Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

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.