Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

COMMON CLAY BRICK

Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the waves.... It had a fine gleam—a vivid wet red against the gravel greys. Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.

... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had once seen on a winter's day—a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet, alone, and now that it was dry—this was just a brick-red. It needed the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason for its appeal to our sense of beauty.

There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain thrilling familiarity—the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.

We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so that we repeat in wonder—"And this is the first time——" Something deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.

For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of red from the pervading greys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other Shore—a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its point—and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales for all this nearer stretch of shore, but its beauty is completed by the peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and the completing vine.

Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which complete each other and suggest a third—the union of two to make one. Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace, the very quest of life.

There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.

We are thrilled by the symbols of the great original affinity of matter and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing third.

Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous paintings. Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in fatness)—but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the promise of the fruit. It was the globe again—the union of the strong and the fragile for a finer dimension of power—bow and cord, ship and sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine—yes, and that which surprised me at the beginning—that gleam of red in the wash of water upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of beauty in a wet, worn brick.