Child and Country Part 10

The young man and I talked it over. We decided that it would be a thankless task for him to spend the summers in ardent endeavour to educate the countryside by browning his back in public. _That_ did not appeal to us as a fitting life-task; moreover, his project would frequently be interrupted by the town marshal. As a matter of truth, one may draw most of the values of the actinic rays of the sun through thin white clothing; and if one has not crushed his feet into a revolting ma.s.s in pursuit of the tradesmen, he may go barefooted a little while each day on his own gra.s.s-plot without shocking the natives or losing his credit at the bank. The real reason for opening this subject is to express (and be very sure to express without hatred) certain facts in the case of the countryside which complained.

They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is above the level of their gaze, or too bright. Potentially they have all the living lights--the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not glorify them, as men or parents or workmen. It does not inspire them to Questing--man's real and most significant business. They do not know that which is good or evil in food, in music, colour, fabric, books, in houses, lands or faith. They live in a low, lazy rhythm and attract unto themselves inevitably objects of corresponding vibration. One observes this in their children, in their schools and most pathetically in their churches. They abide dimly in the midst of their imperfections, but with tragic peace. When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low established forces, and only the more splendid of these young people have the integrity of spirit to rise above the resistance.

As for the clothing that is worn, they would do better if left suddenly naked as a people, and without preconceptions, were commanded to find some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian rather than individual. The year around, these people wear clothing,--woollen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron, touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering quant.i.ties, the adjacent nostril is offended.

They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with the sense of possession.

They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may the where-with to purchase the pa.s.sing bread; that bread is bread and the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the many in amus.e.m.e.nt and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men, static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be erect in other than bone and sinew.

They cover their bodies--but they do not cover their faces nor their minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed!_ They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the world-crowd, whose G.o.ds to-day are trade and patriotism and motion-photography.

The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is merely an unlettered thing.

No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind that has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's treasures from a child, is a mind that is just as apt to be aggressive in its small conceptions as the most capacious and sumptuously furnished, and more rigorous in its treatment of dependents. I have found that the untrained mind is untrained in the qualities of appreciation, is not cleanly, nor workmanlike, nor spiritual, nor generous, nor tolerant; that the very fundamentals of its integrity will hurt you; that it talks much and is not ashamed.

All literature has overdone the dog-like fidelity of simple minds. The essence of loyalty of man to man is made of love-capacity and understanding--and these are qualities that come from evolution of the soul just as every other fine thing comes.

We perceive the old farmer on his door-step in the evening--love and life-lines of labour upon him; we enjoy his haleness and laughter....

But that is the mask. His mind and its every attribute of consciousness is designed to smother an awakened soul. You have to bring G.o.d to him in his own terminology, or he will fight you, and believe in his heart that he is serving his G.o.d. His generation is moving slowly now, yet if his sons and daughters quicken their pace, he is filled with torments of fear or curses them for straying.

I would not seem ill-tempered. I have long since healed from the chaos and revelations of building. It brought me a not too swift review of life as I had met it afield and in the cities for many years. The fact that one little contract for certain interior installations was strung over five months, and surprised me with the possibilities of inefficiency and untruth, is long since forgotten. The water runs. Ten days after peace was established here, all my wounds were healing by first intention; and when I saw the carpenters at work on a new contract the day after they left me, the pity that surged through my breast was strangely poignant, and it was for them. The conduct of their days was a drive through the heaviest and most stubborn of materials, an arriving at something like order against the grittiest odds, and they must do it again and again. There is none to whom I cannot bow in the evening--but the idealisation of the village lives is changed and there is knowledge.

I had been getting too comfortable. One cannot do his service in the world and forget its fundamentals. We have to love before we can serve, but it is fatuous to love blindly. The things that we want are ahead.

The paths behind do not contain them; the simplicity of peasants and lowly communities is not merely unlettered. One does not need to deal with one small town; it is everywhere. The ways of the crowds are small ways. We wrong ourselves and bring imperfection to our tasks when we forget that. We love the Indian crossing the stream in the great and gracious night--but G.o.d pity the Indian's dog. We must look close at life, and not lie to ourselves, because our ways are cushioning a little.

All idealism that turns back must suffer the fate of mere sentiments. We must know the stuff the crowds are made of, if we have a hand in bringing in the order and beauty. You have heard men exclaim:

"How n.o.ble are the simple-minded--how sweet the people of the Countryside--how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.

The rising workman in any art or craft learns by suffering that all good is ahead and not elsewhere; that he must dare to be himself even if forced to go hungry for that honour; that he must not lose his love for men, though he must lose his illusions. Sooner or later, when he is ready, one brilliant little fact rises in his consciousness--one that comes to stay, and around which all future thinking must build itself.

It is this:

When one lifts the mask from any crowd, commonness is disclosed in every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds of common people are the soil of the future, a splendid ma.s.s potentially, the womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.

All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their pa.s.sionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First the dreamer dreams--and then the people make it action....

What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture, the back of the tapestry.

To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.

The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of three kinds: He may desert his vision entirely and return to operate among the infinite small doors of the many--which is cowardice and the grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman.

He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....

The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world.

Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision--all good comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely, which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary victory.

The real workman then--vibrating between compa.s.sion and contempt--his body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.

13

NATURAL CRUELTY

In dealing with the young, especially with little boys, one of the first things to establish is gentleness to animals. Between the little boy and the grown man all the states of evolution are vaguely reviewed, as they are, in fact, in that more rapid and mysterious pa.s.sage between conception and birth. Young nations pa.s.s through the same phases, and some of them are abominable. The sense of power is a dangerous thing.

The child feels it in his hands, and the nation feels it in its first victory.... In the Chapel during a period of several days we talked about the wonder of animals (the little boys of the house present) and the results were so interesting that I put together some of the things discussed in the following form, calling the paper Adventures in Cruelty:

As a whole, the styles in cruelty are changing. Certain matters of charity as we used to regard them are vulgar now.

I remember when a great sign, THE HOME OF THE FRIENDLESS, used to stare obscenely at thousands of city school children, as we pa.s.sed daily through a certain street.

Though it is gone now, something of the curse of it is still upon the premises. I always think of what a certain observer said:

"You would not think the Christ had ever come to a world, where men could give such a name to a house of love-babies."

I remember, too, when there formerly appeared from time to time on the streets, during the long summers, _different_ green-blue wagons. The drivers were different, too--I recall one was a hunchback. These outfits formed one of the fascinating horrors of our bringing-up--the fork, the noose, the stray dog tossed into a maddened pulp of stray dogs, the door slammed, and no word at all from the driver--nothing we could build on, or learn his character by. He was a part of the law, and we were taught then that the law was everlastingly right, that we must grind our characters against it.... But the green-blue wagons are gone, and the Law has come to conform a bit with the character of youth.

The time is not long since when we met our adventures in cruelty alone--no concert of enlightened citizens on these subjects--and only the very few had found the flaw in the gospel that G.o.d had made the animals, and all the little animals, for delectation and service of man. Possibly there is a bit of galvanic life still in the teaching, but it cannot be said to belong to the New Age.

Economic efficiency has altered many styles for the better.

Formerly western drovers used to drive their herds into the brush for the winters. The few that the winter and the wolves didn't get were supposed to be hardy enough to demand a price. It was found, however, that wintering-out cost the beasts more in vitality than they would spend in seven years of labour; that the result was decrepit colts and stringy dwarfs for the beef market. Also there was agitation on the subject, and the custom pa.s.sed. City men who owned horses in large numbers found their _efficiency_ brought to a higher notch at the sacrifice of a little more air and food, warmth and rest. There is a far-drive to this appeal, and there are those who believe that it will see us through to the millennium.

A woman told this story: "When I was a child in the country there was an old cow that we all knew and loved. She was red and white like Stevenson's cow that ate the meadow flowers.

Her name was Mary--Mr. Devlin's Mary. The Devlin children played with us, and they were like other children in every way, only a little fatter and ruddier perhaps. The calves disappeared annually (one of the mysteries) and the Devlin children were brought up on Mary's milk. It wasn't milk, they said, but pure cream. We came to know Mary, because she was always on the roadside--no remote back-pastures for her. She loved the children and had to know what pa.s.sed. We used to deck her with dandelions, and often just as we were getting the last circlet fastened, old Mary would tire of the game and walk sedately out of the ring--just as she would when a baby calf had enough or some novice had been milking too long. I have been able to understand how much the Hindus think of their cattle just by thinking of Mary. For years we pa.s.sed her--to and from school. It was said that she could negotiate any gate or lock.

"Well, on one Spring morning, as we walked by the Devlin house, we saw a crated wagon with a new calf inside, and they were tying Mary behind. She was led forth. I remember the whites of her eyes and her twisted head. Only that, in a kind of sickening and pervading blackness. The calf cried to her, and Mary answered, and thus they pa.s.sed.... 'But she is old.

She dried up for a time last summer,' one of the Devlin children said.

"Devlin wasn't a bad man, a respected churchman.... I spoke to certain grown-ups, but did not get the sense of tragedy that was mine. No one criticised Devlin. It was the custom, they said.... Even the butcher had heard of old Mary.... You see how ungrippable, how abstract the tragedy was for a child--but you never can know what it showed me of the world.

None of us who wept that day ate meat for many days. I have not since. I cannot."

Her story reminded me sharply of a recent personal experience. I had been thinking of buying a cow. It appears that there are milch-cows and beef-cows. Country dealers prefer a blend, as you shall see. I said I wanted b.u.t.ter and milk, intimating the richer the better; also I wanted a front-yard cow, if possible.... There was a gentle little Jersey lady that had eyes the children would see fairies in----

"Yes, she's a nice heifer," the man said, "but now I'm a friend of yours----"

"I appreciate that. Isn't she well?"

"Yes, sound as a trivet."

"A good yielder?"

"All of that."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, a cow is like a peach-tree, she doesn't last forever. After the milktime, there isn't much left for beef----"

"But I don't want to eat her."