The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Hive, by Will Levington Comfort

THE HIVE

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

The Hive
The Last Ditch
Child and Country
Lot & Company
Red Fleece
Midstream
Down Among Men
Fatherland

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

The Hive

BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "CHILD AND COUNTRY,"
"THE LAST DITCH," "DOWN AMONG MEN," ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MARY

... soft gold and deep

fragrance and pomegranate red.

FOREWORD

There is much to say. Many have a part in this story of our days. Their work is on the table. Yet no manuscript, no chapter, is a real beginning. One must start a book this way—with a fresh sheet in the machine and tell what he is going to tell about.... First of all, it has to do with the unfolding of the child mind; all the Stonestudy work has been for that, but the brimming wonder of it all is that we have chiefly been employed unfolding ourselves.

No one can begin upon the sweet and sacred story of life to a child without taking a stride nearer into the centre of things, and living it. That's what all telling is about—presently to stop talking and to catch up on conduct. The fairest culture of all is to become artists in life.... Thinking of this, thinking much upon this one thing, we have been lured out of the heaviness of work into the dimension of Play. We tell here about this particular passage.

Also something about the story of Man and Woman, hinting at what is contained in pages of the Book of Life not opened heretofore for the eyes of the many, but preparing now for the eyes of the children of the New Race—a beautiful story, be sure of that, but one that requires art in the telling. No one could bring this story to the lovers and the children of the New Race who had not found out that Beauty belongs to the divine trinity with Goodness and Truth.

Many seers have not held that well in mind, many sages have forgotten it, many saints have not learned it adequately at all. We have to build our own heavens here before we can have them anywhere else. The more of an artist a man is, the more reverent he becomes about perfecting his thought-forms. Just a mention now—that we rejoice to make much of the Beauty side of things in this book; that a thing cannot be beautiful and bad; that Beauty is the next quest of the many, as they escape one by one from the bondage of Gold.

We try to express the Soul of things rather than to delineate boundaries of matter, but a very strong point is made upon the fact that one cannot deal in the spirit until he has mastered to a good degree the coarser stuff that bodies and worlds are made of. We do not care how the young minds aspire mystically, so long as their abutments hold fast in the bottom-lands. A man must not drag his anchor as he climbs the hill; he must unfold line all the way—a line made of strands of himself, woven of his own wisdom, love and power.

Much is made in this book of the fact that we are given pounds for a purpose—that all here below is symbol and intimation of a globe and perfection elsewhere—that we cannot look upon the archetype of gold until we have mastered the imitation in clay.... We come even closer to this precious subject: For instance, we know that it is only from the soul of things that one can see materials—that no one can get a glimpse of the meaning of materials so long as he is lost in the ruck of them. At the same time we do not believe that we have access, even to the lesser grades of mysticism, until we have all the power and force of the material-minded. We believe we must do well that which the world is doing, even the tasks of the average man, that nothing can be missed.

We do not encourage that mystic or poet who requires endowment. If we are to be artists, we believe in supporting our own groups; we have a suspicion that we are not through with conditions, any conditions no matter how hateful, so long as they have us whipped.

We aspire to be writers and politicians and painters and heroes; we aspire to be masters in all the superb productions of life, but we are content to begin with the ground. We are content with poverty, yet we believe that very early as workmen, we are entitled to a fastidious poverty, which is expensive. No possessions—but all possessions. As writers we are convinced that it is necessary to do—and inimitably well—the things that the public wants and pays ten cents the word for, quite as well as to reveal the deeper folds of our growth for which we have to finance publication. We are not sure yet which is the worthier achievement.

Perhaps we speak much of Soul in this book, but we mean nothing more formidable than the better part of every man. This is the Big Fellow who takes us over when we do that which is worth while—in billiards or diplomacy, in art or love or trade. I think it is the Big Comrade which we are really unfolding—the Workman and Player. Much of Soul, we write, because it is the point of our educational drive—to set It free in the child or the young workman, to make It speak or write or play, and not mere brain and hand.

We speak much of love—not as an emotion, not as a sentiment, but as a cosmic force. You will see much more what we mean by this as you turn the pages. It is the most challenging thing in the world. It is the inner white-hot core of the Fatherland that is to be—the great white Democracy of the future....

Democracy—that's the point of inception of it all; that word is the seed. The more you dwell upon it—you know what the Seamless Robe of the Christ means—the more you realise that the Master Jesus was the first Big Democrat.... We have them speak the word softly and thoughtfully here each day—we like to hear the young ones say it. They are apt to know as much about it as you do—for the word doesn't mean exactly what they mean, who have used it most heretofore. It isn't the name of a political party—yet.... It is government of the people by the people, but only to those who see the sons of God in the eyes of passing men. We only ask its magic, not its presence upon these pages.... They're fighting for it gloriously—every hour. The boys here thrill with the boys there. We hold our hands high to them. Some of our boys are there. They are all our boys! Some are waiting the call to go—but there or here, we are pulling together for the real Fatherland, for the adequite fraternity, under the endless and thrilling magic of the word Equality.

... I can say no more splendid word to you than My Equal: I know of no greater adventure than to become one of the Many. It is true that you and I—the best of us, the Immortal within us each, are of one house—that this is but a far outpost of the journey, Egypt if you like, the husks if you like—but that we have arisen and are on our way home to the Father's House.

Canyon, Santa Monica, California.

CONTENTS

THE HIVE

1

NORTH AMERICANS

The thing called the New Race—the passion of poets, the phantom running ahead and forever calling the dreamer and revolutionist and occultist, is far from a reality as yet among the commonplaces of the world. It is the spirit of everything worth while, but that means nothing to one who has not a breath of it in his own body.... A story went forth from this shop recently in which certain ideals and presences of the new social order were carried through to a cheerful ending. The publisher wrote, "Yes, but what is the New Race?"

It's a fair question, but remember one cannot adequately describe a spiritual thing in terms of matter. It is only possible of portrayal where it has broken through into terms of three-space. First you are apt to get the nearest and most striking picture of the New Race at your own supper-table—the presence of one of your own children, especially if the young one is hard to understand.

Parents and children of all times have found confusion and alarm in each other's ways. But there are rare periods of human history when the difference between two generations has been not a normal and superficial crack, but an abyss. It is so now. The Old has reached its climacteric point of destructivity. All self-passions destroy themselves in time. Fear, greed, sensuality—all are self-destructive. Great human numbers and decadent principles have been recently broken down in the world with a swiftness and abandonment heretofore unrecorded, except in the traditions of planetary flood and flame....

You may watch closely the child under seven who plays in the Unseen, whose companions are not in the room for older eyes; watch the one of fancies and fairies and fragrances which others cannot quite discern. Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood, when they were in reality repressing the imagination—the faculty which master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind. Too coarse and unlit to see what the child saw, the parents again and again have looked gravely at each other, saying:

"This is a crisis. Our child has begun to lie. We must forget her own feelings and punish her——"

So often it is her—but not always. The boys who are to do the great tasks of song and prophecy and architecture—they, too, dream dreams and see visions and have the rapt eyes of Joan in the forests of Domremy; they, too, are severely questioned by the pharisees; none escape this scourging; they, too, in many cases shall be put to death.

The new ideals of the parenthood, education, romance, are now being introduced and promulgated by pioneers long since emerged from the old litter and humus. Education will mean first of all a turning for power to the Unseen. The quest of the Swan and the Star and the Beloved, are never carried along on the levels and inequalities of the earth—always the uplifted face for the saint and the sage and the seer. Great parents kneel beside their children and beg to be delivered from the heaviness which holds them to the dim shadows, where the child sees face to face. Education will mean finding his intrinsic task for the child—the intensive cultivation of the human spirit from the Soul outward, not alone from the brain inward.

