IC-NRLF 
 
 
BOUGHT FROM 
 
 Hearst 
 Fountain Donation 
 

NINE , R T E T A L! BOOKS 
 
 The 
 
 Story of a Quest 
 through a Myriad 
 Books and Days 
 to Find the Book 
 of the Heart which 
 is Humanity 
 
 by 
 
 Published in Los Angeles 
 at 4993 Pasadena Avenue 
 
Copyright 1 920 
 
 by 
 Will Levington Comfort 
 
C77 
 
 To M. M. S. 
 
 831909 
 
THE FLOOR OF THINGS 
 
 I HAVE always wanted to be happy ; it is every man's 
 business, the quest behind everything. To-day I can 
 see a thread which marks the path of my pursuit of 
 happiness running back to the beginning, through books and 
 days. . . . The first book I ever read was Grimm's Fairy 
 Tales, a story there called The Foster Brother. It filled me 
 with a kind of madness of joy, so that I thought it must be 
 evil to love anything that way. Yet I determined to fight for- 
 ever for my right to this dissipation. 
 
 After that came the boy books from the public library, often 
 twice a week, on parents' and friends' cards, to say nothing of 
 the big traffic of the paper covers . . . lighting an oil lamp 
 to read in the middle of the night . . . secret cougees where 
 another boy and I lay cramped and suffocated to consume 
 Nick Carter, Deadwood Dick, Old Sleuth thousands. The 
 things with hard covers, which we were permitted to read 
 openly, were milder productions, but little more real Henty, 
 Fosdick, Alger, Oliver Optic, George Manville Fenn and the 
 like. Then the High School period : Education ended for me 
 after three years of that, and romance gradually entered into 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 the world of physical adventure. F. Marion Crawford's big 
 list became as one novel, and heretical science began to disin- 
 tegrate the stout hangovers of orthodox religion in my blood. 
 
 Those days make me think somehow of a visit long after- 
 ward to Saint Anne de Beaupre's, way up beyond Quebec, 
 and the great pile of crutches and splints and bandages gath- 
 ered there at that place of healing. The odor comes back 
 faintly from the distance days good to look upon in the clear- 
 ing perspective of one's past, but hateful and intolerable, the 
 mere thought of living them again. When I first read of the 
 "pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution, I thought that 
 grown-ups must know all about it, but to me at first, it looked 
 questionable to be happy. 
 
 I had early been told that I would meet my Maker when I 
 died. "God help me," I thought, and tried to produce the best 
 Sabbath countenance, likely an expression blending fear and a 
 desire not to laugh. It was school and a breath of the world 
 that helped me out of the crutched piety of childhood. Again 
 my next step was logical into the sciences. "Europeanism," 
 I have heard this venture called of late. So many have made 
 it that it needed a name. Those hard-headed philosophers sup- 
 plied the natural cleansing for lungs that had breathed too 
 long the thick, dim jungle airs of personal and erotic devo- 
 
THE FLOOR OF THINGS 
 
 tion, but they lacked humor in their thumb-spanned universe 
 and their dogmatic devotion to man-made facts. 
 
 Darwin, Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall glorious souls im- 
 prisoned in "scientific" minds. But Tyndall could not have 
 been quite satisfied with his materialism, for in his Meditation 
 on the Matterhorn I found one of my first hopes of a way out. 
 His soul breathed for a moment in that. Those were the days 
 in which we walked home from High School three city miles 
 and in changing voices discussed and discarded the gods of 
 our parents. 
 
 All this time there were masses of fiction, of course, but 
 the other kind of reading was getting a foothold. I remember 
 a few Sunday afternoons when my mother and I read Hia- 
 watha and Evangeline and the Barefoot Boy and Ode to a 
 Waterfowl, together a lingering of emotional beauty about 
 those hours. It was natural to touch Tennyson then, because 
 he was one of the pioneers to pass through the terrific Euro- 
 peanism of his brother scientists. He has told about his 
 struggle memorably in the poem, Locksley Hall. 
 
 Bravely Tennyson held out against the great material school 
 of his time and held hard, too, against the astral drift of disin- 
 tegrating orthodoxies. Tennyson's later years reveal glimpses 
 of the sage and the saint as well as the artist the artist, in 
 this sense, being the specialist in Beauty, as the saint is spe- 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 cialist in Goodness, and the sage in Truth. The three are said 
 to be one at the top. 
 
 Then the still firmer hand of Wordsworth fine moments 
 of light from his Intimations and Tintern Abbey. They wear 
 well. 
 
 Carlyle was good to me. There was a time when that was 
 the man of all human deities whom I would have preferred 
 to come to my room and stay three days. I saw him from a 
 great distance wrestling with the Lie. Carlyle is the austere 
 purity of the pines to me ; his gray craggy beauty is a mental 
 image of proportion now. And Emerson I like to contem- 
 plate his work in relation to questing youth everywhere. 
 There comes a time when Emerson must be read. For a little 
 while, at least, the whole school of us passes through his genial 
 class room. 
 
 His name was anathema in the churches then. I must have 
 gone to him early in secret, for I remember when he was hard 
 reading. The time came when he was the sweet voice in 
 my heart; and he opened up a past far back of the boyhood 
 that was forced to learn the use of the word sin, and was 
 troubled with the thought of an angry God. Rising genera- 
 tions will be far along before they can do without Emerson's 
 wise and gentle ministration. And Thoreau I've taken his 
 clean book in dissolute days, and held fast to it through the 
 
THE FLOOR OF THINGS 
 
 revolts and reactions of a sick and nerve-shot body. There 
 is no better tonic for a man who is morally disrupted than to 
 breathe Thoreau's clean air again. Ruskin had his grim, hon- 
 orable part a man sterile-clean. 
 
 Also a fellow-American I think I am touching something 
 now that will strike a warm chord in the hearts of many men 
 who are middle-aged the emerging of Elbert Hubbard into 
 our American life. That was a young voice, splendid with its 
 repulsions and attractions. I remember in my earliest news- 
 paper days how the reporters used to talk about him with a 
 copy of The Philistine in hand. First of all he could write 
 then he was making a fight in the lists that certain of us have 
 entered since, some few to win, the many to lose for the time 
 the fight to be ourselves, to say ourselves, to make ourselves 
 fine enough to be used and firm enough not to rock in the lure 
 of passing seasons. It was Elbert Hubbard's earliest period 
 that challenged me and stiffened my spine. 
 
 Meanwhile, I was becoming more and more engrossed in 
 the writing game, and the big whips of the early twenties were 
 Kipling and Stevenson. Those two working-artists of our time 
 twisted me into their own passages for a while, so that I was 
 more of them than of myself Kipling, a real story teller of 
 the ages, a cosmic boy at twenty-five, but merely an English- 
 man at fifty. His Kim and Dick Heldar made me know Asia. 
 When Earth's Last Picture is Painted is as lovely now as 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 ever. There aren't as many book-things as the fingers of one 
 hand, which have stood for twenty years as true and flawless 
 as L'Envoi. . . . Treasure Island even the movies can't 
 spoil our boyish tastes for that; and the Stevenson essays 
 which so roundly pleased our adolescent days! He only 
 meant to do that in Virginibus Puerisque. One of his highest, 
 best things to me, I seldom hear spoken of a long short story, 
 called The Treasure of Franchard. 
 
 Too much of a cub to be sent as a reporter when the Spanish 
 War began, I went out as a cavalryman. I was a good horse- 
 man, but never a good soldier. With careful reserve from 
 this distance, I may say that single-handed, save for the aid 
 of some Porto Rican rum, I broke more army regulations in 
 one twenty-four hours than ever was equalled. I saw Porto 
 Rico through many bars, and from many mounds of rooty soil, 
 for I dug the sinks for the troop through intricate weaves of 
 palmetto-root with an armed sentry watching me work. Once, 
 as I picked and dug, very weary, a swelling formed on my 
 wrist. I whacked it around so that it became more visible, 
 and demanded the sentry to take me to the troop-doctor. The 
 latter, after examination, permitted me to go to my bunk. 
 
 This bunk was in a black room with some bad natives and 
 small-pox in the place. The troop accounted me safer in the 
 native prison than under a private guard in camp. There was 
 one hole in the wall, the size of a shaving mirror, about ten 
 
THE FLOOR OF THINGS 
 
 feet from the floor, and in its ray I had three or four great 
 days with Ouida's Under Two Flags and Sienkiewicz's Quo 
 Vadis. 
 
 The authors are dead, but I hope they know the joy they 
 gave me. How blessedly long those books were, and what a 
 thirst I brought to them! I have an idea that there are big 
 moments in both books, especially in the Pole's tale. But I 
 wouldn't look deep again. They filled me then almost unto 
 the first madness of Grimm, and a lesser measure of the rous- 
 ing impregnation of The Light That Failed. In something of 
 the same setting as Quo Vadis is Ben Hur with a really 
 great fiction moment, prepared for patiently throughout the 
 large part of the novel. It breaks with a crash I cannot forget 
 . . . the dusty paths of Palestine at evening when the 
 Healer touches the lepers by the roadway. 
 
 A lot of books sell because they are trash, but the opposite 
 is also true occasionally. A real book bulks big of its own 
 intrinsic power. Ben Hur has that, and so has Trilby an 
 utterly different vibration, but a spiritual force. Every form- 
 ing artistic taste of mine was delighted and satisfied by Du 
 Maurier's great book, nor was I a boy at the time. Queerly 
 enough, and here I was different from the crowd, I loved his 
 Peter Ibbetson quite as well. 
 
 Very early in the twenties, a man gave me Herman Mel- 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 ville's Moby Dick. I looked at the Harper imprint of 1850 and 
 read the book again. Here was a big walloping American 
 whom I felt hadn't been given a real show. I set out to give 
 him one all lit with the subject. I did a Sunday newspaper 
 feature on the greatness of Herman Melville and the national 
 shame of forgetting such a lordly male. A Boston paper 
 wrote me coldly that Herman's fame might not yet have 
 reached the middle-west where I thundered, but that the 
 Boston papers usually had something about him every Sunday 
 and had been printing Melville comment for a half-century. 
 
 Then I found Conrad's Lord Jim, and in highest enthusiasm 
 wrote to McClure's about its greatness. They replied re- 
 servedly, and I met one of the real tragedies of the writing 
 game, that a book like Lord Jim wasn't selling. Years later I 
 found almost the same thrall in Conrad's story, Heart of Dark- 
 ness. One doesn't read words or pages when he finds a real 
 tale. He soars in the soul of the thing a dimension above 
 technique. 
 
 Away back early I read that great book of the heart, The 
 Story of an African Farm the voice of a real girl ; later I read 
 her Dreams, the work of the girl grown up, and later Woman 
 and Labor, from the, mature pen grown weary. 
 
 I read Les Miserables first in early boyhood, following the 
 one main thread of Jean Valjean through the maze ; later when 
 
THE FLOOR OF THINGS 
 
 I knew something about books, the novel came to me again. 
 It's a mighty thing, mightily done by one of the first spiritual 
 democrats, a book that touches most lives. I like the other 
 Hugo novels, but none lie broad awake in the meshes of mem- 
 ory like Les Miserables. Balzac, on the contrary, is not a man 
 of a single book. His whole list, like Crawford's, means one 
 book to me, and one of the best on earth, culminating in Sera- 
 phita, which in sixty or seventy pages tells the great story of 
 Swedenborg. This is a story that needs badly to be known. 
 
 Dickens is a man of marvelous sketches a writer of certain 
 pages rather than books, and Tolstoi was really writing one 
 story all the time the story of his own spiritual unfoldment. 
 Tolstoi's past-fifty problems are the problems of the children 
 of the New Age to-day. The greatest thing he did was to go 
 out alone to find union, even in the last hours of the flesh, with 
 his own Master, whose Sermon on the Mount he had tried to 
 put into perfect speech for twenty years. I always smile at 
 the way the Associated Press men and other correspondents 
 followed with telegraph wires the steps of the aged Russian 
 on his last journey. They sought to be on the ground for the 
 Meeting. . . . Tolstoi was on the Cross for the rest of us 
 most of the time, and that's the first and most intensely real 
 function of the writer-man. 
 
 In one of those years between twenty and twenty-five, Wai- 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 ter H. Page saw some short things of mine which he said 
 had promise. He asked me to let him see a book some time. 
 I couldn't wait to put on the last chapter; couldn't wait for 
 a decision by mail, but followed the thing on to New York. 
 The publisher took me in to him one hot afternoon and refused 
 the book in the softest possible terms. He was genuinely ten- 
 der, and he told me afterward, when I could see how- right he 
 was, that he never saw a man sweat as I did while he let me 
 down and out. He gave me a real book that day one I have 
 loved to give to boys since, Bob, Son of Battle. 
 
THE LIFTING SPINE 
 
 II 
 
 THE LIFTING SPINE 
 
 I HAVE never been a saint, and yet the idea grew 
 upon me through childhood and youth that the Plan 
 of the Universe was a lot bigger and more perfect 
 than I could have made it. Most men are butting their idea 
 of the Universe against a greater Plan that won't give. One 
 must bring some reverence to the Plan before it begins to un- 
 fold, before the spirit of the Plan appears. I had a talk with 
 a lawyer in a small town, and must have spoken of the "spirit" 
 of something once or twice, for he stopped me, saying : "What 
 do you mean by spirit? Do you mean what the preachers 
 are talking about every Sunday?" I hastened to explain it 
 wasn't exactly what I meant ; that I meant the hidden and in- 
 vincible loveliness in all men and things. 
 
 Everything was changed when I began to get the first 
 glimpse beyond the three-score and ten arrangement. It grew 
 upon me in the same way as that the structural plan of the 
 universe was better than my idea of it. I began to see that 
 to have a philosophy or any adequate explanation of life, one 
 must hypothecate a before and after. In writing, I had found 
 subject matter on the pages forming before me day after day 
 that I didn't know I knew ! Anyone may say with a warm 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 smile that those writings were not important. They were 
 to me, because they were bigger than I was when I sat down 
 to the desk. 
 
 This phenomenon opened up a psychological problem that 
 has not ceased to work since. Did I have a Self that was 
 greater than my mind, or was this particular and passionately 
 developed aptness for writing used in certain fine moments as 
 a vehicle for some one wiser than I, outside? Sometimes I 
 inclined to one view again to the other. In any case I didn't 
 handle the problem. And there were other questions: how 
 about dreams; how about the difference between myself and 
 others? How about this passion for writing in itself? How 
 could my fervent inarticulate love for certain faces be ex- 
 plained? 
 
 I had not heard of the continuity of consciousness beyond 
 death. I certainly am not preaching any dogmatic view of 
 what happens after death, nor do I undertake to tell how we 
 come and go. I wouldn't touch reincarnation at all, except 
 that it's a basic thing in a writing about books, the quest of 
 which is to find Happiness what they meant by that magic 
 phrase, "pursuit of happiness," in the Constitution. 
 
 Now, one may know a bovine calm of the senses, but the 
 thing I mean must transcend accident, disease and death, or 
 I pass it up. Moreover, I don't expect to meet the Big Chief 
 
THE LIFTING SPINE 
 
 the minute the body dies. You couldn't end a story as obvi- 
 ously as that, and the scheme of the Universe includes all 
 tales and tellers. Even as a child, I found it hard to adhere 
 to the conviction that I could be patched up to meet the 
 Father directly after this adventure, as a sick actor might 
 be massaged and stimulated to keep his appointment with the 
 gathered crowd. There was a neighbor once who had brooded 
 over a mortgage for forty years, yet he expected to be trans- 
 lated to the Absolute at the end of this great tribulation and 
 become one of the Lords of the Holy Universe. 
 
 How such a conception of the Father and the Human Spirit 
 can stand and endure in the presence of the earth and the solar 
 system, the infinite stars and their invisible planets but one 
 does not have to look up! He need only feel the fluttering 
 phenomenon of his own heart, or look at his own knees, or the 
 ploughed lands, or breathe them after a rain; at the grain 
 coming forward like the song of returned soldiers ; at the leaf, 
 at the clay-lump, the ant under the clay, the grain of sand 
 used as a building block by the ant. 
 
 I have felt instants of happiness of late, and seen glimpses. 
 I know that I shall arrive and that you shall arrive, but anyone 
 is hopelessly bogged until he perceives a nobler vista than 
 three-score and ten. The trail at this point is a defile with 
 a big rock fallen in the center of it. You can get your infantry 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 by; even the cavalry can scrape past against the walls, but 
 you can never get your big guns through until you blast 
 the rock. In other words, you must surmount the dogma that 
 one organic body is enough to prepare you for heaven or hell. 
 
 The East has always held to its visions of the Long Road of 
 Life. Children of the New Race, which is the first blend of 
 the East and West to walk the earth, are, in the main, born 
 with an understanding of this principle, and need only to be 
 reminded. Children of the New Race what I mean by that 
 will leak out presently, if you don't know already. Look well 
 into your own family and you may find one. 
 
 I was in a room with four people the other evening, and we 
 discussed the inevitable turning from the old to the new. It 
 transpired that the whole four had made this turning under 
 the influence of one author Marie Corelli the Romance of 
 Two Worlds having performed the trick in three cases. The 
 point is too big for comment. I, too, have sat under the art- 
 lamps and cackled at Marie Corelli's sort of art, but I'm inter- 
 ested of late in the art that whips thousands of lives out of 
 the old and into the new. Mostly this turning point of life 
 involves Theosophy, or Christian Science, or New Thought, 
 but about this time I went out to the little wars. In the first 
 Russo-Japanese campaign, I did much traveling with a really 
 
THE LIFTING SPINE 
 
 big man, named Grant Wallace, who was ten years older 
 than I. 
 
 In junks, in steamer bunks, on many hatches, afield in 
 blankets at night, Grant opened up my mind. It hurt. It 
 came fast. He was in and out and around all I knew. It 
 made me glad and mad at the same time. I had to go apart 
 for hours to catch up. 
 
 In one of these departures, I went through the city of Chifu, 
 at least the inner native quarter. Grant's most recent talk was 
 straining my faculties at the time. It was not only unassimi- 
 lated, but still alive in my mind. This within, and the stench 
 and horror of the native city playing from without, made the 
 incident queer, to say the least. 
 
 I walked in a hush of time and space all around me a 
 dream. I went back at dark to Mrs. Cabot's English boarding- 
 house on the cliffs above the harbor and wrote the story of 
 the afternoon. Grant was in the room. I read it to him and 
 he said it was good. Roswell Field of The Chicago Evening 
 Post said it was the best newspaper story that came out of 
 that war in Asia. At least I was told this. I never saw the 
 Chifu story in print that I can remember. 
 
 Still I didn't know anything about the thing explicitly 
 called reincarnation, though a friend in The Detroit Free 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 Press told me I was writing it. This was James Barr, brother 
 of Robert Barr. He referred to some articles I was doing for 
 the Sunday paper, and what he had to say, he whispered. Re- 
 incarnation was a thing to whisper, down town, in those days. 
 He gave me a letter to a theosophical society and went to 
 a meeting that same night. There was a red light at the door 
 that is, a red pane with a light behind. I held the letter of 
 introduction in my hand, and saw, behind the curtains, a circle 
 of middle-aged men and women very silent. The leader took 
 the letter and vanished. I heard them say that James Barr 
 had sent a message to them. They thought I was the messen- 
 ger-boy. That was straightened out, when I lingered. I 
 thought, of course, that I was going into some spiritist seance, 
 but when I finally got in, I found a group of serious and 
 friendly people talking about God in a new way and very much 
 interested and genial about it not at all cracked. 
 
 Now, I am not a theosophist; in fact, many good theoso- 
 phists think I have gone far astray of late, but I took a deep 
 drink of what they had twenty years ago and found it good. 
 Theosophy is the study of God mainly from an ancient and 
 Asiatic view-point. It flooded into me like a heavy spring 
 rain over a dry river-bed; and with it came one of the big 
 moments of amazement of life. 
 
 It had to do with books again. Even in nineteen hundred 
 
THE LIFTING SPINE 
 
 the majority o people in the West was cut off from the many 
 of the East, as from another planet. I had been reading all 
 my life many thousands of books, and yet I had never 
 touched anything like this. Here were Besant, Sinnet, Lead- 
 beater three who could write yet they had a new language, 
 a new intonation, new flora and fauna. If they had written 
 badly, I would have been able to hold on to myself, but when 
 I found them capable of style, yet capable of forgetting it, and 
 at the same time opening up Asia for me, as my two journeys 
 there had not done by any means I had to let go. It was the 
 Grant Wallace experience again. They had me off my feet. 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 III 
 
 UNDER THE WHITE LAMP 
 
 OOKS come mysteriously to a man as he unfolds. 
 You pick up the things you are ready for. Many 
 times a book destined to mean a life-realization lies 
 unopened for years in a man's library. The moment comes 
 for its taking forth. Or a friend brings the right book. I have 
 said many times that there is no need to go out in search for 
 the right thing to read. 
 
 The other half of the same mystery is that a book cannot de- 
 liver its message to you, no matter how much you read, until 
 you give yourself to it in readiness. There's a book here that 
 throws light on the meaning and symbolism of the Apostle's 
 Creed; another that illuminates the Revelation of Saint John. 
 The churches have struggled to explain these matters, but 
 have not touched these two books which would help so much. 
 Yet these are not rare parchments nor isolated volumes. They 
 are emphatically in the world, but the churches that need 
 them most bring against them preconceived opinion en masse ; 
 from such the magic lies concealed. There is an occult saying 
 that a man's master is always ready when the man is but 
 that the man must go half way to meet him. This going 
 forth to find the master signifies again the reverence and re- 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LAMP 
 
 ceptivity which must be brought to a great book before it 
 unfolds. 
 
