Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

The veil, the mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with this conception.

Would you like to know where man's ideas—man's plan of Conception—is most utterly outraged? In the coming of Messiahs. The Josephs are mainly dangling. They are in the mere passage of events, having to do neither with heights nor depths.

One of the deepest human instincts of the male is that woman is a wanton. It breaks out still in the best of men, wherever the sex-principle overpowers the mind. This is well-covered ground. I would suggest only that the present horrible chaos of human affairs, while directly the fault of the absence of rational idealism in the world, has been brought about in reality by the man-pressure which for centuries has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of the miracles that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the transition is on....

The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within her—submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream—indeed, the fruits of these dreams have come to be—but more often the heart is filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but the fire they burn with is red and not white.

Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of motherhood—and his words were wise and pure enough—that not one of the women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen, and to answer the dream....

I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When I thought that some time they would be mothers, it came with a rush of emotion—that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these; dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the things said that day are written here without quotations:

... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity—the handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment upon the many—the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have waited for the One; they have listened for a certain voice. Their hearts knew. There was no chance. When they were ready, the One arrived.

The lovelier we become in conduct and the higher we turn in aspiration—the more beautifully are we prepared for the great services of Romance. As a race we have only touched our lips to the cup of its beauty and fruitfulness.... Would you, who understand so well what culture has done for corn and roses, forget the mysteries of your own great being—rush blindly as the world does into the arms that first beckon, following the laws that have made you the most superb of animals, forgetting the laws that have made you living souls?

I would have you study the lineage of Mary, the wonderful care with which it was written, even to include that blent flame of earth and heaven which was Ruth; I would have you read again the stories of Gautama and Jesus, and of the mothers of the prophets. The stories of the coming of Messiahs are always the greatest stories in the world.... And then we see the great stony fields of humanity—the potential mass in which the great ones of the future are to rise. Their matings are makeshifts; their brief honeymoons are matters from which the finer world turns its eyes.

... For many days you have come in here quietly at this time, taking your seats together, and listening so cheerfully to what has passed. You know as well as I that there have been moments in which the stones of the Chapel walls faded from our eyes, and that which we saw in each other was not that which we see as we pass in colder moments in the street. We have had moments here when it seemed that any thought was easily to be comprehended—that it had but to be spoken to be embraced.... There have been moments, too, sudden spontaneities when we were pure givers, when there was love in our hearts for all beings, and we were strong to answer any call.