Part 6
We sat down upon the sand again. The sun was higher. White clouds brooded in heaven's own daylight; white wings moved upon the sea, I was thinking about Steve and all he had said. What Conrad pictured in the dark continent existed here in one of the cleanest small towns of America--an earlier stage of the same malignant disease. From the broad and beautiful vantage points of democracy and fraternity--every shop here was a lair, the products, exposed and secreted, a spectacle of moral decay and insensate devouring; every schoolhouse a place of dismal enchantment where competition was not only taught but enforced. Steve knew deeply well when he spoke, that the creative artist, the producer of every real and true and beautiful thing, comes into the power to express himself, in spite of such education, not because of them.
One can laugh at all mediocre men occupying seats of the mighty and calling their dead gods to witness that they are right--but one who knows that the intrinsic gift of each child is the one thing in sunlight to be promoted, turns away a bit dismally from the spectacle of the standardisation of the child mind--from the wholesale manufacture of middlemen by school system.
Steve loves America. I know of no one who loves America more. He doesn't rise and cheer when the orchestra plays a questionable bit of verse and tune in a movie-hall where imagination is being put to death--_but he believes in the vision of the Founders of America_. He believes in the spaciousness and splendour of the American spirit; that the dream of a few mystics will triumph at the last, and that the many will follow the dream of the few. He does not believe that the voice of the middlemen is the voice of God.
It's hard to credit, but this young man does not hate one country to love another. He loves America because the dream of a new heaven and a new earth has a quicker chance for breaking through into matter here than elsewhere. He perceives the tissues of the senile and the obscene breaking down in America, under intense civil and martial and moral processes. He believes that this breaking down is essential before the building begins. He believes that the future will be built upon the thoughts of men who are great enough to stand apart from the dumas, from the cabinets and the senates, just now. As Steve sees it, all partisans have to do with the parts, and the parts of the partisans have to do with the Old, which is destroying itself--sense against substance, limb against limb, organ against organ.
The young men of the New Race are born of a mating of the East and West. They are naturally intolerant of partitions. Steve is one of these. He isn't a spirit alone. He is a body and brain. He has stayed awake through the full night and day. He sees the planet in one piece. He has crossed all the rivers. He knows the young men of America. He is one of them. He loves America because he knows the rest of the world. He has friends among the Chinese young men--among the young men of Russia and India. He says that all three have greater obstacles to overcome in getting the dream through, than we of America--that everybody will be singing it after the wreckage is cleared away.
"America, Russia, India, China--they are lands, not pavements," Steve declared.
He was looking across and to the south. The sun was a glory about us--all the background a tentative, swiftly passing thing, all but forgotten now, stilled by the rustle of the long, low white lines of the sea.
"The New Age will redeem all the broad lands," he said, with a trace of a smile--"lands for meadows and fields and gardens--meadows for milk, fields for wheat, gardens for honey--the New Race is particular for the perfect foods--foods for the giant and the child--broad lands for the toilers--the great sea coasts for the dreamers.... It's all a matter of taste," he added.
* * * * *
10
HEJIRA
We found we were a bit tied in the Middle West, caught somewhat whether we liked it or not, in the meshes of possession. Steve and I had liked it much out on the Southern California strand.... When one reads in the earlier book,[12] the stress that we put on building that big stone house on Lake Erie; this felicitous hejira may disconcert.
[12] _Child and Country._
The fact is, we wearied of possession. We found ourselves yearning for that beauty which is unconfined. We were athirst for new things, a different break of seasons and taxes.... The world was so full of people who could build and buy and own and insure, that we decided we should be doing the things that the others could not. We were glad to have built the house for the other fellow. We had to do it. We learned how to run it well, in and out--but it was a stone house. When a man builds a stone house with walls eighteen inches thick, he must leave a hole to get out; also he must be sure that he isn't building on his own chest.... In true Hive spirit, we renounced at the highest moment of possession.
The crowd cannot be seen by one who stands in the crowd. On the same basis a man cannot see the relation of his house to the road or garden from the inside of the house. The world must be regarded from outside to be seen as a whole. The New Race is determined to see it so. This _outside_ is none other than the mystical viewpoint of all world artists and builders.
One does not know what friends are, until one discovers that the secret of friendship is not in getting but in giving. No one knows what love is until he reverses all the laws that the many follow now. I do not mean lawlessness. I mean the higher law that is found at last by the quester after goodness, beauty and truth. We have to finish with the world as it is before we set out in quest of a better country.... We found that we had to become active servants of a finer ideal than householding at its highest. We determined to do more than to dream this ideal; we set about to make a better country. At worst, we work for our children.