The quest of the passing age was for Gold. The real meaning and symbol and glory of gold, as the highest, smoothest and most finished of minerals, has been lost in the bulkier products and possessions it meant to measure and signify. More and more has gold itself hid away from vulgar hands and been represented by objects intrinsically inferior. We now behold a civilisation destroying itself for commodities and destroying the commodities for which the destruction began.

Gold itself will serve Beauty in the coming age; commerce will serve æsthetics. The lovers of Beauty begin with the sand, with the clay. They love nature from the ground up; they are fervent for light and air, for sun and sky and water, for fruits and grains and bees, for stars and rains and romances. They say such things are holy. Words are inadequate for their loves and appreciations. They find the ways to love God infinite. They see Him in stone and stream; they see Him in the eyes of the deep down men; they see Him risen and inevitable in the eyes of their lovers....

Straight goodness will not do for the New Race, nor straight intellectuality. Artists, singers, painters and idealists will be the heroes of the generations to come, for they will add the quest of Beauty to the unwashed goodness of the saints and pilgrims.

These are but flaring points; one is embarrassed in short space because of a myriad things to say. Free verse is a sign of the New, also the dream of a free world and the planetary patriotism. The immanence of the spirit of all things, is a sign; the sense of the underlying oneness of humanity; not alone the Fatherland, but the Kinterland, where new Fountains are established and sages and masters come for inspiration—all these, like a passing train of wonder, a glimpse of many cars....

I think I can bring the picture in closer by using a few pages of work from one of the young men with me. His name is Steve. I called him The Dakotan,[1] in the book, Child and Country. We've romped and ridden together for three years, and I've known Steve better every day—still far from the end. The rest of the chapter is Steve's writing:

NORTH AMERICANS

Out of the centuries of moil and mix and fuse of Europe, the orient and the north countries, a gleaming archetype has emerged here which may be called the real North Americans. They are scattered here and there among the younger generation—young people new in name only; in soul they are as old as Zeus. Often they are strangers in their father's house. They blend the mind of the occidental with the soul of the east; splendid firstlings of an untried future. They betray themselves by their genius. Heredity is the first fetich overthrown by them.

From the first they are a law unto themselves. They cast off churches, codes, creeds, schools and parents as preliminary steps in their teens. In the twenties they are prodigies, leaders in the arts or the revolutions. It is their aim to over-reach themselves, not to further a type. Very early they conjourn together in secret and obscure places, revolting against life as it is lived, like a handful of white dwellers in a foreign city.

There is always an alien, intangible something about these people. One senses the double life they lead, their own, and others. Conditions are not yet adjusted for them. They are super-nationalists, the first mark of the new. They are dreamers who make their dreams come true in matter, and first among their dreams is of the planet in one piece. They are naturally intolerant of barriers and partitions. They see ahead a new social order vast and shining as a devachanic vision—the real democracy of the future. They see that the new has come in not to kill, but to build. Theirs will be the spiritual heroics. Yet all this, of the greater patriotism, must not yet be spoken. It only alienates them the more from those they must live with. Their arch enemy is Ignorance, personified so often in their elders.

It is noticeable that these young people are healthier, stronger, swifter, sharper, tougher, bolder and at the same time lighter and finer than the passing generation. They have the new healthiness. They belong to the open and are practically immune to disease. Theirs is the health of sun and wind and spirit—vitality instead of constitution, something the old can never understand. Constitution is weight, solid, ungiving. Vitality is volatile, springy, electric, constantly being given, constantly being acquired, self-refining. Constitution does not change; it accumulates all it can, then begins to die....

The young women of this new Race are open, strong, eye-to-eye, free spoken. They are capable of friendships; they are not adverse to being wholly understood by males. They are not popular with ordinary women, who surmise their superiority but comprehend it not. Deceit, jealousy and such common disturbances evident in the sex are unknown to them. They have character and are lovely rather than beautiful. They are apt to go half way in their love-making, for who should know better when the chosen father of their children arrives.

All of these people are bringers of true love. Love is their philosophy and religion. They listen to the heart as well as the brain. Others think them cruel in their discrimination in mating. They take all or nothing—prodigious riskers, great sufferers, throwing even love's dream on the board to be played for, and laughing as they play. The slightest blight on the loved one is deepest agony.

Perhaps the surest way of discovering these young giants is to search about for the most sorely harassed children. Invariably they are put to it, to break into this day and generation. They fight their way up through all the banked-up ignorance and antagonism of unlit humanity. Often they are solitaires, coming and going with the secrecy of kings and eagles.

2

QUICKENINGS

A few pages of drift first of all with the younger boys.... There is a lane of Lombardy poplars from the Lake to the interurban car-line—a half mile. It is a lifting walk at any time, but summer evenings are wonderful with all the sounds and scents of a true pastorale—lake-breath and meadow-lands, the whole sky to look at, and the murmuring dissonance of the poplars. Often we walk to the car with passing guests. One evening a guest went away whom we loved very much. A lad of seven, named John, and I walked back from the car alone.

He was ignited. I felt this at last through his hand. I had been thinking about my own things all too long, missing the beginnings of his talk.... He hurried forward in the dusk, speaking in a hushed rapt voice. Because I had missed the first part, I said: "John, I want you to write that—either to-night or to-morrow."

And this is what came in:

The Magic Lane:

It was at dusk. Two people left their tracks in Nature's dust road.

Love is found on that road. It is the road of the mystics.

They leave their love in it; Nature kisses their feet.

Many horses' feet have been kissed on that mystic road.

That mystic road will last forever.

I long to walk upon that road of love.

Love on that road will last forever.

It is all true love.

Our friends have been met on that road of love.

It leads to the Hills of God.

Certain spelling matters have been corrected. We pay little attention to spelling in the work here. The young ones learn by reading and get the proper look of a word altogether too soon in many cases. There was another high moment from John at the same time. The following three lines have stood out from the period with memorable magic:

Wonder

The soft breath of the Mother came in through the window of vines.

The stars were shining like the face of the New Generation.

My spirit was away in the Hills. A noise at the door brought me back——

John then fell into a psychological tangle which we found little profit in following. By the "Mother" he referred to Nature.... The verse period has passed for the time. Around the age of seven, boys change. Often, as in this case, they are not so interesting for a while afterward. John is coming nine now and is writing "action" stories with all the worn and regulation props and settings. The early tendency will return with a dimension added. All transitions are times of disorder, but they are followed by larger areas and truer fulfilments of order. A cloud falls upon the sanctuary, but when it is dispelled, one perceives a lifted dome, bright with its new cloth of gold.

I am struck every day in dealing with young boys how wisdom and beauty and truth can be inculcated in their lives, without pain and strain to them, and with great profit to the teacher. The young mind is quick to change. It has not grown its pharisaical ivory....

The sanction of a boy must be won on a physical basis. A man must know what the boy knows and go him one better. The man must understand boy points of view, but never expect the boy to be puerile. Parents of the past generations have had the steady effrontery to expect very little from children. "Why, they are only children!" has done more to make for vacuousness and drivel than any other visionless point of view, none of which has been missed. There is a difference in ages, to be sure. The child's mind has not massed for use the external impacts of twenty or thirty years of life in the world, but there is also an Immortal within—a singer, hero, builder, or a teacher possibly, eager to manifest through the child's fresh mind, fervid to bring the mind of the child to its subjection, for the expression of its own revelations. Indeed, the parents themselves are enjoined to become as little children. In arriving at this wisdom and humility, they may suddenly find masters in their own children.

