Part 32

There is no art in the temporal. You are not true workmen as slaves of the time. Three-score-and-ten--that is but an evening camp in a vast continental journey. Relate your seeming misfortunes not to the hour, but to the greater distances, and the pangs of them are instantly gone. Art--those who talk art in the temporal--have not begun to work. If they only would look back at those masters whose work they follow, whose lives they treasure, they would find that they revere men who lived beyond mere manifestations in a name, and lifted themselves out of the illusion of one life being all.

There is no philosophy in the temporal. That which we call reason and science changes like the coats and ties of men. Material science talks loud, its eyes empty, clutching at one restless comet and missing the universe. That thing known as psychology taught to-day in colleges will become even for your generation a curio, sacred only for the preservation of humour. No purpose that confines itself to matter can become a constructive effect, for matter breaks down, is continually changed into new forms.

Electric bulbs wear out and are changed, but the current does not change. The current lights them one after another of different sizes, as you put them on. The bulb is an instrument like the brain. You turn on the power, and there is light. You would not rely upon the passing machine, when you know the secret of its force. Matter is driven, flesh is driven, all that answers to the pull of the ground is driven and changed and broken down and reunited in ever refining forms. That in your heart--that sleeping one--is dynamic with all that you have been. Your brain knows only the one. Do not forget your native force, as an immortal being. You may be workers in magic.

Do not become bewildered by what the world calls good. The world does not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its dictates and learned its wants--its taste will change and leave you nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of the many is not the voice of God--it is the voice of the temporal and its destiny is swift mutation.

Nothing greater than the many can come from the ballot of the many; that is so well learned that its few and startling exceptions but help us to see the bleakness of the blind choice of the crowd, which conducts us sometimes to war and invariably to commonness. The few great men who have touched the seats of the mighty in this or any country--have walked with God alone against the crowd--until they were given the power to master their way into authority.

The choice of the many in a political leader is not different from its choice of a book or a flower or a fabric. A low vibration is demanded.

THE ROSE CHAPTER

I remember the February day in Chapel when the winter first became irksome. It had settled down in mid-November and been steady and old-fashioned. The little girl opened the matter. Winter had become a tiresome lid upon her beloved Nature--a white lid that had been on quite long enough. She had not let us forget the open weather much, for her talk and her essays had to do with growing days invariably.... The Abbot began to talk of Spring. Spring had also appeared in his paper, though outside there was two feet of steely frost in the ground.... Memories of other Springs began to consume us that day. We talked of buds and bugs and woodland places--of the gardens we would make presently.

"When roses began to come out for me the first time," said the old man, "I sort of lost interest in the many flowers. I saw a rose-garden and little beside--vines, of course. I know men who fall like this into the iris, the dahlia, the gladiolus and the peony. There are folks who will have salvia and petunias, and I know a man who has set out poppies in his front yard with unvarying resolution--oh, for many years. He knows just how to set them out, and abandonment is over for that place with the first hard frost in the Fall. There is one good thing about poppies. They do not lie to you. They are frankly bad--the single ones, dry and thin with their savage burning, their breath from some deep-concealed place of decay. The double poppies are more dreadful--born of evil thoughts, blackness blent with their reds. Petunias try to appear innocent, but the eye that regards them as the conclusion in decorative effect, has very far to come. Every man has the flower that fits him, and very often it is the badge of his place in human society.

"The morning-glory is sweeter natured and somewhat finer in colour than the petunia, but very greedy still. It does not appreciate good care. Plant it in rose soil and it will pour itself out in lush madness that forgets to bloom--like a servant that one spoils by treating as a human. Each flower tells its story as does a human face. One needs only to see deeply enough. The expression of inner fineness makes for beauty."

Which remarks were accepted without comment.

"Again," the old man added, "some of the accepted things are not so far along in beauty. Tulips are supposed to be such rejoicers. I can't see it They are little circles, a bit unpleasant and conceited. If one were to explain on paper what a flower is like, to a man who had never seen anything but trees, he would draw a tulip. They are unevolved. There is raw green in the tulip yellows; the reds are like a fresh wound, and the whites are either leaden or clayey.... Violets are almost spiritual in their enticements. They have colour, texture, form, habit, and an exhalation that is like a love-potion--earthy things that ask so little, do so well apart and low among the shadows. They have come far like the bees and the martins. Lilacs are old in soul, too, and their fragrance is loved untellably by many mystics, though the green of their foliage is questionable. Nothing that is old within is complacent. Complacency goes with little orbits in men and all creatures."

