Part 31

"Those are the Balkan reds," I was told.

A bit of poison has lingered from that shaft. I saw something about America that I have been unable to forget. The women and girls didn't know what they were doing. They had accepted Trade's offering of the season blindly. Trade had exploited the reds, because the word Balkans was in the air that Fall, on account of an extra vicious efflorescence of the fighting disease. American mothers had allowed their children to ape barbarities of colour which are adjusted exactly to those sinking and horror-bound peoples--bloody as the Balkans--because Trade had brought them in.

These reds meant that the American multitude was unaware that certain colours are bad as hell. Trade will always lead a people astray. The eye that wants something from you, cannot lead you into beauty, does not know beauty.... Moreover, we are led downward in taste by such short steps that often we forget where we have landed.... I was sitting in a street-car just recently, near the rear door where the conductor stood. I had admired his quiet handling of many small affairs, and the courtesy with which he managed his part. When I saw the mild virtue and decency of his face and head and ears, I wondered afresh that he should be there.

He did the same thing each day, like a child compelled to remain at a certain small table to turn over again and again a limited and unvarying set of objects. There were but a few people in the car. I turned forward to the shoulders of the motorman; and from his figure my mind wandered to the myriads of men like him, somehow opening and shutting valves upon the juice and upon the passing force of steam--through tunnels and trestles at this moment--driving trains and cars and ships around the world.

It was all a learning of Order, an integration of Order; and yet this motorman was held in rigid bands of steel, making the same unswerving passage up and down the same streets, possibly a score of times each day--his lessons of Order having long since lost their meaning; his faculties narrowing as fingers tighten, lest Order break into chaos again. And I wondered what a true teacher might have done for this motorman as a child, to make the best and most of his forces. The average child can be made into an extraordinary man. In some day, not too far, it will be the first business of the Fatherland to open the roads of production to those who are ready.

Now I was back with the conductor; found myself attentively regarding his trousers.

They were of heavy wool and blue, doubtless as clean as the usual every-day woollen wear of men.... Here is a peculiar thing: If we wear white clothing for a day or two, an unmistakable soil attaches, so that change is enforced. And yet, since there is no cry of Scandal across the more civilised zones of earth, the many wear the same woollen outer clothing winter and summer for months at a stretch. One must accept this conclusion: It is not that we object to dirt, but that we do not want the dirt obvious. The garment that holds dirt may be worn until its threads break down, but the garment that shows dirt must be washed.

... They were heavy wool and blue. It was not the fabric alone, but the cut that held my eye. They were shaped somehow like a wide W that a child might bend with stiff wire, a letter made to stand alone. I suppose some firm makes them in great quantities for motormen and conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this good man should be shamed so.

And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season, widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the abdomen as from a tightened stem the next--these are the real obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is frank and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the bringing up of children not to revolt.

* * * * *

I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be alone is to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and warm.

It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker who brings up anything worthy, has done just this--reproduced the thing more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him. It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's work in the Chapel.

Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect of the novel as a vehicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth--white because it contains all colour--is not dominant and flaring enough for the wearied and plethoric eye.

We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character, the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no matter how consummate we become as artists.

It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a more perfect expression in words.

In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of character portrayal--the facility with which we are able to lose ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known delight when some one said, "You must be that person when you are writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer through a book and presently begins to do himself. After that one goes over the early part of the book during which the character is being learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished conception."

It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a shiftiness which must pass.

The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the fiction sense--that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to enflesh their literary efforts in story form.

This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and fictioning of any form is impossible.

Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and the actual.

The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of the human spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.

I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way is first--all the great companions have taken that way at first. Solitude--that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism. The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of God--then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two worlds--that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings--and a time for great migratory flights.

THE CHOICE OF THE MANY

A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation--a patriotic meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their spines touched with death.

The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and the like. It has been a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it--as if they had been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and conception for them, they find it mainly out of accord with things as they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.

This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us, the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to understand him better than their fathers.

I say to them here: I do not expect common things from you. I expect significant things. I would have you become creatively significant as mothers and as writers and as men. The new civilisation awaits you--new thought, the new life, superb opportunities for ushering in an heroic age.

You are to attempt the impossible. Nothing of the temporal must hold you long or master you. Immortality is not something to be won; it is here and now in the priceless present hour, this moving point that ever divides the past from the future. Practice daily to get out of the three-score-and-ten delusion, into the eternal scope of things, wherein the little troubles and the evils which so easily and continually beset, are put away. There is no order in the temporal, no serenity, no universality. You who are young can turn quickly. That which you suffer you have earned. If you take your suffering apart and search it, you will find the hidden beauty of it and the lesson. If you learn the lesson, you will not have to suffer this way again. Every day there is a lesson, every hour. The more you pass, the faster they come. One may live a life of growth in a year. That which is stagnant is dying; that which is static is dead.