shiftiness which must pass.

The utterance of truth is not aided by passing through a brain that is
cut like a hockey rink from the passage of many characters. The
expression of truth preserves its great vitality by passing in as near
a straight line as possible from the source through the instrument. The
instrument is always inferior. It is always somehow out of true, because
it is human and temporal. It is not enhanced by human artifice, by
actings, nor by identification with fictions. The law of all life tells
us, and we do not need to be told if we stop to realise, that the spirit
of man is integrated by truth in expression, that the more nearly the
truth we speak, the more nearly we bring the human and temporal to a par
with the immortal within us. Bringing the mind to interpret the immortal
is the true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love
of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle,
Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the
fiction sense--that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to
enflesh their literary efforts in story form.

This is true. Yet we do not count our greatest novelists and actors
above them in the fine perspective of the years, for they were
interpreters of the human spirit. They interpreted more and more, as the
years mounted upon them, the human spirit as it played through their own
minds, which steadily conformed more nearly to truth. The point of the
whole matter is, that in learning to interpret the human spirit more and
more directly, by actions in the world or written words apart, the mind
draws increasingly deep from a source that is inexhaustible, and its
expression finally becomes so rich and direct and potent that acting and
fictioning of any form is impossible.

Again, it is the straight expression of things as they find them, that
charms us in the words of children and masters. The true education is to
encourage such expression, to keep the passage between the mind and its
centre of origins wide open for the forth-sending of the inimitable and
the actual.

The young minds here are trained to realise that the biddings of their
inner life are more interesting and reliable than any processes merely
mental can possibly be. Unless their teacher fails, they will become
more and more the expressionists of themselves. No matter what form
their work takes in the world, the ideal is held that the dimension of
the hu