, than to ease her own heart, to tell her love for them. Radiation--that is happiness. Mill-girls have been a dream of hers. She is full of force to pour out.
Incandescence is happiness. All expression is happiness. Happiness is creative. To work, to express, that is to radiate. The object is as important as the thing that aches to go forth. Choose the form that sets you free. To each his form.
A tireless woman asked how she might serve. Her lover was lost in Flanders. We told her to write to the soldiers--to write her heart out in letters to soldiers--that she would save lives and start great dreams and bring the gold back to many grey mists--to be Mary the Mother, the saint, the dream of the film-eyed fighting men--to love them through the heart of her beloved. That is what focalisation leads to--to draw forth the great energies from our souls, to set us free, first to one, then to the world.
We learn to love the one--in order to give this love to the world. We learn to love in matter for the moment, in order to become consummate artists and players in the soul stuff that cannot die. Again and again, through possessions and personalities--missing, destroyed or moved away--we learn to take the force of our outpouring from the mutative to the changeless--making a divine bestowal at last of a clinging human need--lifting from the idolatry of the flesh, which encloses all pain, to the love of souls which sets us free.
7
THE NEW DANCING
I have found true North Americans. A woman of twenty-seven, a mother (with a mysterious man somewhere) and a girl-child with the calm and power of Joan come again.... I needed a change, was tired of my house and my voice--close to the end of all human interest that morning as I set out for a walk up the edge of the Lake. On and on walking, until I came to the little girl on the shore. She was making a frowning man in clay. She asked me if I were the Crusader, but answered herself while I was hoping to fit the dimension of that fascinating title. She had decided that I wasn't.
_North Americans_--I think of them so again and again--something great and calm and deep and beautiful, something arrived, at last, from all the fusion--en rapport with nature, children of the light, living and abiding constantly in the essences of sunlight--with the humour and certainty of Mother Earth about their ways--the cleanliness of earth and the sweetness of golden light in their house and mind....
Mind you, I had walked forth as one would wade out to sea in the path of the moon--actually yearning for a better land than this.... There on the shore, after hours, was the child--her eyes turned to mine, putting me into the enchantment of the wise--stilling hate and ennui. We had words together, the great awe of life stealing over me again after many days. Her hand stretched forth to take me to her mother (this day called the Lonely Queen, for they live in an enchanted story-book). A climb to the top of the bluff and into the most fragrant and godly lane, a low house in the distance in the shelter of beeches--solitary and isolate beeches sheltering a human house, built for sunshine long ago. Many pages would not tell of the lane and the house, the lawn and the hives.... I want to touch the core of this inimitable pair that took me in--poor but dining upon the perfect foods, so poor that they make and dye the lovely things they wear--a kind of holy handiwork everywhere--perfume of summer in the house and in the heart of it a deepdelved peace where broods a sort of lustrous dream.
The child is but seven--that is, her body and brain are but seven. Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheat bread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning--a last jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray--all miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking sombre and wrathful in the distance.
Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a grove of white beeches--lingering gold on the vines at the window, the murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle begins to sing, and the mother hovers over--a kind of sacred rite, all this--then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and France are in the room. Tearoses--some daughter of poetry must have named them.
... Still I am telling you about _things_--not about _them_. I thought I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ... sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the hushes between.... I must get down to earth again. I must begin with the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned up to me from the frowning clay....
I should like to report them moment by moment--to make you see, but there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that first night, I contemplated the North America of the future--a kind of dream that nestles within a dream--the Great Companions, superb men and women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made cigarette--not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned drowsy--opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and sweet as a new-woven basket.
... I awoke to low singing. The room was grey and seemed to lift with me, and the walls to widen. It was as if I had caught the old house just waking from a sleep of its own. The phenomenon of the singing lived in my mind. I don't know the song--a rapid bird-like improvisation possibly--two voices hushed, but a vibration of clear liquid joy. I went to the window. The earth was still asleep--a pearl-grey world of dripping trees in a kind of listening ecstasy--two beings below on the lawn--a lawn that was grey with dew. It was like looking down upon a cloud from the Matterhorn. These two beings--one in a veil of rose, one in a veil of gold--were dancing upon the cloud, dancing bare-armed and limbed, their voices interpreting some soft harmony that seemed to come from the break of day upon the sphere.
It was not for me--yet I could not draw back from the vines. I brought only thankfulness to it--sharing the joy in the dim of a room, in the dim of a mere man's heart. Yet all I could contain came to me from the mother and child. They knelt in the grass, the song more hushed, bringing up to their faces and shoulders hands that dripped with the holy distillations of the night--a wash in dew and day, their song a prayer, their dance a sacred rite.... I should have thought it the gift of dreams, but there was a starry track of deep green across the lawn, where their bare feet had broken the sheen of dew.
... I dwelt with souls--that was the truth. I sat at breakfast with souls, dew-washed, speaking to each other and to me from that long road of life which we lose for a squalid by-way when we put on the garments of the world.... They talked again about what the birds hear in the morning. They said that what the birds sing is their interpretation of the great song of daybreak--that the earth does not meet her Lord Sun in silence.... And then I knew that the song I heard was their interpretation--think of it--a child of seven eating buttered toast.
