Part 8

The thought of your scarred legs has been with me on the borderland of sleep for many nights, also our hours together on the pine needles. To-night, with the sun falling sadly over the iron mills, I walked along the Heights and cast an eye down into brilliant Harlem. The voices of the bargemen, the wheeze of tugs, the low growl of outpassing vessels, an occasional curse from a freighted barge, came up with the hum of the city. There seemed to be some goddess entwined with sea-weed standing over the ocean of structures. She held a finger to her lips for silence, and pointed to the Lord knows where--well, where I felt a tumult to go, to satisfy some hot quest.... I was lost to the multitude of faces that sent up a passionate and incomprehensible hum ... savour of youth singing in the veins.

Presently a drizzle drove me back to the room.... I reached up and flicked out the lights.... In an apartment across the street lives an old man who always comes to his window at dark and gazes up and down the streets. His head is grey--his eyes are deep and old. The light from his shaded reading lamp falls in a pool of dim yellow about his carpet. Sometimes he turns out the lamp, and leaves the fire-place alone. Sometimes his head falls forward on his chest, and he dreams--I suppose, of boundless seas, for he was once a sea-captain.

His wandering days are over--no more quest. The houses rise to his eyes like one long, bleak, uncrested wave from the Arctic Sea.... He means old days, but we--we must never grow old; we must live and ever be full of creation as the cloud is full of lightning. We must, old pal, ride the deserts, drift over seas; we must spill our work as we go, as night spills its stars from a casket. Fill me up with the Pacific in your letters--the big sunlight--the colour of the mountains where they dip and rise to clouds. I have a dry palate for it all. Fill me--eye and ear and soul.

Yours deep in those scars----

* * * * *

DEAR OLD MAN:

The Hudson is very still this morning; a few battleships have swung out with the tide; gulls seem to be forever passing up and down the river in white eddies; smoke from the factories rises straight and white. The morning sun strikes like a sledge upon the Palisades. How grand that old river is, and how untiring in its endless ebb and flood--almost like a solar system in the serene way it deals with human traffic.

A great new sense of words has come over me lately. At the very birth of language lies a chest of rich obsolete words--quite like a Spanish treasure chest, with its doubloons, bezoar stones and "pots of Arica bronze." The artists go treasure hunting in language, and a few do startle the world with their wealth. The live-long day seems to me now like a shuttle driving back and forth, weaving from soul to matter, a golden fabric.

This word-chest means much to me because it deals with the sea. Lift up the lid, and tucked away in those little drawers lies the seaman's religion in bits of turquoise, in coils of fish line and hooks, in pink sea-shells, perhaps in an old violin, or in a few stray books of Carlyle, Goethe, Dante and Melville's _Moby Dick_. The point is we all bungle along through our world-term somehow; we have our work and religion and pleasures and tales in a camphor-wood chest with a brass band around it. Sometimes we bring out the violin and make God-awful discords, calling it music of the sea; we brighten people's eyes with our bits of turquoise; terrorise them with the philosophy that Carlyle and Goethe and Moby Dick have given us; we make them feel that endless _wroom, wroom, wroom_ of the ocean that is washing in our souls.

Yes, we must first learn the futility of life before we can live. The war teaches this lesson well, but won't it be great when everybody is singing over his golden shuttle and laughing? Won't it be great when the chastened New Race springs up, like green shoots at the passing of winter? Won't it be great when the world has grown serene and wise enough to sit down beside a blazing bark fire, with the shadows of pine trees about, or near the dim breakers, and consider it profitable to talk about the stars?

... There are times when one feels he must be alone--when he wants to be connected with nothing--when he wants to go to a distant and high altitude, and there boil his pot of alchemy--there, where the air is dust free, and the incense of one's devotion goes straight up. He must listen and listen, until he believes that he hears the stars humming in their courses; then the sun drawing like a magnet, then a crescendo of song up to a deafening roar,--that all things, all stars, are headed towards one point of balance among that whole mass of sapphires we see above.

Man, but the joy of telling tales, of recording the warmth of human hearts, of loving men and their ways--to fill out a morning with that golden shuttle! One has but to sit and the sun on the walls and the shadows in the corners, or if at night, the flame on the stones of the hearth turn to words!... The old sea is full of that. The heart within her breast sounds the footfalls of quest; the ecstasy of life tears in her storm and in still hours she sits in her glitter....

