Child and Country Part 2

Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of men....

A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney--faced stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of firelight in the stone cave--a Mediterranean vision of curving sh.o.r.e to the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake--to the suspense of distance and Southern constellations.

I laugh at this--it sounds so pompous and costly--but it is the shop of a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the sh.o.r.e and nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin--indeed, it had to. That winter after we had left for the City, the elms were put out--a few six-inch trunks, brought with their own earth frozen to them--a specimen of oak, walnut, hickory (so hard to move)--but an elm over-tone was the plan, and a clump of priestly pines near the stable.

These are still in the revulsions of transition; their beauty is yet to be. Time brings that, as it will smoke the beams, clothe the stone-work in vines, establish the roses and wistaria on the Southern exposure, slope and mellow and put the bloom over all.

We remained until November and returned the following April to stay. In the meantime the three children--a girl of ten and two younger boys--had almost their final bit of public schooling, though I was not so sure of that then; in fact, I planned to have them continue their training from April on in the small town school until the summer vacation. This was tried for a few weeks, the result of the experience hastening us toward the task of teaching our own.

4

IMAGINATION

Matters of child-education became really interesting to me for the first time that winter. There were certain unfoldings of the little daughter in our house, and I was a.s.sociating a good deal with a group of teachers in town, some of whom while still professionally caught in the rigid forms of modern education, were decades ahead in realisation. I recall especially a talk with one of my old teachers, a woman who had taught thirty years, given herself freely to three generations--her own and mine and to another since then. She had administered to me a thing called _rhetoric_ in another age, and she looked just the same, having kept her mind wide open to new and challenging matters of literature and life and religious thought.

I had the pleasant sense in this talk of bringing my doubts and ideas to her tentatively, much as I used to bring an essay in school days. She still retained a vivid impression of my faults, but the very finest human relationships are established upon the knowledge of one's weaknesses--as the Master established His church upon the weakest link of the discipleship. Speaking of the children, I observed:

"I find them ready, _when they ask_. In the old occult schools there is a saying that the teacher will always come half-way, but that the student must also come half-way----"

"It is soil and seed in everything," the woman said. "In all life, it is so. There must be a giving, but also a receiving. I talk to five cla.s.ses a day--twenty-five to fifty students each--but so much falls upon stony ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds----"

"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated.

"If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question itself proves that the soil is somehow ready----"

"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions.

The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but prepare the soil, too."

"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the imagination--to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of abundance."

The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.

"... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that surely interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all----"

"Nature?"

"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her--what pictures _mean_ Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature is a kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a G.o.d-mother--to kittens and trees and b.u.t.terflies and roses and children.

She is mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her about it. Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet--shelf after shelf full of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told her about the Sun as the Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her.

She held to that. Always now when we fall into talk _naturally_--it is about the old Mother and the brilliant Father who pours his strength upon all concerned--Mother Nature's mate."

The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do that----"

We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days--of the handful of days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam; beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....

"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out of that, really. A teacher who hasn't--kills it in the child; at least, all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery--but the lack of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle and repress their real impulses and rush for things to hold in their hands for a little time. If they had imagination they would see that the things they hold in their hands are disintegrating _now_ as everything in Nature is; that the hand itself weakens and loses its power. Why, here we are upstanding--half-G.o.ds asleep within us. Imagination alone--the seeing of the spirit of things--that can awaken us."

I felt the need of apologising at this point for getting on that old debatable ground--but the secret was out. It was the essence of my forming ideas on educating the children, as it is the essence of everything else--all writing, all craftsmanship, labour and life itself.

"... Half-G.o.ds asleep in a vesture," I added. "All nature and life prompting us to see that it is but vesture we make so much of. Children see it--and the world takes them in their dearest years, and scale by scale covers their vision. I talked with a man yesterday--a man I like--a good man, who loves his wife by the pound, believes all things prospering when fat--children and churches, purses and politicians. A big, imperial-looking man himself, world-trained, a man who has learned to cover his weaknesses and show a good loser on occasion; yet, through twenty years' acquaintance, he has never revealed to me a ray other than from the visible and the obvious. He hunted me up because one of his children seemed to want to write. We talked in a club-room and I happened to note the big steel chandelier above his head. If that should fall, this creature before me would mainly be carrion.