There is also a lad here of seven named Tom. Yesterday I found him beside me on the sand, down by the water's edge. I began to tell him about the Inner Light that we all carry. You can talk over a child's head, if your words are choked with mental complications (which is apt to be second-rate talk, anyway), but you seldom are out of reach of a fine child's grasp when you speak of spiritual things. He was sitting cross-legged, folded hands between his knees—a little six pointed star—head and shoulders the three upper points, knees with folded hands between, the three lower. He was bare from the waist up and thighs down, and brown as the honey of buckwheat.... I told him that the seventh and perfect point of his star was within; that if he shut his eyes and kept very still, putting away for the present all his thoughts about himself, his feelings, his wants and his rights—looking into himself as one would look ahead for a lamp in the night, listening deep within, as one would listen for the voice of a loved friend,—I promised that at last he would see what the three wise men saw—the Star in the East. He need only follow that Star and be true to its guidance to come at last to the Cave and the Solar Babe.... After that I hinted that I would come to his feet and listen.

Tom felt that it was worth trying for at once—shut his eyes, turning all thoughts and gaze within. He held the posture long.... I have marvelled again and again at the quickness with which the child-mind attains to concentration so essential for all original production. The little ones have no mad emotional lists to sort out and subdue; their wants are simple "yes" and "no" in so many cases. Indeed, they are spared the struggle of becoming as little children.... Tom held the posture, until I was actually tense from the strain of waiting and keeping my thoughts from calling his.

It was a picture—sun-whitened hair, long yellow lashes, brown body with a bit of babe's softness left to it, and glorious sunlight. He opened his eyes at last saying that he had the door, where the light was, almost opened, when a fly bit him.

I thought of the perfection of the instance of the mind's waywardness—the coming of the Master spoiled by a fly bite.... Tom will search for his Star every day. It is strange that he is closer to the hill-pastures around Bethlehem, under seven, than for years afterward.

To learn concentration in mid-life after the world "has been put through a man," is an ordeal at best; and yet we are by no means masters of ourselves, nor capable of significant achievement until the brain can be stilled at will of its petty affairs (the first aim of concentration) and becomes the glad servant of the "giant" within.

A little later I saw Tom on the back of a huge black walk-trot saddle-horse of show quality—passing up the Lane at a fast clip, his feet half way to the stirrups, holding on to the saddle with one hand, the bridle-rein in the other. A year or two ago I should have been afraid to permit that, but we manage now to relieve the young ones of a large part of our fears for their welfare. Children have enough to overcome from their parents. Frequently the New Age young people have to master their heredity before they begin upon themselves.

Life is a big horse to ride, so often a black horse. It is well to start children free and unafraid. We do not let them dwell in thought of pain. We do not permit tears. We inform them early that to be sick is a confession of uncleanness, that lying is for the use of cowards only, and that to be cruel marks the idiot.

We are occasionally serious over repeated failures, but we laugh over things done well. Tennis has unfolded marvellous possibilities in the training of will force. Children are shown that there is a mystic quality to all the perfect games—that the great billiardists and tennis and baseball players perform feats in higher space, whether they know it or not. There is the essential ideal first in the making of the athlete as in the making of the poet. The great moments of play require faculties swifter and more unerring than the human eye or hand or mind. Ask the master of any game if he had time to think in pulling off the stroke that won. It is inspiration that he uses quite the same as the poet in his high moments.

Education is the preparation of the mind to receive and answer to inspiration from a plane above. The more you develop merely the brain of a child, the more he is detached from the great principles of being, the more also is he closed to the real, and subjected to the danger of actual lesion and sickness. The more you develop the spirit of a child, or rather give the significant One within an opportunity to come forth and be the child, the more you make for beauty, health, goodness and glory of bodily life.... A lucky day when you start really to associate with your children, luckier still when you undertake the work of teaching them incidental to your own work. Then and there, you begin to realise that children are close to a source of things that you cannot touch. Presently you realise that they are teaching you....

Day after day I have studied and practised the development of the child from within outward. I have seen the capacity to synthesise and assimilate mere mental matters developed in a year, by training the mind from the centre of origins outward, that mental training alone could never accomplish. The mind itself becomes vigorous and avid and capacious and majestically swift. It is trained to express its true self. That is power—that is king-play. This sentence covers the whole matter:

The perfect way to develop the mind of the child is to teach him to sit and listen at the feet of his own master, the Soul.

The right to live and to bring the laughter of power to the days must be won afresh each morning. No two days alike. We make ourselves impossible to children of the New Age by trying to confine them in the laws and rules of yesterday. The young people whom I serve live in a different intensity. Their interest flags if I repeat, if I fall into familiar rhythms. Continually they spur me on. I think, after all, great teaching is the capacity to feel what the younger minds are thinking. If we are too coarse to catch the first warning of their resistance, they slip farther and farther from our grasp.

It would not seem possible to hold American young people with spiritual affairs; yet this is done daily. We call the Unseen—the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays—how all matter is a mockery at the last—that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic.

We dwell upon the mystic white lines which connect all things—the sources of daring and beauty and creativeness. I ask my young people where they were—when they did any rare and improved bit of work, when they felt like great comrades, met some magnanimous impulse, arose to superb instants of play, or when in Chapel the big animation touched us all and set us free. They always answer that they were out of themselves.

That's a secret of the new teaching again—to lift the students out of themselves. Men take to drink or drugs for this same reason: men and women set out on the great adventures, pleasures and quests for this. We hunger and toil for this freedom; we suffer and adore—to get out of ourselves. Mental teachings tie us in more firmly. The teaching here—and no two days alike—is to startle and encourage the young minds to arise and live and breathe in that lovelier and more spacious dimension which at least borders upon the Unseen. The doors open and shut so softly. One does not know he has been out—until he is back with strange light in his eyes and in his hands a gift from the gods.

The essential spirituality of the new teaching must not be confused with religious affairs as they are known and exploited in the world. You cannot teach the New Age religion of the world's kind. It has its own. No dry as dust sage will do. A snort will answer your sanctimoniousness; flexible science will reply to the abysses of your logic.... You must be the consummate artist if never before in your life, to teach the beauty of the soul to youth. The young workers of the new social order will never bring forth their great harvests from your reflected light. You must be spontaneous—you must flood them with pure solar gold; you must show them by your life and your work, how you come and go into the Unseen.

There is no rest.... One commands his disciples to go forth at last. The teacher strides forward faster when they cling. He tells them one day they must race the gamut to follow him; and the next day he puts another in his place and begs to be allowed a cushion in the midst of the children.... We hold them by setting them free—the first law of love. All unions of the future—in trade and friendship and matrimony—will be founded upon the principle of freedom; and this is the essence of the new teaching—to liberate the children into their larger and God-quickened selves.

No rest and no two days alike.

A Bob White called me this morning across the uncut hayfields at the edge of the lake-bluff.... His two smooth and patient notes seemed to contain the secret of putting off all fret and fear and unrest. He seemed to ask if I had not done this already—had not yet put all boyish and merely temporal things away? "Not yet?... Not yet?" he called the question.

I answered that I would try again, and I set out straightway to be honest once more with the world, with the soil and with myself. I would begin with the clay again to be clean—to rise and think and dwell in cleanliness, to think no thought, to perform no action second-rate—to begin with the Laugh again—the warm laugh of conquest that always opens some inner door to fresh powers—to arise afresh in the glory and gamble of the Unseen.... I returned and saw the young ones one by one—from Tom and John up to the men and women—doing their work. I set about mine with a laugh and called the day good. The teacher knows best who is taught.