 The study of oriental philosophy and literature cleaned up 
 my behaviour for a time. I did without meat, read theo- 
 sophical literature five or seven hours a day, and incidentally 
 wrote a long story which I believed would prepare the nup- 
 tials of the East and the West. I was thin and white and 
 brittle from the deep burns of enthusiasm. 
 
 There was a wise critic who handled an earlier book of 
 mine. He said that Comfort was always intoxicated either 
 with the Idea of God, or Romance, or Plain Alcohol. Early 
 days, at least, furnished reason for this report. I hadn't 
 been selling anything. Besant Sinnet Leadbeater had 
 spoiled my work for the markets. They were in my stuff. 
 Magazine editors who had been watching a young man who 
 could write field action with some "punch," were snorting 
 now over the copy all shot to pieces with a new religion. As a 
 matter of truth about this influence, I explain that I sold more 
 stories at twenty-two than I did at twenty-seven. 
 
 I took the long story manuscript to New York after seven 
 austere months. Having placed it on the prospective pub- 
 lisher's desk, I went further about the Lord's business by 
 calling on a group of young mystics under Harold Percival up 
 Lenox way. They were wonderful young men one a jewel- 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 salesman, another a broker, another a surgeon all doing 
 "down-here" tasks with excellence, as I understood, and all 
 far deeper students than I. Under their white lamp my story 
 was told how I meant to sink the East into the West through 
 a literature of the East and West. They listened and admired. 
 
 I was very happy. They suggested that I eat meat that 
 I would do better work if I did.* They represented that it 
 was a mistake to think that a man should neglect the world, 
 just because he was called of God. They explained that they 
 had tried it ; that whole schools of yogis had tried it in India ; 
 that it meant retracing after going a certain distance ; that the 
 mere fact that we carry a hundred odd pounds apiece should 
 be sufficient suggestion that we make flesh do well here in the 
 dimension it belongs to. They were genuinely fine in explain- 
 ing my disease. 
 
 I found Grant Wallace in New York. We sat down together 
 in a studio in Lower Fifth Avenue on the floor, just as we 
 would have done on Japanese matting. Many hours. I told 
 him a lot that Percival's young men had told me about divine 
 laws and how I was going to put this new stuff into America 
 into American fiction how this was my job, how clearly I 
 saw it. I know of no more gentle heart than Grant's. I forgot 
 
 *I tried this out afterward, but of course it proved a mistake. 
 Those young questers under Percival have doubtless found it so. 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LAMP 
 
 during the stretches of our communion that it was he who 
 had first brought me these things. He didn't remind. He 
 listened and laughed and patted my knee, and when we were 
 exhausted, we rolled into a blanket together quite as before. 
 . . . Dickie Barrie joined us the next day, Port Arthur Barrie 
 Dickie on a shoestring, when I parted from him in Japan 
 come back famous, having lived and loved Nogi, and camped 
 and ridden for many months with brave old Frederick Villiers. 
 
 Grant had a desk at The Sun. Barrie had a desk in every 
 magazine office in New York and was selling all he wrote at 
 from five to fifty cents the word. Barrie fled, but I pinned 
 Grant, making the picture over and over again of impregnat- 
 ing my country with the Asiatic consciousness. 
 
 "But don't forget your humor," Grant said. 
 
 "Humor, man," I answered. "This is a serious matter." 
 
 "I know, only don't go about it seriously. You see, a man 
 can ride right up to the Throne on humor " 
 
 Always gentle, this Grant. All I could repeat was that it 
 wasn't in the cards for me to fail. . . . You see, I didn't 
 allow that anybody else was to help in the redemption work. 
 I was going to do it alone. My country needed it badly. 
 
 Meanwhile, in New York, I waited for the report on the 
 manuscript. After two or three days with Grant, I called at 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 the editor's office and was told kindly that the manuscript was 
 spoiled by a deluge of unbaked philosophy. Those were 
 friends of mine in that office. Will Irwin was there, but it 
 was Viola Roseboro who was delegated to impart to me how 
 rotten my stuff was getting. No one could have done it more 
 sweetly. ... I couldn't get the humor working without 
 help then. I went out in the street and began to drift. I 
 ended up in the Battery with some soldiers met in Porto Rico 
 long since. . . . 
 
 The days were hot, the drift hotter. Grant was looking for 
 me, but I was far singing along on the old rum-trail after 
 seven months of abstinence, seven months of winnowing out 
 the blood and iron. The "white line" took me like a storm. 
 I saw as I never saw before. I saw everything, but I could 
 not feel fast enough. I lost the manuscript. I lost the sol- 
 diers. I lost Grant and Dickie Barrie. The drift took me 
 from one end of Manhattan to the other. A bar-tender gave 
 me a nickel to get from West Farms to the studio in Lower 
 Fifth Avenue, but I was so dry after making the touch that 
 I took a drink and started to walk. That was the smallest 
 glass of beer in the world. On the way I remembered my 
 friends under the white lamp. "I will arise and go to my 
 friends," I said. 
 
 They took me in. I shall always remember that. A few 
 days before I was their guest all clean and white, telling 
 
UNDER THE WHITE LAMP 
 
 them quietly how I meant to change the world. I had even 
 seen the advantage of knowing less than they did, as I began 
 the big task for cannot the neophyte teach the many better 
 than the master who may have forgotten the initial steps so 
 far behind him? And now I was more like a thing swept up 
 from the streets, after three or four days of drift unwashed, 
 unshaven, half-mad from deep drink, the one-eyed crocodile of 
 the Aquarium pictured in my fancy, every time I closed my 
 eyes. 
 
 And their house was so clean. A soiled man who has been 
 clean has no front in the presence of cleanliness. Even they 
 could not contain the extremes I was made of. ... They 
 gave me alcohol to drink, water to bathe in, and clean sheets 
 to lie between but I could not rest. The crocodile came even 
 there. The vague God I had erected was very far indeed, 
 but not so far as I thought. I see that now. 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 IV 
 LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 MAN has a surface and a secret consciousness. It is 
 like a vast estate which we cultivate field by field. 
 Mainly men only open their kitchen-gardens, but the 
 artist dimly apprehends glades and glens, and if he is lucky 
 and balanced enough he finds certain sun-washed silent hills. 
 That fine group of lyric poets Byron, Burns, Poe, Shelley, 
 Keats opened up sick swamps and found them too hard to 
 drain, yet they were continually going back to them, dwelling 
 in a kind of helpless wonder upon those fevered margins, until 
 the murk and illness of the bottomlands was like a shadow in 
 their eyes, even when they sought the eminences of their own 
 being. 
 
 The mystic has been called many things, but he is really 
 the man of a single transcending secret that there is one 
 light in himself, and in every one of us, which, if developed, 
 is capable of raying out over all our lands. He finds that 
 there is no recess nor abyss of his nature too deep or dark or 
 fearsomely tenanted for this light to cleanse and sweeten. 
 He learns that by developing this light, he is working from his 
 own highest point, also from the central point of his own 
 being; that its ray can penetrate the thickest forest and dif- 
 
LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 fuse its light into the blackest ravine, leaving a cathedral won- 
 der there. He sees his estate as one, and as he integrates and 
 masters his possessions, his central light becomes a land-mark 
 over all the province, and the neighboring planters use his 
 light to order their own possessions. 
 