"You see what I mean. He has spent every energy of his life here, in building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that these half-G.o.ds of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. No sooner are they aroused than we have imagination; we begin to see the connecting lines of all things, the flashes of the spirit of things at once. No workman, no craftsman or artisan can be significant without it.... However, as I thought of the chandelier and the sumptuous flesh beneath, I talked of writing--something of what writing means to me.

When I stopped, he said:

"'I didn't know you were so religious.... But about this writing matter----' and opened the subject again....

"He's all right. Nature will doubtless take care of him. Perhaps his view of life: 'I see what I see and take what I can,' is as much as is asked from the many in the great plan of things--but I like madness better. To me, his is fatal enchantment; to me, wars and all tragedies are better. I would rather live intensely in error than stolidly in things as they are. If this is a devil and not a half-G.o.d that sleeps within--at least, I want him awake. I must feel his force. If he is a devil, perhaps I can beat him."

"That's something of a definition of imagination," the teacher said, "----seeing the spirit of things."

"I hadn't thought of it as a definition--but it expresses what the real part of life means to me. Men and women move about life and affairs, knowing nine out of ten times what is going to happen next in their wheel of things; what their neighbour is going to say next, from the routine of the day's events. After a little of that, I have to run away--to a book, to a task, to an awakened imagination. Only those who are in a measure like us can liberate us. That's the key to our friendships, our affections and loves. We seek those who set us free--they have a cup to hold the vital things we have to give--a surface to receive. If they are in a measure our true kin--our dynamics is doubled. That's the secret of affinities, by the way----"

The teacher smiled at me. "Tell me more about the little girl," she said.

"... She learned so quickly from the processes of Nature. I found her sitting in the midst of the young corn last summer, where the ground was filled with vents from the escaping moisture. I told her about the root systems and why cultivation means so much to corn in dry weather. She read one of Henry Ward Beecher's _Star Papers_ and verified many of its fine parts. She finds the remarkable activities in standing water. The Sh.o.r.e is ever bringing her new studies. Every day is Nature's. The rain is sweet; even the East winds bring their rigour and enticements. She looks every morning, as I do, at the Other Sh.o.r.e. We know the state of the air by that. And the air is such drink to her. You have no idea how full the days are."

"You mean to make a writer of her?" the teacher asked.

"No--that was settled the first day. I asked the little girl what she wanted to be."

"'I want to be a mother,' she answered.

"'Of course,' said I, thoughtfully.... It had been the same with her music. She liked it and did well, but it never burned into her deeps--never aroused her productivity. And I have found it so with her little attempts at written expression. She is to be a mother--the highest of the arts.... Once we saw the terrible drama of the hornet and the gra.s.shopper. I had read it in Fabre, and was enabled to watch it work out with some intelligence. Nature is a perfect network of processes, the many still to be discovered, not by human eyes but by intuitional vision. Finally I asked her to write what she thought of one of our walks together, not trying to remember what I had said--only expressing something of the activity which my words suggested."

The teacher nodded again. Her face had become saddened.

"I would not encourage her to become a writer," I repeated. "Expression of some sort is imperative. It is the right hand. We receive with the left, so to speak, but we must give something of our own for what we receive. It is the giving that completes the circle; the giving formulates, makes matter of vision, makes the dream come true. You know the tragedies of dreaming without expression. Even insanity comes of that. I have never told her matters of technique in writing, and was amazed to find that she has something that none of us grown-ups have, who are formed of our failures and drive our expression through an a.r.s.enal of laws and fears."

"Do you mean that you instruct her in nothing of technique?"

"I haven't--at least, not yet. I have hardly thought of it as instruction even."

"And spelling?"

"Her spelling is too novel. It would not do to spoil that. In fact, she is learning to spell and punctuate quite rapidly enough from reading.

These matters are automatic. The world has taught men to spell rather completely. G.o.d knows we've had enough of it, to the abandonment of the real. I could misspell a word in every paragraph of a three-hundred-page ma.n.u.script without detriment to the reception of the same, all that being corrected without charge. There are men who can spell, whose G.o.d-given faculties have been taught to spell, who have met the world with freshness and power, and have learned to spell. I have no objection to correct spelling. I would rather have it than not, except from children. But these are things which a man does with the back of his neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different and higher organs."

"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.

"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh to me," I said.

"The little girl is ten, you say?"

"Yes."

"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"