3

CONQUEST OF FEARS

An interesting boy of ten and I have been much together in the open weather. We have learned many things, but nothing more important than what a sham Fear is. I do not mean that we take chances or that it is wise to risk life or limb. Fine discrimination is back of all training in the arts of life; still we certainly have found that Fear is a waster and diminisher of beauty and power—and that it can be mastered.

About the most fascinating thing that life has shown me is the way in which fine examples of the younger generation learn the deeper matters of life—matters of self-mastery which make the very presence of a lad significant to a stranger, and which formerly were supposed to be secrets for the sons of kings alone.

"Do you fear anything?" I ask. "Look deep. Listen deep—do you fear anything?... It's like the pain that tells you of a weakness or disease. Fear is an unerring reminder of a task of conquest ahead for you. That which you fear most is the thing to conquer first."

There had been much of this talk of Fear before a laughable personal experience showed me how much I asked.

I crossed a mesa and came to an abrupt drop-off—two hundred feet sheer. It astonished me. I hadn't experienced anything like this quiver of horror for years. All members and muscles bolted at the thought of advancing closer to the edge. I sat down to think it out. It never had occurred before that I wasn't my nervous system, and must not let it get me down.

The more I thought, the more I perceived that I must do the thing I dreaded so. In fact, I had told trusting young people that they were not their bodies, not their emotions, not even their minds—that these must be made to obey. Here I had a chance to prove if I were less in action than talk. I forced my fluttering young self to the edge.... Dizziness—wobbly limbs, fancied shoves from behind, the call of the huge shadowed space below, a queer sense of parting in mid-air, the body thumping down, another and liberated self gladly spurning the ground—all these symptoms of panic followed swiftly.

I held until calm came, and I then could study this little coil of forgotten fears—a civilised mess.... The weakness was absurdly easy to overcome after the will was once aroused. There's no end or limitation to will force when awakened. The greater the man, the more awe he has for this subject. There's a glow that follows conquest of any kind; the mere call of the will to action brings a sense of power in the heart. There is no way more speedily to dispel pain, anger, passion, fear, or any of these tentacles of personality—than to summon the power of will to instant action. The particular matter of this precipice showed me a trick about calling up the force—priceless to me afterward in bigger tests, and for opening the way of self-conquest to boys.

One must decide what one wants to do—then carry it out to the death. Discrimination, art, all culture and knowledge may be brought to bear in making the decision—but after that, it must be carried out—just that.

Fears belong to the abdomen. You can feel them there. They are quicker than thought. Perhaps you had a twinge of nerves over some sight or sound or odour, before your mind could tell you what you were afraid of.... I have often told the young ones here—listening a bit to my own voice—that there isn't anything living or dead, phantom, shell, or living soul, that has got the authority to make the spirit of man quail.

Courage is spirit.

Most people don't care to try to deal with it; they let it have its way.... Do you recall the fears of the dark room as a child—fear always stealing behind—upstairs alone, the rush to the light, almost screaming tension?... I heard a patter of steps the other evening and knew the whole story—a boy of seven. He had been sent upstairs without a light. I sent him back, told him to stay there until he got himself in hand—to stay in the dark and think the bogie down. He was well afterward.

I have known some under-fire work. A man soon gets himself in hand to look straight at a white-fringed trench. Fear of sharks furnished another test. From a child the deep-sea devourers had an exquisite fascination for me—to be cut in two under brine, white belly, backward mouth, black-rimmed, hairy pig eyes, the double-rows of teeth.... Pacific Islanders swim in the same harbour with fourteen-foot scavengers, careless of whole schools of monsters, yet scurry to their boats at the sight of one solitary, different fin. I had seen the so-called, man-eating brutes, "grey nurses," dim grey horrors with dull black spots. A well-fed imagination also came into play.

I went swimming in the surf with a splendid Australian chap—a doctor home from the trenches.... He left me back in the surf lines and started out to sea. I finished my swim decently in toward North America, and lay on the strand. From time to time off in the sunset I saw my friend's head.... I was glad to grab the beach-comber when he came in.

"It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to ask—what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?"

"You don't think about them," he said.

That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite. One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens all the monsters of the mind....

There's nothing fit to be afraid of, unless it is the self. When we get the ape and the tiger, the peacock and the porpoise, the lizard and the shark and the carcajou of our own natures mastered, there isn't anything left to do but to tally them off outside, a friendly finish with them all. No menagerie is complete as man's, and each of us favours some species from time to time.

I have thought much about fear. In another place I told how we have overcome inertia; how we developed senses through the hard administry of fear and hunger, anger and the rest. Now, however, these must be overcome.... One of the last physical fears to let go in my case is that for the hangman's rope. I think Roger Casement really wanted the axe in preference to the hemp. Steadily facing a repulsion, it surely vanishes.

The point of it all is that you can teach self-command to the children.... I took a girl of fourteen to my precipice—left her there standing on the very edge. After a few minutes I called. Her face was calm as if she had gazed from a porch....

"Did you feel any fear?" I asked.

"Only yours for me," she answered.

It was very true. I had the thing whipped for myself, but it had been hard to leave her there.

Finally I took the smaller boys out for a test. They didn't know I was testing them. Children haven't the fear of height such as we put on. I recalled a score of episodes of my own boy-days, in which I startled the elders by Sam Patch imitations. Also I have put the young ones through some deep water affairs....

You may not be able to get it quite—but all fear is illusion. Every inner beast mastered makes us stronger. These animals within are our cosmos to rule. We do not know how beautiful they are until we lose our fear for them. Boys and girls here are learning these things and putting them in action.

The kingdom of heaven is also within. Fear, passion, anger, poverty, and the like—all represent areas of our own kingdom not yet brought under perfect cultivation.... After the emotional and physical conquests come the psychic ones—hard matters of mastery pertaining to the heart and mind—to know, to do, to dare, to keep silent—then the finding of the hidden treasures of the subconscious, mystic fleets that sail those dim seas, as yet uncharted for most of us.... After that, the Soul. At last we must be potent enough to stand eye to eye in the presence of the King Himself.

From looking steadily over an escarpment of two or three hundred feet drop, to gazing at the world from the forward cockpit of an airplane at two or three thousand feet, isn't such a long step as you would imagine. The fact is, I was in no way terrified in my first flight, and fear certainly crawled me full length as I stood that time at the edge of the mesa. Our young people have the call to test the new dimension of wings. This zeal corresponds in a unique way with the new education. Intellect stays upon the ground. Intuition is the lifting of the wings of the mind.

I had already begun to make friendly visits to an aerodrome at the edge of the Pacific when the following letter came from the Abbot,[2] who is now seventeen and in New York:

... Perhaps Steve told you that I had a ride in an airplane about three weeks ago. Man! 'Tis the place for me! Next summer, soon as school dissipates, I attach my name to the Royal Flying Corps. The psychic effect of a flight is wonderful—like travelling over a very tall bridge. The Atlantic coast for many miles lay in profile as a map, the roads stretched as thin mathematical lines; forests as darker shadows of the earth; New York as a blotch of smoke and curious patchwork. For twenty minutes we sailed around and around, just as you've seen a gull pinion, then we came to earth; waited until it got dark, then up again.... Lights of the aerodrome lay like jewels upon the earth, but up, up we went, faster and higher, the roar of the propeller providing a steady nervous outlet. I could shout my lungs out—I had to relieve myself of the excess thrill.

Then what should happen? Red, a tiny rim, like the disc of a golden dollar, the sun began to lift up from the horizon again. The higher we went, the higher it lifted, until there it hung, as a golden bulb, a swollen orange off in the mighty stretches,—pure, golden,—while below twinkled the town's lights. 'Twas the fullest, richest, most brimming moment I've ever had. The awe of the cosmos overtakes the heart and lays down its stupendous laws. The distance between sun and 'plane seemed a golden pathway that ever could absorb your flight. I was aware only of worshipping God, and that roar of the machine made one think of the roar of the planets, comets, meteors, all the suns, roa-oa-ring. What a romance! Finding the sun!

