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.