Child and Country

Part 1

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CHILD AND COUNTRY

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

LOT & COMPANY RED FLEECE MIDSTREAM DOWN AMONG MEN FATHERLAND

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK

Child and Country

A Book of the Younger Generation

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

AUTHOR OF "MIDSTREAM," "LOT & COMPANY," "DOWN AMONG MEN," "ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE," ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1916, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TO THOSE

WHO COME AFTER THE WRECKERS

TO THE BUILDERS

OF THE RISING GENERATION

FOREWORD

... To-day the first glimpse of this manuscript as a whole. It was all detached pieces before, done over a period of many months, with many intervening tasks, the main idea slightly drifting from time to time.... The purpose on setting out, was to relate the adventure of home-making in the country, with its incidents of masonry, child and rose culture, and shore-conservation. It was not to tell others how to build a house or plant a garden, or how to conduct one's life on a shore-acre or two. Not at this late day. I was impelled rather to relate how we found plenty with a little; how we entered upon a new dimension of health and length of days; and from the safe distance of the desk, I wanted to laugh over a city man's adventures with drains and east winds, country people and the meshes of possession.

In a way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children in school--the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to resist contagions, mental and physical--the whole tendency of the school toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop the intrinsic and inimitable gift of each child.

We entered half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine things of the time belong most intensely to that. Others of the coming generation gathered about the work here; and many more rare young beings who belong, but have not yet come, send us letters from the fronts of their struggle.

It has all been very deep and dramatic to me, a study of certain builders of to-morrow taking their place higher and higher day by day in the thought and action of our life. They have given me more than I could possibly give them. They have monopolised the manuscript. Chapter after chapter are before me--revelations they have brought--and over all, if I can express it, is a dream of the education of the future. So the children and the twenty-year-olds are on every page almost, even in the title.

Meanwhile the world-madness descended, and all Europe became a spectacle. There is no inclination to discuss that, although there have been days of quiet here by the fire in which it seemed that we could see the crumbling of the rock of ages and the glimmering of the New Age above the red chaos of the East. And standing a little apart, we perceived convincing signs of the long-promised ignition on the part of America--signs as yet without splendour, to be sure. These things have to do with the very breath we draw; they relate themselves to our children and to every conception of home--not the war itself, but the forming of the new social order, the message thrilling for utterance in the breasts of the rising generation. For they are the builders who are to follow the wreckers of war.

Making a place to live on the lake shore, the development of bluff and land, the building of study and stable and finally the stone house (a pool of water in the centre, a roof open to the sunlight, the outer walls broken with chimneys for the inner fires), these are but exterior cultivations, the establishment of a visible order that is but a symbol of the intenser activity of the natures within.

Quiet, a clean heart, a fragrant fire, a press for garments, a bin of food, a friendly neighbour, a stretch of distance from the casements--these are sane desirable matters to gather together; but the fundamental of it all is, that they correspond to a picture of the builder's ideal. There is a bleakness about buying one's house built; in fact, a man cannot really possess anything unless he has an organised receptivity--a conception of its utilities that has come from long need. A man might buy the most perfect violin, but it is nothing more than a curio to him unless he can bring out its wisdom. It is the same in mating with a woman or fathering a child.

There is a good reason why one man keeps pigs and another bees, why one man plants petunias and another roses, why the many can get along with maples when elms and beeches are to be had, why one man will exchange a roomful of man-fired porcelain for one bowl of sunlit alabaster. No chance anywhere. We call unto ourselves that which corresponds to our own key and tempo; and so long as we live, there is a continual re-adjustment without, the more unerringly to meet the order within.

The stone house is finished, roses have bloomed, but the story of the cultivation of the human spirits is really just beginning--a work so joyous and productive that I would take any pains to set forth with clearness the effort to develop each intrinsic gift, to establish a deep breathing of each mind--a fulness of expression on the one hand, and a selfless receptivity on the other. We can only breathe deeply when we are at peace. This is true mentally as well as physically, and soulfully, so far as one can see. The human fabric is at peace only when its faculties are held in rhythm by the task designed for them. Expression of to-day makes the mind ready for the inspiration of to-morrow.

It may be well finally to make it clear that there is no personal ambition here to become identified with education in the accepted sense. Those who come bring nothing in their hands, and answer no call save that which they are sensitive enough to hear without words. Hearing that, they belong, indeed. Authorship is the work of Stonestudy, and shall always be; but first and last is the conviction that literature and art are but incident to life; that we are here to become masters of life--artists, if possible, but in any case, men.

... To-day the glimpse of it all--that this is to be a book of the younger generation.... I remember in the zeal of a novice, how earnestly I planned to relate the joys of rose-culture, when some yellow teas came into their lovely being in answer to the long preparation. It seemed to me that a man could do little better for his quiet joy than to raise roses; that nothing was so perfectly designed to keep romance perennial in his soul. Then the truth appeared--greater things that were going on here--the cultivation of young and living minds, minds still fluid, eager to give their faith and take the story of life; minds that are changed in an instant and lifted for all time, if the story is well told.... So in the glimpse of this book as a whole, as it comes to-day (an East wind rising and the gulls blown inland) I find that a man may build a more substantial thing than a stone house, may realise an intenser cultivation than even tea-roses require; and of this I want to tell simply and with something of order from the beginning.

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT.

Part 2

STONESTUDY, March, 1916.

CONTENTS

PAGE

BEES AND BLOOMS 17

BLUFF AND SHORE 28

STONESTUDY 38

IMAGINATION 43

WILD GEESE 55

WORKMANSHIP 65

THE LITTLE GIRL 78

THE ABBOT 90

THE VALLEY-ROAD GIRL 102

COMPASSION 113

THE LITTLE GIRL'S WORK 123

TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT 134

NATURAL CRUELTY 151

CHILDREN CHANGE 163

A MAN'S OWN 171

THE PLAN IS ONE 186

THE IRISH CHAPTER 196

THE BLEAKEST HOUR 202

THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER 217

COMMON CLAY BRICK 222

THE HIGHEST OF THE ARTS 230

MIRACLES 248

MORE ABOUT ORDER 259

THE FRESH EYE 270

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