... No discussion of the fear element whatsoever in the letter....

The old thrills won't do for the new race. I took a pair of screen-trained young ones to a circus recently and became absorbed at their mild boredom. Alcohol is too slow and coarse for the wastrel tendencies of the modern hour. The sad ones of the new generation use high potency drugs to forget the drag of time and space. A new dimension is required in all things. The young men of the new race make light of our old dreads and are learning winged ways to heaven and to hell.

4

THE STUFF OF COMRADES

I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things, and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old.... I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of effort, even the sense of thought—and an hour would pass in the joy of communal blessedness, because we were one.

Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more. The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of the hat-band. There is a continual condensation at work within us mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.

This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of the oil of a subject or a breath from its essence.

There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences of experiences of thousands of lives—yet the refinement of the soul is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences of but one life, but because the soul is so small or so diffused, the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet, we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us, in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the fourth dimension—the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well to-day—I mean well for me—if I rise to the opportunity at all, it will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.

I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a review of the evolution of the world.

The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see, proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all knowledge and experience beneath.

The higher man ascends, the more inclusive. To heal another, the physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual refinement—the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the spirit of things.

In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact, that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of the externals of the Plan.

The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath, the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in containing the Idea of it.

This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great single, all-including, all-mastering emotion—such as love. And now we are in a region where there can be no difference of opinion; at least I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.

There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply—himself, his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours, and sympathies and tolerances. Its outpouring is action, and is of itself creative. This is the OM. Such a love leavens and impregnates all things, because it understands and includes all things. It unifies all separateness; it enfolds all intelligence with intuition; it unites all parts.

This brings us to that ancient and unassailable premise of all religions—that God includes every part of the universe in being the spirit of it; that His idea of creativeness is expressed in one great single, all-mastering and including emotion,—which is love. We hear the little children saying it, "God is love."

... We awaken the Ideal in ourselves first by imitating the virtues of others. In the earlier days when to me courage meant physical action, men passed in different fields, leaving an imperishable remembrance. I have often seen the expressions of those I loved and idealised as a boy, live again in the faces of my own children. John T. McCutcheon in Luzon, filling a reel of films, under a volley of fire at Binan, on his knees, working the camera with a whole brigade sprawled behind—gave me one of the finest early building blocks for the courage among men. He also gave me an ideal of cleanliness: One evening, after a vicious day's march, and we were all ravenous, John T. left camp to find a river. There he bathed with government bouquet,—made himself right with himself, even to shaving, before meat and drink. His constraint looked like mastery to me then. Grant Wallace was a big star of that service—ideal in performance of friendship.... Young men at hand now are different. Not one of them lack in grip and grit. They reveal the new thing in courage, the courage that begins where the courage of the soldier ends. These have gone far into the mystery of their own kingdoms—rapidly becoming kings of themselves.

The world doesn't understand them. The Abbot[3] is a sensation in literary matters at Columbia, but unplaced. The Dakotan[3] was said to be unfit for a soldier because he was twenty pounds under weight for his height. He can leap five feet six, run or hike indefinitely, exhaust a cement-mixer, say "stick" in all tongues and "quit" in none. He has the will and wisdom to make himself a new man over night—and yet his Government wants him served up just so, in pounds. There isn't any one loves America more than the Dakotan, whom we now call Steve. Even the young military surgeons will know before long that endurance is a matter of spiritual culture, that courage is spirit—that a man is well because of cleanliness of body and thought and organised will; that he doesn't fail in a pinch because he is evolved; that all the higher forms of life call for speed rather than strength, the levitating force of spirit rather than the gravitating force of flesh, for brain rather than brute.... Comrade stuff is the stuff of souls.... I've studied them long and devotedly. I build my days upon the things these boys show me. Less and less are we different from those who call to our hearts.

These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large, unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days these young men perform automatically.

My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness—the American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness above this—where intuitions play and weave causes and effects together—where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more like a giant's, perhaps—where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if at all.

Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It became clear as daylight—that a man is at his best only when out of himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward. Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force.

Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools and materials in black and white—just intimations.... If we are sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two words suggest it best. The first is Comrade, which has become a silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the years—or avoided using it—until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear—its meaning in work and world and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.

It seems to say Equality. It's a kind of deep drink of spirit together, a word spoken at the last moment between men—an inner-shrine word, spoken with a smile, and a glimpse into the eternal indestructibility of the human heart. It expresses the love of the world, not as it is felt in the brain, but in the breast of the soul. The New Race has already washed it clean. It goes with a Cause fit to die for. It belongs to men and women who can look at each other with a kind of prayer in their eyes and face death alone and laugh at it.

There's a fury, too, in the word—fury against the world, against things as they are. It stands against the world-darkness now, and for the day that is to be. It means love for the poor, a love for the peasants, a passion to serve and be tender to them, not to drive them into the pits of death—a readiness to die for them without cant, a readiness also to dare to live for them.

Comrade—there's vision in it to strip off the masks of decadent nations, to open wide the sepulchres where the priests are still plotting to crucify the King; its strong magic will uncover the monotonous crimes of commerce.... It signifies the spirit of the young men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear the débris for the building of the New Age.

They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the soil and the rivers and snows—to build upon them the new heaven and the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word—the laugh of youth and power.

The other word is Democracy.

5

JOHN'S THINGS

Here are some of John's things, mainly letters to the Old Man. California called hard for the recent winter, and I went out a few weeks ahead of the Stonestudy outfit. John intended to follow within three weeks, but overturned a kettle of boiling water in his lap, and was unable to leave his quarters for three times that period. We all learned better the hard lesson—to wait. The quoted word "Play" in his first letter refers to a little slip of paper which I had pasted upon my typewriter. There has been a big tendency in recent months, in my case, to let down all tension in relation to literary production—the idea being that when one has learned all the laws he is capable of, the time is at hand when it is well to forget them. I have written several times throughout this book of an ideal emergence of Workman into Player. We learn many laws, to learn at last that there are none. We come up through many slaveries to freedom.... I have not corrected all the spelling in John's documents. The point most interesting is how the real voice breaks through the mind of a child of nine from time to time.

Dear Younervers[4] Pal:

We got your letter but it was not like you for it was not type-written. Your old machine here is going grand. I am using it now. It seems that I am with you all the time. Comrad has meant a lot the last four days to me. Comrad is everything in the New Race. Masters will be comrads with every one.

That "Play" has it all, on your machine. "Play" is in all somewhere. It is all like a big page and everything is woven on it. There is a time when Comrads hafto go apart for a little while, but not long. Their thoughts never go apart. They are always pulling together, always weaving in thoughts and things that are the same. It is wounderful—a parting. No sadness over it. It is the best that could come, or it would not. We are held together. The pull of the world is nothing to us.

It is hard to keep high, but we will. Fred[5] and I take a swim every day. I go a hundred and fifty feet. Then we come up and rub each other.

True Comrads have it all. Love from Comrad to Comrad.

Pal:

I woke up this morning kind of blurred, and got Irving and Steve to come out and clean up the barn. They came and we worked there all morning, and then went in for a swim. It was wounderful, the feel I had when I got some clean clothes on and had the old dog[6] feeling good. He is meditating over what a wounderful world it is now. The stall smells sweet as a hay-stack.

Fred just got here and is working at your desk.

How was your morning? I never had a better one, and its the weary old Sabbath, too.

