THE FORGING OF PASSION INTO POWER
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
This is a book for those who have leisure to think. To the hasty reader and the careless critic it has nothing to say, beyond bidding them God-speed in the perusal of any kind of literature which suits their state of mind.
I am writing for such persons as these:—
For the voyager to far countries, who can take one or two small volumes in his small luggage. It may help him to prepare for a better understanding of the relation between the people he is leaving behind and those whose acquaintance he is about to make.
For the young mother, who has a little time to read on Sunday evening after her baby has gone to sleep, and plenty of time to think over what she has read while she makes its clothes or holds it to her breast. It may help her to steer the child into something like its true place in the world in which it will have to live.
For the cloistered sister who is beginning to wonder why she cut herself off from the joys which other women prize—provided, that is to say, that she has the courage to ask the question of God, and wait to hear His answer; not thinking it necessary to stun herself, as the heathen do, with vain repetitions of pious statements which she does not believe but only thinks she ought to believe.
For the lady of the demi-monde:—provided she has the courage to face her situation calmly in the morning hours; not thinking it necessary to stun herself all day long with noise, drink, affectations, and the strumming of unmusical tunes on some unmusical instrument.
For the man or woman condenmed by circumstances either to a life of monotonous drudgery or to one of dreary idleness, or to a still more dreary round of so-called social duties, which are not really due to anyone, and of so-called social pleasures which do not please.
For the man who knows he has something to tell the world, but has not found his way to any adequate mode of utterance.
For the paralytic confined to his chair.
For the felon confined in a gaol.
And, last and chiefly, for the patient in the lunatic asylum.
For any and all who have, temporarily or finally, drifted out of the main current of social life into some stagnant (and perhaps muddy) backwater.
Whoever the reader is, he or she will find the understanding of the book much facilitated by interposing at least one night between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.
Dear friends, never suppose that, because you yourselves are unable to swim in mid-channel, therefore you are cut off from the great joy of delivering your message to your fellow-men and women.
Thoughts are facts; and they can pass through barriers impenetrable to human bodies.
Let me help you, if I can, to understand yourselves. If you once do that, believe me, you will somehow succeed in getting the world to understand you.
I want to help you, if you will allow me, to learn the art (for it is an art, quite as much so as music and painting) of the orderly arrangement of thought.
It is a common mistake to suppose that the Art of Thinking can be learned only by thinking of what are called "learned" topics. This is not the case. The finest music is made not by clashing together heavy masses of gems or of precious metals, but by "scraping the guts of a cat with hairs from the tail of a horse." But you must do the scraping according to the Laws of Music.
The Art of Thinking can be learned, and practised, with very homely and even unbeautiful material to think about. It is said that the finest poetry in the Yiddish language was written by a man who toiled seventeen hours a day in a factory and lived in a hideous tenement of New York.
A man in prison once wrote to a woman outside:—
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds, innocent and quiet, take
That for a hermitage."
People who are well-to-do, free and cultured, and who live in beautiful surroundings, admire those lines and find enjoyment in reading them; but you, who are in prison, say, and say truly, that they bring no message of comfort to you; stone walls do make a prison for you, and you see no use in pretending to deny it.
You are quite right. Those who offer you things written by other people by way of consolation, mistake, it seems to me, the whole lie of the situation. Can you imagine the delight of writing those verses; of feeling the music of them flow into one from some Source Unseen, and through one out into the world? The material out of which the man built up his verses consisted of:—stone walls and iron bars. Whatever the material, the joy of the artist in the act of creating harmony under inspiration is the same.
“I am a lonely man,” said he;
“The storm-tossed mariner, alone,
Echoing back the wild wind’s moan,
Breathes not my loneliness,” said he.
“All alone; all unknown;
Like the sun, like the moon.”
“There is,” I said, “a loneliness
That lights the soul like fireflies
Dim twinkling under darkening skies;
’T is near akin to happiness.
All alone it hath shone,
Like the sun, like the moon.”
“I’m not a manly man,” said he;
“A worm upon the path, I fear
The fight for life is too severe.
They’ve crushed me under foot,” said he.
“All alone, nothing won,
Myself I seem to shun.”
“A worm there is, a worm,” said I,
“That strives to glimmer on the earth,
A light for all. Is that not worth
A life as in the changeful sky?
Shines the moon, shines the sun
Not unknown unto One.”
The writer of these lines had no literary skill, and could not write good rhyme and rhythm; but he could, and did, weave the symptoms and symbols of mere melancholic passion into exquisitely organic imagery; he translated the sense of hopeless loneliness into the useful solitude of the light-house, and the sensation of being abject like a worm into the vision of a glow-worm. Do you think he felt abject or lonely while he was writing these lines? His passion had become transformed into power.
Perhaps some reader may feel inclined to say that his mind is neither innocent nor quiet; that he has nothing to think of except anger, hatred, and unsatisfied lusts. That is not quite true of anybody; still, let that pass. I am neither parson nor moralist; it is no part of my function to tell you that such passions are wicked. They are, in their own way, not bad material for art. If you have nothing to think about except stormy passions and desires, think about them; but think about them truly according to the laws of your own thinking machinery. We cannot all acquire skill in weaving words into harmonious verse, but we can all be artists in thought and group ideas harmoniously. Whatever you have to think about, learn to think according to the Laws of Thought.
If you are on a long voyage across a monotonous ocean, learn to think artistically, not only about the sea and sky and the sailors’ work, but also about the fact of monotony.
If you have become a criminal after being brought up “respectably,” as it is called, learn to think artistically about the relations and the contrast between what is called respectability and what is called crime.
If, on the contrary, you were brought up by thief parents, and have nothing in your memory but a life of more or less successful dodging of the police, learn to think artistically about the relations between your class and the police:—there is plenty that needs thinking out in that matter, and the world would be the better for hearing what you have to say about it.
And you, young mother, you at least have plenty of thought-material close at hand, in your baby’s cries and smiles. He will begin to cut his teeth presently, and the first use he will wish to make of them will be to bite you. You have to decide whether you will allow him to do so or not. Decide it carefully, according to what you know of your child’s heredity; not forgetting to take into account the amount of your own stamina and power of endurance. Do not forget that, in this matter more perhaps than in any other—
“As we chose in small things always
We must choose at last in great;
For ’t is then the gods deny us
Our own hand upon our fate.”[1]
Now you are going to ask me whether or not you shall let baby cut his teeth upon your flesh! How should I know? I am an artist, not a quack-doctor with a universal prescription to suit all constitutions. Whether a baby ought or ought not to bite his mother, depends, as I said, on his heredity and the extent of her powers of endurance; also on her and the father’s conception of the meaning and use of family life. On the father’s conception especially. I am trying to teach you, not a code suited to all families, but the Art of Thinking on the facts presented to you by your own life and circumstances.
And you, whom the world calls mad, you at least can have no lack of material for thought. And you well know—some of you—that the so-called “sane” world is ignorant of much which you have seen, and hideously irreverent to much that you feel to be sacred. Pull yourselves together, friends, and learn to deliver your message in such-wise that the outer world must listen, and revere. You do not, you cannot, doubt the value of your own message to the world; many of you are certified “megalomaniacs” because you cannot be got to disbelieve it. What you most long for is that someone in the outer world should believe in it with you. Courage, friends; I believe in it,—because I have seen. Now, therefore, let us, who understand each other, learn some logic together, and write so that the world shall understand something of which you have caught a glimpse, and which you know to be part of the scientific framework round which must be organised anything which could claim the right to describe itself as an organic art of thinking.
- ↑ Mary Ellen Hinton.