Chapter III: Pines (3)

I have learned to go very slow in building a matrix of my own thought about any young man's mind, yet I told the Abbot that day what I saw for him--how he was bound to do the big sea-tales, how we were sick of steam, sick already of the big hydroplanes, sick of all that hurries, all that explodes, all that has the taint of gas; that the world presently would be so sick of noise and explosions and show and speed, that professional soothers would be in great demand, like the Japanese masseurs who wait upon the sleepless; that the sick world would want to read of long, loose, lazy days under canvas, of the few ports left where they haven't set up recruiting offices;--that the world would be in desperate need of sunlight and surf and wide swinging seas--that he must be one of those to usher in the old romance of the sailing craft again.

I told about his sea-chest better than I have told it here, but the Abbot's eyes didn't bulge. Presently, however, he began to grow that way.... His Saturdays and Sabbaths now are spent, not in Morningside Heights, but down among the shipping and across the harbour, where the big world tramps hang out. You will see these things in his letters. I have several of his yarns here, but I am not going to run any of them in this book. They are good yarns, but too intrinsically big yet for the handling of a boy of seventeen. He has too much calibre for his brain so far to carry ten thousand words to superb consummation. I want to spring a big tale presently. I have a lapful of his random letters from days spent down on the water front, and nights under the study lamp:

DEAR OLD WASP:

Morning mists over the lake, the _Pelee_ coming up out of them.
Just had a night with John and a corking good run of work. We've
been watching the sun go down from Lynster's[15] back lately, and
breathing the planetary heave under the stars, with the milky
way dipping to the lake before us. This inland place is heavy
to take. The weight of agriculture is like a blanket over all.
It takes three or four pages to bore up through the cuticle. Me
for a get-away to the world soon--to feed up on the hum of feet
and voices and cars.... Blackbirds are beginning to blacken the
mornings and nights again; touch of Fall and Pine-smoke this
morning. Real itchings in the ankles--to you! A wonderful synthesis
for us all when we meet up again.... I'd like to roam the world
with John. He is a grand pal. Could joke over an oven made out of
a tomato-can, as well as eat from a banquet table....

[15] The saddle horse.

A day or two later:

... Black forces strong around Stonestudy last night.... About
eight-thirty I rode over on Lynt, to sleep with John. Decided to
have a debauch with tea. While I worked on, he gathered the cups
and tea and electric tea-kettle together and got things going.
He called for me to come and make the tea. He was seated in the
big chair with a tableleaf in front of him, and on that was the
tea-kettle, boiling.... One leg slipped, and the whole boiling
collection went in his lap.... A prince, the way he stood it. The
bunch was just coming back from town. Penel' rushed over, and the
next was a turmoil right, cries, olive oil, lint, rags, confusion
of voices and footsteps--too many people and the little guy sort
o' lost his control--but it all came back again. Almost any minute
I am looking for the laugh from him. All night I was with him.
Penelope, the finished heroine as always. One could see the shades
of pain pass over John's face time and again. His nerves jump--but
his mouth and eyes are certainly getting a grand hue of steel....
Yours right along.

Another:

Hazy summer about. Blue over the lake with shadows deepening in the
distance. Crops drying beneath the sun. Leave it at its height--am
headed back for Columbia--where I'll let time shape the winds for
farther "going."

School is not harmful to one who _is_ himself. I'll take
philosophy, and then be over to tell you who stole your
washboard.... It is no struggle, no test, for one to be lit among
his own as we are. One's depth of listening is best tested in
crowds. We've got to separate--go out and change the continents
into tablelands of democracy.

War seems settling on the world for years longer, but there is a
bigger order coming out of the incredible chaos. Each must see God
and worship through his work to shape the master beauty. Every
one's art breaks new roads which lead to one place.

Stories are coming freer every day--I've gotten across. Don't
know whether it's the best thing for me. But I've done it, and
that's what I wanted to know. It is all preparation. Results are
beginnings. I look back now on the summer of '14. It _was_ heaven.
It _was_ peace. To look at the cottage lights and hear the voices
of rowers through the dusk was a breath from God. It was peace, it
was relaxation, a deep resting of tissue for turmoil. Depth and
mastery to you.

THIS TO JOHN:

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....