Send for me soon now. It seems that it was a year since we have been together. We can not do without each other. Send for me Soon. I hold my hand high to you.

Dear Old Magic Fath:

I am at Steve's desk in the guest room. It is the first time that I have touched the keys of a type writer since the night I was berned. It sure does feel good.

It has been much more wonderful to hafto have Patience for the Meeting. It will be twice as great for both. I have needed you so since I have been in bed. In pane and sicknes there is nothing that you need so much as your Comrad.

I felt palms up to everything. It is all good. We love it all. It all was something for us to get. It puts us higher after something comes to us like that.

I have all the pores poring out love to you. We are always together.

Your Side Kiker.

Dear Old Pal:

Fred and I slept again in the Study. It looked like a storm last night, but it did not come. Fred is a real Comrad. I got to his heart last night. I do not know how. The roses have been wounderful the last few days.

How is wounderful Mary? We are all sending Thoughts to you. We have had wounderful full days lately, all heat. The town is howling for rain now; they are never satisfied. We are always ready for anything. It is the best. Our wounderful old mailtrain just crossed the magic lane. I love trains more and more. They have a pull to my heart. We love everything.

I do not feel on erth. I feel in space. Out of the draw of the erth—Free.

Love always in my heart for you. I hold hard for the time that Comrads pull together again for the road, us two. Jane is at my hump all the time—so I will quit.

Dear Old Comrad:

We are close this morning. I can feel your warm wounderful hand in mine this morning. We are one. There is the holy breath—such a great pull of thoughts and work to California. It seems as if all the Comrads were calling me there. Then I hafto think of the one thing—Patience. When you have mastered Patience, you are free. All well here. My sores are getting better fast. I have wanted to work lots lately, since I was in bed, but I could not. I lost so many ideas in bed. Beds are a curse. I love you, Comrad. We need to be together.

Your old Pal.

Sunlight Pal:

A wounderful sun. A little late in getting up. The sun was out full—a wounderful breakfast and a wounderful bowl of roses.

Every morning gets greater. The coming together again gets closer. Separation is a great thing! You find that when it comes. It will be so big and wounderful to come together on the shores of the sea. The trains on the Pere Marquette line have a draw to my heart; the whistle is so wounderful.... To have a bath in the salt water and not in old Lake Erie.... It was another wounderful night with Fred. He has done so much for me this time that we have been away from each other.

He is so wounderful if you can get to him. I think I have got right to him to the heart. I am awful lonesome for you and the sea.

I walked to the train track with Fred this morning. It was like the day you were going away. I felt it was nearing the last walk up the old Lane. Fred has the same feel. It swept over us—a free feel; it was almost too much.

How is your Sisity-list coming? Mine is great. It is hard to get along without you here. Old Abe was drafted, and we don't know when we will see him. The sea and sunlight sweeping in the open door of your work room! We will sure have some grand times. We will get horses and have some more of them Moonlight rides. It will be great to hit the old Tie path Itself—with the[7] Welcome Mulligan and the[8] Onerbel Chas. Lipton under our arms. The smell of the burning bark and a caben in the Rockies! Oh, the open road. Life is Life on the old Road.

That canyon must be a wounder, and the sea and the misty mountains and the brown hills. You have it all. Oh man, that is the country for everything.

I keep high for our meeting, Comrad of the Road.

Prose Settings

I

THE RED SUNSET.

The red sunset Died away like the close of a forest fire.

The Dusk ran through the mountains like a scarf of blue.

The Moon and old Jupiter took the Open Road together.

The others came out of the everlasting Blue Deeps.

II

THE DESERT NIGHT.

The man at the camel corral was fixing the camels for the desert. Other men were waiting at the front of the Temple. Another came forward with four camels, a pack-beast and two riders. Then all were off over the Sun Betin Sand.

Nothing but Sand and Harizen. Only the Arab who was ahead on the Old Camel knew the way.

They went on and on over the Everlasting Sand, the Sun Betin Sand.

III

PINES.

The great wood is the Pines. The very whiff of them gives you the breath of Nature, the great Mother of the planet, the mother of Love. Her breath is the breath of life and love, and the Mouziek of the world.

Treas (California)

Treas are grate. They are so wild and wounderful. There is so many kinds here. The trea I love best of them all, is the U.K. Liptes. It is fragran; it has the sun and the erth all flowers and the swaying beauty of its great youth. I loved it from the first. It is beauty that stays.

I went up to a grove the other day and along a little lone path—the mist and odor of them lingering in deep shadows. My feet broke the deep silences and a Voice came and spoke soft to me: "If you listen long enough you can hear——" I think it was my Master speaking, for a glow came around me, after He had spoke.

The Song of the Sperit

Life is not any good until you forget your boddy; then you get all the power of living, but you can't do anything that you feel like doing.

Lether:

All lether has a mystery in it. It is the animal's mystery. The misteks of the other world know it, and try to tell us. I have been told but my mind has not received it. I will hafto wait until it does. I think I will know it all in a fue years. I will tell the rest of the world, if I hear it first. I would like to be the first to hear it.

Stones:

The whole erth was of stone.

God thought that he would make it something good. He sent the Old Mother Nature down and she spent years and years, but she did not know what to put on it. She went up to God and He took her to a room, and showed her the things that He had to put on the Erth.

They were sperits, so she got them one at a time and brought them down.

In the mean time she was making other things. They were seeds and she planted these and they came up. It was wheat and barley and other things like that. The sperits became people and took them for food, and the old Mother is still putting things and bringing her sperits on the Erth. This world is just about filled.

The Sperit

At night the Sperit goes to see God. It gets fresh to make the boddy fresh every morning. This is what keeps you clean. If you were all clean, you would not die. You go thru a hard life and what is not clean is burned off, and then you are pure to go to heaven. You rest then until you are ready to come and be a saint.

Alone

The sun beat hard upon the rocks.

I was alone in the Power of the rocks. Nothing was moving.

I was Alone. My Sperit was alone.

It was the loneliest place in the world.

No animal of any kind, not a bird or a snake—alone.

Nature did not even have cells of thought.

The power of the rocks was holden me there.

A thought came over me that I had never known Home.

All of a sudden Nature spoke, and I was free from everything.

I came back to the Father.

Equals

There is a greatness in a man that treats his horse like his brother. A man is a beast when he beats his horse. He is of a lower Brivahen[9] than the horse. The man who says to his horse that he is his equal, is a great man, a master of animals.

Beauty

When the New Race comes, there will be beauty—real beauty. Down thru the ages people have talked of beauty, but they have not seen it really, yet. It will come with the New Race—beauty in everything—in the body, in writing, in talk, in love. Not love one, but all. The younerverse Lovers will not only love each other, but they will love all. This war is the great clean up of the world. After it is all over, and the troops come all home together, there will be the great New Race waiting for them with open arms—then all will be real beauty.

The Hold Up and the Get Away

... It was the first time Denver Bill had come in without a cigarette in his mouth. They wanted to know why he wasn't smoking, but they didn't ask.

He ordered the same drink and took it fast.... He chucked the chair over, grabbed the tellfon off the table and gave "Hlo."

He said, "Horse up here in five minutes."

It was there.

He was out of town in a minute more.

Denver Bill stopped at a cabin where he had made ponmets[10] to rob a train at 7:45, and it was now 6:10. His friend was there. They jumped on their horses and rode a quarter of a mile. The train whistled around the curve.

There was a shout. Denver called: "Stop that engine!"

It stopped slow.... Bill murdered the engineer, and then flew thru the train of cars. He grabbed the fifty pound gold box and jumped thru the window. A shot rang out.

Bill was pincked.

The man that he had come with played dirt on him because he went off with the gold. Bill crawled across the field and laid in the hay stack.

