Produced by David Garcia, Barbara Kosker and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
CHILD AND COUNTRY
BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
LOT & COMPANY
RED FLEECE
MIDSTREAM
DOWN AMONG MEN
FATHERLAND
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK
Child and Country
_A Book of the
Younger Generation_
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT & COMPANY,"
"DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE
RIDES ALONE," ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1916,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
TO THOSE
WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS
TO THE BUILDERS
OF THE RISING GENERATION
FOREWORD
... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all
detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many
intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time....
The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making
in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture,
and shore-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house
or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two.
Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found
plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and
length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to
laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country
people and the meshes of possession.
In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the
Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of
the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been
wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and
weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in
the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking
the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children
in school--the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to
resist contagions, mental and physical--the whole tendency of the school
toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop
the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child.
We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but
out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at
hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens
and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine
things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming
generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings
who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of
their struggle.
It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain
builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in
the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could
possibly give them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after
chapter are before me--revelations they have brought--and over all, if
I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the
children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the
title.
Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a
spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have
been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see
the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age
above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we
perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of
America--signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have
to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our
children and to every conception of home--not the war itself, but the
forming of the new social order, the message thrilling for utterance in
the breasts of the rising generation. For they are the builders who are
to follow the wreckers of war.
Making a place to live on the lake shore, the development of bluff and
land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a
pool of water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer
walls broken with chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior
cultivations, the establishment of a visible order that is but a symbol
of the intenser activity of the natures within.
Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of
food, a friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the
casements--these are sane desirable matters to gather together; but the
fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the
builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in
fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised
receptivity--a conception of its utilities that has come from long need.
A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a
curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in
mating with a woman or fathering a child.
There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why one
man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along with
maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will exchange a
roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster. No
chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our
own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual
re-adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.
The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the
cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning--a work so
joyous and productive that I would take any pains to set forth with
clearness the effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep
breathing of each mind--a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a
selfless receptivity on the other. We can only breathe deeply when we
are at peace. This is true mentally as well as physically, and
soulfully, so far as one can see. The human fabric is at peace only when
its faculties are held in rhythm by the task designed for them.
Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the inspiration of
to-morrow.
It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal
ambition here to become identified with education in the accepted sense.
Those who come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save
that which they are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing
that, they belong, indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and
shall always be; but first and last is the conviction that literature
and art are but incident to life; that we are here to become masters of
life--artists, if possible, but in any case, men.
... To-day the glimpse of it all--that this is to be a book of the
younger generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly
I planned to relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came
into their lovely being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to
me that a man could do little better for his quiet joy than to raise
roses; that nothing was so perfectly designed to keep romance perennial
in his soul. Then the truth appeared--greater things that were going on
here--the cultivation of young and living minds, minds still fluid,
eager to give their faith and take the story of life; minds that are
changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if the story is well
told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it comes to-day
(an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a man may
build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an
intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to
tell simply and with something of order from the beginning.
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT.
STONESTUDY, March, 1916.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BEES AND BLOOMS 17
BLUFF AND SHORE 28
STONESTUDY 38
IMAGINATION 43
WILD GEESE 55
WORKMANSHIP 65
THE LITTLE GIRL 78
THE ABBOT 90
THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL 102
COMPASSION 113
THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK 123
TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT 134
NATURAL CRUELTY 151
CHILDREN CHANGE 163
A MAN'S OWN 171
THE PLAN IS ONE 186
THE IRISH CHAPTER 196
THE BLEAKEST HOUR 202
THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER 217
COMMON CLAY BRICK 222
THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS 230
MIRACLES 248
MORE ABOUT ORDER 259
THE FRESH EYE 270
THE CHOICE OF THE MANY 279
THE ROSE CHAPTER 284
LETTERS 294
THE ABBOT DEPARTS 301
THE DAKOTAN 313
THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_) 319
THE HILL ROCKS 330
ASSEMBLY OF PARTS 339
CHILD AND COUNTRY
CHILD AND COUNTRY
1
BEES AND BLOOMS
In another place,[1] I have touched upon our first adventure in the
country. It was before the children came. We went to live in a good
district, but there was no peace there. I felt _forgotten_. I had not
the stuff to stand that. My life was shallow and artificial enough then
to require the vibration of the town; and at the end of a few weeks it
was feverishly missed. The soil gave me nothing. I look back upon that
fact now with something like amazement, but I was young. Lights and
shining surfaces were dear; all waste and stimulation a part of
necessity, and that which the many rushed after seemed the things which
a man should have. Though the air was dripping with fragrance and the
early summer ineffable with fruit-blossoms, the sense of self poisoned
the paradise. I disdained even to make a place of order of that little
plot. There was no inner order in my heart--on the contrary, chaos in
and out. I had not been manhandled enough to return with love and
gratefulness to the old Mother. Some of us must go the full route of the
Prodigal, even to the swine and the husks, before we can accept the
healing of Nature.
