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....

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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.

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