Some day we shall be together on the blessed Pacific coast. We shall have bookshelves and packages of dates, bottles of cream and combs of honey. We shall work with that rugged lunge of mountains in our products; and that endless and insistent _wroom, wroom, wroom_ of the ocean in all. Listen, here is a day as we shall have it:

The sun lifting up the depth of Canyon shall awake us. After we have cooked and eaten of crisp toast and honey and coffee, we shall go to our desks and bring out a most rigid problem in mathematics,[16] and dwell perhaps for an hour in drawing all forces of thinking into play--awaking the mind--shaking off that inertia of body. After that we shall penetrate the thing which we wish to work upon that particular morning. We shall see its functions and logical action, then begin the shuttle and weave back and forth with that pliancy that sees the deepest of metaphysics in an old man lighting a pipe or loitering over a pork-pie. To top the morning, we'll have a meal of milk and dates. The afternoon shall mean an isolation with the books--perhaps on the sand with the sun tanning our backs. Both healthfully and mentally an efflux of soul. At about five in the afternoon comes the humming calm--the poise of mind and soul and body. Another meal of the simple foods and once more, production, as the sun goes into the sea--giving one's soul the might and expanse that the planets use in weaving their ways. Perhaps, at ten or eleven we shall reach up, switch out the electric bulb and open the door. That shall be a day mastered. Side by side, we'll walk over to the cliff at whose base mumbles the mighty Pacific. We shall pass no words--the earth'll be good to feel and smell. We'll honour the still night of stars.

[16] Help!

That day is a privilege to earn--our bodies must suffer and become scarred and jostled by the currents of people, and cursed upon by foul mouths. All pleasant presently. We must know the heart of a bartender as we would want to know the heart of the Christ. Do you know that Masefield was a bartender? The secret of the real artist is sanity. One must grow hair the medium length--keep a well muscled and full lunged body--and if chronic fishermen should happen in on us for a meal we must be able to argue that a hickory pole is better for a pound-net than pine; or if a devout pastor--that we would much rather praise God's work outside on the beach....

* * * * *

TO JANE:

Your letter this morning after a long, wonderful run of work. This is really the highest day I've had--real rugged work--bronze moving pictures before me--faces--open shirts on sunburnt breasts--and, of course, the eternal sea. Your letter came like a sudden bag of sunlight emptied into a mist. The water became blue and the promontories sharp like ink lines.

And about Steve. I understand all. The draft explains his not writing. And this war--it's like a maelstrom rising higher and higher. Next summer for certain, possibly this Christmas, it means I go. But rather than go as a private I'm going to enlist voluntarily in the aviation corps. Flying only would have as much thrill as doing the climax of a story. That's like the sea. And I'm not panicky or worried about it. I feel in some unconscious way that the balance of the cosmos demands it. God, nobody should drag now! It's just like a marshfire that grows and grows to let the new green shoots come under in spring. It's like a big song. I would not go to fight Germany, or France or England or America. I'd go because it's a cleanser. One must play with the song of many feet and express with the original song. One must flash pictures to the many eyes of their own being. Oh--it's a song, the whole thing! And I'm looking forward to it.

Only the ones such as John and Tom shall escape. Don't you see the joy, the peace, the grandeur in owning a scar, in being bled white? The first year of the war, England was black with mourning. Now, she is white.... The work is on me with talons.

I am looking only at the impossible heights--of a portrayal of life--the rugged life in endless volumes. I have made an oath silently with myself that in three years I shall do a book.... The work comes now just as if I were to sit down before a fire-place with shadows and light around stones, and were to grow interested, with stars low on the horizon like live sparks.

And friends? A foolish question! I mean that I must be alone in the formative thrall of work. I _did_ want your letter. But forget pity. That is a thing that stifles soul. I do not ask, by all the stars, I do not ask for anything. The highest of all things to you all.

And Steve? He has too much of the Song to be trodden or be lost or be ground in mud. You are all friends--but I must be alone now. The work is rising....

* * * * *

TO JOHN:

There ain't no sun beatin' in my doorway, and there ain't none of your sacred seas and canyons around; but there is a socialist's riot in the street below--kerosene torches a-going--one shaggy haired enthusiast is standing on a soap box and is wagging his jaw in an athletic way.... How's the fire burning under your type-mill? What's the brand of smoke it gives up--poetry, action, lumps of granite or ladles of ocean? I'm all lit up in this place here--because things are moving--real issues are gathering--and the pulse of living is so close that I can almost feel it occasionally. Last Saturday, went to a place called Rockaway--and oh man--rocks--rugged grey and eroded--surf bitten--gnarled, twisted--and they tossed the sea's white jaws about like bits of cotton. Real sea coast it was--with a little smack in the purple way, her sails bellied, her mouth lapping the brine--an old fisherman browsing around the shores for clams while his wife hauled up the nets, basketed the cod and upturned their boat.