 Now it's a hard fact nailed that this light in every one of 
 us is the secret of happiness; the "pursuit of happiness" 
 through books and days is at first the quest and then the quick- 
 ening of this light. It's every man's property, and the few who 
 have touched it, know the "amplitude of time" and "laugh at 
 the thing called death." Balzac wrote of it, "To live in the 
 presence of great truths and eternal laws . . . that is what 
 keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm 
 and unspoiled in the world of praise." 
 
 The secret was just touched for a moment at a time in cer- 
 tain books up the years. I don't mean in the sacred writings ; 
 that's the business of such books. We are so familiar with 
 many of the sacred sayings and their pointings of the ways 
 that they have become a patter upon our minds. To say that 
 Truth leads men to happiness tells the whole story, but it 
 doesn't mean everything to us, in the midst of detached affairs 
 Down Here. It has been said too many times ; we're hardened 
 to the impact of it. I mean that I touched the secret for an 
 occasional instant up the years in the books of feverish young 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 questers in our midst the ones who write or paint or play as 
 they hurry on. 
 
 I read a story of Guy de Maupassant's. I may not remember 
 the tale exactly for it was long ago, but of the spirit I am 
 sure. A young man and woman met, and in the sudden power 
 of each other, forgot all the stresses and bondages of life 
 which were already upon them. They vanished in a cloud of 
 scandal. Thirty or forty years afterward, an old Frenchman 
 who had known the man and woman at the time of their dra- 
 matic meeting, was traveling somewhere in the mountains and 
 came upon a cabin where an aged pair lived alone in the wil- 
 derness. . . . They were silent together, full of peace and 
 wistfulness. 
 
 The woman joined the man in the hard tasks of their rocky 
 garden; the externals of life were utterly simple, yet the 
 traveler found between the two, something that all the world 
 had not shown him before. Sometimes when he spoke, sitting 
 between them at the hearth, the man would lift his eyes and 
 turn them slowly to the woman whose gaze would meet his for 
 a moment steadfastly, without any effort at communication, 
 but with a calm and understanding that involved all life and 
 seemingly all the past." There was a fearlessness in their eyes 
 that unmistakably intimated a working knowledge of the long 
 ascending slopes ahead, infinitely beyond the little mystery 
 
LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 of death, so close to one or both. Their love was the first 
 and last fact of their lives, so that the traveler wondered at 
 their happiness in the imminence of what men call the end. 
 . . . That story is one that means Romance to me. As I 
 recall, the traveler went his way, before he remembered the 
 old story of the two who had fled together, and that he had 
 seen the end of the scandal. De Maupassant called his story, 
 Happiness. 
 
 Years ago, in Detroit, there was a beloved city editor, named 
 Harry Hetherington. He touched many of us younger men 
 from time to time, and most of us profited by the big things 
 which he could not say. One night he gave me Andreieff's 
 The Seven Who Were Hanged. It was a psychological study 
 of certain young revolutionists awaiting death, and others 
 who were in the death-chamber with them. A remarkable 
 story, and to me there was one culminating moment one of 
 those moments in books and days which leave a man different. 
 . . . A man and woman standing together at the last mo- 
 ment, and their look past the world and the flesh and the gray 
 dawn directly into the Essential Loveliness of each other. 
 
 They saw something that life here below mostly conceals 
 from us. They discovered that instant the Romance that goes 
 on and on ; that the door just ahead of them, which had looked 
 so dark, swung really into a freer dimension. They knew, 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 standing together, that they belonged to a bigger world than 
 they had dreamed of ; that they belonged to those about them 
 in the death-cell, to the guards who brought death to them, 
 to the teeming suffering myriads outside most of all that they 
 belonged to each other. 
 
 I never could get past the need of building something be- 
 tween real lovers that will help them over the barrier called 
 Death. To me the very awakening of the love-energy seems 
 to demand that. The countless deaths of soldier-lovers afield 
 in the recent war would seem to demand that the higher 
 octave of Romance be touched, at least, if not played upon. 
 Certainly there have been many men and women whose stately 
 mourning for one gone has brought to them a faint intimation 
 of nearness; moments in which the heavens were flung back 
 ever so little. It has always seemed to me that there could 
 be no contentment in a real love story in the midst of the in- 
 finite chances of life and death, if the love thing itself would 
 not open something beyond the petty span of things as seen in 
 the flesh. 
 
 . . . One of the finest romantic moments I ever lived in 
 a book was in Maeterlinck's chapter, The Nuptial Flight in 
 The Life of the Bee. s 
 
 There was one night away up in the gallery of a Detroit 
 theater, when I read a little pamphlet called, Hindu Meta- 
 
LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 physics, and an old shell in my brain cracked open. I knew 
 then that we were mainly doing things in detachment in Eu- 
 rope and America; that so-called Science was but a study of 
 parts, like Darwin's segment of evolution, which the great 
 man considered in his superb concentration to be the whole 
 stretch of man's progress. I found that in India they had a 
 word called "prana," which we haven't even English for ; that 
 they mean by it, the quality in air which cannot chemically 
 be analyzed, but without which no plant or man or animal 
 can live. 
 
 It was demonstrated to me that we move and have our 
 being in the atmospheric cushion which rests upon the crust 
 of the planet, because it contains this quality named "prana" 
 the breath within the breath. The little pamphlet was crowded 
 with matters as revelatory as this, quite a number of which 
 statements have since been demonstrated in our Western 
 world. I swung again in that reading altogether loose from 
 the ground, and renewed my burning boyish allegiance to all 
 that was of the Orient. 
 
 It was a long time after that before I learned that the East 
 has merely been doing what we haven't; that the East has 
 been holding to the synthesis, while we have been at work in 
 analysis ; that the East has clung to the whole, while we have 
 been doing the lonely cold work with the parts; in fact, that 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 the East is little better off than we are, but that both East 
 and West have ineffable gifts each for the other on every plane 
 of being. 
 
 It was long before I came in from eccentric yearnings and 
 gropings to realize that the man who finds intimations of 
 immortality in the primrose on his path, is working quite as 
 importantly in the big scheme of things, as the sage on the 
 roof of the world, who has opened his skylights to commune 
 with a passing Stranger, too lustrous for mere man's optic 
 nerves to delineate. In fact, the intimations of immortality 
 are quite as significant in the primrose as in the archangel; 
 and it is as truly essential for us to perceive the majesty 
 in miniature as to expand our souls to contain celestial con- 
 figurations. I can find the dear care of being and the love- 
 tokens of an awakening spirit quite as evident in Amiel's 
 Journal and Jeffery's Story of my Heart as in the Mahabarata 
 or The Book of Job. 
 
 It is but a step farther, and just as sure a step, to perceive 
 the emerging prophets in the lives of those tortured lyric 
 poets ; to know that Poe and Burns, Byron, Shelley and Keats 
 were just as surely making their patterns straight, as the 
 apparently more ordered questers in the monasteries of Vindya 
 or High Himalaya. In fact, the mysticism of the man, Slocum, 
 who built his boat of pasture-oak, and sailed it alone around 
 
LOVE AND DEATH 
 
 the waters of the world, communing with his God in the great 
 voyage; and Appleseed Johnny, who planted orchards ahead 
 of the pioneers, and John Brown, whose soul is still marching 
 on such mysticism is as magic to one who sees, as that of 
 the lofty devotees who have transmuted every passion and 
 desire and appetite into one great Yearning for union with 
 their Lords. 
 