Nothing but space is around me. I feel all hollow inside. Power and beauty and all things else flow through ... and out, like a sieve. My body is far below me, yet it will be taken care of. It does not stumble, nor make any clumsy, unnecessary movement. Finding it alone and forgotten, Rhythm catches it in her gentle arms. Slowly, softly, gently, Rhythm carries it along, the same that carries the deer so swiftly in the forest, the mountain sheep from ledge to ledge and over valleys, and that which waves the trees' long arms so gracefully.... The night moves on its way, the threat of storm is passed. I am back again--an untellable freshness has sweetened hair and clothing. I am all glowing inside.

* * * * *

This was done two years ago. There was a kind of dream story which she recently finished, gratifying the artistic sense entirely, but in a way that ruined it for the general reader. It was all new to her that there could possibly be two ways to regard a bit of workmanship. Five or six story-writers were present for the reading, and out of the fruits of that evening, we surely saw the lesser beauty give way before a greater. We forecasted the readers of the future, who would prefer the more spiritual, more challenging story texture and dénouement.

There has always been The Few--glad to discover the real, answering to interior order and clarity, "straight grain,"--but the fact for enthusiasm now is that the world is being peopled with the awakened. These young moderns are recognising each other from day to day, pulling together for better social order, utilising the wisdom of the East, and the drive of the West--labouring in new paths, daring new leaps, working out philosophies as fresh and ancient as the dawn and, what is straighter to the point, demanding modern books, written out of an integrity to match their own....

Short story writing in America is less a trade and more of an art since Edward J. O'Brien, the poet, took his chair in the flow of the output and began to say which was which. There are a number of people in America who know a good short story when they see one; this is true among those who buy short stories, but editors cannot always buy what they want. A deal of mechanism in a magazine has to be oiled and energised by different kinds of minds from those who paint the pictures and write the tales. O'Brien knew both ends--also he knew that big, unobtrusive part of the market that looks long and pointedly for the real tale.

He is a queer boy--from the bleak fishing grounds north of Boston. He is in no hurry. You couldn't tell if he really wants anything. He doesn't seem to want much--for O'Brien.... After he had his main line and most of the ramifications of his idea laid, he told the editors to send on the stories. Most of them did. O'Brien did a lot of work in a few weeks, did it startlingly well. He started something.... Now, if a writer sits down, suddenly struck with a fine idea for a tale, and this fine idea precludes the possibility of selling it for a high price--the writer dares go ahead and finish the task, because he knows O'Brien will get to the thing in due time, and that if it is really what it seems and the performance of the idea adequate, then the work will not be utterly lost.

As a matter of fact, this is a bit of self-placation, since no work is lost; no one gets the value of a big thing to anything like the degree of the man who does it; no big thing is lost from the world, not even if dropped in a sewer, if it is really important for the world to have it. We are all a bit too heavily handicapped with our own idea of what the world should have from our own shops--at the same time, when we are young, we pant for the quicker return, the answering hail within reason--at least, within time and space. Now O'Brien has come, strangely arrived, his proper phylacteries in place, the touch of tinted haze about his head, the right man.

Back of all, however, is the workman's own spine. That's the best thing to lean on; and when the going is heavy, to learn to do without. We often remind each other in Chapel of the modern artist Cezanne, who moved about his painting for many years, painting _the thing_, satisfying his soul, and leaving his canvasses around in the fields for the peasants to laugh at or mull over.... They have long since been brought in out of the rain--those canvasses. I forget the incredible thousands his littlest sketch brings now.... But Cezanne got the films out of himself--tallied them off--the landscapes within and without, when it did him most good. It never fails. What was good for the artist is good for the rest of us afterward.

Meanwhile much is still to do in the story world. The big smash of the moving pictures hasn't cleared from our game yet. It will be the cause of greater tales before the end is seen, for you can't portray the realities of romance upon a flat screen. For a time the many thought it was no longer necessary to learn to read, because there was such a torrent of pictures everywhere, but it was only through the pictures that the few has finally managed to realize how marvelously pictorial mere words are, and how few words are required when they are imaginatively driven. One day in Stonestudy we discussed these story and screen affairs, looking ahead somewhat to better times than these. One of our young men, whose story is told in a later chapter, put down the things we talked about. This is Shuk's writing:

* * * * *

A fresh and different vitality is manifest to-day in American literature. At various points around us, dealing with words, colours and the subtler tools, are active young workmen who for the first time, in the fullest sense, may be termed "North American." The first characteristic of this new element, these young flexible and vigorous minds, is that they are workmen--not labourers, not professionals, not primarily artists in anything unless it be life--but workers first, and after that novelists, poets, musicians, painters or politicians. They are not competitors. They have not forgotten the warm side of justice, but they know well the stern face of compassion--they know that it takes Christ and anti-Christ to make a world. They are neither modest nor egotistical, being for the most part busy and intensely alive. This implies their joy.

