Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

" ... 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....