He rolled the first cigarette of the day.

Letter to the Abbot (from California)

Dear Old Wife:

How are you coming? I was just up over the hill behind us, getting two wounderful qwortz of golden honey. How is your type mill pumping these days? I got a new story in my bean:—Have an old fisherman that takes those forks and goes after crabs—have him find a pot of pearls instead of crabs.—Think if it is done right it would make a wounder.

When will you be out here? We will lead a pack trane over the mountains! Oh, that is the old open road! Pack mules, they mean it to me—a line of mules in the mountains and a couple of saddel horses! That's the life.

I hope you have changed your mind about them airaplanes. I do not like the Idea. But, old man, it is for the best, and nothing is a mistake. Take it as it comes. Write soon, and make the pages fly like dust to me. I need all that I can get.

Last night was our first bit of rain. Slept in an open window where my face was sprayed all night with the wounderful cold drops of spring. When I got up, I was feeling better than I ever did before. I was all relaxed. I lay a long time just in the wounder of the wounderful free air and rain. I got up and went down and washed in more of the soft rain, and ate and went outside to come down to my work shop. I stood in the wind. Everything around me was so wounderful. All the trees and flowers were brighter. The hills were a little damp. The birds were playing and drinking in the rain. The ray of sun was just coming over the hill. I could almost hear the breathing of the grass and erth. It was like a song, the great song of spring and breathing of the world.

That is the way that the new generation will come in after the world is washed and all countries are one. A Boy, young and clean, will come in, whistling and breathing a Song of the New Race.

Your Comrad.

Another

Well, Wife:

Here I am pumping a little more of my vocabulary at you. I think that I will go into the ocean and have a swim. It's dulce on my wounds. What I want to tell you is about an old sea loafer here—a big, black dog. He isn't any kind of a dog—nothing but a world-man-dog, he is. He is a lover of the sea and sand. He goes down with us every day. He is a pal for the road. He can't follow the saddel like Jack, but he can shore be a frend. I have lerned him and he has lerned me. We stick close.

Well, pal of the sea and saddel, I am getting awful lonesome, but I am with you all the time. I need your old paw. I shore keep high for the Spring Coming. We will have a shack back in the hills all alone, and drink tea and talk. Don't it sound good? I won't forget it either, not until we have it. We have planned it for many ages, and we will hafto have it—old pal of the moonlight rides.

I am close and always your Comrad.

6

VALUES OF LETTER WRITING

Stonestudy particularly is a shop for writers. A man is at his best in writing to the one who pulls the most from him. The thing is to pour out. The pursuit of happiness is a learning how to radiate. Happiness itself is radiation—incandescence.

You say you write to the world. A composite? An abstraction? These will not draw forth your best and greatest.... You pass a thousand faces in the town, and are suddenly torn by one? Do you think that the unmanifested, upon which the thousand faces sleep so far as you are concerned, is capable of bringing out your wisest or tenderest expression, as is this one face pressed against the very window of your habitation?

As a workman, as an artist, as a player, one must give his best, one by one, to individuals first, before he arouses the force to set the table for the world.... It is important for the young writer to answer exactly certain listening attitudes. I think, in a story mood, of the shepherd fires—the endless droning tales of Persia and Palestine—camel bells, bearded men in white hoods, occasional weary movements of women in the tent openings as the evening passes to dead of night. The tale-teller is making his listeners see more or less dimly something he sees—something he has heard and visualised, better yet, something he has lived. The finer his telling the more completely he has lived it. The more listeners pull from him, the more excellent his animation, his art. A speaker, accustomed to give himself spontaneously to an audience, said: "If I don't give you what you want—if I am not at my best to-day—remember it's apt not to be all my fault."

Soil and seed in all things.

We prepare ourselves with much misery and massed experience to tell our story of life. How strange that we should not have reckoned with the fact that all this preparation is only half.... Really, it is as important to think to whom one is writing as what to write about. I've been afield with many young men, soldiers and the like. Their best and highest moments afield were spent in writing home, or possibly to the girl they left under the beeches or sycamores. We should write a myriad or two love letters, before we are ready to write for the world.... By writing and dreaming and travelling and living toward the one, we learn how to focalise our forces. Having done that, we are ready to diffuse, to radiate. Sooner or later the one point will be taken away.

Don't be distressed; it is only for the time. But the love we have learned with one must be turned upon the many. It's all a love story. The whole universe is that. The stillness of the sun in relation to the planets tells the first story of radiation—love a cosmic force, not a sentiment—all one big, brave tale.... The real priest is trained to draw out, to furnish understanding,—inclusion. One can talk well to one who includes him. As professional essayists and story-tellers, we are only beginning to learn that we must talk or write to some one greater than ourselves, to set ourselves free.

The wonderful power of letters begins and ends just here.... Write your story or your essay to one who contains you—to one who draws your best, to one who sets you free. You can ascertain your relation to another by your mood as you prepare to write. The more you practise the art, the more sensitive you are, the more you realise that no two moods of yours are the same, as you write to different people. One draws humour, one irony, one a tendency to exaggerate, another deeply to be serious and reformative. This should reveal the whole secret. Choose your complement for the portrayal of a mood.

The thing we call our style is merely the evidence of that which we have chosen to work toward, plus our particular personality. We should work to that which sets us free. Certainly one cannot be free in another's form. There are fixed vehicles for expression—novel, essay, poem, infinite departments of each, but the fact remains that no workman or artist or player can be utterly himself, who remains in the forms laid down by those who went before, or in forms prescribed by the generation he undertakes to express himself through.

No good workman ever accepts things as they are. To be the workman unashamed, he must be considerably beyond his generation in culture and acumen. He therefore finds the beaten paths—which are the easy paths for the many—the most irksome paths for himself. He grinds long and hideously against the things that are, and thus becomes formidable, since grinding makes the edge. The dullest part of the axe is held the longest against the wheel.

Bit by bit, as the consciousness of the chosen workman expands under years and ordeals, he casts off all the shackles, forms and prescribed nonsense of the trivial and material-minded. He breathes deeper with each unbinding, until he reaches the fair eminence upon which lies the priceless secret of all expression:

That there is no law for the pure in heart.

He reaches this point through many slaveries, and yet a child can be taught the secret. The child must also be taught, at the same time however, that the world is wrong and inferior in all its views; otherwise the child will not have stamina enough to stand against the opinions of all elders of all times, much less those who sit at the same breakfast table. Verily, the thing that Rodin and Balzac and Carpenter and Hugo and Chavannes and Nietzsche and Whitman gave their prodigious vitalities to learn, before their real work began,—can be taught to the child, but the child must find his faith in his own spirit and some true teacher to set him free.

In the later aspirations beyond professional workmanship for the world, the Players achieve that master freedom which detaches itself entirely from causes and effects in materials. They work as do those who are ambitious, yet refuse to tie themselves in the least way to results. They work to their Masters, to the Unseen.... All of which is pure and perfect liberation, but requires one trained in building with spiritual causes and effects. We seek to furnish this training for a few who are ready. It is the way to the inmost and the uppermost in all art and mysticism. We are set free here as expressionists of various kinds by writing or painting or playing to those we hold dearer than ourselves. We wouldn't be writing if we could be with them in the flesh—how clear that is! The fundamental processes of our picture-making are quickened by our yearning. Here we touch an old and curious law, that you must have separation for the true romance.

We learn to mass life into pictures or tones or tales.... All that we do well shortens the grade for those who receive. If they are quite ready, they won't have to make the mistakes we did—mistakes painful at the time, but out of which we make humour now.

A man brings a gift when he brings forth a good tale. He has done something with the worn-out tools of incident and experience which hasn't been done before. To do it well his telling is dependent upon his audience. His telling will be different for each listening group. The greater the artist, the less alike will be his methods of approaching different friends or comrades. Each will bring from him a different tone, a different look to his eyes, a different grip of hand, and different order of unfolding his genius....

The most perfect bits of writing we have from the group of our greatest novelists—is either in the form of letters or parts of work inspired by the influence of a woman's heart—some romantic and one-pointed outbreathing of their souls to one.... The great creative producers rarely found steady human companionship in one woman. No flesh was starry enough to endure their idealisation; the break of their picture was often the shattering of life itself. Experience forces us all at last to take our idolatry from that which changes—to continue our lessons of love toward the Unseen. Lovers of the New Race seem to have learned the agony of trying to find all in each other, of trying to find the universe eye to eye. They realise at once that man and woman are but the two earth points of a triangle; that they safely may rear their passions and their transfigurations only to the pure point of union above....

A man has found something when he cries "Eureka!" He loves something, when he pours out his heart to it. The first great struggle of the real workman is to find a form that contains him—a form of expression that will not maim his dream. It is never the form that has held another, that has sufficed for another artist. A letter is one way to freedom. A writer's style should set him free.

The enduring aphorisms and tablets and discourses of the Masters have been spoken to their beloved few. A man's sealed orders in the world, his occult transcriptions from above the world, come in the form of personal messages. Great documents of the future shall be written this way. We write many personal letters. One of my young comrades has the idea to gather together names of a score of mill-girls in New York or somewhere, and write her heart to them—less to try to help them, than to ease her own heart, to tell her love for them. Radiation—that is happiness. Mill-girls have been a dream of hers. She is full of force to pour out.

Incandescence is happiness. All expression is happiness. Happiness is creative. To work, to express, that is to radiate. The object is as important as the thing that aches to go forth. Choose the form that sets you free. To each his form.

A tireless woman asked how she might serve. Her lover was lost in Flanders. We told her to write to the soldiers—to write her heart out in letters to soldiers—that she would save lives and start great dreams and bring the gold back to many grey mists—to be Mary the Mother, the saint, the dream of the film-eyed fighting men—to love them through the heart of her beloved. That is what focalisation leads to—to draw forth the great energies from our souls, to set us free, first to one, then to the world.

We learn to love the one—in order to give this love to the world. We learn to love in matter for the moment, in order to become consummate artists and players in the soul stuff that cannot die. Again and again, through possessions and personalities—missing, destroyed or moved away—we learn to take the force of our outpouring from the mutative to the changeless—making a divine bestowal at last of a clinging human need—lifting from the idolatry of the flesh, which encloses all pain, to the love of souls which sets us free.

7

THE NEW DANCING

I have found true North Americans. A woman of twenty-seven, a mother (with a mysterious man somewhere) and a girl-child with the calm and power of Joan come again.... I needed a change, was tired of my house and my voice—close to the end of all human interest that morning as I set out for a walk up the edge of the Lake. On and on walking, until I came to the little girl on the shore. She was making a frowning man in clay. She asked me if I were the Crusader, but answered herself while I was hoping to fit the dimension of that fascinating title. She had decided that I wasn't.

North Americans—I think of them so again and again—something great and calm and deep and beautiful, something arrived, at last, from all the fusion—en rapport with nature, children of the light, living and abiding constantly in the essences of sunlight—with the humour and certainty of Mother Earth about their ways—the cleanliness of earth and the sweetness of golden light in their house and mind....

Mind you, I had walked forth as one would wade out to sea in the path of the moon—actually yearning for a better land than this.... There on the shore, after hours, was the child—her eyes turned to mine, putting me into the enchantment of the wise—stilling hate and ennui. We had words together, the great awe of life stealing over me again after many days. Her hand stretched forth to take me to her mother (this day called the Lonely Queen, for they live in an enchanted story-book). A climb to the top of the bluff and into the most fragrant and godly lane, a low house in the distance in the shelter of beeches—solitary and isolate beeches sheltering a human house, built for sunshine long ago. Many pages would not tell of the lane and the house, the lawn and the hives.... I want to touch the core of this inimitable pair that took me in—poor but dining upon the perfect foods, so poor that they make and dye the lovely things they wear—a kind of holy handiwork everywhere—perfume of summer in the house and in the heart of it a deepdelved peace where broods a sort of lustrous dream.

The child is but seven—that is, her body and brain are but seven. Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheat bread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning—a last jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray—all miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking sombre and wrathful in the distance.

Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a grove of white beeches—lingering gold on the vines at the window, the murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle begins to sing, and the mother hovers over—a kind of sacred rite, all this—then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and France are in the room. Tearoses—some daughter of poetry must have named them.

... Still I am telling you about things—not about them. I thought I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ... sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the hushes between.... I must get down to earth again. I must begin with the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned up to me from the frowning clay....

I should like to report them moment by moment—to make you see, but there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that first night, I contemplated the North America of the future—a kind of dream that nestles within a dream—the Great Companions, superb men and women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made cigarette—not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned drowsy—opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and sweet as a new-woven basket.

... I awoke to low singing. The room was grey and seemed to lift with me, and the walls to widen. It was as if I had caught the old house just waking from a sleep of its own. The phenomenon of the singing lived in my mind. I don't know the song—a rapid bird-like improvisation possibly—two voices hushed, but a vibration of clear liquid joy. I went to the window. The earth was still asleep—a pearl-grey world of dripping trees in a kind of listening ecstasy—two beings below on the lawn—a lawn that was grey with dew. It was like looking down upon a cloud from the Matterhorn. These two beings—one in a veil of rose, one in a veil of gold—were dancing upon the cloud, dancing bare-armed and limbed, their voices interpreting some soft harmony that seemed to come from the break of day upon the sphere.

It was not for me—yet I could not draw back from the vines. I brought only thankfulness to it—sharing the joy in the dim of a room, in the dim of a mere man's heart. Yet all I could contain came to me from the mother and child. They knelt in the grass, the song more hushed, bringing up to their faces and shoulders hands that dripped with the holy distillations of the night—a wash in dew and day, their song a prayer, their dance a sacred rite.... I should have thought it the gift of dreams, but there was a starry track of deep green across the lawn, where their bare feet had broken the sheen of dew.

... I dwelt with souls—that was the truth. I sat at breakfast with souls, dew-washed, speaking to each other and to me from that long road of life which we lose for a squalid by-way when we put on the garments of the world.... They talked again about what the birds hear in the morning. They said that what the birds sing is their interpretation of the great song of daybreak—that the earth does not meet her Lord Sun in silence.... And then I knew that the song I heard was their interpretation—think of it—a child of seven eating buttered toast.

And I knew that power is a song—that the singing of the kettle is the song of steam, that the inimitable t'sing of an electric burner when the current first charges through, is the awakening song of steel and carbon to their native capacity and direction. The same is in the heart of a boy when he finds his task—the same is in the order of a master and in the making of his poem.... These two hear it—the song of Mother Earth as the floods of light pour out and over her from the East.

Here was a mother who knew how to play. She had launched somehow into a sphere of her own making—doubtless having found life of the world insupportable. I had thought much about bringing up children, about unfolding the child, and here it was being worked out with brimming joy.... It was all too natural to be called education. It was nature—it was liberation, rather—a new and higher meaning of naturalness.

I was almost afraid to speak. The life here seemed so delicate and delightful that comments would bruise the fine form of it.... They played together—that was the point. Play is a liberation of force—great play is ecstasy. In it one rises to the stillness of production, wherein one bathes in mystery and potency and all commonness is cleansed away. Those who reach this stillness are the great beings of the world.