Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

It is not that which we pass coldly on the street that has gladdened me so often and so strangely in your coming—but those mysteries within, those arousings deeper than brain, that do away so peremptorily with all systems of teacher and student; which show us one in meaning and one in aim.... It is tragic that the romances of the world so seldom touch these high mysteries. We feel the Old Mother drawing us together—all her great blind forces for renewing her lands and seas and realms of air. But we forget that the animals follow this; the myriads of unawakened men and women follow this; the products of this are used for every waste and violence. Nature brings them in, and then destructive principles play upon them. They are dealt with in great numbers, because individuals have not emerged. They have slain them twenty thousand the day in Europe of late—the bodies of men whose mothers in the main have followed the blind forces of Nature, and no more. Nature will replenish these losses.

Perceive, too: The many have not even sensed the beauties of Nature. This physical being of ours which the Old Mother has raised from the earth that a God might be built within it—even the beauty of this is not yet fulfilled—much less the powers of the mind which we have touched—much less that radiance of spirit which has made our highest moments together so memorable.

... You would be mothers—that is the highest of the arts. The making of books is childish and temporal compared to that. Mothering of men—that is the highest art.... Yet we do not make books blindly. For years we labour and watch the world; for years we gather together our thoughts and observations of men and Nature; studiously we travel and willingly at last we learn to suffer. Suffering brings it all home to us; suffering connects together all our treasures, so that we see their inter-relations and our meaning to them all. At last (and this, if we have been called in the beginning) we dare to write our book. It fails. Again and again we fail—that is the splendid unifying force, working upon us. So far, we have only brought into the world our half-gods. Failures melt us into the solution of the world.... We have learned to welcome suffering now; we have detached ourselves from the shams that the world can give. We have learned that the world cannot pay in kind for any noble action—that the spirit of human hearts alone can answer any great striving.... We go apart to the wildernesses to listen. In the summit of our strength, the voice begins to speak—the Guru's voice.

We are but instruments for the making of books. We are but listening surfaces for the voice to play upon. At last and at best, we have merely made ourselves fine enough to be used. Then our book is done. We have no part in it afterward. If we have done well, the world will serve it in God's good time.... And that is the low and the temporal art. Mere bodies of books come into the world in thousands. They move their little season and pass. Even the half-gods only rise and stir and pass away. But when the half-gods go, the Gods arrive.

... You would not do less than this to bring forth men—you who have the call.... You must learn the world—be well grounded in the world. You need not forget the Old Mother. Your feet are of clay—but you must have the immortal gleam in your eyes. Do not forget the Old Mother—yet it is only when the Father appears that you can see her as she really is. It is the light of His spirit that has shown you the passion of the rose, the goodness of the wheat, the holiness of the forests. By His quickening you are hushed in the beauty of the Mother.... The myriads of makers of books have not yet sensed this beauty.

There is a different love of Nature. We cry aloud in our surface ecstasies—that the Old Mother was never so beautiful, her contours and colourings. We travel far for a certain vista, or journey alone as if making a pilgrimage to a certain nave of woodland where a loved hand has touched us.... But this lifted love of nature is different from the Pipes of Pan, from all sensuous beauty. The love of Nature that I mean is different even from wooings and winnings and all that beauteous bewilderment of sex-opposites—different from all save the immortal romances.

I wonder if I can suggest what is in the heart; it cannot be more than a suggestion, for these things have not to do with words. You who have felt it may know; and in those high moments you were very far from the weight and symbols of Nature, but very close to her quickening spirit.... I walked for hours alone, through different small communities of beech and oak and elm; and on a slope before my eyes there was a sudden low clearing of vapour, as if a curtain were lifted, and I saw a thicket of dogwood in the mystery of resurrection, the stone of the sepulchre rolled away.

I do not know to this day if they were really there. I have never found the trees again.... I was sitting here one fall night, a South Wind straight from the great water, and the mignonette came in and lingeringly passed. The garden was behind to the North. I went to it and it gave me nothing, moved around it, and there was no respiration of the heaven-breath. Yet the oneness and the spirit of life had touched me from the miracle, like the ineffable presence of the dogwood in bloom on that fairy slope.

The love of Nature, the different love, is a matter of our own receptivity. If we are brave enough, or sweet enough within, we will not require the touch of the senses, nor Nature's masterstrokes to awaken us. We will not need to leave our rooms, for it is all here—in the deep gleam of polished strength of the hickory axe-handle, in the low light of the blade, in stone wall and oaken sill, in leather and brass and pottery, in the respiration of the burning wood, and veritably massed upon the sweeping distance from the window. It is because we are coarse and fibrous and confined in the sick weight of flesh that we do not stand in a kind of creative awe before the lowliest mystery of our physical sight.

Do you know that there is a different fragrance, a different manner of burning to each tree, whose parts you bring to the open camp fire or your own hearth; that some woods shriek at this second death after the cutting, that others pass with gracious calm, and still others give up their dearest reality, at the moment of breaking under the fire, like the released spirit of a saint that was articulate heretofore only in beautiful deeds?