So deep was the imprint of this experience that I said for years: "The
country is good, but it is not for me...." I loved to read about the
country, enjoyed hearing men talk about their little places, but always
felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria.
I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live,
for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental
activity would sink into a bovine rumination.
Yet during all these years, the illusions were falling away. It is true
that there is never an end to illusions, but they become more and more
subtle to meet our equipment. I had long since lost my love for the
roads of the many--the crowded roads that run so straight to pain. A
sentence had stood up again and again before me, that the voice of the
devil is the voice of the crowd.
Though I did not yet turn back to the land, I had come to see prolonged
city-life as one of the ranking menaces of the human spirit, though at
our present stage of evolution it appears a necessary school for a
time. Two paragraphs from an earlier paper on the subject suggest one of
the larger issues:
"The higher the moral and intellectual status of a people, the more
essential become space, leisure and soul-expression for bringing
children into the world. When evolving persons have reached
individuality, and the elements of greatness are formative within them,
they pay the price for reversion to worldliness in the extinction of
name. The race that produced Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, that
founded our culture and gave us a name in English, is following the red
Indian _westward_ off the face of the earth.
"Trade makes the city; congestion makes for commonness and the death of
the individual. Only the younger and physical races, or the remnant of
that race of instinctive tradesmen which has failed as a spiritual
experiment, can exist in the midst of the tendencies and conditions of
metropolitan America. One of the most enthralling mysteries of life is
that children will not come to highly evolved men and women who have
turned back upon their spiritual obligations and clouded the vision
which was their birthright."
It is very clear to me that the Anglo-Saxons at least, after a
generation or two of town-life, must give up trade and emerge from the
City for the recreating part of their year, or else suffer in deeper
ways than death. The City will do for those younger-souled peoples that
have not had their taste of its cruel order and complicating pressures;
for the Mediterranean peoples already touched with decadence; for the
strong yet simple peasant vitalities of Northern Europe, but the flower
of the American entity has already remained too long in the ruck of
life.
There came a Spring at last in which there was but one elm-tree. The
rest was flat-buildings and asphalt and motor-puddled air. I was working
long in those April days, while the great elm-tree broke into life at
the window. There is a green all its own to the young elm-leaves, and
that green was all our Spring. Voices of the street came up through it,
and whispers of the wind. I remember one smoky moon, and there was a
certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved
profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to
me, and all that the elm-tree meant--hill-cabins and country dusks, bees
and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and
aspiration. In this dawn I found myself dreaming, thirsting, wasting for
all that the elm-tree knew--as if I were exiled from the very flesh that
could bring the good low earth to my senses again.
Could it be that something was changed within--that we were ready at
last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I
stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to
rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen
minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the
American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over
again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the
smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban cars--one
that would take us to the Lake St. Claire shore, and another that
crossed the country to Lake Erie, travelling along her northern
indentations for nearly ten miles.
"We'll take the car that leaves here first," said I.