It came to us many times before we moved that we were forever done with things as they are; that we had come to the end of show and property-measure and hoarding; to the end of the love of self which destroys the vision for friendship; to the end of domesticity which holds one's neighbour as prey or rival; to the end of civic identification, or relation with any federated commonwealth, which fancies its existence threatened by the prosperity of other political bodies. No heat about it.
We came to the edge of the Lake in vanloads; we went away with bags.... I turned from the eastern distance on the bluff, on one of the last days, and looked at the vined study and the big stone house, the elms so strong and green about it. I remembered the early picture of all this. It began from Stevenson's _Treasure of Franchard_, many years ago,--how old Dr. Duprez went out in the morning and tried grapes and plums with the dew on them, sniffing the perfumes of his own yard, dwelling in his own orchards.
I remember one day before building that the man came to us about the young trees. He had pictures of them in books--blooms and fruits of such colours that nature would never be guilty of--all the fruits I heard of as a boy--white grapes that never grow in this country, purple ones that grow whether you care or not....
The trees were coming on now, many with ripening fruit. The grove of elms was a matter of collateral, as the bank would say. The break-water had caught up thousands of yards of sand. It worked--the old struggle of wasting banks forgotten until a greater storm. The honeysuckles that were planned to climb the bars of the study windows, had to be trimmed now for any light at all. The wistaria trailed admirably and imposed upon the front the sense of years.
... We had planned to have all the fruits; some of the finest were now in flower. We came with many clothes, underwear and outerwear, wool and dark things. We left with a few light effects in our hands--to find a place where white garments might be worn in peace. We came with a great idea of food--game and fishes, meats, poultry, many cans and vegetables and desserts. We went away with a taste for graham bread and butter--a spread of honey, a glass of milk. We came with a fear of disease for the children, fear of colds, fear of losing something, or having something taken away, doubtless having the fear of death and accident. We went away with a clear idea of what death is and the advantage of it, children and adults alike.
Young children rode the horse that had a reputation for being wild-spirited and very much a man's mount. We had seen the deep places of the Lake fill with sunshine. We came with parasols and awnings and protections against the sun. Most of us would like to have worn nothing but a breech-clout had the town permitted; and the only time we had found the world hard to bear, was the long grey Spring days of rain.
Sunlight--it is closer to God and happiness and manhood and every delight than words can suggest. The more you know of it, the more you need; the more you love it, the more its mysterious excellence unfolds. I know what sunstroke is, and what the sickness from heat is. It's a vile state of the body, or vile clothing that stifles the body. When one is well and has learned to come back to the Father of Lights--there is no fear in his heart. I used to wear a helmet and dark glasses, but no more--eyes stronger than ever. I look for the sun in the morning and stare up from the sand into his face at high noon. There is nothing the matter with sunlight. The sadness and the sickness is with those who bring their quilts and cloaks to hide it from their flesh....
It's all in synthesis. The end of bulk possession is pain.... We started in with many flowers. We ended with roses. It's all in the tea-rose.... By careful selection of thoughts over a little period, we can come into the joy of flowers in other people's gardens. There are brave men who allow you to walk in their orchards; and there are many who work hard to raise fruits for a price. There is much joy, if you really look at it, in building a house for another fellow.
We start with the brute materials--beginning with the clay itself. Our cultivations become more intensive through the years. All life is so. We take the extract of a thing at last--a shelf of books where formerly we wanted a roomful--somebody's else little rented bungalow, where formerly we wanted an estate. We realise, at last, that there is an essence to be obtained from the extract, an oil from the essence--a spirit at last from the oil. The whole story is in that--synthesis. Slowly, at last, we begin to set ourselves free. We descend into matter; learn its lessons and laws, rise like a plant through the darkness to the light, integrating force to meet and cope with the new and lighter element. I held up seven little books in one hand--weighing no more than a new novel.
"It's all in these," I said to the Chapel. "One could put these in his bag and have it all."
... And then at last, I went down alone and empty-handed to the shore, meditated on God with sun and sand and flowing airs.... All matter is scaffolding which falls away. A man thinks he builds a house for himself, but no sooner has he put on the last tile than death or the open road calls. He chooses his climate and grows out of it. He thinks he must possess, that he must hoard against a rainy day, and he gathers the stuff of death about him. If he cannot rise, death covers him for the time. Dr. Duprez didn't speak of the care of his orchard, or his garden. It was all _story_ to me. Dear R.L.S. He didn't dream of the work of the hand necessary to keep up an orchard, and have a connoisseur's joy for a few summer days of the year. He didn't tell of the parasites, the sprinklings, the arsenates and pumps, nor of the little winged migrators that sit on the hills, waiting for the potatoes to come up. The call comes to possess nothing. It had better be answered.
