old-books/books/clark-glenn/the-man-who-tapped-the-secrets-of-the-universe/text/chapter-03.txt

Any reader who has listened in on this conversation this long must be getting impatient to learn more about the life of this remarkable man. Therefore we will give both you and Mr. Russell a rest while I take time to sketch the main outlines of his life and career.

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 19th, 1871. He attended a village school until nearly ten, when because of family reverses he was put to work.

He got a job as a cash boy in a dry goods store, drawing a munificent salary of $2.50 weekly and walking six miles a day to and from work. But down deep in his heart he knew that we all have the same promise of the unlimited help of the Universal Intelligence that guides all things. If we want it, we only have to plug into it with the master keys of desire and trust. From that day his life has been one continuous proof and fulfillment of that faith.

A musician from infancy, he secured a church organist position at thirteen and entered art school. He has been entirely self-supporting and self-educated since then.

When he was taken out of school and put to work, it did not make him bitter. In fact, he considered it one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to him. For thus he escaped encyclopedic educational systems of information-cramming and memory-testing which filled other children's lives until they were twenty-five. He used his precious youth to find out the secret mysteries of his inner Self. His whole life has been used in the search for the real Self and the relation of this real Self to the selective universe of which he knows himself to be a vital part.

These secrets which Nature whispered to him for the asking have not only given him a deep insight into what he terms "Man-the-Unseen as genius or as Deity itself," but have helped him to know her creative principles so surely that he began to follow them, even in his youth, with as rigid an adherence to the law which governs all creation as is humanly possible.

When he was fifteen years old and working his way through art school by means of a job that brought him $12.00 a week, the girl he was going with announced that the opera company was coming to the city to present a series of grand operas. "I want you to take me to the opera," she said.

"That is exactly what J am planning to do," he replied. He meant that he was planning to take her to one performance, but she thought that he was going to take her to all the performances. The cost for the entire series was $79.60, a sum that he had not anticipated seeing for several years!

"The entire series!" he exclaimed. "That is impossible!"

"Did you say impossible?" she replied. "You are the last person in the world that I would ever expect to hear say that word."

He took her remark to heart. When the time came for the opera series to begin, he found himself standing at the end of a long line of people waiting to purchase tickets with $6.00 in his pocket, but with absolute faith in his heart that before he reached the window-he would have the $79.60 necessary to purchase the entire series.

He stood in line all night in order to get a good place. In the morning a man said to him, "Sonny, would you like to make $5.00?"

"Yes, sir, how?" he asked.

"By selling me your place in the line so I can get to my office by nine," the man replied.

Quick as a flash he replied, "I'll do better for you than that. Give me the money and I will deliver the tickets to you."

Without even asking his name, the man gave him the money and his address, and he put it down in a notebook. Holding the money between his fingers and with notebook and pencil in hand, looking like a bookmaker at the races, he became a magnet drawing scores of people to him. By the time he reached the box office he had the amount necessary for the entire series for his sweetheart and himself, and $ 110.00 in excess, enough to carry him through months of school. The strange thing was that no one even asked his name or address! When one trusts this inner universal power, it automatically draws forth the trust of the people one deals with.

One summer he took a job as a bellboy in one of the hotels. The salary was only $8.00 a month, but he was told that the tips that bellboys received amounted to $100.00 in a season. When the first tip was offered him, however, something deep down within him would not let him take it. Stammeringly, he said, "No, thank you. sir," and fled. He went down to his retreat in the cellar and tried to probe why that inner voice had spoken to him thus. Then suddenly he had a great vision.

"I'll be the only bellboy in existence who never took a tip!" he exclaimed. " And I'll be the best bellboy the world ever knew. I'll pledge myself to give the most joyful and cheerful service that ever a bellboy gave!"

From that moment he responded to every request with the alacrity of a steel trap. He ran his legs off for everybody. He got up at five o'clock every morning to procure cow's milk for a baby that needed special care, and then went back to bed again. When asked why he did not take tips he replied. "I receive a salary, and I love my work." The guests were simply overwhelmed by it. They invited him to dinner parties and yachting trips, and when the management explained that it was against the rules for servants to have social relations with guests, those people of influence said they would never go back again to that hotel if they didn't break a rule for him. So he had a wonderful summer.

During his spare time he did sketching and painting. The guests became deeply interested in his work, and at the end of the season instead of $100, from tips he had received checks amounting to $850 for his pictures and five offers of legal adoption into wealthy families, in one of which there were already three badly spoiled boys. The people to whom he brought icewater became his lifelong friends, and from them and friends of theirs he received many commissions for painting after he became famous in that field. And he went to the wedding of the baby that he brought the milk for!

"I have absolute faith," he asserts over and over again, "that anything can come to one who trusts to the unlimited help of the Universal Intelligence that is within, so long as one works within the law, always gives more to others than they expect, and does it cheerfully and courteously."

