When we came back the second summer, we found that a bullet had broken Jack's right front leg. He had wintered out at times, had known much pain. It was not that he did not have good friends who would have taken him in, but I think Jack lost faith a bit in the pain and stress. There was grey about his muzzle. One day he sat in the centre of the little Chapel class.
"I'd like to be as good a man as Jack is a dog," one of the boys said.
"You'd be one more man," said another.
The fact is Jack has filled his circle rather well. This thought came to me presently with fuller meaning. I regarded him with knowledge of three seasons. A clean dog, a gentleman, a master of himself, very courageous and slow to anger, impossible for small children to anger—a dog among dogs, but more than dog among men.
"He has filled his circle," I said aloud. "What makes a man look less in these very virtues that Jack has mastered, is that a man's circle is larger, and he has not reached the time of fulfilment as Jack has. If the dog's accomplishments were suddenly lifted from his circle and placed in a larger one, we would not be conscious of the fine integration of virtues that keep us interested now."
Men, lost in the complications of cities, yearn for the simplicity of their early days on the farms; and yet they could not go back. The simplicity they yearn for is ahead. That of the old country days is but a symbol of the cosmic simplicity in store for us. Tolstoi turned back to the peasants, yet the simplicity he craved was not there.
The peasants are merely potential of what the New Race will be; the peasants themselves must suffer the transition—must have their circle widened and feel their little laws and their little sense of order suddenly diffused over broad, strange surfaces. Their cosmic simplicity will appear when the larger dimension is put in order. That which is lovely in any plane of being, is that which is in flower—when it has about filled its present circle. We are not less, intrinsically, because our values are placed in a larger vessel, though we have a renovating sense of our own insignificance. There is an order of small men, so obviously a part of their very narrowness, that it becomes instantly repulsive to larger souls. Many of the latter have flashed off to the end of their tether for the time, preferring chaos, to the two by two neatness of small-templed men.
A secret of growth lies in these observations. We fill a certain circle, restoring a kind of order in the chaos; and then the circle is suddenly widened and that which was our order and mastery is loose and diffused within the larger orbit. Herein are the pangs of transition. We lose our way for the time in the vaster area, like a man who is unfamiliar with an estate just purchased. There is but one thing to do—to begin to work upon the new dimension. As we work, courage and patience steal in. Presently comes the vision of the completed circle. When this comes, our labour is pinned to a fresh ideal, and we are safe.
In a hundred ways I have found it true that the vision comes in the labouring hours. One may move for weeks about his new estate (or manuscript), planning this and that, but the glimpse of the cohering whole is denied him, until he has actually begun upon the nearest or most pressing task. This is the miraculous benefit of action again. In giving ourselves forth in action, the replenishment comes. The sense of self ceases to clutter the faculties as we bend and toil.