11
THE SPECTATOR
Some of us here have swiftly reviewed certain old slaveries, that we may set free the children of to-day.... They do not have to make the same mistakes we did. I, at thirty-nine, say to those ten and twenty and thirty years younger:
"Start where I leave off. I do not relieve you of pain or error or shortsightedness, of passion or pleasure, or anything that arouses or wears down body and soul. Only this I ask you--don't make the same mistakes I did. Let me give you the answer to a few petty and pestiferous lures. I can put you right on them. Begin now to learn your lessons by doing things wrong at first, a holy way to get somewhere, but be a pioneer in your evils; be daring and fastidious and full-powered and discriminating in your faults! Above all, be impersonal in them as soon as possible. Let the winds of the world breeze through. It's all a Laugh."
Every process of the world to-day is designed to take away that adorable love and listening of the child to its own soul. Streets, schools, trade, neighbours, houses in rows, priests, pastors, charlatans, all standardise. A thousand teachers in technic for one in the spirit of things; ten thousand teachers of the health of the body (and every one wrong) for one who shows the way to the single and sacred fountain of youth; innumerable voices lifted in fly-dronings of instruction, how to fill the bin and the brain, the bank and the bourse--how to have and to hold and to die holding, and to bury oneself in the midst of--for one who laughs and plays and dares to watch the world go by.... At last to be the Spectator!
I tell you now from much living that there is nothing here in the world that is worth fighting for, but the glad tolerance of events, sheer, laughing joy in the Plan.... Every time you adjust your life to the standard of the world, you are doing something that is beneath your soul, and you will suffer for it, and be forced to retrace. Dress for the world, and the world will find its flaws in you. Work for the world according to its specification, and it will defile you. Enter into any of the competitions of the world and your face and your hands and task will be constricted by visible and invisible impediments and barriers, less than the real of you in every detail. Search for health according to the laws of flesh alone, and it will elude you at every point, showing you all vanities and pits and pains. Search for beauty of face and body, and it will be the first thing taken. There is nothing in the world but to make the human divine--that is the job we are here for.
To cease to hold is the beginning of invincible attraction; want nothing and the treasures of the world are yours. You cannot have health until you are ready to give up life here. Cease to cling, and that which was a body held apart from you, is suddenly a winged creature returning.... There is nothing here but the love story, and the power of that must be spiritual. The madonna of the future will look up, not down at the head upon her breast. Man must overcome mammon; Woman must overcome the mammal. The lovers of the future will look a little time in each other's eyes and much above to a Third who will come nearer and nearer for their adoration.... The friends of the future will sing in their Partings; they shall know the spirit and the breath of _camaraderie_ which knows no death.
* * * * *
There is a tendency on the part of our young associates to be extravagant in their speech. Much that they see is beyond their capacity decently to express. A group of us was looking down from a high balustrade. Flowery vines were woven intricately against the face of the stucco below. We became conscious of an incredible whirring, so low that it was difficult to hear, and yet so intense as to give the thought of a distant seismic disorder. It was the invisible wings of a humming-bird, flashing from cup to cup in the vines below. The child standing next to me said:
"The sound has texture."
It expressed something very real to me; yet there is not power in words to portray the exact feeling. All the objects of nature have their spiritual dimensions also for those who dwell much in the Unseen. These unusual children see the material object merely as an outpost for a challenging mystery; while, to the material mind, the outpost is all, and the lavish adjectives and expressions of the former are deplored as gush or affectation. As a matter of splendid truth, the most marked and potent of all adjectives and expressions are pitifully inadequate to express the lustre and radiance which begins at the point where three dimensions end.
The Valley Road Girl came into the Study one day, saying that this chapel book should be called _The Hive_. We all thought it a wonderful name to work toward, yet the unfolding of possibilities has been steadily interesting since that day.
The inner sanctuaries of occult literature commend the students to look to the bees. The pattern of much that man has still to unfold from his own soul, for his personal and communal uplift, is already expressed in the hive. There is a period of larva, and a period of wings to each cycle. Such matters call to those of spiritual discernment. One feels on the verge of great revelations for humanity, beyond the thing called death, as he studies this miniature model of a great democracy.
The most fascinating love episode I ever read was the Nuptial Flight in Maeterlinck's _Life of the Bee_. The majesty of winging to the sun, the falling back of the weaker-winged suitors, the commanding isolation of sun and sky, fusion under the mighty beat of the wings of the queen, the broken body of the male, the mother's return to the shadow and the labour of the generative wheel--magically, it all opened a vista to the great renunciations, the great passions and aspirations ahead for the human soul, great fusions of the future, marriages truly made in heaven, the inevitable trinity of all matings--the drama of love and death.