And I knew that power is a song--that the singing of the kettle is the song of steam, that the inimitable _t'sing_ of an electric burner when the current first charges through, is the awakening song of steel and carbon to their native capacity and direction. The same is in the heart of a boy when he finds his task--the same is in the order of a master and in the making of his poem.... These two hear it--the song of Mother Earth as the floods of light pour out and over her from the East.
Here was a mother who knew how to play. She had launched somehow into a sphere of her own making--doubtless having found life of the world insupportable. I had thought much about bringing up children, about unfolding the child, and here it was being worked out with brimming joy.... It was all too natural to be called education. It was nature--it was liberation, rather--a new and higher meaning of naturalness.
I was almost afraid to speak. The life here seemed so delicate and delightful that comments would bruise the fine form of it.... They played together--that was the point. Play is a liberation of force--great play is ecstasy. In it one rises to the _stillness_ of production, wherein one bathes in mystery and potency and all commonness is cleansed away. Those who reach this stillness are the great beings of the world.
* * * * *
When we finally open ourselves to any subject, we find intimations of it everywhere. I found presently that all the voices of the New Age had designated the magic of the dance. It seems almost dull to declare that I do not refer now to the dance as it is taught and used and exploited as a social accomplishment, but that in which the personality is subdued and quiescent, quite as absolutely as it is in all great moments of production. One must give oneself. Music carries the sensitive soul into its own mystic region. A rhythm within answers to the external rhythm--the two meet and mate--the fusion is bewildering beauty.
As in all creativeness, the first law is spontaneity.
The great dancers of the future will _hear_ their own music--possibly give voice to it as they give their body to the rhythm. There shall be no exact interpretation of song or sonata--at least, not until absolute genius interprets the exact figure of each tone-set. This is impossible in a world of mutation. Accordingly, one who establishes a series of movements to accompany a certain harmony, misses the meaning of the divine improvisations which is the essential beauty of the New Age dances. One should dance as freely as one called upon to speak. And one will neither speak nor dance greatly by prearrangement or following any arbitrary form.
The very tone of the voice is different and deeper when one is caught in the spirit of spontaneity. The prime object of the new education, which includes dancing, is to set the soul free. Music is one of the master-lures to call forth the sleeping giant.
* * * * *
One night a stranger[11] came to Stonestudy. She said she was called by the way we were doing things, and that she hoped she had something to bring to us.... The next morning at daybreak, down on the shore, I saw stars and circles of young women and girls folding and bending together in exquisite tones of colour and song. Her gift was the new dancing. Over night she had captured the young people, bringing them a new joy in the world. For two or three months she remained with us and has since established classes east and west--life given to the message of beauty. With us her expression and magic has endured.
[11] Helen Cramp.
There is no way more swift to merge in the universal, than by the response to music through movement. Not dancing, which is a response to time in music more than to rhythm, but the actual blotting out of self, a spiritual exaltation which many religionists have sought and few attained.
The means is very simple; nothing strange or peculiar. It is the dropping of the human will so that the music may flow through. One does not move to the music then; one is moved by it. The objective mind ceases to operate and through the larger consciousness absolute Beauty streams. The response to the music may be totally different with several pupils, but where the dancer is really lost to the objective world, the movement is always true and satisfying to those who watch. This is easy for those who are close to Nature and God, but it is fraught with difficulties for those who are over-mental or who have been terribly repressed. In many ways the will is man's highest asset and it requires a supreme effort of the will itself to drop the objective consciousness.
There is a technique of the dance to be sure, but it is designed only to free the body so that it may be a purer channel for the music, and to facilitate the effacement of self. Physical strength, agility, beauty as mere beauty, are never sought, but only the revelation of eternal harmony.
There is rhythm throughout Nature. Man often moves less gracefully than the higher mammals. He has opposed his will to the law of the universe, for centuries abusing his ancient right, but through music he may realise again the harmony of all. The dancer is radiant with the splendour of the infinite and there comes an ecstasy into the spirit, of those who witness the transfiguration--the hush that one feels only before the highest art and purest religion.
It is reasonable to suppose that those who dance must bring back with them into every-day living something of the beauty of those exalted moments when they touch "the white radiance of eternity." Here is natural education, natural religion--a practical mysticism, the merging of self in the Infinite with a consequent fitness for daily living.
So the dancing of the New Age is but a different form of contemplation and production, by which the Soul becomes the creature--for the period achieving that blessedness which is above time and space, and dwelling in that dimension, where goodness, beauty and truth are one.
* * * * *
The new dancing is "in the air." Like vers libre and all New Age realisations and creations, its first essential is freedom. This is the meaning of the word Democracy--equality, liberation. The very spirit of all that is new demands freedom. The deeper one penetrates, the lovelier the folds of this marvellous conception. There is no title for friend or comrade, for child or lover--comparable to the assumption of equality.