 . . . In fact, I see the austere yogis coming down from 
 the hills to toil and endure the low vibrations of the plains and 
 cities, quite as surely as we of the west shall later fix our 
 knowledges and cool our distractions in the mountains of the 
 spirit. It is good to go to the mountains, but just as good to 
 make one's place at the water-levels. Zarathustra goes up, 
 but comes down again. Moses and the Lord Christ go up 
 into the mountains, but come down again, covering their faces 
 from the many, until they get adjusted to the pressures of the 
 plain. Peter, James and John wanted to build their tent upon 
 the Mount of Transfiguration, but their Master smiled and led 
 them down again. It is the abysses as well as the peaks which 
 make the scenery of the Himalayas; matter as well as spirit 
 for the experiments of our laboratories; the East and West 
 which make our world. 
 
 The value of woman is that she is unlike man. Her glory 
 is ruined by the man who tries to possess her and make her 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 like himself. It is only when he sets her free that she comes 
 to him gladly with effulgence in her eyes. In fact, it is only 
 the free woman who can give herself. In all their fighting 
 alone and apart man and woman, catholic and protestant, 
 heart and mind, mystic and occultist, East and West, have 
 gathered together great treasures and powers, each for the 
 completion of the other. 
 
 . . . The New Race sees the globe in one piece, night 
 and day as parts of the same movement, the Innermost and 
 the Uppermost one; the doctrines of Immanence and Emana- 
 tions, as the systole and diastole of one Quest. Plato and Aris- 
 totle are not forever incompatibles, any more than Baptist 
 and Congregational in the weaving tolerance of the New. 
 
FIGHTING BACK 
 
 V 
 FIGHTING BACK 
 
 ERGSON and Eucken and Ouspensky, three Euro- 
 pean middlemen whose great work lies between the 
 East and West, between the Old and the New, might 
 have hurried me back into the Western balances, but I did not 
 read them at the time of my thrall for things Eastern. I 
 remember a book at that time, a book about women, by the 
 brilliant young apostate, Weininger. Its flashing subtleties 
 and sophistries carried me deeper into the drift, but the actual 
 needs for life in the world, sooner or later brought me back. 
 The fact is, I never would have been able to make the spiritual 
 'and the natural, or the East and West, work together at all in 
 one body, if it had not been for the needs of daily bread. 
 
 The struggle is pictured well in my numerous journeys to 
 New York from some haven of quiet in the middle-west. The 
 big town had hurt me so many times that it came to mean 
 Hell. I would go there with a book manuscript in a confi- 
 dence that required no return ticket, thoroughly warmed and 
 self-psychologized, after months of bearing work in my own 
 atmosphere, all personal magnetism and thought-force inno- 
 cently enveloping the story which the nearest editor would 
 deliver from me, leaving the author little more alive than his 
 still-born. 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 It was hard for me not to blame the people and place of 
 these parturitions. Broke, I would have to find work on a 
 newspaper in order to get straightened out, after the months 
 of concentration on the "priceless" task. In fact, I frequently 
 had to go to work in New York in order to negotiate trans- 
 portation to the particular garden-spot of the middle-west, 
 where another novel cried for birth. In the midst of peace 
 and production again, I would slowly and surely lose the 
 memory of Hell ; I would forget all that New York had taught 
 me last about keeping my stuff within the range of the public 
 mind. Increasingly, as the weeks drove on, I would follow 
 my own tastes as to what a novel should be, and lose the 
 clutch of actuality which the market demanded. 
 
 Left alone too long in the shop, I always drifted out of 
 touch with the American spirit. So the struggle of those years 
 was less to make my stuff good enough for the market stand- 
 ard, than to keep it down within the reach of the many 
 with all the wings of metaphysics tugging from above. But 
 New York always broke these pinions. The editors remarked 
 that I did physical adventures rather well, but got maudlin 
 over spiritual adventures. 
 
 I fought back, but the harder I fought, the farther I was 
 pushed from the chahce of getting across. I hated hard, but 
 hate spoils everything. The man who hates has a sick spot 
 on his mental surface. Hate comes back to the hater. Yet 
 
FIGHTING BACK 
 
 it is energy. Hatred isn't so alarming as impotence. The 
 great hater is potentially the great lover. The man who loves 
 sees the object more in the real sense and less in the critical 
 and personal sense. The man who hates sees the object alto- 
 gether in the critical and personal, and misses the super-per- 
 sonal reality. It is impossible to hate anyone whom you really 
 understand. If you had come the same road of the one you 
 hate, you would be as he is. It is the opposite to hatred 
 which is the key to understanding and the clue to the thing 
 we are after, which is Happiness. 
 
 A man who neither loves nor hates is sick spiritually. That 
 indifference called Moksin by the Hindus has been well tried 
 out. If pushed too far, it results in atrophy of a deeper vitality 
 than that which has to do with the body. I have hated indi- 
 viduals and countries and societies and editors and myself. 
 Finally I indulged the dissipation in hating abstractions, like 
 Ignorance. The queer thing about hating Ignorance is that 
 you are called back to the hatred of it in the individual. 
 
 If you hate Ignorance in the individual man, you tighten 
 his trouble and attract him to you with his slowly-rising hos- 
 tility. There is nothing to that. A man watches it work for 
 a little while; then comes back to the changeless truth that 
 the main trouble with the hater is his own insides. As he 
 cleanses and corrects these, understanding is gained which 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 makes hatred impossible. Driven to the last ditch by the 
 hound of heaven, a man is forced to love something, a girl, 
 a phantom, a family, a friend, a dog or the dank earth will 
 get him right there. 
 
 One of the last things I hated was the Old in everything. 
 I had given my allegiance to the phantom called the New 
 Race, but I didn't get the phantom to stand still and be en- 
 fleshed until I reached calm on the subject of the elders, whom 
 I had called "the bearded generation." One sees later that 
 the Old is the essential matrix in which the New is born. 
 
 It is well to consider that the Law works both ways. Love 
 comes back to the lover, and now we are touching the quest 
 again. . . . We are shut off from each other in detachment, 
 but we really all want the same thing. Everyone whom we 
 have learned to trust tells the same story Hermes, Orpheus, 
 Gautama, Jesus, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, Socrates, our own Walt 
 Whitman and his great disciple, Edward Carpenter. 
 
 Personally and nationally we want the same thing. It is 
 only the illusion of detachment which makes us see it differ- 
 ently. What is essentially good for America is good for New 
 South Wales. The same is true in every commercial and 
 romantic contract. Two men prosper in business so long as 
 they are out after the same thing; man and woman pull to- 
 gether, just so long as they lose the pain of their own wants 
 
FIGHTING BACK 
 
 and aim as one to a single goal beyond. In the higher romance 
 it becomes absolutely essential to work together toward one 
 spiritual point. The increase of force rends two beings who 
 have breathed Open Country together and fall back into the 
 tight dimension of me-and-mine. 
 
