Child and Country Part 18

23

MORE ABOUT ORDER

The order of the narrow-templed men is not to be criticised in itself.

In fact it must be accomplished before the fresh complications and the resulting larger dimensions of faculty may be entered upon. The error lies in the hardening of the perceptions of children, through the existing methods of purely mental training; and in the manner of adult life, wherein the one imperious aim is dollar-making.

The men employed in the building here worked ten hours the day. No man lives who can do a thing well for ten hours a day as a habit. The last two or three hours of such a working-day is but a prolongation of strain and hunger. Here is a little town full of old young men. There is no help for him who "soldiers," since that is the hardest work. If you look at the faces of a half-hundred men engaged upon any labour, you will observe that the tiredest faces belong to those of the structurally inert--the ones who have to surmount themselves as well as their tasks, and who cannot forget themselves in their activity.

In many of the modern mills, they called it a fine thing when the labour hours were shortened from ten to eight. As I see it, the man who is allowed to do the same thing every second or two for eight hours presents a picture of the purest tragedy.

Two of the primary causes of human misery are compet.i.tive education of children and the endless multiplication of articles of trade by mechanical means. Of the first only a thought or two need be added. I have suggested the spirit of the Chapel, in its upholding of the one whom I undertook lightly to reprimand for repeating a technical error.

All the others sustained him and waited almost breathlessly for me to cease, so that I suddenly found myself out of order with one ent.i.ty, as it were.

The big plan of unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and again--from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor Aurelius--and even before these, whom we have the temerity to call Pagans. Then the Master Jesus came down, and left the story told more clearly and perfectly than any.

A loaf of bread may be leavened by yeast over night, but it requires thousands of years to leaven a planet with a new spiritual power. We look at the world just now and are inclined to say that it is at its worst. In truth, this is the hour before daybreak. In every land men are watching the East. Already some have cried out at the false dawns; and in their misery afterward have turned back hopelessly to the strife--immersed themselves again in the long night of war.

But the causes of war are still operative in our midst, and they are more terrible than trenches in Flanders, because their effects must still be reckoned with after the madmen of Europe have found their rest.

The idea of Brotherhood has been brooding over the planet for thousands of years. It tells us that all life is one; that we do the best unto ourselves by turning outward our best to others, and that which is good for the many is good for the one; that harmony and beauty and peace is in the plan if we turn outward from self to service.

Yet behold the millions of children taught at this hour on a compet.i.tive plan that reverses every idealism and shocks every impulse toward unity.

I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by heroic measure) the first compet.i.tive thought that insinuated itself in the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind us--every day, every hour, in every cla.s.s, they are stimulated by this baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars.

The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can and giving only what he must--against every call, every fragrance, every flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring us nearer home as a race.

Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the lie that we prosper by adding _things_ unto ourselves.... A certain automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means, the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear--to say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built nothing.

There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot, or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and pluck it forth--eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages could pay for these h.e.l.ls of routine.

Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a marvel for efficiency.

The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property--but the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.

A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own centres of being, puts his enduring self in it--a self said to be fashioned not of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind.

You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price--matter yields unto you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.

I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought--and he didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but bark and green, shade and sun--a kind of twilight curtain dropped before his eyes. There was a low hill with a ma.s.s of stones grouped on top.

"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.

"Why?"

"Why, they're just stones----"

I didn't answer.... He wouldn't have believed me, nor possibly his landscape gardener. He couldn't see through the twilight curtain the bleach or the tan of the rock pile, its natural balance--that it was a challenge to a painter. The place would be all hedged and efficient presently. He spoiled everything; yet he would have known how to deal with you had you brought to him a commercial transaction--the rest of his surfaces were covered in a thick, leathery coat, very valuable in a septic-tank where air and light must be excluded.... This man had another country estate in the East and still another in the South. I would point out merely that he did not truly own them.

Rather it would seem that one must spend years to be worthy of communion with one hillside of dogwood. According to what you can receive of any beauty, is the measure of your worthiness.

