BY ERNEST WOOD

I have often asked myself the question, what will happen in the world when humanity has ceased its multifarious quarrellings and has solved the problem of peace? Already we have taken one great step on the way by the development of the scientific spirit. This has removed the necessity for quarrelling over material things–food, clothing, shelter, and the instruments of education and amusement–because through it we have learned great productiveness.

At this moment humanity seems poised for the second step. Natural thought, as opposed to fanciful thought, has opened the door to material riches, but because man has not yet natural feelings, truly human feelings, rational feelings–but is still ridden by the terrible emotional fancies of fear and pride and greed–he cannot put his foot over the threshold, and enter into the region of peace in which those material riches will be a source of comfort and pleasure to all. When the spirit of brotherhood, which is analogous in the feelings to the spirit of reason in thought, begins to govern the emotions of the leaders of men, the foot will pass over the threshold and humanity will soon achieve both prosperity and peace. Then, as I said before, I have asked myself what will happen in the world when thought and love combined have rendered human life a heaven upon earth.

It is interesting that so few people who look forward to a heaven in the clouds, can decide what they will do with themselves when they arrive in that blessed place. The pictures that have been put before us are tolerably depressing. Some have thought that to sit in rows and play upon harps would be a satisfactory occupation to fill up the wastes of eternal time. One friend of mine, a Chinese, came nearer to reality when he told me that he doubted his possibility of happiness there, unless he could be a traffic policeman, which was the desire of his heart. There was something majestic–that is, crudely beautiful–in that. Somewhat better than most is the picture that I find in ancient books of the roads leading to the city of Yama, the King of Righteousness, with their splendid trees, their elephants and horses, and the roadside ponds peopled with swans and ducks. They are better because they contain more beauty.

All this answers my question. Prosperity and peace cannot make a heaven on earth. Something more than thought and love must come out of man before that is attained, and that more is beauty, the joy of pure or perfect action.

We are all familiar with the sayings that art alone endures, and that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Even in the realm of nature we find the same tendency, for the land which has been devastated by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes soon blossoms again into the beauty of the flower. Shakespeare lamented that the most precious things are the most fragile; he did not stop to remember that the beauty he mourned over was the highest product of life in the world, and that life could rise again in even greater beauty from every adverse encounter. I say that beauty is the deepest thing in life because the highest achievements of human thought and feeling only prepare the way for that, and the joy of that. It is the height of yoga–an external harmony expressing an internal unity. Truly the Gita says that yoga is skill in action.

It is curious that this pure nature of beauty is so seldom understood or appreciated. I find, for example, that many of my friends are enthralled by a piece of music which they have

been educated to understand; they tell me that it means so much to them, and speaks to them in a sort of universal language about palaces and gardens and fountains, and clouds and the wind. All that leaves me very cold. It is only one degree less unpleasing than the remark of a lady who, coming suddenly upon a rich meadow, exclaimed, ‘O, how lovely, just like a beautiful green carpet!’ It could be forgiven in the little girl who saw a wild deer, and clapped her hands and cried: ‘O mother, is it real, like those in the Zoo?’ But thinking people ought not to make a game of art. It is all so mental, and contains so little of that complete response to beauty which is really the direct perception of the unveiled universal will, the penetration of the eye through the circumstance to the archetype.

Beauty is not a thing of parlour tricks, but of life. It can never be put on with a brush. But where life expresses itself in action, not restrained by fear and not augmented by greed or pride, beauty naturally results. Let me take as example the beauty of a racehorse–of its limbs and of its motion. These are the outcome of real skill in action. There is the horse at the starting post, eager to run; how difficult to restrain him until the signal goes for the start! And then, what joy, what pure and complete concentration in the action, with never a thought of what food shall be eaten tomorrow or what was eaten yesterday.

Looking at this, one thinks what beauty may become man’s also when he too takes less thought for the morrow and enters without fear or pride into some perfect action in the present time. He too will become beautiful–and all his works. And that will not be inconsistent with purpose in action. It is not necessary for the future to poison the present, as is the vogue at the present time. I can picture a student of future times, and, rarely, even of the present, who, although he is aiming at complete knowledge or mastery of a subject, is nevertheless fully wrapped up in his study and rejoicing in that as he goes along. It is only when the action is impure, when the knowledge is required for foreign purposes, most dreadful of all for the passing of examinations intended to lead to something different, that the studies are ugly and painful, and also relatively ineffective and damaging to the mind.

Beauty is a goddess who will brook no rival, but will show herself only when there is undivided homage and no external consideration. Nothing can make the beauty of the race- horse. No external power can mould those limbs; no imitation produce their equal. Even devotion and admiration will not purchase them for the young racehorse. They will be his merely as the result of running, that is of living, which is really life. There is no statuesque life. Life is living, and that is why pure action is the key to the very heart of life, which is joy within and beauty without.

The heaven on earth of which I am thinking, the human life saturated with beauty, may be little conscious of beauty as we think of it now, looking at it through our mental windows. There will be little consciousness, I fancy, of this and that as beautiful, it will be the natural expression of our skill in action, not valued as skill, but itself in turn the outcome of the joy of pure action. Even in the clumsy and antiquated art of our day skill is a requisite, and will is behind the skill, and will is nothing but life. No one uses his will or achieves more

concentration, which is the same thing, than the artist. And do you not find, if you concentrate–not with force, but with simple poise, as concentration should be done–upon some simple natural thing, a mere line perhaps, the edge of a leaf, that you become aware of a wonderful beauty there, which holds you spell-bound? Concentration is the master key to the perception of beauty. That is perhaps why the Japanese, who excel in concentration and are noted for their strength of will, both find and create beauty in simple things and ways. Visitors to Japan are often struck with this. One day a European lady visiting with a Japanese family, found one flower in the vase in her room. She wanted to know, was there a dearth of flowers in Japan, and why did they not place nice fat bunches in their rooms? The young daughter of the house remarked, ‘But O, that would be gluttony!’ and then spoke of the tender care with which the one flower was disposed.

I have said that art and beauty are the outcome of life in pure action, although even in Greece it was argued that art is imitation. An argument in favour of the existence of a divine mind was derived in this way. It was said that the highest human mind and the greatest genius, as found in the artist and the philosopher, showed us only the most perfect examples of imitation. The philosopher could only tell the truths which he had learned; naturally they were not inventions of his. And the artist also could but copy as perfectly as possible the things which he saw. It was then said that if it takes the best of human minds merely to copy, and that imperfectly, the objects around them, how much greater must be the mind which produced the originals. It was a specious argument, for the artist does not see with the eyes of ordinary man. His eye penetrates the form or expression and blends with the soul or life that produced it from joy, or from living, with no thought of external loveliness. The work of the artist then is not to fill our museums and public places with statues, but to isolate those portions of form which have come into the world as the outcome of pure action, and set them up so that men may see them apart from the mess and muddle of ugliness produced by fear and pride and greed. So the artist is a true teacher, causing men to discover the beauty not in his own creations but in the place where he himself found them at first.

In the past, art has been linked greatly with devotion. With unending unconscious patience men have worked to represent in beauty the object of their love, and in their work they have found a sort of adoration or communion. Even in that they stand God off and apart; but when the true secret of beauty is known and the presence felt, the communion will become union and one Life will be over all.

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