"Cats are complacent," said the Abbot.

"Nasturtiums are really wonderful the more one lives with them," the voice of the Chapel went on. "They are not so old, but very pure. Their odour, in delicacy and earth-purity, is something that one cannot express his gratitude for--like the mignonette. Their colouring and form warms us unto dearer feelings. They seem fairer and brighter each year--not among the great things yet, but so tenderly and purely on the way. Then I may betray a weakness of my own--and I am glad to--but I love the honeysuckle vine. Its green is good, its service eager, the white of its young blossoms very pure and magically made. The yellow of its maturer flowers is faintly touched with a durable and winning brown like the Hillingdon rose, and its fragrance to me though very sweet has never cloyed through long association. Yet clover scent and many of the lilies and hyacinths and plants that flower in winter from tubers, can only be endured in my case from a distance."

"Soon he will get to his roses," said the little girl.

"Yes, I am just to that now. It has been an object of curiosity to me that people raise so many just roses. Here is a world by itself. There is a rose for every station in society. There are roses for beast and saint; roses for passion and renunciation; roses for temple and sanctuary, and roses to wear for one going down into Egypt. There are roses that grow as readily as morning-glories, and roses that are delicate as children of the Holy Spirit, requiring the love of the human heart to thrive upon, before sunlight and water. There is a rose for Laura, a rose for Beatrice, a rose for Francesca.... Do you know that one of the saddest things in the world, is that we have to hark back so far for the great romances? Here am I recalling the names of three women of long ago whose kisses made immortals of their mates, as thousands of other writers have done who seek to gather a background out of the past against which to measure their romances.

"You will say that the romances of to-day are not told; that a man and woman of to-day keep the romance apart of their life from the world--of all things most sacred. You may discuss this point with eloquence and at length, but you are not on solid ground. A great romance cannot be veiled from the world, because of all properties that the world waits for, this is the most crying need. Great lovers must be first of all great men and women; and lofty love invariably finds expression, since greatness, both acknowledged and intrinsic, comes to be through expression. A great romance will out--through a child or a book or some mighty heroism. Its existence changes all things in its environment. One looks about the place of it and finds the reporters there. The highest deeds and utterances and works have come to man through the love of woman; their origins can be traced to a woman's house, to a woman's arms. A woman is the mother of a man's children, but the father of his actions in the world. He is but the instrument of bearing; it is her energy that quickens his conceiving....

"Roses--how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of themselves? Do you think that the actual hurt of their beauty--the restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their silent leaning over the rim of a vase--is nothing more than a product of soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like, that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening--something that makes a flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.

"... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have reached roses--have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses. In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the white to the pink roses--and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the search ever more passionate--until we begin to discover that which our hearts are searching for--not upon any plant but in ideal.

"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about producing the flower--as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of the thought. At least we think so--as the universe is evolving to fulfil at last the full thought of God....

"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes, until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him, and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the performance of the lesser ones.... But roses--so many by-paths, because roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.

"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens which are at the bottom. There are good greens--the green of young elms and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of yellow may be--and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging--the water-colours--the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like ninety degrees of evolution--the full quarter of the circle that is similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect spine of man.

"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for instance, to represent all stages--roses that are specialising in their present growth, one might say, in form or colour or texture; but in the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body, then a mind, then a soul--and growth in the dimension of soul unifies and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who see--that the plan is one....

"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture, the sun began to paint a new beauty upon them--not the pink that is a diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl. The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a white base.

"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral. We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is steadily upward--always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a transition--an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.

"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it. There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost in the same illusion....

"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a few spots of red on the outer petals--like the persistent adhering taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys--they are the best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty. Like some saintly lives--they seem to have come all but the last of the ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products. In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the fragrance itself to our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose, on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a rain."

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