I remember my first adventure with a player-piano. I was conscious of two distinct emotions--the first a wearing tension lest some one should come to interrupt, and the second that I did not deserve this, that I had not earned it.... The instrument had that excellence of the finely evolved things. It seemed to me that the workmen had done something that money should not be able to buy. One does not buy such voices and genius for the a.s.sembly of tones. It seemed to me that I should have spent years of study to be worthy of this. There is a difference, as deep as life, in the listening and in the doing. Something of the plan of it all, is in that difference. I found that the spirit I brought was more designed to be worthy of this happiness, than any money could be. I found that a man does not do real work for money. That which he takes for his labour is but the incident of bread and hire, but the real thing he puts into a fine task, must be given. One after another, for many decades, workmen had given their best to perfect this thing that charmed me. Every part from Bach's scale to the pneumatic boxes in the making of a piano and player had been drawn from the spirit of things by men who made themselves ready to receive. They had toiled until they were fine; then they received.

It was something the same as one feels when he has learned to read; when the first messages come home to him from black and white, and he realises that all the world's great literature is open to his hand.

Again the great things are gifts. You cannot pay in matter for a spiritual thing; you can only pay in kind. I saw that the brutalisation of the player-piano resulted from people who thought they had earned the whole right, because they paid a price; that they did not bring the awe and reverence to their interpretations, and therefore they got nothing but jingle and tinkle and din.

I didn't know the b.u.t.tons and levers, but I had an idea how a certain slow movement should sound, if decently played. In two hours the instrument gradually fitted itself to this conception. It was ready in every detail; only I was to blame for the failures. The excitement and exultation is difficult to tell, as I entered deeper and deeper into the genius of the machine. It answered, not in _tempo_ and volume alone, but in the pedal relaxations and throbs of force. I thought of the young musicians who had laboured half their lives to bring to concert pitch the _Waldstein_ or the _Emperor_, and that I had now merely to punctuate and read forth with love and understanding....

A word further on the subject of disposing of one hundred thousand motor cars in a year. You will say there was a market for them. That is not true. There is not a natural market for one-fourth of the manufactured objects in the world. A market was created for these motor-cars by methods more original and gripping than ever went into the making of the motor or the a.s.sembly of its parts. The herd-instinct of men was played upon. In this particular case I do not know what it cost to sell one hundred thousand cars; in any event it was likely less in proportion to the cost of the product than is usually spent in disposing of manufactured duplicates, because the methods were unique.... Foot and mouth and heart, America is diseased with this disposal end. More and more energy is taken from production and turned into packing and selling.

Manufactured duplicates destroy workmen, incite envy and covetousness, break down ideals of beauty, promote junk-heaps, enforce high prices through the cost of disposal, and destroy the appreciation and acceptance of the few fine things. These very statements are unprintable in newspapers and periodicals, because they touch the source of revenue for such productions, which is advertising.

You will say that people want these things, or they would not buy. A people that gets what it wants is a stagnant people. We are stuffed and sated with inferior objects. The whole _art of life_ is identified with our appreciations, not with our possessions. We look about our houses and find that which we bought last month unapproved by the current style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true appreciations--in clothing, house-building and furnishing--following the heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a restless matter-mad race.

We have lost the G.o.ds within; we have forgotten the real producers, the real workmen; our houses are dens of the conglomerate, and G.o.d knows that implicates the status of our minds. William Morris is happily spared from witnessing the atrocities which trade has committed in his name, and the excellent beginning of taste and authority over matter inculcated by the spiritual integrity of Ruskin is yet far from becoming an incentive of the many.

There are men who would die to make others see the wonderful character-building of productive labour. Until the work is found for the man, or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling dear; so long as the child is compet.i.tively educated in great cla.s.ses, and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of the eternal things--just so long will we have war and governmental stupidity, and all shames and misery for our portion.

24

THE FRESH EYE

Living in rows, conducting our movements and our apparel as nearly as possible in accordance with the hitch of the moment, singing the songs our neighbours sing--this is Order, but gregarian order. It is thus that we lose or postpone the achievement of the fresh eye, the sensitiveness to feel ourselves and the truth. We accept that which we are told as true and beautiful; we accept that which is accepted. In reality, each man's sense of beauty is a different treasure. He must have the spirit of pioneers to come into his own.

A few years ago I pa.s.sed for a square or two along the main avenue of a large city--a sunny afternoon in early winter, as I remember, and the hour of promenade. Young women and girls were wearing reds of the most hideous shades--the reds of blood and l.u.s.t and decadence.

"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--b.l.o.o.d.y as the Balkans--because Trade had brought them in.

These reds meant that the American mult.i.tude was unaware that certain colours are bad as h.e.l.l. 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sage 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 quant.i.ties 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.