It was the Erie car. In the smoking compartment I fell into conversation
with a countryman who told me all that could possibly be synthesised by
one mind regarding the locality we were passing through. He suggested
that we try our fortune in the little town where the car first meets the
Lake. This we did and looked up and down that Main Street. It was quiet
and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy--the
tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came
running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his
destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said:
"He can tell you more than I can."
I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it
was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to
say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth
edited. He called men by 'phone--names strange to me then that have
become household names since--while we sat by smiling and silent in his
little newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank,
when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.
Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had
rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not
always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor
people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of
the car had been rigid among beer-cases.
We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of
the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East
in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the
house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He
was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages.
That boy you shall be glad to know.
We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach
our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He
would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now
from where I sit--to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to
the very edge of a willowed bluff--to the end of the land. Erie brimmed
before us. It led to a new life, too.
I had always disliked Erie--as one who lived in the Lake Country and
chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a
little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie
heretofore had meant only something to be crossed--something shallow and
petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light
darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I
knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to
wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars
from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain
where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian
peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the
Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of
the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end
of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think--we are pausing still.
One must pause to project a dream.
... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we
hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had
brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of
life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the
cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern
heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the
first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep
gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster
were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not
a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year.
Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and
brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had
given. There were days in which we were so happy--that another summer of
such life would have seemed too much to ask.
I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read
newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it
was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully
every night across the Lake--a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide,
obscenity and passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like
the smell of blood.
* * * * *
... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country;
literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives
apart from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can
find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here
for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants--turning back
with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants
that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded space,
and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other.... One does not say
what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work
is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy
planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be
free.
The City, intolerable as it is in itself--in its very nature against the
growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time--is nevertheless
the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and
naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to
avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.
Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of
spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel
tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet
and pass through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which
brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a passage
through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole
is an ascent.
A great leader of men who has never met the crowds face to face is
inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and
pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men
turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of
us can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure
continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the
year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and
half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the
City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again
from the country replenished and refreshed.
The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally
true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have
returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the
last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the
turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.
Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the
farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men
within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every
year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep
cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have
not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the
long summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the
heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the
breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men
look up more seldom.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Midstream, 1914, George H. Doran Co., New York.
2
BLUFF AND SHORE
There is no playground like a sandy shore--and this was sheltered from
the north by a high clay bluff that tempered all voices from below and
made a sounding board for the winds. The beach, however, was not as
broad then as now. To the east for a mile is a shallow sickle of shore
with breakers on the point. In itself this indentation is but a squab of
the main Pigeon Bay, which stretches around for twenty miles and is
formed of Pelee Point, the most southern extension of Canada. The nearer
and lesser point is like a bit of the Mediterranean. It takes the greys
of the rain-days with a beauty and power of its own, and the mornings
flash upon it. I call it the Other Shore, a structure of idealism
forming upon it from much contemplation at the desk. The young people
turn to it often from the classes.
The height of land from which the Other Shore is best visible had merely
been seen so far from the swimming place in front of the rented
cottages. It was while in the water that I determined to explore. The
first thing that impressed me when I reached the eminence was the
silence. It was something to be dreamed of, when the Lake was also
still. There was no road; a hay field came down to the very edge of the
bluff, and the shore fifty feet below was narrow and rocky. Very few
people passed there. That most comfortable little town was lying against
the rear horizon to the West. I used to come in the evenings and smoke
as the sun went down. Sometimes the beauty of it was all I could
bear--the voices of children in the distance and the Pelee light
flashing every seven seconds far out in the Lake.
I first saw it in dry summer weather and did not know that a bumper crop
of frogs had been harvested that Spring from the deep, grass-covered
hollows formed by the removal of clay for a brick-business long ago.
There was good forage on the mounds, which I did not appreciate at the
time. The fact is these mounds were formed of pure dark loam, as fine a
soil as anywhere in the Lake Country.
Those of the dim eyes say that once upon a time an orchard and
brick-house stood on a bluff in front of the brick-yard, on a natural
point, but that the Lake had nibbled and nibbled, finally digesting the
property, fruit-trees, brick-house and all.