The great love story has not been written. The few great love stories of the world have to be pieced out by the imagination. We find that we have been told that certain are great love stories, but they do not stand examination. The classic form will not do for the New Age. There is to be a new language--for literary handling. It may be called American, to distinguish it from English in the accepted form. It is to be brisk, brief, brave and ebullient--to meet the modification all must reckon with--the screen-trained mind.

American-mindedness of itself, cannot yet accept a great love-story. It would be called "sentimental" if not lascivious. The average American is an impossible lover, making it incident to business. The real and the sham are equally above him. He would not know when to be exalted or when to be ashamed. He thinks his own passion is evil, and thus makes it so. The great love-story can only be written with creative dynamics, and can only be accepted as yet by the few of corresponding receptivity. There is nothing soft about true romance. Some passionate singer of the New Age will likely appear right soon, his story to have the full redolence and lustre of the heart, his emotions thoroughbred, his literary quality at the same time crystalline with reality.

The big adventure-story has not been done so far. The day of guns, horses and redskins is over. Photoplays have developed these fiction resources to the limit, proving to those writers born to be modern that their full tales can never be shown on a flat surface. There will be undercurrents, overtones, invisible movements, tensions upon the reader, not only from between the lines, but between words. The story-teller of the New Age may handle his theme in words of one syllable, but his tale will have an intensity scarcely to be explained--only responded to by minds which cannot be satisfied by two-plane production--minds which demand more of life than the camera sees.

The real war-story of to-day, even for to-morrow, ought to arrive soon. This is an age for an epic. Some keen and comprehensive mind will arise--a literary genius who will include the patriot, the anarchist, the poet, dramatist, humanitarian, theosophist, dreamer, judge and statesman, even the iciest aces of the air--and tell the story of War, a tale of trenches, kings and arms; blood, heroism and monstrous greed; vast far-reaching causes and the slow, inevitable hell of effects--told from a viewpoint so inclusive that thrones are merely pawns in a Planetary Game.

Inclusion is the first business of the writer who is truly allied with the modern element. Propagandists do not fill the picture. Yesterday the wreckers and agnostics--to-day the specialists and onesided enthusiasts--to-morrow, the embodiers, the includers.

* * * * *

16

VALLEY ROAD GIRL

The Valley Road Girl, who gave us the title, and helped us to see how the New Race will become in due time the planetary hive, asked not to appear in this book. A letter this morning asks it again. She is in the stress and heat of a series of ordeals, learning what it means suddenly to be parted from friends and the centre of her work. A wise and sensitive young woman--I rather thrill over her sufferings. We don't commiserate; we congratulate, when one is called to a stretch of particularly stiff and solitary going. We know that one must be passionately worthy to take the big-calibred ordeals. There is pain to all births--pain, the precursor of greater joys. Pain is not the expansion of the flower to the sun; that is joy, that comes afterward. Pain is the necessary rupturing of the bud-sheaths before the final unfolding into the new dimension. Pain is within, inarticulate--merely finds a correspondence in some outer cause.

Part of the Valley Road Girl's letter follows:

... It hurt to let that last Lamentation go to you. I thought of the times when I had put up a braver fight, bolstered only with pride. But pride is low now, and still dwindling in the glass. Even the gods withdraw from the pathetic. They love us more when we challenge with doubt than when we implore. The many are God-fearing. They must have some divine power to shift their responsibility upon. They can ask the Flame to cleanse them, but quail at working out their own salvation. I have done some crying out to God, but I am finished. The one good path I have is Work--self-expression every day.

I made another mistake--in looking back. Regret identifies us with the past and impedes progress. Youth is smileless, inclined to regard to-day's struggles as ultimate evil, but gradually we learn that all things pass. To consider everything as in transition, we place ourselves in the very current of growth.... For rapid journeying, we must travel light. We can only carry along the spirit of things--the essence of our joys and lessons. That's what I have from Chapel days.