For her one high noon flight in June, the queen toils through years. She brings back from that superb instant the swarming cities of the future. On and on, she unfolds her fecundity in the dark, a prodigious and Herculean labour; from the human standpoint a task of intolerable pain and monotony. The queen's labour is scarcely more difficult than the tasks assigned to the hosts of workers, which appear to be denied any separate episode of emancipation. Yet, equally with the queen, they share the communal spirit; and no one who has stood among the hives at the end of a long summer day, and heard the song of bounty and deep-hearted content, can deny the peace that dwells among the myriad of skilled artisans, each with his perfectly appointed task.
Bees appear to remember the light, while working at the opposite side of the wheel. Men, as yet, are detached, lost in the heresies of self and strife. Only a few visionaries have peered beyond the petty reach of the optic nerve, to perceive that this, which we make so much of, is but the hell-portion; that this appearance of ours in pounds is a mere dressing up in materials of earth to endure the dark and low vibration of the wheel's most downward sweep. These few visionaries, always singing the joy of the other arcs of the cycle, somehow keep the dream alive,--the dream that appears already to be the essential blessedness and magic of life in the hive.
All mysticism seeks to teach us this single point which the bees seem to have learned so well--to transcend time and space in labour; to put off the sense of separation and strife, to hearken to the soul's own song of equality and sufficing days. We must be pushed to the last reaches of pain before we learn this secret. We have to penetrate the darkness before we earn this flash which swings wide the portals of joy.
Joy is the most potent thing in the universe. The bee-queen mother weaves race after race of progeny out of the incredible dynamics of an instant's joy. Each cell that she fills with life is a living fragment of her nuptial feast. Fusion is ecstasy, parturition is pain. The many become one; that is heaven. The one becomes many again; that is earth and hell. Integration and diffusion--the same story told in the hives and ant-hills, in the strolling winds and swinging seas, in the hearts and marts of men, in matings everywhere.
* * * * *
The original idea was to use the title, _The Hive_, in relation to the happy intensity of Stonestudy days, but our ideal grew to adapt to the name, because of its revelations in regard to the new social order; the pure and instant abnegation of the self to the community; the active acceptance of the precept: _That which is good for the one is good for the many, and that which is good for the many is good for the one_.
We cannot lose ourselves long in our own misery when we realise the glory of yesterday, and the more spacious solar adventure of to-morrow. We cannot continue to feel our own isolation when we perceive a brother in the eye of a stranger, when we perceive the sons of God in the eyes of passing men. At length appears the task ahead--the great Fatherland, the Planetary Hive.
I have taken the hint from the new race children, that to transcend pain we must make joy of it. Given the hint, one realises that the masters of all ages have told the same story--how to make light of human shadow, how to make lustrous our own darkness. No matter what science says to the contrary, the quest for the Absolute means the same thing; this is the marriage at Cana, the turning of water into wine; this is the passion of the ancient alchemists, to transmute base metals into gold; this is healing; this is regeneration.
To make joy out of pain is still more: it is power for world's work; it is the light that one carries among men; it is the fire that makes man remembered by his fellows, that makes man significant in any task. It is loss of the sense of self; the death of the lower for the birth of the higher life; the subjugation of three-score-and-ten for immortality; an _adios_ to the hands that cling, for the stride and rhythm of the Great Companions on the long road. It is not for the saint any more than for the soldier, not for the sage any more than for the politician, not for the poet any more than for the parent. It is not piety, it is power. One learns it best from the children. One becomes as a little child in learning it well.
We are learning rapidly these days. These are the days of humanity's passion and pilgrimage. The soul of humanity is passing along the dusty roads of Palestine, for the healing of its own weaknesses, the casting out of its own demons. One who is not carrying a part of the world burdens now, as well as his personal pack, seems forgotten of the gods. It has come to many of us that we dare not take more than a glimpse of our own allotted happiness--that we may not have more than a touch of the beloved's hand in these days of parturition everywhere.
But personally and nationally we shall come to that significant crossing where nothing else can be taken from us, where death seems the highest boon, and Master Pain has driven home his most pointed shaft.
That is the moment of laughter. Driven to the last ditch we turn and laugh. That is the moment of our expansion for a new kind of heroism. One builds from that deep hour.
The ultimate secret is not to identify oneself with that which changes. When these objects shift or break down, or some one takes them away, we suffer the old savage rent. The day comes when we disentangle from the final mesh of possession--cease the idolatry of things; then, and only then, are we rich--possessing the spirit and essence of all things, tallying the universe within according to its objective arrangements with the universe without.