Child and Country Part 12

15

A MAN'S OWN

The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of educating young minds in small cla.s.ses with a design toward promoting the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic impossibility.

The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that the great ma.s.s of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.

... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a dining-table--the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way, like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely, shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.

"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just now. It is seeing us through these hard days."

But _I_ missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is, my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work, published in the book called _Midstream_.

"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate a man's work from his religion. A working idea of G.o.d comes to the man who has found his work--and the splendid discovery invariably follows, that his work is the best expression of G.o.d. All education that does not first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising; because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the cla.s.s-room.

"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too l.u.s.trous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work.

No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.

"_I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his daily task--and watching for his own among them._

"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness for buying cheap and selling dear--if as a race we were lifted into our own work.

"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager and tender.

"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tute turned over to me, my throat choked; something sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full, eager and honest, the answer came--the work of specialists which had moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in that--for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.

"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the temperament to choose a work because it is easy.

"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument, the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.

That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities--whether tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.

"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer receptivity--and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here and there in the cohering line.

"... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is ended, the finished forces turn _outward_ in service. According to the measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the instrument in pure listening--long forenoons pa.s.sing, without a single instant of self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even awareness of the body....

"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the mind, its mult.i.tude of experiences and unreckonable possessions--are given over to the creative and universal force--the same force that is l.u.s.trous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.

"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He, first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the power of the superb life-force pa.s.sing through him.... This is rhythm; this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the rock; and though we achieve the very sanct.i.ty of self-command, our inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."

Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand.

Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line of his life will become more clearly established.

_A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has already answered._ Browning stood amazed before a man who had met Sh.e.l.ley and was not different afterward--a man who could idly announce that he had met the poet Sh.e.l.ley and not accept it as the big event of a period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of finding the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps men had made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been enacted on that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of earth there, the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was just on that spot that he found an eagle's feather.

I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago--was speechless and outraged that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather about afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in water.... There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are called to the same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts know each other; the mystics of the arts know each other.

The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story--of a certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal signified. Mostly the "great man" did not know what he had done for the boy.... I would have the great man know. I would have him seek to perform this miracle every day.

There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying, "There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to bring him to you--but he would not come. I think he did not dare."

Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom brought the thing about. A man should say, "_Lead me to him now_!..."

Those who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put stamps upon letters they write. G.o.d knows they are not ashamed to come and ask for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their structure of desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail the letter he has written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out, full of terror and torture before you--take him to your breast for he is your own. Children you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he....

Do you want a slave, a worshipper--seek out your own. You want nothing of the sort, but you alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate his worship to the task. He can learn from you in a week what it would take years of misery in the world to teach him. You have done in a way the thing he wants to do--that's the whole magic. You have fitted somehow to action the dream that already tortures his heart. There is nothing so pure as work in the world. There is something sacred about a man's work that is not elsewhere in matter. Teaching is a mutual service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but because he has reverence, he is potentially great.

The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all kinds of workmen; these things are not alone for the artists and the craftsmen and the professions. There is one boy to linger about the forge of an artisan, after the others have gone. I would have the artisan forget the thing he is doing, to look into the eyes of that boy--and the chemist, the electrician, the florist.

It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The work here would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us for several days. She was so still that I did not know what was happening in her mind. My experience with the others had prevailed to make me go slowly, and not to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be glad that she had come. I asked no expression from her for several days.

When I finally suggested something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror in the room. Her expression came in a very brief form, and it showed me the bewilderment with which she had encountered the new points of view in the Chapel. I learned afresh that one must not hurry; that my first work was to put to rest her fears of being called upon. I impressed upon the cla.s.s the next day that we have all the time there is; that we want nothing; that our work is to establish in due time the natural expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in particular, I said that when she felt like it she could write again.

Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl to see if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All I ever got from that afternoon was this sentence:

"... She is going to be a nurse."

I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting her surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must have nurses.

... And then the Columbia young man--a big fellow and a soul. I had talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room cla.s.s in the city. He took a cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel began; then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening, I had good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his mind and heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible integrity, a natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the world's bestowal--but Inertia.

Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do not mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that it is of necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the valuable inner life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual energy came forth to intensify the vibrations of the race, to say nothing of their own poundage. It is less a matter of weight after all than texture; still their fat was a handicap.

These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and men; all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression of the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit bring about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required to express itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression of the spiritual life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a whole, the great servers of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole in every fabrication of man and nature--the finer the work, the finer the instrument.

The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.

The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of a dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live either for appet.i.tes or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit, in its pa.s.sionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.

The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of countless ages to produce the form that we see--the gracious beauties of the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a Clovelly rose is beautiful.

The finest rose of this season, when cut at the end of its budding mystery, left nothing but a little grey plant that you could cover in your hand. You would not think that such a plant could grow a bachelor's b.u.t.ton; and yet it gave up an individual that long will be remembered in human minds. I saw that rose in the arch of a child's hand--and all about were hushed by the picture. For three days it continued to expand, and for three days more it held its own great beauty and then showered itself with a laugh upon a desk of blackened oak. We will not forget that inner ardency--the virgin unfolding to the sun--born of some great pa.s.sion that seemed poised between earth and heaven--and expectant of its own great pa.s.sion's maturity.

I went back to the little plant, called the children to it and all who would come. It was grey and neutral like the ground. I think a low song of content came from it. The Dakotan said so, and he hears these things.

I thought of the ecstasy of the great givings--the ecstasy of the little old grey woman who had mothered a prophet and heard his voice afar in the world.

I showed them the lush and vulgar stems of the American beauties, whose marketable excellence is measured by size, as the cabbage is, and whose corresponding red is the red of an apoplectic throat. I showed them the shoulders and mane of a farm-horse and then the shoulders and mane of a thoroughbred. Upon the first the flies fed without touching a nerve; but the satin-skinned thoroughbred had to be kept in a darkened stall. The first had great foliages of coa.r.s.e mane and tail; the other, a splendid beast that would kill himself for you, did not run to hair.

We stand to-day the product of our past ideals. We are making our future in form and texture and dynamics by the force of our present hour idealism. Finer and finer, more and more immaterial and l.u.s.trous we become, according to the use and growth of our real and inner life. It is the quickening spirit which beautifies the form, and draws unto itself the excellences of nature. The spiritual person is lighter for his size, longer-lived, of more redundant health, of a more natural elasticity, capable of infinitely greater physical, mental, and moral tasks, than the tightly compacted earth-bound man.... That is not a mere painter's flourish which adds a halo to the head of a saint. It is there if we see clearly. If the sanct.i.ty is radiant, the glow is intense enough to refract the light, to cast a shadow, to be photographed, even caught with the physical eye.

16

THE PLAN IS ONE