He early discovered that wealth may be more of a handicap than a help because the comforts and luxuries it can give sidetrack one's desire for a successful life and develop instead a desire for ease. At any rate, none of the boys in the art academies in which he studied who had wealth amounted to much of anything. It is those who started with the realization that they must get to the top themselves because of their own initiative who have succeeded.

Because of his versatility and love of doing many things at a time, he developed the feeling that he had five lives within his one. Each one of them, he said, seemed to be crying for recognition and the right to manifest itself. His life seemed to be divided into epochs of from five to twenty years each. Each new life became a transition from the one preceding it.

Music, for example, financed his necessities for the five years of his art school days. At thirteen years of age he got $7.50 a week for playing a church organ and $2.00 a week for playing the piano at Friday evening prayer meetings. He taught music at 50 cents a lesson, although he himself had but three months of musical instruction. During one summer he conducted a three-piece orchestra at a summer hotel.

During this period Paderewski accidentally heard him play some of his compositions. Thirty years later, at a distinguished gathering of musicians in the studio of Sig. Buzzi-Peccia, in honor of the Maestro Gatti-Gazazza, Paderewski insisted that he play a certain one of his compositions, a waltz. Reluctantly he played it, and Buzzi-Peccia wrote it into manuscript. Thus this one waltz is the only one of his many compositions that has ever been recorded, except for a series of five which he sold for $ 100.00 to another musician to use under his own name.

In his second transition he was an illustrator for books and magazines. From 1897 to 1898 he was Art Editor of Collier's Weekly, then became war artist and correspondent for Collier's and Century in the Spanish War. In 1900 he completed his allegorical painting entitled The Might of Ages, which was first exhibited in the Turin International Art Exposition, winning honorable mention from Italy, then exhibited throughout Europe, winning him many honors from France, Belgium, and Spain, including membership to the Spanish Academy of Arts and Letters, Toledo.

Portrait painting majored during the third transition. His principal instructors in art had been Albert Munsell and Ernest Major of Boston; Howard Pyle of Philadelphia; and Jean Paul Laurens, of the Academy Julian, Paris. At first he specialized in children. He painted the children of notables all over the country, including the children of President Theodore Roosevelt, Governor Ames of Massachusetts, Thomas Lawson, and many others. At the zenith of his fame as a child specialist, he was commissioned by the Ladies Home Journal to select (and tour America to paint) the twelve most beautiful children in the country.

In 1914 he ceased painting children and then executed many portraits of notables, including Archbishop Corrigan, Bishop Alexander C. Garrett, Sir Thomas Lipton, Hudson Maxim, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Revell, Clayton Sedgewick Cooper, and many others.

During this period he wrote The Bending of the Twig, The Age of Innocence, The Universal One, The Genero-Radiative Concept, Salutation to the Day, and The Sea Children. As well, he delivered hundreds of lectures.

The biggest things he ever has done in his life have been done without preparation. He never, for example, studied architecture. He had a strong desire to build better studio buildings for artists, and so he designed a building for them. He designed and built $20 million worth of buildings in the City of New York, such as the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street which is known the world over, the first Hotel Pierre occupying a whole Park Avenue block between 48th and 49th Streets, Alwyn Court at 58th and Seventh Avenue, and the beautiful Gothic studio building opposite the Museum of Natural History on 79th Street, which he built upon a quicksand which cost him $300,000 to conquer. He designed and brought into usage the duplex studio apartment idea which has been widely emulated ever since.

He also financed the buildings and sold all of the stock and even devised the legal possibility of making a sound economic principle out of an idea that was deemed unsound before. It was the principle of cooperative ownership, which for many succeeding years was acknowledged as a sound economic principle throughout the world. He conceived that principle. Lawyers said it couldn't be done, and the realtors and bankers said it was ridiculous. He showed them the soundness of the principle even though he knew nothing of man-made law or finance. He knew Universal Law, however, and applied that law of balance in nature to man's law and thus created an epoch in New York real estate dealings. He had a very hard lime procuring the first loan, but after four or five buildings had been erected every financial institution in the city offered him all the money he wanted, and he built many notable buildings on that principle.

Real estate "operators" then came along and destroyed the principle. They violated the universal law of balance between give and take. They looked at the product and the profit as the reality instead of upon the thought which created the product. They "milked" every operation for themselves and left only a liability for their cooperative clients. The result is that every cooperative building that he erected is profitable even today—and some of them are forty-five years old—while practically all of those in which businessmen varied the principle to make more profit are failures. Shortsightedly they killed a wonderful market and wrecked a cosmic idea by increasing their immediate profits at the expense of their future ones. Incidentally, in doing this they caused losses of many millions to investors who relied upon them.

Then came the transition to sculpture at fifty-six years of age. His change from painting to sculpture came about purely because of an accident. He had been a painter all his life and never had handled clay. He had been elected President of the Society of Arts and Sciences, and they were to give a medal to Edison. The artist who was to have done the portrait-sculpturing for the medal failed them. So Walter Russell got some clay and wired to Mrs. Edison that he would do it himself.

