Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

And to every workman there are eager apprentices, who hunger to know, not his way, but the way. Every workman who does the best he can, has a store of value for the younger ones, who are drawn, they know not why, to the production he represents. Moreover, the workman would learn more than he could give, but he is not called. He seldom offers himself, because the laugh of the world has already maimed him deeply.... I had told them austerely what I would do for them, and what I would not do; but I did more and more what they really asked, for therein and not elsewhere I had a certain authority. More and more accurately I learned to furnish what they came for. All my work in the study alone was to do just that for a larger class, and in this effort I stumbled upon the very heart of the fatherhood ideal and the educational ideal—for they are one and the same.

A man is at his best in those periods in which self-interest is lost to him. The work in which a man can lose the sense of self for the most hours each day—that is his especial task. When the workman gives forth the best that is in him, not feeling his body, above all its passions and petty devices for ruling him, concentrated upon the task, a pure instrument of his task and open to all inspiration regarding it—that man is safe and superb. There is something holy in the crafts and arts. It is not an accident that a painting lives three hundred years. We are not permitted to forget the great potters, the great metallists, the rug and tapestry makers. They put themselves in their tasks, and we are very long in coming to the end of their fineness.

They produced. They made their dreams come true in matter; and that is exactly what our immortal selves are given flesh to perform. Each workman finds in his own way the secret of the force he represents. He is an illuminated soul in this discovery. It comes only to a man when he is giving forth, when he is in love, having lost the love of self. Giving forth purely the best of self, as the great workmen do, a man is on the highway to the divine vocation which is the love and service of humanity.

... They begin to call him twenty minutes before dinner is ready. He is caught in the dream of the thing and has little time to bargain for it. He feels for his glasses, when you call him forth; he sweats; he listens to the forge that calls him. The unfinished thing is not only on his bench, but in his mind—in its weakness, half-born and uncouth.... "Talk to my daughter. She knows about these things," he says. "I must go.... Yes, it is a fine day."

It is raining like as not.... And because the world has laughed at him so long, he has forgotten how to tell his story by the time he has perfected his task. The world laughs at its betters with the same facility that it laughs at the half-men. Our national and municipal fathers should teach us first that the man who has found his work is one of the kings of the earth. Children should be taught to know a workman anywhere. All excellence in human affairs should be judged by the workmanship and not by the profits.

We are neighbourhoods in name only. How often has our scorn for some strange little man changed to excited appreciation, when the world came at last to his shop with its sanctions of money and noisy affairs. He is nervous and ill at ease. His world has ceased to laugh. He wonders at that; asks himself if this praise and show is not a new kind of laughter, for he cannot forget the grinding and the rending of the early years—when there were days in which he doubted even his work. Perhaps his has been a divided house all these years; it may be that he has lost even Her for his work.

The world has left him richer, but he is not changed, and back to the shop again. A man's work lives with him to the end—and beyond—that is the eternal reason of its importance.... All quandaries cease; all doubts sink into the silence; the task assumes once more; his real life is awake; the heart of reality throbs for him, adjusting the workman to an identity which cannot grow old.

He may not know this miracle of fine workmanship. This that has come to him from the years of truth, may not be a possible expression from his lips, but he knows in his heart one of the highest truths of here below: That nothing which the world can give is payment for fine workmanship; that the world is never so vulgar as when it thinks it can pay in money for a life's task. The workman can only be paid in kind.

It is not the product that men use that holds the immortal result. They may come to his shop fifty years after he has left it; they may cross seas and continents to reach this shop, saying: "This is where he did it. His bench was just there—his house over yonder. Here is where he stood, and there he hung his coat." But these are only refinements of irony.... They may say, "This is his grandson." But that will only handicap or ruin the child, if he find not his work. A thousand lesser workmen may improve his product, lighten it, accelerate its potency, adapt it to freight rates—but that is no concern of the dream.

The payment of it all, the glory of it all, is that the real workman finds himself. His soul has awakened. In the trance of his task, he has lost the love of self which the world knows, and found the blessedness of the source of his being. He does not need to state it philosophically, for he lived it. He found the secret of blessedness, if not of happiness. At his bench, he integrated the life that lasts. He could have told you in the early years, if the world had not laughed. He would have learned himself more swiftly, had he been encouraged to tell, as he toiled—if the world had not shamed away the few who were drawn to his bench.