 These things are hard to see in detachment. The pith of 
 them has to be accepted on faith until it can be seen, but 
 every effort a man makes to hold to it is moral calisthenics of 
 a fine type. It is in the great expansions of life, in moments 
 of high happiness or hard-driven from pain, that most of us 
 get our first glimpses of the truth which heals. 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 VI 
 A FEW FINE THINGS 
 
 I AM writing this now in a room practically devoid of 
 books making no effort to remember. The names 
 of my big moments of reading come one by one 
 without external reference. I may forget many; could hardly 
 hope to touch all. In early days, again and again, I have said 
 about some forgotten volume, "This is the best book I ever 
 read." I know I said this about Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni, 
 and possibly about his Strange Story; still earlier, of a cer- 
 tainty about Camille and Three Musketeers. For a time I 
 was right to dwell in Thomas Hardy's thin watery lights 
 and deep windless glooms, but the Waverley novels and I 
 have yet to meet at the exact right time. 
 
 I never drew unqualified inspiration from Shakespeare, 
 though I have often tried the plays and sonnets. One thinks 
 at the same time of Bacon, from whose ethical essences I 
 have taken real profit ; but even more from the balanced coun- 
 sels of the noble Roman, Aurelius, tough-fibered and fine- 
 fibered enough to be an Emperor and remain a man. In the 
 same thought comes to me the spiritual faculties kindled 
 within from the self-mastery of the slave, Epictetus. That 
 little volume I kept warm a long time against my hip. 
 
 Some of Browning's things I have actually found intact in 
 
A FEW FINE THINGS 
 
 my memory from much conning; but I have always wished 
 that he had been a poor man, compelled to meet the markets 
 for daily bread. That would have forced him to make words 
 work better. In spite of this, he pulled a love from me that 
 made him unfold for my inner consciousness. He knew some- 
 thing of what a lover means which the world has still to learn. 
 I would have adored the lover in Dante for one single page of 
 his great heart story, and when I read that Beatrice said 
 to him: 
 
 "I will make you forever a citizen of that Rome whereof 
 
 the Christ is a Roman " I could hold no more of sheer 
 
 Romance ! 
 
 Many of the great moments of the great ones, I learned 
 through their disciples of Goethe from Carlyle; of Socrates 
 from Plato ; of H. P. B., who still has much for young America, 
 from Annie Besant. For a time the disciples looked so bright 
 in the foreground that I missed the looming masters behind 
 them, but one's eyes straighten with the years. For a long 
 time I hated Paradise Lost because of its seeming orthodox 
 adhesions, but, as I loosened the adhesions from my own 
 mind, I came to realize that Milton was blind on the outside for 
 a very good reason ; that he had caught something of the Big 
 Story of the Gulf which the best men of the here and now will 
 do well to look at again. Moreover, as Mencken says, "he 
 could write like hell." 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 I have taken more worth from Coventry Patmore's two 
 stanzas called Departure, than from all the Shakespeare plays ; 
 more, I think, of the throb of life from The Ballad of Reading 
 Gaol. As a little child I was thrilled "to a peak" when a room- 
 ful began to sing: 
 
 "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the Coming of the 
 Lord " 
 
 Oscar Wilde touched the same vibration in the Ballad, and 
 this is the very core-vibration of the "Marseillaise." ... I 
 wonder that more people do not know one of the loveliest 
 things ever made in America, the "Hymn to the Marshes," by 
 Sidney Lanier a countryman of ours who saw the great Writ- 
 ing on the ground which is the Western way the same Writ- 
 ing which the Easterns read in the Stars. 
 
STARS AND BEES 
 
 VII 
 
 
 
 STARS AND BEES 
 
 LOVE the men in books and life who are groping 
 f r the same things as we are. They called Blake and 
 Bohme mad, but cults are forming today and books 
 are written about them. They pushed their skylights open a 
 bit. They couldn't bring down all they saw, but we treasure 
 the words which they formed in open consciousness. The 
 more we know, the less vague appear their words, and the 
 more we realize that theirs was a magnificent madness. In 
 the white fire of their awakened faculties, they looked down 
 from the mystery and saw more than flesh in faces. They 
 saw the sons of God in the eyes of passing men. No trouble 
 to be a Democrat after that, for the heresy of separateness is 
 forever broken. 
 
 That fine living Irishman, A. E., has told the same over and 
 over again: 
 
 "This mood hath known all beauty, for it sees 
 
 O'erwhelmed majesties 
 In these pale forms, and kingly crowns of gold 
 
 On brows no longer bold, 
 
 And through the shadowy terrors of their hell 
 The love for which they fell " 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 A. E. is talking about men the men of the street. And 
 more he is getting it down, so that those of us who haven't 
 time to make poetry or dream dreams for a living, are unable 
 to get away from the things he sees the same that all the 
 great ones have seen. It's the work of the workmen of the 
 New Age to bring it down to matter straight to make the 
 dream come true in matter, so that even the man who runs 
 must catch his breath and remember his birthright. The war 
 has done much to make the myriads stop and look and listen. 
 So many who have lost the dearest thing here want to know 
 what is on the Other Side. 
 
 The Spoon River man gave me an extension of conscious- 
 ness ; and young and old in this settlement have passed around 
 James Stephens' Crock of Gold, looking at the world differently 
 before and after. The breath quickens in the same passage of 
 thought to Algernon Blackwood's stories. Here are three big 
 workmen of the transition. ... I have read James Op- 
 penheim's little verses called Annie in the same evening with 
 some of the finest pages of rhythmic print ; and Alfred Henry 
 Lewis' Wolfville Stories to the same group who believe Ro- 
 main Rolland's Jean Christophe to be one of the highest best 
 productions of any artist any time. Every day that big French- 
 man shows his light in the world, which is to say that he helps 
 to uncover the light intrinsic in all men. Ellen Key's Love 
 and Marriage was a real book to me ten years ago, and one 
 
STARS AND BEES 
 
 of the strangest and most potent things which I ever held in 
 hand was the Poems of Aleister Crowley. 
 
 Much enlightenment came to me from The Perfect Way, 
 The Aquarian Gospel, Hartman's Paracelsus and Magic, White 
 and Black. The last has been the final object dropped a hun- 
 dred nights before turning off the reading lamp. There were 
 two winters when I read very little besides Astronomy, and 
 almost as long when the prime interest of life to me was Bees 
 in books and fields. 
 
 I used to own walls of volumes, but I could do with nine 
 now, not counting the Bible, which is the book of all for our 
 day. Yes, I would keep these and let the others go nine great 
 little books of the world to me. Sometime I want them in 
 leather on India paper so that the whole nine could be held 
 in one hand The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,* Imitation of 
 Christ, Bhagavad Gita, Voice of the Silence, Light on the 
 Path, Impersonal Life, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Leaves of 
 Grass and Towards Democracy. 
 
 *Chas. Johnston's edition preferably. 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 VIII 
 THE MYSTIC ROAD 
 
 GODAY I can see innumerable intimations of the larger 
 consciousness breaking through the minds of the 
 many, little touches of the real in fiction and moving 
 picture, sentences of deep reality, themes which contain actual 
 correspondences of spirit and matter. Out of an old drawer, 
 recently, I plucked forth a much worn copy of Bucke's Cosmic 
 Consciousness. It had literally been read to pieces and was 
 bound away like letter-sheets sacred to someone's beloved. 
 
 Breathlessly, ten years ago, I went about making those 
 revelations my own. It was the main subject and object in 
 those days to break with a crash into the larger field of con- 
 sciousness. I remember how the term World-man shook me, 
 when it first appeared on copy of mine. "Ahead on the road 
 are the World-men" that little sentence looped over into 
 Canaan like an announcement that we were coming. It meant 
 all that "worldly man" does not. 
 