To do such a thing as that, which required a sudden change of medium from a familiar one to which the automatic reflexes of the body had been trained, to an unfamiliar one which required new skills, was like a violinist suddenly changing his instrument to a piano.

"It was very unwise for me to do, perhaps, because with such a great man as Edison as my subject, I might not have survived a failure," he remarked. "But I never let the thought of failure enter my mind. My knowledge of my unity with the Universal One and the fact that I must do this thing, and the inspired belief that I should do it as a demonstration of my belief in man's unlimited power, made me ignore the difficulties that lay in the way.

"So I went to Florida with a mass of clay, but on my way down I spent the entire time absorbed in inspirational meditation with the Universal Source of all inspiration, in order to fully realize the omnipotence of the Self within me as a preparation for doing in a masterly way what I would otherwise be unable to do.

The result was one of the greatest mile posts in my career.

"If I had followed the usual procedure of the superficially- minded man and played bridge all the way down to Florida, or otherwise enslaved my mind by sidetracking it from its creative purpose in order to entertain that great aggregation of sensed corpuscles which I call my body, instead of approaching this mountainous hurdle with reverence and insulation of mind from body demands. I know I would have failed. In fact, I knew in advance, from long experience in trying to achieve the unachievable, that meditation and communion between my Self and the Universal Self was the only way to achieve that impossibility.

"The communion which I have just described is the creative thinking process of all super-thinkers. It has nothing whatsoever of the sense reflexes of the complexly organized body which we so often mistake for thinking."

Other portrait busts immediately followed, including Cass Gilbert, Leopold Godowsky, Jean d' Arc, Colette D' Arville, Thomas J. Watson, George Gershwin, Hereward Carrington, and the colossal bust of Charles Goodyear, a fragment from the monument erected, in Akron, Ohio, in honor of that great discoverer.

Mr. Russell had only made the change from painting to sculpture a few years when he was commissioned to do a monument of Mark Twain with twenty-eight figures. To paint one figure two-dimensionally is difficult, but to do two isn't just twice as hard, it is four times as hard. It increases as of the square. In sculpture, which is three-dimensional, the difficulty increases as of the cube, and it is eight times as difficult. He had never done a monument, and to undertake this was a bit of insolence so far as the sculptural world was concerned. Other great sculptors said, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. No one has ever done a successful group of twenty-eight figures." It was another proof of Mr. Russell's conviction that one could create any product he desired to create if he started doing it with knowledge of the underlying principle of balance which is fundamental to all things, and with the feeling of certainty that he can do it, for he is not alone in that task; the whole universe is working with him to help him continue the orderly growth of the WHOLE, of which his little part of the structure is as necessary as any big part.

He never asked God to give him the power to do anything, for he already knew that he had that power. What he asked for in his wordless, inspirational communion was to keep forever aware of that universal Omnipotence within him.

If ever he felt the slightest indication of fears arising at crucial moments, he knew that his awareness was lessening. Then he would say in words, "O God, stand by, I need Thee," for he well knew that fears arise from lack of awareness of universal omnipotence in men, and failures arise from these fears.

The Mark Twain bust so pleased Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, George Bernard Shaw, and other English authors (hat they caused the British Government to invite a copy to be placed in the Victoria Embankment Gardens.

When the war broke out, Mr. Russell was commissioned to sculpt the bust of Colin Kelly, the first war hero, for the Colin Kelly Memorial at Madison, Florida, which was dedicated by the Governor of the State.

Next he created a group of four figures representing Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear, which he designed and interpreted from a concept expressed by the late Franklin D. Roosevelt in the following words: "Four angels with upraised protecting wings, facing the four points of the compass, would be my conception of a world symbol." This was dedicated at the Women's International Exposition of Arts and Industries in Madison Square Garden, New York, on November 22, 1943, by Mrs. Harold V. Milligan, Commander of the Field Army of the National Cancer Hospital, in the presence of the Women's Auxiliary of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Mr. Russell is a great believer in versatility in all creative work. In any physical work he believes one can work many hours at a lime, but in mental, creative work he believes one can do his best only for two hours at a time on any one subject, but he can work another two hours on another subject with equal freshness. He therefore sometimes works two hours a day on each of five different creations, "and in that way I can live five lives at a time," he says.

He also believes that every man should be master of anything he does and should do it in a masterly manner, with love, no matter what it is, whether hard physical work, menial or boring work, or inspirational work.

This is fundamental With him. He believes it to be the reason for his perfect health and great physical strength throughout his entire life. With an overwhelming desire for intensive expression, a love of all tasks of every nature, and a deep love of life and of all people and things in life, he believes that every person can remain vital and effervescent throughout one's entire life.

He most certainly demonstrates that principle in his own life, for he is one of the most effervescent men I have ever met. His voice has the vibrant ring of a man of forty.

He has made his living creditably in all five of the fine arts: music, literature, architecture, painting, and sculpture, and conspicuously in two of them. He has also made great discoveries in science and has gained an international reputation as a philosopher and lecturer upon ethical human relations.