... The sun had set. Darkness was wrapping the basin of the little stream; heavy dew was falling. Mother Nature was weeping tears of sympathy for one so short-sighted and drawn to failure.
10
COMPASSION
I was struck early in the progress of the class of three with the difference between the little girl, now turned eleven, and the other two of fourteen and seventeen, in the one particular of daring to be herself. She has never been patronised; and in the last year or more has been actively encouraged to express the lovely and the elusive. Also, as stated, she has no particular talent for writing. She is the one who wants to be a mother. Not in the least precocious, her charm is quite equal for little girls or her elders. Her favourite companions until recently were those of her own age.
On the contrary, the other two were called to the work here because they want to write, and although this very tendency should keep open the passages between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter, the fashions and mannerisms of the hour, artfulness of speech and reading, the countless little reserves and covers for neglected thinking, the endless misunderstandings of life and the realities of existence—had already begun to clog the ways which, to every old artist, are the very passages of power.
" ... Except that ye become as little children——" that is the beginning of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the world, or most of them, and all have told the same story—look to Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior purpose, confronted the lie with the realities of their own nature, and fought the fight for the cosmic simplicity which is so often the unconscious flowering of the child-mind. All of them wrenched open, as they could, the doors of the prison-house, and became more and more like little children at the end.
The quality I mean is difficult to express in straight terms. One must have the settings to see and delight in them. But it is also the quality of the modern verse. The new generation has it as no other generation, because the old shames and conventions are losing their weight in our hearts.... I was promising an untold something for a future lesson to the little girl yesterday, just as she was getting to work. The anticipation disturbed the present moment, and she said: