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<h2>
<a href="#startoftext">The Children, by Alice Meynell</a>
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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Children, by Alice Meynell
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Children
Author: Alice Meynell
Release Date: March 16, 2005 [eBook #2012]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN***
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<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
<p>Transcribed from the 1911 John Lane edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
<h1>THE CHILDREN</h1>
<p>Contents</p>
<p>Fellow Travellers with a Bird, I.<br />
Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II.<br />
Children in Midwinter<br />
That Pretty Person<br />
Out of Town<br />
Expression<br />
Under the Early Stars<br />
The Man with Two Heads<br />
Children in Burlesque<br />
Authorship<br />
Letters<br />
The Fields<br />
The Barren Shore<br />
The Boy<br />
Illness<br />
The Young Children<br />
Fair and Brown<br />
Real Childhood</p>
<h2>FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, I.</h2>
<p>To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed
of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the pre-occupations.
You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year,
do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not
the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenated ways of
a child you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after
failing you where you tarried; your former experiences, your documents
are at fault. You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The
bird alights and escapes out of time to your footing.</p>
<p>No man’s fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl
of four years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the
sweet and unimaginable message: “I hope you enjoy yourself with
your loving dolls.” A boy, still younger, persuading his
mother to come down from the heights and play with him on the floor,
but sensible, perhaps, that there was a dignity to be observed none
the less, entreated her, “Mother, do be a lady frog.”
None ever said their good things before these indeliberate authors.
Even their own kind—children—have not preceded them.
No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five
whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different,
perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing,
and had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies.
“Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work
to buy things for you.” “Do you work,” she asked,
“to buy the lovely puddin’s?” Yes, even for
these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth pursuing.
“And do you work to buy the fat? I don’t like fat.”</p>
<p>The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was
to be soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been
drowned in the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her
that she should forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay
subject—her wishes. “Do you know,” she said,
without loss of time, “what I should like best in all the world?
A thundred dolls and a whistle!” Her mother was so overcome
by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offer as to the dolls.
But the whistle seemed practicable. “It is for me to whistle
for cabs,” said the child, with a sudden moderation, “when
I go to parties.” Another morning she came down radiant,
“Did you hear a great noise in the miggle of the night?
That was me crying. I cried because I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother]
had swallowed a bead into his nose.”</p>
<p>The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is—no,
nothing feminine—in this adult world. “I’ve
got a lotter than you,” is the word of a very young egotist.
An older child says, “I’d better go, bettern’t I,
mother?” He calls a little space at the back of a London
house, “the backy-garden.” A little creature proffers
almost daily the reminder at luncheon—at tart-time: “Father,
I hope you will remember that I am the favourite of the crust.”
Moreover, if an author set himself to invent the naïf things that
children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he would hardly
light upon the device of the little <i>troupe</i> who, having no footlights,
arranged upon the floor a long row of—candle-shades!</p>
<p>“It’s <i>jolly</i> dull without you, mother,” says
a little girl who—gentlest of the gentle—has a dramatic
sense of slang, of which she makes no secret. But she drops her
voice somewhat to disguise her feats of metathesis, about which she
has doubts and which are involuntary: the “stand-wash,”
the “sweeping-crosser,” the “sewing chamine.”
Genoese peasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.</p>
<p>Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they
should by any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually.
A London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her
pointing finger, and names it “bird.” Her brother,
who wants to play with a bronze Japanese lobster, ask “Will you
please let me have that tiger?”</p>
<p>At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the
most touching kind of newness. Thus, a child of three asks you
to save him. How moving a word, and how freshly said! He
had heard of the “saving” of other things of interest—especially
chocolate creams taken for safe-keeping—and he asks, “Who
is going to save me to-day? Nurse is going out, will you save
me, mother?” The same little variant upon common use is
in another child’s courteous reply to a summons to help in the
arrangement of some flowers, “I am quite at your ease.”</p>
<p>A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record,
was taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing
from her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer.
As he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her,
she noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went,
for they might be those of the <i>fournisseurs</i> of her friend.
“That is his bread shop, and that is his book shop. And
that, mother,” she said finally, with even heightened sympathy,
pausing before a blooming <i>parterre</i> of confectionery hard by the
abode of her man of letters, “that, I suppose, is where he buys
his sugar pigs.”</p>
<p>In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is
intent upon a certain quest—the quest of a genuine collector.
We have all heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs,
of collecting cocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a
joy that costs her nothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names
over all shop-windows. No hoard was ever lighter than hers.
“I began three weeks ago next Monday, mother,” she says
with precision, “and I have got thirty-nine.” “Thirty-nine
what?” “Smiths.”</p>
<h2>FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, II.</h2>
<p>The mere gathering of children’s language would be much like
collecting together a handful of flowers that should be all unique,
single of their kind. In one thing, however, do children agree,
and that is the rejection of most of the conventions of the authors
who have reported them. They do not, for example, say “me
is;” their natural reply to “are you?” is “I
are.” One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have
nothing but the nominative pronoun. “Lift I up and let I
see it raining,” she bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes,
“Lift I up and let I see it not raining.”</p>
<p>An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered
for her by maternal authority. She wore the garments under protest,
and with some resentment. At the same time it was evident that
she took no pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet,
her friend. He had imagined the making of this child in the counsels
of Heaven, and the decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes,
and of her hair—“a brown tress.” She had gravely
heard the words as “a brown dress,” and she silently bore
the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of Providence in the
mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy. The unpractised
ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrase for
snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. “That,”
she said more or less after Sterne, “is a cotton-wool story.”</p>
<p>The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the
years of mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a current
word into use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to
save the interruption of a pause for search. I have certainly
detected, in children old enough to show their motives, a conviction
that a word of their own making is as good a communication as another,
and as intelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction
among them that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside
as occasion befalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous
that every day brings forward some hitherto unheard? The child
would be surprised to know how irritably poets are refused the faculty
and authority which he thinks to belong to the common world.</p>
<p>There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out
of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so
much confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple
adventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything
strange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trusts
genially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first
sight of sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without
allowing himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, “summersets.”
This was simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very
little older. “Why does he call those flowers summersets?”
their mother said; and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour
and penetration, answered, “because they are so big.”
There seemed to be no further question possible after an explanation
that was presented thus charged with meaning.</p>
<p>To a later phase of life, when a little girl’s vocabulary was,
somewhat at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded
to express a meaning well realized—a personal matter. Questioned
as to the eating of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the
child averred, “I took them just to appetize my hunger.”
As she betrayed a familiar knowledge of the tariff of an attractive
confectioner, she was asked whether she and her sisters had been frequenting
those little tables on their way from school. “I sometimes
go in there, mother,” she confessed; “but I generally speculate
outside.”</p>
<p>Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with
something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation.
Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages.
But sometimes a child’s deliberate banter is quite intelligible
to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother
who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to
be satisfied with something of her own writing. The child has
a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of irony. There was
no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at home, but
the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen:—“My dear
mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it
is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such a unletterary
article. I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will not
write any more such unconventionan trash.”</p>
<p>This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister,
and thought her forward for her age: “I wish people knew just
how old she is, mother, then they would know she is onward. They
can see she is pretty, but they can’t know she is such a onward
baby.”</p>
<p>Thus speak the naturally unreluctant; but there are other children
who in time betray a little consciousness and a slight <i>méfiance</i>
as to where the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them,
obscure. These children may not be shy enough to suffer any self-checking
in their talk, but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word
of which they do not feel too sure. A little girl whose sensitiveness
was barely enough to cause her to stop to choose between two words,
was wont to bring a cup of tea to the writing-table of her mother, who
had often feigned indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid
always called “the infusion.” “I’m afraid
it’s bosh again, mother,” said the child; and then, in a
half-whisper, “Is bosh right, or wash, mother?” She
was not told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh.
The afternoon cup left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library
“bosh” thenceforward.</p>
<h2>CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER</h2>
<p>Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise
to see them blooming in winter. Their tenderness, their down,
their colour, their fulness—which is like that of a thick rose
or of a tight grape—look out of season. Children in the
withering wind are like the soft golden-pink roses that fill the barrows
in Oxford Street, breathing a southern calm on the north wind.
The child has something better than warmth in the cold, something more
subtly out of place and more delicately contrary; and that is coolness.