I blush for many hours since. Sometimes I have felt as if I were on a vast plain and there was no God nor earth nor the quality of love anywhere, but only I--deathless--in long, hideous travail, all life to be tested against this Me!...

* * * * *

How I want to write! Every day more awe enfolds the dream. Days bring me closer to the Town. The war has deepened the hearts of all the young people here, especially the women. Young women are very wonderful to me. They have a certain loveliness of body that comes of girl-whiteness within--thoughtful tenderness about them, and something else, a lightness that may be just youth. It attracts me because I have never felt it.

I do not care if the gods laugh at my ambitions to write. By the very sign that we are victims of matter now, we shall become victors. I want the bottom--down among the deeps of pain, where all the sorrow of the world is my sorrow; all tears, my tears.... I am not ready for the Hive. No compromise. To accept less in one's work than the dream--that is failure.

* * * * *

The Valley Road Girl is eighteen. She has hardly been away from the little town by the lake shore. She is held to it queerly still. I expect her to make the place long-lived in the memory of many novel readers. I see the big book of the country-side about her--a gallery of quaint and curious faces--done with her stern, sweet power. I have seen this big book building about her, as I see the top trays of The Abbot's Sea Chest. These are the days of her sketching and tearing down. Deep draughts of life call to her, deeps of religion, deeps of cosmic memory--and all about is the little town. The meaning has come to her at last. Already she has turned to love the nearest; loving the nearest will unfold the big book and set her free. Six hundred pages I call for--the leisurely vibration, terrible intensity of romantic moments, passion of the fields, the hideous mockery of narrow, brittle lives, the country-wife worn glassy with routine and insane monotony, and the young of the country-side--quick bloom, pure youth falling into coarseness before its form is finished, the real and immortal behind it all. These are her properties. Hundreds of pages have been written and prayerfully destroyed. Thus is she setting herself free.

I have a paper of hers on the spiritual adventures of a smileless child--which I liked much when it came in, more than two years ago. The Valley Road Girl is close to us in all our preparing and building; so that these chapters would be strange without her voice:

... Fire was always terrible, so my first aspirations were caused
by fear of hell _below_. Before that, I had wanted to laugh when
told to pray. As I grew, I thought much of the heavenly state, but
could find only vague pictures. Recently I asked a country minister
his idea of heaven, and he seemed uncertain. He could only assure
me that it was a desirable place. Yet children always wonder about
their destination, questioning as they journey.

I started early to pray--a grim affair; at first crying out through
fear or hurt. God was too awful for such intimacies so I took the
Christ figure of the Trinity into my confidence. Just here came
a strange transition. It didn't seem sufficient for me to think
those prayers: I felt I must state them clearly or my wish might
be ambiguous. Even to-day, I find that only expressing a thing
simplifies it for me.

If there were acquaintances whose lives were touched with beauty
or romance, I prayed for them, but mostly named _my_ wants. I made
the discovery that the intensity put forth in holding the image of
a desire brings it into the world. Man may call the answer _God_,
but that seems his own power. I have sometimes thought of Will with
its divine kindred, Wisdom and Love, as the Three Who stood first
before His Face.

To-day we dream, and to-morrow our hands are filled. I remember
the early Chapel days when the Old Man would say, "Be careful what
you want--you are apt to get it,"--with a great laugh and mystery
playing about his words. How truly one comes to realise that.
When I started at Stonestudy, the town-people used to ask how we
were taught,--if our English and story-structure were principally
considered as in the schools. I could only tell them, "Oh, no, not
like school!" Then I tried to explain Chapel and they wondered how
that manner of education could make us writers. Yet our writing
improved with the days. Work, a few weeks old, embarrassed us with
its defects.

Then I actually tried to discover just how we were being helped.
To a young aspirant, there is awe about an artist; we had come to
listen. The same thoughts expressed in homely words wouldn't have
quickened us. The Old Man's sentences were rich with figures that
clarified everything. We began to _see_ Stonestudy. About this time
at home I used to start anything that interested me, "I've got a
picture----" Chapel had helped me, as only one can help another, by
quickening the imagination.

That was what drew me to the Little Girl--her vivid impression of things. She could make _her_ listener see also. Speaking of children whom school had overwhelmed, she used to tell us of their "lacking eyes" and the world that had crushed them, as the "solid world." ... I think that was the secret of her faith in fairies and Nature's most elusive agencies. I listened doubtfully at first, for school had tampered with my once-ready belief. One had first to trust her words, "If you believe, you will see." And I recalled my early religious experiences, based on "According to your faith, be it unto you."

