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THE ARTIST UNLEASHED

The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories. Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be prepared.

There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of consciousness—before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated experience are open to his every-day working mind. That may really be what sumptuous artistic equipment is—the capacity to open up the old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.

Certainly intellect alone will never make a great drama of life and love, yet action and romance of the present hour draw hard upon one's present life training and the faculties and tastes of his immediate culture—actual brain possession and the ordering thereof. A child can portray superbly well some ancient imprint upon the Soul, even the passages of his own initiations through earth, water, air and fire, his brain not conscious of the real nature of what is coming forth; yet, the same child cannot put the cohering line through a series of episodes occurring under his own notice. Something of this mental grasp is necessary to make the artful effect required in a short tale. The child's mind, in the first place, is trained to listen and interpret the experiences of the larger consciousness; in the second set of conditions, he is forced to rely upon actual brain tissue which requires the training and culture of the years.

Art is composition. The farther you go, the finer the tools. It is difficult to train the fingers to intricate tricks of weaving, or the brain to sort and place the facts and colours and surprises of a present-day narrative or tale, but the soul may be called upon to express through the narrow temples of an awakened child its cosmic understanding, its ordered firmament.

Decades of observation and reporting; firm and verified actuality of knowledge and opinion; to these, added experience and the excellence of order—such is the training of the intellectual artist who times his production to his own generations. He pays the price in pain and subjection to the things that are; he knows well the meaning of labour; often, though he may still laugh as an artist, he has forgotten how to laugh as a man.

My desk here is covered with papers and poems of a beauty this intellectual artist cannot reach, of a freedom he can never know, until he lifts the torch of his consciousness out of and above the brain, making that serve quite as his knees bend and serve. Thinking of these things to-day, the door of the Study opened and the Little Girl gave me her work. She writes things of the larger consciousness without effort, but finds it hard and wearing to narrate the immediate matters of life. To her, the fine short story of the present hour is the great accomplishment, the ideal she is working toward.

With another she goes often to the cities—rambling among the rooming-houses, cheaper restaurants and mills. She means to work in the mills soon—to forget herself and forget us for a time, to be with the harder-lucked girls whom she loves with thrilling passion. She has brought home from these little adventures wonderful stories of the patience and the laughter and the heroism crowding like hidden sacred presences about the duller lives. She brings a humour to the telling of the divine secrets of the poor—the clutching pang for food, the soldier going, his baby coming, the tortured spine, the stunted, the darkened, the wasted—an irresistible divinity about it all—pain impermanent, joy enduring. Back of the lacking eyes and leaking lives, she sees wonders that Zola never saw, that none can see with mere intelligence, that none can dream, who sees only the here and now, who has not learned to laugh at the so-called injustices of men, who cannot see the greater order to come because the present chaos is so devastating.

One may report minutiÆ of torments, mass the items of degradation and bring forth a great document of the underworld—but these are mere foundations. The Builders bring the dream, they live the hope, they open the long-road consciousness, they substantiate their visions of better days, bring order and coherence to all the splendid toil of the intellectualist; they raise their edifice upon all that is done.... Here is the Little Girl's work of to-day's writing:

Meditation

In the night the Master came down to a woman who lay sad and sleepless in a dark house. He came so near that she felt his holy radiance. Her soul breathed; her body ceased to tremble; she felt within his sacred circle. The Master smiled and said:

"Why do you not sleep?"

The woman answered, "I am carried away by thoughts that will not hush. Night after night I lie here so bitterly close to old dreams. I realise that they are not worthy, but my brain is full of them."

The Master smiled again. "There is a way to compel the silence of the brain."

"I have not found it," said the woman.

"Learn to be the soul," the Master said. He suggested a way to begin—then was gone.

The rest of that night the woman thought of his words. Deeper and deeper his words sank into her heart. When morning came, a happiness brooded within; she dressed quickly and went out.... Back of her little house rose the golden brown hills. She climbed, and at the top of the nearest, sat down. The peace and purity and fragrance of the sun-steeped hills filled her soul. For a long time she thought in silence, then slipping off her loose white sandals, said: "I begin with the grass. Yes, I begin with my feet.... How wonderful you are—so ready to obey, to give your service at any time! What would happen if you carried me other than my will? Supposing some day I should be walking fast to the house of my beloved, when you suddenly took me the other way!"

She laughed, and added: "You stay with me all my life, and little by little are carrying me up the shining path to the Father's house. And yet—how strange! I am not you.... And my knees, how wonderful and willing—all limber and full of life—helping me in all ways to do all things—bending gently when I bow in holy communion, expressing joy through free, easy movements, mute, yet strong before pain! There is nothing more wonderful in the world than you. Yet—I am not my knees.

"And you, old heart," she added. "You have endured the keenest pain; you have loved and given yourself, have hated and become black only through pain to whiten again—old heart of many rendings—until all life was tragedy, and you almost ceased to beat. Little heart, sanctuary of the soul—room for his rest.... Yet I am not the heart!

"And the white throat in which the lotus unfolds its mystic petals of light—I am not the throat!... And the mind, stream for the soul's fulfilment—listener, runner, interpreter of light—mate of the soul in all things, ever ready, sparkling with the inner fire,—I am not the mind. You can hurt me no longer. I am free!"

The woman sitting alone upon the hilltop, paused again. "What am I?" she almost cried.

It was as though the hills, the air and the rising sun joined her in the answer—"I Am, ... Longer than the living flame leaps within, I Am. Longer than sun and planets radiate light, I Am. Longer than worlds give birth to form, I Am. I am one with the rocks and the sea, one with the warmth and light, one with the earth, one with Humanity.

"I am Humanity. I Am."


It is only when the Little Girl brings in a bit of fiction that we remember her years. The brain that even now can polish a detached incident, or clip into firing-form a bit of humour of the street, cannot as yet order the narrative to a culminating effect. She is in her brain, which is only fourteen, struggling with the matters of time and space, wherein only lie pain and bewilderment.

Art is long. The training of the hand and intellect requires the years—but not the labour, not the agony, not the mad strain supposed to prepare one for an artistic career by those who believe mental equipment to be all.... The key to this whole discussion is the fact that the brain can be developed more in a year through inner awakening than in a decade by the usual methods of external impacts alone.... The ideal education is the balancing of the without with the within—the tallying of the world without with the world within—the same old story of the kingdom without clearing its correspondences with the kingdom within.

The Little Girl's ideal is to do great stories. They challenge her by their very difficulty. When I see where she stands now, and think of the far ways we elders went to learn the game; when I see what the twenty-year-olds are doing now, how they command their mysticism—a harder task for me than the accomplishment of physical results; when I see the inner bloom and co-ordination and the inimitable surfaces which come to all the arts by the development of the soul life first, the listening for the Master within—I want to get my hands on them all, upon all the young builders of the New Race. I want at once to awaken within them the Spectator—the One who cannot be swung back and forth in the pairs of opposites, who cannot give himself to the partisans, who has glimpsed the Plan and offers it full adoration, who says accordingly that the best possible thing that can happen is the thing that happens next. These are the young Players who will reveal life by living it—portray life as naturally as breathing, whose equipment is not possessions, not even brain possessions, but spiritual en rapport with all, oneness with all life.

I remember struggling for effects. These young people breathe effects. I remember style as a studied attainment. These young people acknowledge but one style—that is being one's self.... I want to set many of them free from within outward. In their gladness at the finding of themselves, they will go forth to include the world; they will bring to it the compassion which enfolds all, reveals all.... Love the world well and you will understand it. Love the world well, and you will write well to it. Give it yourself, and the world is yours.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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