 That enthusiasm was all very well, though I have learned 
 since that Enlightenment comes as it is earned; that a man is 
 very far from it when he is "fixing" to arrive; that it cannot 
 come, in fact, to fit the mind's conception, because the mind 
 works in three-space and It works in four. All this self-con- 
 
THE MYSTIC ROAD 
 
 scious stuff is part of the mountain of matter which must be 
 renounced, before the Day breaks and the shadows disappear. 
 One makes his body ready to endure an incredible increase of 
 power. This making ready is the conquest of the mind and 
 feelings. 
 
 One may have Enlightenment, if he pays the price and this 
 price looks steep in the beginning. It means to give up every 
 whim, habit, eccentricity, failing, appetite and predilection. It 
 means, if one is called, to give up money, name, house, lover, 
 child. It means to be ready to become as nothing in the eyes 
 of men. The Book of Job is one story of the coming of En- 
 lightenment. One laughs at the need of celibacy and austerity, 
 before one is called, but head-on in the dark, one finds himself 
 in the midst of restraints and denials which would have looked 
 like fanaticism to himself a while back. 
 
 The time comes when he forgets that he is being restrained 
 and denied. He refuses to make a single mind-image of his 
 reward. For a long time he appears less than he was, as a 
 mind-power and as a man among men. This is because he has 
 repudiated all that he knew on the plane of generation, and is 
 not yet ready to use the wisdom, love and power of the Self. 
 This is a sorry time. 
 
 Bucke's book was good for me, but I do not believe that real 
 Enlightenment, or Illumination, as he called it, comes in the 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 way he pointed out. I think it is more like a wick being 
 turned up, the slightest fraction of a turn at a time. Each 
 turn is an extension of consciousness. It never fails to come 
 the instant the poor man-trained objective consciousness gets 
 decent and healthy enough to stand it. 
 
 There are many tests and ordeals. One must learn to dis- 
 criminate between his mind which thinks, and the Voice within 
 which knows. This is delicate work, and after learning to hear 
 the Voice, one must know no other god before it. Enlighten- 
 ment steals in like the Dawn, which it is, after the long dark- 
 ness of preparation and purification. It comes softly as one 
 puts on courage to do bravely in details and to keep the 
 bravery hid. In fact, it is questionable to me if a flash of illu- 
 mination in a mind not ready, is not a great misfortune. . . . 
 
 Very recently there came a memorable volume Mysticism, 
 by Evelyn Underbill, who wrote a wise introduction for Songs 
 of Kabir, Tagore's best book to me. Mysticism was like find- 
 ing greatly done, what one hoped to grow to do. I read the 
 haunting names of martyrs and mystics whose words I had 
 long searched for Suso, Tauler, Brother Lawrence, Ruys- 
 broec, Eckhart, Swedenborg, Catherine of Siena, Catherine 
 of Genoa, Mme. Guyon, Santa Theresa. . . . 
 
 Twenty-five years ago I used to walk home from school 
 with a lad named Cameron. There was much time for talk. 
 
THE MYSTIC ROAD 
 
 You may hardly believe it, but Cameron knew something 
 about most of these names. For years I remembered his story 
 of the terrible austerities of "the blessed Henry Suso." No 
 one else had ever uttered these names in my hearing, but I 
 knew I should come to them again. Here was a valuable 
 synthesis of all the ecstasies and actions, sayings, confessions, 
 renunciations, exaltations, contemplations and rigors of that 
 Holy Company. 
 
 . . . The intellectualists keep us coherent; they keep us 
 fit and lean and efficacious. They are like the friends a man 
 meets afield men he learned to love, riding side by side, fight- 
 ing back to back but the mystics are like the women who 
 wait at home. They are impassioned to say exactly what they 
 mean. That is their service. They are free from world forms ; 
 they dare to be themselves; finally they reach and begin to 
 sustain, through this freedom of soul, the Larger Conscious- 
 ness which is the desired aim of all good workmen. In that 
 freedom, the simplest mind is greater than the subtlest savant. 
 
BOOKS AND DAYS 
 
 IX 
 THE BOOK OF THE HEART 
 
 E end of much reading is an emerging into life. It 
 has dawned upon me with amazement of late that I 
 have practically ceased to read books ; that this wasn't 
 a whim or a mood, rather that the great world of books had 
 dropped away; life itself closer, more intense and revealing. 
 Intimate human documents of personal correspondence have 
 become consummately attractive. Letters set me free out 
 of the prison house of self. That's the key to our pursuit. I 
 do not write to get answers, yet I have found the answers to 
 be more involving and real than formal lines of print. Any- 
 thing that sets one free, that draws forth his best from different 
 angles, speeds the way to Open Country. There is more to 
 these relations established through letters than mere pages of 
 writing, and there is no limit to the work that one can do. A. 
 E., in his Candle of Vision, has told something about the use 
 of real powers which not one in a million understands. It is 
 said that only one in fifteen units of heat comes out into the 
 room from the average open fire-place the rest up the chim- 
 ney. People in the world waste their powers as an open fire- 
 place wastes heat. "Yet the fire-light is dear. . . . 
 
 We read books and we go to plays ; we travel from mountain 
 to shore to forget ourselves. Happiness is the loss of the 
 
THE BOOK OF THE HEART 
 
 sense of self. You may try in a thousand ways to get by this 
 conclusion, but steadily it will be brought back to you, face 
 to face at the end, until there isn't a quibble or a wobble left. 
 It is the loss of the self to find the Self. 
 
 A page of typewritten copy driven straight to one mind 
 if possible with the carrying force of great-heartedness is 
 often taken and held entire by that other, so that it becomes a 
 tablet. Neither the one who receives nor the one who sends 
 is the same again ... It seems to me that priceless docu- 
 ments of the human heart writings that have not found print, 
 yet which contain the profoundest truths of life come to my 
 table from day to day around the world. Continually before 
 me are pages ruddy and strong with life. Their vibration is 
 a part of my strength intimate human pages, spiritual self- 
 revelations. . . . All life is in human association. Books 
 pass, but we never pass men. We read a myriad of books, to 
 open at last the Book of the Heart which is Humanity. 
 
VOL. ONE 
 
 THE MYSTIC ROAD 
 
 The First Nineteen ' 
 
 of the 
 
 Will Levington Comfort Letters 
 
 A Temporary Edition in Paper at 
 One Dollar 
 
 ' '* The world needs to know that a great love story 
 is the story of an Initiation. * * * The inter-attraction 
 of man and woman calls forth the highest potency of love 
 in this Place; therefore it involves the strongest energy 
 we have to work with for spiritual unfoldment. The 
 real romance of man and woman, is not entered upon until 
 organic desire is mastered. The beautiful possibilities of 
 generation, not to mention the next step of regeneration, 
 are not dreamed of in a mind which is at the mercy of 
 sensuous passion. Since one cannot know the full power 
 of his passion until the love nature is awakened,, he cannot 
 enter the ordeals of conquest alone. It would follow that 
 two who love and fulfill the Law are therefore involved 
 in the highest possibilities of mystical attainment, and that 
 they form a center of radiant regenerative force in the 
 world. * * * 
 
 WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 
 
 4993 PASADENA AVENUE 
 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 
 
GayJord Bros., Inc.! 
 
 Makers 
 
 Stockton, Calif 
 W. JAN. 21. 1908 ' 
 
 831909 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY