Presently she came every morning.... I (to return to first person again) had been led to believe that any outside influence in a man's Study is a distraction; not alone the necessary noise and movement of the other, but the counter system of thinking. I perceived little difference, however. I had no fewer good mornings than formerly; and yet, any heavy or critical attitudes of mind would have been a steady and intolerable burden. In fact, I believe that there was a lift in her happiness and naturalness. It came to me so often that she belonged there.
She remained herself absolutely. She had never been patronised. Recently with six young people in the Study, I suddenly thought of the relation of teacher to student in a finer light. I was impelled to say to them:
"I do not regard you from any height. You are not to think of yourselves as below. It might happen that in a few years—this relation might be changed entirely even by the youngest of you. The difference between us now is merely a matter of a decade or two. You have more recently come in; things are strange to you. Intrinsically you may be far greater than I, but we do not deal with comparisons. We are friends; we are all one. I sit in the midst of you—telling you from day to day of the things I have learned about this place, having come here with an earlier caravan. My first years here were of rapid learning, as yours will be. Presently the doors will shut upon my new impressions, but you will go on. When you reach your best, you may smile at your childish fancies of how much I knew. You will always be kind in your thoughts of these early days, for that is the deep law of good men and women; indeed one must reverence one's teacher, for the teacher is the symbol of Nature, of Mother, of Giving. But there must be equality first. My brain is somehow filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in relation to the long life—the importance only of one bead on the endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight moment—that we really are the sum of innumerable adventures, the lessons of which form us, and only a little of which we have yet learned to tell."
I had something of this attitude when the little girl came alone, and I believe it to be important. A sense of it in the teacher's mind (and the more one thinks of it, the less it appears an affectation) will help to bring about that equality between the young and the old which the recent generations did not possess, and from the absence of which much deformity and sorrow has come to be.
The little girl could quickly understand from the rapt moments of her own production, how disordering a thing it is to bring foreign matter to one's mental solution in an abrupt fashion. She saw that the organisation of ideas for expression is a delicate process; that it never occurs twice the same, and that the genuine coherence is apt to be at its best in the first trial, for one of the essences of the rapture of production is the novelty of the new relation. There were times in the forenoons when I met halting stages and was ready possibly to banter a moment. I very quickly encountered a repulse, if she were in the thrall. She would wave her hand palm outward before her face—a mistake of meaning impossible.
Now she had only learned to write two years before, this detail purposely postponed. I did not undertake to correct spelling, permitting her to spell phonetically, and to use a word she was in doubt of. What I wanted her to do was to say the things in her soul—if the expression can be forgiven.
I believe (and those who do not believe something of the kind will not find the forthcoming ideas of education of any interest) that there is a sleeping giant within every one of us; a power as great in relation to our immediate brain faculties, as the endless string is great in relation to one bead. I believe that every great moment of expression in poetry and invention and in every craft and bit of memorable human conduct, is significant of the momentary arousing of this sleeping giant within. I believe that modern life and modern education of the faculties of brain and memory are unerringly designed to deepen the sleep of this giant. I believe, under the influence of modern life on a self-basis, and modern education on a competitive basis, that the prison-house closes upon the growing child—that more and more as the years draw on, the arousing of the sleeping giant becomes impossible; that the lives of men are common on account of this, because the one perfect thing we are given to utter remains unexpressed.
I believe by true life and true education that the prison-house can be prevented from closing upon the growing child; that the giant is eager to awake; that, awakened, he makes the thoughts, the actions, the smiles and the words of even a child significant.
I believe that an ordinary child thus awakened within, not only can but must become an extraordinary man or woman. This has already been proved for me in the room in which I write. I believe that this very awakening genius is the thing that has made immortal—shoemakers, blacksmiths and the humblest men who have brought truth and beauty to our lives from the past. Moreover the way, although it reverses almost every process of life and education that now occupies our life and race, is not hard, but a way of beauty and joyousness, and the way is no secret.