I could well believe it when the first storm came. An East wind for
three days brought steady deluges of high water that wore down the
shore-line almost visibly. A week later came a West wind that enfiladed,
so that what remained of the little point was caught in the cross-play
of the weathers. If some one did not intervene, the brick-yard site
would follow the orchard--that was clear.
... Three or four times the owner came to see me. We had rejoiced in the
rented property, rejoiced in owning nothing, yet having it all....
Thoreau in his daily westward migrations studied it all with the same
critical delight, and found his abode where others did not care to
follow. We look twice at the spot we choose to build our house. That
second look is not so free and innocent.... Yet a man may build his
house. Thoreau had no little brood coming up, and I have doubted many
times, even in moments of austere admiration, if he wouldn't have lived
longer, had there been a woman about to nourish him. She would have
insisted upon a better roof, at least.... I told the neighbour-man I
would buy the brick-yard, if he didn't stop pestering me about it. He
smiled and came once too often.
The day before, standing upon that height of land (not too near the
edge, for it looked higher in those days) I had gazed across the Lake,
at one with it all, a friendly voyager of the skies, comrade of the
yarrow and the daisy. I remember the long grass of the hollows, the
peculiar soft bloom of it, and what a place it was to lie and dream,
until one became a part of the solution of sunshine and tinted
immensity.
So I lost the universe for a bit of bluff on the Lake shore.
When the East wind came, I saw with proprietary alarm the point wearing
away. That which coloured the Lake was fine rose-clay and it was mine,
bought by the foot-front.... A man may build his house.
Every one who came along told me how to save the point. For weeks they
came. Heavy drift-wood was placed in times of peace, so that the sand
would be trapped in storm. No one failed me in advice, but the East wind
made match-wood of all arrangements.... The high water would wash and
weaken the base, and in the heaviness of the rains the bulk of earth
above would fall--only to be carried out again by the waves. The base
had to be saved if a natural slope was ever to be secured. Farther down
the shore I noted one day that a row of boulders placed at right angles
with the shore had formed a small point, and that a clump of willows
behind had retained it. This was a bit of advice that had not come so
authoritatively, but I followed the cue, and began rolling up rocks now
like an ancient Peruvian. It was a little jetty, that looked like a lot
of labour to a city man, and it remained as it was for several days.
One morning I came forth in lashing weather--and rubbed my eyes. The
jetty was not in sight. It was covered with a foot of sand, and the clay
was dry at the base. A day's work with a team after that in low water,
snaking the big boulders into line with a chain--a sixty-foot jetty by
sun-down, built on top of the baby spine I had poked together. No man
ever spent a few dollars more profitably. Even these stones were covered
in time, and there was over a yard-deep of sand buttressing the base of
the clay and thinning out on the slope of shore to the end of the
stones. Later, when building, I took four hundred yards of sand from the
east side of the stone jetty, and it was all brought back by the next
storm....
I read somewhere with deep and ardent sanction that a man isn't worth
his spiritual salt if he lets a locality hold him, or possessions
possess him; and yet, the spell was broken a little when we came to buy.
Whenever you play with the meshes of possession, a devil is near at hand
to weave you in. It is true that we took only enough Lake-frontage for
quiet, and enough depth for a permanent fruit-garden--all for the price
of a fifty-foot lot in the City; but these things call upon one for a
certain property-mindedness and desiring, in the usage of which the
human mind is common and far from admirable. There were days in the
thrall of stone-work and grading and drainage, in which I forgot the
sun-path and the cloud-shadows; nights in which I saw fireplaces and
sleeping-porches (still innocent of matter to make the dreams come
true), instead of the immortal signatures of the heavens.
But we had learned our City lessons rather well, and these disturbers
did not continue to defile. A man may build his house, if he can also
forget it. A few good things--perennials, by all means an elm-tree,
stone-work and an oaken door; the things that need not replenishing in
materials, that grow old with you, or reach their prime after you have
passed--these are enough. For a home that does not promote your
naturalness, is a place of vexation to you and to your children.
