17
BEAUTY
We develop through expression. I find these paragraphs among many of the Little Girl's for which there is no place here:
... Everything in pouring out one's dreams and thoughts, one's very soul into words! It is relief, fulfilment; it completes all thoughts and dreams; it gives them strength. They are only half-powers if left unexpressed. In the moments of great outpouring, order forms—the inner order that is lasting and divine, the order that every man must have running rhythmically through him, before his great task can be given him by the Master. If man lives in truth, he lives in order. There is no truth without order—no order without truth. They are one at the top. There are no mistakes in all the Holy Universe.
We speak much of the Master. As every artist becomes significant, I think he is more and more conscious, deep within, of the presence of one whose word is absolute. The great artist isolates himself from criticism—that is, he may listen to the observations of a child or the youngest critic and find values, yet his life is passed in doing things others cannot do, and for which there are no criteria. He loses the sense of all laws at the last, in the great ebullition of his soul—to get its records down. He is not ignited with expression as formerly, because he is expression. His establishment in flesh is for that, and no other reason. His Master nears. I think of Tolstoi so intimately and Carlyle in these things.... We are close, in our best moments, to the Shop Itself. Kipling touched this mystic arrangement in his inimitable L'envoi, "When earth's last picture is painted——"
More and more life teaches us the treachery of matter, as it teaches us how to love. One by one the things we turn to, vanish, leaving us rent and crying out. Thus we learn to turn to the Unseen. We long at last for our particular archetype who embodies potentially the ideal of parent and teacher and beloved. The last tearing torrential love of the flesh is for the mate, the first of our more purely spiritual aspirations for the Master.... The good days of apprenticeship give us the basic ideal of him—the pure workmanship, the love of truth, need for utter comprehension with few words—the love of one another, yet the absolute essential so hard to learn, to cling to nothing in the realm of change—all these are incentives to the quest of the Master. More and more we succeed in turning our love to what we still call the Unseen from old habit. The very love that you turn to the Master builds the path by which he comes to you. He can only appear in your own thought-form....
It comes to us so often that we make our own heavens. So many forget that we require beauty as well as goodness and truth. Not sages alone, not saints alone—but artists, workmen and players in beauty, as well as in love and wisdom. The Master will come to you in your own thought-form; your heaven will fill your own conception. Saints of the elder bigotries will have angels with feathers and peasant feet. Those who have clung so hard to their bodies, must galvanise them again with rheumatism and senility and mortgage-ridden minds.
I tell them here to be careful what they dream—to take all the loves, the safe things, love of child and mother and mate, love of comrades, the passion for dying for another ... to take Nature's perfect things,—the grains, the fruits, bees, stars, devas, poems—majesty of mountain, strength of the field, holy breath of sea—the highest moments of song and thought and meetings ... to take all that is consummate for the thought-form—to build the coming of the Master in that—light from the Unseen—to build for eternity.... The Master can only show you that much of Himself as your own highest picture contains.... This is the practice of his presence, so liberating to the minds of dreamers and workmen and mothers.