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?"