This is the "really" religion--faith in the hidden world. We conceive its light gradually as the seed pushes its way upward through the soil. All religion that does not make the workshop a Chapel--the place for picturing heaven, is less than we know. I seem to confuse religion with the stimulating of the imagination. It is because they are one to me.

The Valley Road Girl has a beautiful sister who was rather reluctant to come to Stonestudy. She did not think she could ever belong; had no thought ever of writing or taking part in our things, yet none of the young people ever brought us more than Esther. I found the following pages about these two sisters together among the writings of the Little Girl:

... On the floor below lived two girls who came often to visit
their beloved friends in the attic. One was a year or so older than
the other, and most serious and sober, constantly hunting for her
own philosophy and making her own religion, praying for power and
vision, fearing lest she fail at the appointed task, suffering over
conditions, revolting at times, loving her work and her sister with
an everlasting passion. That was the one whom we call the Valley
Road Girl.

The other was a perfect giver, born with the thought of her own
smallness, unwilling to accept a different point of view on the
subject from another. A spirit--wide eyes, frail body, living her
life calmly, objecting to nothing, obeying others, loving all,
frightening her parents with her absolute goodness. And that was
Esther.

When she came at last to Stonestudy, her cushion with the others
round the fire had been waiting for many months. For we all knew
her; through the Valley Road Girl we knew Esther belonged to us.
One Chapel day later, when she remained at home, we wondered how
we'd ever manage without her.... Occasionally Esther brought a
paper with her and laid it under the black stone--a bit of verse,
perhaps a dream, or something deep and mysterious from her soul.
One day it was a picture of the Desert, I remember.... Noonday, the
white heat of the sun reflected by the sand, the brown of a camel's
eyes, the long road to travel--caravans--then night--the sound of
low music, women dancing, the red of fires on black oily bodies of
slaves.... Esther made us see it all.

There were long days in the woods--spring quickening life in all
things. We'd gather moss and violets and talk endlessly, Esther
always so free these memorable days, and happy. It was the dance
that set her free--her expression through the dance--a dancer's
body and soul, her wonderful quality of forgetfulness of self, made
her perfect. Literally she could surrender herself to the music,
trust it, and be carried in perfect grace and rhythm. We watched
her unfold, the beauty of her deepening in every way. Her joy in
life grew. She became like a nymph in the pure light of summer....

* * * * *

As was set down in the other book,[17] it was the Little Girl who started these educational proceedings. Less than four years ago I suggested that she remain home from school, and take a stroll with me down the Shore. I was a bit bored at the time, doubtless heavy with the sense of parental care. To my best knowledge, the Little Girl was in no way extraordinary. She does not seem so now. It seemed natural for her to turn in the chapter on "Tom" in this book. I did not think of it as a brimming thing for a child to perform. Incidentally Steve brought in an essay last night on the young lovers and beauty lovers of the New Race, covering matters which I planned as necessary for me to do in this book. _Weaving_, that's really what a book from the group amounts to--weaving, more and more. From time to time in years to come, I hope to take a few weeks and spin a book.

[17] Child and Country.

* * * * *

It is only in matters having to do with actual world-facts that the Little Girl ever reminds us that she is only finishing her second period of sevens. There is no one to whom I go more often for wisdom or consolation. Her comradeship is complete. Others forget the matter of age in relation to her. Her big friendship with the Valley Road Girl overrides four years of growth most formidable in the usual attachment. The soul is out of time and space. The same thing is more emphatically shown in the case of John and The Abbot--nine and seventeen.

The Little Girl reads very little--not nearly so much as I do. She carries no weights. The slightest tendency toward precocity would sicken me of the whole business. This growth and development which I speak of is not intellectual in the acquisitive sense. I take the young minds away from long division examples. One of those a day is plenty. Excessive use of the young brain is dangerous. One should handle brain-tissue with delicacy. One should learn well how to think, so as to escape lesion and avoid rupture of those most delicate fibres. Any strain sounds a warning. The use and development of the brain from outside is only safe so long as the process is joyous. The development of the brain from within is natural and continually felicitous. No two processes are alike--for the Soul perfects the instrument to serve Itself. In due time the brain, thus trained, will bring forth the one perfect and inimitable product. Trained by the world solely from without, its product is a mere standard at best.