Yet it is through this breaking of the husks of illusion--through the
very artificialities that we come to love the sane and holy things. The
man of great lands, who draws his livelihood from the soil, can never
know the healing nor the tender loveliness that came up to us that first
summer. One must know the maiming of the cities to bring to the land a
surface that nature floods with ecstasies. Carlyle thundered against
artificial things all his wonderful life, exalted the splendours of
simplicity which permit a man to forget himself--just missing the fact
that a man must be artificial before he can be natural; that we learn by
suffering and come up through the hell and complication of cities only
to show us wherein our treasure lies.
The narrow non-sensitive consciousness of the peasant, with its
squirrel-dream of filled barns, its cruelty and continual
garnering--that is very far from the way. Tolstoi went against the
eternal law to try that. He wanted simplicity so tragically that he
permitted his desire to prevail, and turned back to the peasants for it.
It is against the law to turn back. The peasants are simple because they
have not met the intervening complications between their inland lake
consciousness and the oceanic clarity ahead. Be very sure that none will
escape the complication, for we rise to different dimensions of
simplicity through such trials. War, Trade, the City, and all organised
hells are our training-fields. The tragedy is to remain, to remain fixed
in them--not to rush forth at length from our miserable
self-consciousness and self-serving in the midst of them. Cosmic
simplicity is ahead; the naturalness of the deeper health of man--that
is ahead.
That summer is identified with the Shore. I worked at the desk through
the long forenoons, and in a bathing-suit for the rest of the day. I
expect to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the
bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little
trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From
one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my
land--that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they
have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes
think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a
week--there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them
on a different side; their laterals and tap-roots have been severed;
they meet different conditions of soil than they were trained for. Much
water helps, but they must breathe, and sometimes mulch keeps them too
cold. Then they have their enemies like every other living thing--and
low in health from moving, they cannot withstand these foes without
help. The temporality of all things--even of the great imperturbable
trees--is a thought of endless visitation in Nature. She seems to say
morning and evening, "Do not forget that everything here must pass."
There is to be little woodland, a miniature forest, a hundred feet long
and thirty feet wide only. Beech and ash and elm are started
there--dogwoods and hawthorns and lilacs. Mulch from the woods is being
brought, and violets. Twice I have tried to make young hickories live,
but failed. I think the place where the roots are cut in transplanting
should be sealed with wax. A man here said that you can transplant
hickories if you get all the roots, but that they bleed to death even in
winter, if their laterals are severed.... I want the birds to come to
this little wood. Of course, it will be many years before it follows the
plan, but there is a smile in the idea. The hawthorns came whole; the
ash and beech are doing well. Some wild grape is started, but that must
be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....
I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first
summer that I yearn for again--close to the sand, close to the voices of
the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones
have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of
healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it
plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.
The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from
beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below,
and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty
degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any
artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or
fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes.
Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths--a trickle of water
over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines--something of all this
will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is
last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this
Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small
shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the
leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to
plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.
The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun
to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could
not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a
summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a
fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and
clearer--a blend of _patio_ and broad hearth--running water and red
firelight--built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a
roof of wired glass over a _patio_ paved with brick; the area sunken
slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the
sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms,
urns, ferns and winter plants.
All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it--and as yet, there
wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop
to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse
was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.
3
STONESTUDY
Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work.
This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the
presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there
were ancient scars across my back--as if I had helped in that building,
and under the lash, too.
... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of
stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated
to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was
afraid of short time or flaws of construction--I was watching because it
satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get
accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy
powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is
a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of
setting. If you can find a bearing for one stone upon another without
falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall
is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with
stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that
muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens
slowly hardens best.
The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that
there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier
Fall than that--a full year before the thought of Europe became action.
I watched the work--as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen,
so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns
easily after this.
It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all
symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of
order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well--six, eight, and
eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at,
his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter
he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily
increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a
great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be
learning masonry all over again.
"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by
night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."
There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is
something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long
roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I
asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke
it.
"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.
Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have
built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone--fifty years
of masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their
stone-hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so.