Put an extra stick under the machine and line a few of your aphorisms.

* * * * *

14

THE ARTIST UNLEASHED

The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories. Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be prepared.

There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of consciousness--before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated experience are open to his every-day working mind. That may really be what sumptuous artistic equipment is--the capacity to open up the old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.

Certainly intellect alone will never make a great drama of life and love, yet action and romance of the present hour draw hard upon one's present life training and the faculties and tastes of his immediate culture--actual brain possession and the ordering thereof. A child can portray superbly well some ancient imprint upon the Soul, even the passages of his own initiations through earth, water, air and fire, his brain not conscious of the real nature of what is coming forth; yet, the same child cannot put the cohering line through a series of episodes occurring under his own notice. Something of this mental grasp is necessary to make the artful effect required in a short tale. The child's mind, in the first place, is trained to listen and interpret the experiences of the larger consciousness; in the second set of conditions, he is forced to rely upon actual brain tissue which requires the training and culture of the years.

Art is composition. The farther you go, the finer the tools. It is difficult to train the fingers to intricate tricks of weaving, or the brain to sort and place the facts and colours and surprises of a present-day narrative or tale, but the soul may be called upon to express through the narrow temples of an awakened child its cosmic understanding, its ordered firmament.

Decades of observation and reporting; firm and verified actuality of knowledge and opinion; to these, added experience and the excellence of order--such is the training of the intellectual artist who times his production to his own generations. He pays the price in pain and subjection to the things that are; he knows well the meaning of labour; often, though he may still laugh as an artist, he has forgotten how to laugh as a man.

My desk here is covered with papers and poems of a beauty this intellectual artist cannot reach, of a freedom he can never know, until he lifts the torch of his consciousness out of and above the brain, making that serve quite as his knees bend and serve. Thinking of these things to-day, the door of the Study opened and the Little Girl gave me her work. She writes things of the larger consciousness without effort, but finds it hard and wearing to narrate the immediate matters of life. To her, the fine short story of the present hour is the great accomplishment, the ideal she is working toward.

With another she goes often to the cities--rambling among the rooming-houses, cheaper restaurants and mills. She means to work in the mills soon--to forget herself and forget us for a time, to be with the harder-lucked girls whom she loves with thrilling passion. She has brought home from these little adventures wonderful stories of the patience and the laughter and the heroism crowding like hidden sacred presences about the duller lives. She brings a humour to the telling of the divine secrets of the poor--the clutching pang for food, the soldier going, his baby coming, the tortured spine, the stunted, the darkened, the wasted--an irresistible divinity about it all--pain impermanent, joy enduring. Back of the lacking eyes and leaking lives, she sees wonders that Zola never saw, that none can see with mere intelligence, that none can dream, who sees only the here and now, who has not learned to laugh at the so-called injustices of men, who cannot see the greater order to come because the present chaos is so devastating.

One may report minutiæ of torments, mass the items of degradation and bring forth a great document of the underworld--but these are mere foundations. The Builders bring the dream, they live the hope, they open the long-road consciousness, they substantiate their visions of better days, bring order and coherence to all the splendid toil of the intellectualist; they raise their edifice upon _all_ that is done.... Here is the Little Girl's work of to-day's writing:

MEDITATION

In the night the Master came down to a woman who lay sad and sleepless in a dark house. He came so near that she felt his holy radiance. Her soul breathed; her body ceased to tremble; she felt within his sacred circle. The Master smiled and said:

"Why do you not sleep?"

The woman answered, "I am carried away by thoughts that will not hush. Night after night I lie here so bitterly close to old dreams. I realise that they are not worthy, but my brain is full of them."

The Master smiled again. "There is a way to compel the silence of the brain."

"I have not found it," said the woman.

"Learn to be the soul," the Master said. He suggested a way to begin--then was gone.

