Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering at their little legs, I felt a part——"

I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,—at least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do that—to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression. The greatest expressionist can only approximate, even after he has emerged from the prison-house and perfected his instrument through a life of struggle. His highest moments of production are those of his deepest inner listening—in which the trained mind-instrument is quiescent and receptive, its will entirely given over to the greater source within.

The forenoons with the little girl before the others came, showed me, among many things, that education should be mainly a happy process. If I find her getting too dreamy with the things she loves (that her expression is becoming "wumbled," as Algernon Blackwood says), I administer a bit of stiff reading for the pure purpose of straightening out the brain. The best and dryest of the human solids is John Stuart Mill. Weights, measures and intellectual balances are all honest in his work—honest to madness. He is the perfect antidote for dreams. Burke's ancient essay "On the Sublime" is hard reading, but has its rewards. You will laugh at a child of ten or eleven reading these things. I once kept the little girl for three days on the latter, and when I opened the doors of her refrigerating plant, and gave her Thoreau's "Walking"—there was something memorable in the liberation. She took to Thoreau, as one held in after a week of storm emerges into full summer. The release from any struggle leaves the mind with a new receptivity. It was not that I wanted her to get Mill or Burke, but that the mental exercise which comes from grappling with these slaves of logic, or masters, as you like, is a development of tissue, upon which the dreams, playing forth again from within, find a fresh strength for expression.

Dreaming without action is a deadly dissipation. The mind of a child becomes fogged and ineffective when the dreams are not brought forth. Again, the dreams may be the brooding of a divine one, and yet if the mind does not furnish the power for transmuting them into matter, they are without value, and remain hid treasures. It is the same as faith without works. While I hold the conviction that the brain itself is best developed by the egress of the individual, rather than by any processes from without, yet I would not keep the exterior senses closed.

In fact, just here is an important point of this whole study. In the case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have related something of the process.

The point is this: If I have seemed at any time to make light of intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of which is the first purpose of life itself. My zeal for expression from within-outward amounts to an enthusiasm, and is stated rushingly as an heroic measure is brought, only because it is so pitifully overlooked in the present scheme of things.

Latin, mathematics, the great fact-world, above all that endlessly various plane of fruition which Nature and her infinite processes amount to, are all splendid tissue-builders; and of this tissue is formed the calibre of the individual by which his service is made effective to the world. As I have already written, one cannot shoot a forty-five consciousness through a twenty-two brain. The stirring concept cannot get through to the world except through the brain.

In the last sentence I see a difficulty for the many who still believe that the brain contains the full consciousness. Holding that, most of the views stated here fall away into nothing. Perhaps one is naïve, not to have explained before, that from the view these things are written the brain is but a temporary instrument of expression—most superb and admirable at its best, but death is at work upon it; at its best, a listener, an interpreter, without creativeness; an instrument, like the machine which my fingers touch, but played upon not only from without but within.

If you look at the men who have become great in solitude, in prison, having been forced to turn their eyes within—you will find a hint to the possibilities. Yet they are rare compared to the many upon whom solitude has been thrust as the most terrible punitive process. By the time most men reach mid-life they are entirely dependent upon exterior promptings for their mental activity—the passage entirely closed between their intrinsic content and the brain that interprets. Solitary confinement makes madmen of such—if the door cannot be wrenched ajar.

The human brain is like a sieve, every brain differently meshed. If the current flows continually in one direction either from within-outward, or from the world-inward, the meshes become clogged, and can be cleansed only, as a sieve is flushed, by reversing the current. The ideal is to be powerful mentally and spiritually, of course. "I would have you powerful in two worlds," a modern Persian mystic said to one of his disciples.... Still I would not hold the two methods of development of equal importance. The world is crowded with strongly developed intellects that are without enduring significance, because they are not ignited by that inner individual force which would make them inimitable.