They have learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed
to the Line, and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence
of their being (I cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly
integration. There is a nobility from stone-work which the masons put on
with the years--the tenders have it not; neither have any of the
indiscriminate labour men. One must have a craft to achieve this. The
building is not so much. The houses and barns and stores which the elder
masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands in this
country--they are but symbols of the building of character within. They
see _into_ the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another
all would look the same--the blacks and reds and whites, even the
amalgans--all grey-brown and weathered outside--but the masons know what
is within, the colour and grain and beauty.
"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.
"No, that's a black feller."
"And this?"
"Good colour, but he ain't got no grain--all _gnurly_--as the feller
says."
Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of
men....
A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney--faced
stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a
low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden
pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of
firelight in the stone cave--a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to
the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake--to the suspense of
distance and Southern constellations.
I laugh at this--it sounds so pompous and costly--but it is the shop of
a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more
than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and
nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin--indeed,
it had to. That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put
out--a few six-inch trunks, brought with their own earth frozen to
them--a specimen of oak, walnut, hickory (so hard to move)--but an elm
over-tone was the plan, and a clump of priestly pines near the stable.
These are still in the revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to
be. Time brings that, as it will smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work
in vines, establish the roses and wistaria on the Southern exposure,
slope and mellow and put the bloom over all.
We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In
the meantime the three children--a girl of ten and two younger boys--had
almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of
that then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from
April on in the small town school until the summer vacation. This was
tried for a few weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward
the task of teaching our own.
4
IMAGINATION
Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first
time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter
in our house, and I was associating a good deal with a group of teachers
in town, some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid
forms of modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall
especially a talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught
thirty years, given herself freely to three generations--her own and
mine and to another since then. She had administered to me a thing
called _rhetoric_ in another age, and she looked just the same, having
kept her mind wide open to new and challenging matters of literature and
life and religious thought.
I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to
her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She
still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest
human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's
weaknesses--as the Master established His church upon the weakest link
of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:
"I find them ready, _when they ask_. In the old occult schools there is
a saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the
student must also come half-way----"
"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is
so. There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five classes
a day--twenty-five to fifty students each--but so much falls upon stony
ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds----"
"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated.
"If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question
itself proves that the soil is somehow ready----"
"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions.
The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but
prepare the soil, too."
"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the
imagination--to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has
to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry
him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of
abundance."
The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.
"... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that
surely interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all----"
"Nature?"
"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her--what
pictures _mean_ Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature
is a kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a
God-mother--to kittens and trees and butterflies and roses and children.
She is mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her
about it. Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet--shelf
after shelf full of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told
her about the Sun as the Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her.
She held to that. Always now when we fall into talk _naturally_--it is
about the old Mother and the brilliant Father who pours his strength
upon all concerned--Mother Nature's mate."
The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's
quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do
that----"
We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days--of the handful of
days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of
thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam;
beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when
all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....
"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out
of that, really. A teacher who hasn't--kills it in the child; at least,
all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the
child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery--but the lack
of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the
wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so
terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle
and repress their real impulses and rush for things to hold in their
hands for a little time. If they had imagination they would see that the
things they hold in their hands are disintegrating _now_ as everything
in Nature is; that the hand itself weakens and loses its power. Why,
here we are upstanding--half-gods asleep within us. Imagination
alone--the seeing of the spirit of things--that can awaken us."
I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old
debatable ground--but the secret was out. It was the essence of my
forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of
everything else--all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.
"... Half-gods asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life
prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children
see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by
scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I
like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things
prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A
big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned
to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through
twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than
from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his
children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I
happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should
fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.
"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in
building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage
has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that
these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner
are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the
connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at
once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without
it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh
beneath, I talked of writing--something of what writing means to me.
When I stopped, he said:
"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing
matter----' and opened the subject again....
"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his
view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is
asked from the many in the great plan of things--but I like madness
better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies
are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in
things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-god that sleeps
within--at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a
devil, perhaps I can beat him."
"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said,
"----seeing the spirit of things."