The rest of that night the woman thought of his words. Deeper and deeper his words sank into her heart. When morning came, a happiness brooded within; she dressed quickly and went out.... Back of her little house rose the golden brown hills. She climbed, and at the top of the nearest, sat down. The peace and purity and fragrance of the sun-steeped hills filled her soul. For a long time she thought in silence, then slipping off her loose white sandals, said: "I begin with the grass. Yes, I begin with my _feet_.... How wonderful you are--so ready to obey, to give your service at any time! What would happen if you carried me other than my will? Supposing some day I should be walking fast to the house of my beloved, when you suddenly took me the other way!"

She laughed, and added: "You stay with me all my life, and little by little are carrying me up the shining path to the Father's house. And yet--how strange! I am not you.... And my knees, how wonderful and willing--all limber and full of life--helping me in all ways to do all things--bending gently when I bow in holy communion, expressing joy through free, easy movements, mute, yet strong before pain! There is nothing more wonderful in the world than you. Yet--I am not my knees.

"And you, old heart," she added. "You have endured the keenest pain; you have loved and given yourself, have hated and become black only through pain to whiten again--old heart of many rendings--until all life was tragedy, and you almost ceased to beat. Little heart, sanctuary of the soul--room for _his_ rest.... Yet I am not the heart!

"And the white throat in which the lotus unfolds its mystic petals of light--I am not the throat!... And the mind, stream for the soul's fulfilment--listener, runner, interpreter of light--mate of the soul in all things, ever ready, sparkling with the inner fire,--I am _not_ the mind. You can hurt me no longer. I am _free_!"

The woman sitting alone upon the hilltop, paused again. "What am I?" she almost cried.

It was as though the hills, the air and the rising sun joined her in the answer--"_I Am_, ... Longer than the living flame leaps within, _I Am_. Longer than sun and planets radiate light, _I Am_. Longer than worlds give birth to form, _I Am_. I am one with the rocks and the sea, one with the warmth and light, one with the earth, one with Humanity.

"I am Humanity. _I Am._"

* * * * *

It is only when the Little Girl brings in a bit of fiction that we remember her years. The brain that even now can polish a detached incident, or clip into firing-form a bit of humour of the street, cannot as yet order the narrative to a culminating effect. She is in her brain, which is only fourteen, struggling with the matters of time and space, wherein only lie pain and bewilderment.

Art is long. The training of the hand and intellect requires the years--but not the labour, not the agony, not the mad strain supposed to prepare one for an artistic career by those who believe mental equipment to be all.... The key to this whole discussion is the fact that the brain can be developed more in a year through inner awakening than in a decade by the usual methods of external impacts alone.... The ideal education is the balancing of the without with the within--the tallying of the world without with the world within--the same old story of the kingdom without clearing its correspondences with the kingdom within.

The Little Girl's ideal is to do great stories. They challenge her by their very difficulty. When I see where she stands now, and think of the far ways we elders went to learn the game; when I see what the twenty-year-olds are doing now, how they command their mysticism--a harder task for me than the accomplishment of physical results; when I see the inner bloom and co-ordination and the inimitable surfaces which come to all the arts by the development of the soul life first, the listening for the Master within--I want to get my hands on them all, upon all the young builders of the New Race. I want at once to awaken within them the Spectator--the One who cannot be swung back and forth in the pairs of opposites, who cannot give himself to the partisans, who has glimpsed the Plan and offers it full adoration, who says accordingly that the best possible thing that can happen is the thing that happens next. These are the young Players who will reveal life by living it--portray life as naturally as breathing, whose equipment is not possessions, not even brain possessions, but spiritual _en rapport_ with all, oneness with all life.

I remember struggling for effects. These young people breathe effects. I remember style as a studied attainment. These young people acknowledge but one style--that is being one's self.... I want to set many of them free from within outward. In their gladness at the finding of themselves, they will go forth to include the world; they will bring to it the compassion which enfolds all, reveals all.... Love the world well and you will understand it. Love the world well, and you will write well to it. Give it yourself, and the world is yours.

* * * * *

15

WORK IN SHORT STORIES

The Little Girl sketched this impression of an Indian Summer Dusk:

* * * * *

... Just now the great blue dusk, after an Indian summer day. It deepens and seems to laugh, then all is night. Huge black clouds roll up, promising a storm. Against them, tall, selfish, unafraid, stand the poplar trees. The great Mother of the dusk is singing, the God in Nature is singing, and Nature's belongings, all of them, sing in this magical moment. One feels it all in one's self, feels the glory, the romance, the very core-life of the Universe. The matings too, taking place in the grass and air; the matings of the two streams, the two grains of sand; the matings of butterflies, birds and bees. It all flows through one's body like music and honey and sunshine....