To be cool in the cold is the sign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien
from the common conditions of the world. It is to have a naturally,
and not an artificially, different and separate climate.</p>
<p>We can all be more or less warm—with fur, with skating, with
tea, with fire, and with sleep—in the winter. But the child
is fresh in the wind, and wakes cool from his dreams, dewy when there
is hoar-frost everywhere else; he is “more lovely and more temperate”
than the summer day and than the winter day alike. He overcomes
both heat and cold by another climate, which is the climate of life;
but that victory of life is more delicate and more surprising in the
tyranny of January. By the sight and the touch of children, we
are, as it were, indulged with something finer than a fruit or a flower
in untimely bloom. The childish bloom is always untimely.
The fruit and flower will be common later on; the strawberries will
be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus dull in its day.
But a child is a perpetual <i>primeur</i>.</p>
<p>Or rather he is not in truth always untimely. Some few days
in the year are his own season—unnoticed days of March or April,
soft, fresh and equal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun.
Then he looks as though he had his brief season, and ceases for a while
to seem strange.</p>
<p>It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the
year to children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For
man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their
metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without
repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an
intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in
the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again
another time, and for a waning that shall not be final, shall not be
fatal. But every winter shows us how human they are, and how they
are little pilgrims and visitants among the things that look like their
kin. For every winter shows them free from the east wind; more
perfectly than their elders, they enclose the climate of life.
And, moreover, with them the climate of life is the climate of the spring
of life; the climate of a human March that is sure to make a constant
progress, and of a human April that never hesitates. The child
“breathes April and May”—an inner April and his own
May.</p>
<p>The winter child looks so much the more beautiful for the season
as his most brilliant uncles and aunts look less well. He is tender
and gay in the east wind. Now more than ever must the lover beware
of making a comparison between the beauty of the admired woman and the
beauty of a child. He is indeed too wary ever to make it.
So is the poet. As comparisons are necessary to him, he will pay
a frankly impossible homage, and compare a woman’s face to something
too fine, to something it never could emulate. The Elizabethan
lyrist is safe among lilies and cherries, roses, pearls, and snow.
He undertakes the beautiful office of flattery, and flatters with courage.
There is no hidden reproach in the praise. Pearls and snow suffer,
in a sham fight, a mimic defeat that does them no harm, and no harm
comes to the lady’s beauty from a competition so impossible.
She never wore a lily or a coral in the colours of her face, and their
beauty is not hers. But here is the secret: she is compared with
a flower because she could not endure to be compared with a child.
That would touch her too nearly. There would be the human texture
and the life like hers, but immeasurably more lovely. No colour,
no surface, no eyes of woman have ever been comparable with the colour,
the surface, and the eyes of childhood. And no poet has ever run
the risk of such a defeat. Why, it is defeat enough for a woman
to have her face, however well-favoured, close to a child’s, even
if there is no one by who should be rash enough to approach them still
nearer by a comparison.</p>
<p>This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than that
beauty of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred,
and which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily.
There are, indeed, other adult beauties, but those are such as make
no allusions to the garden. What is here affirmed is that the
beautiful woman who is widely and wisely likened to the flowers, which
are inaccessibly more beautiful, must not, for her own sake, be likened
to the always accessible child.</p>
<p>Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which
is much beyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition,
this completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their
beauty of finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses,
as years are added, that little extra character and that surprise of
perfection. A bloom disappears, for instance. In some little
children the whole face, and especially all the space between the growth
of the eyebrows and the growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible
down as soft as bloom. Look then at the eyebrows themselves.
Their line is as definite as in later life, but there is in the child
the flush given by the exceeding fineness of the delicate hairs.
Moreover, what becomes, afterwards, of the length and the curl of the
eyelash? What is there in growing up that is destructive of a
finish so charming as this?</p>
<p>Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face “from the
right or from the left” when her portrait was a-painting.
She was an observant woman, and liked to be lighted from the front.
It is a light from the right or from the left that marks an elderly
face with minute shadows. And you must place a child in such a
light, in order to see the finishing and parting caress that infancy
has given to his face. The down will then be found even on the
thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red of his cheek. His
hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not much harder than
petals.</p>
<p>To return to the child in January. It is his month for the
laying up of dreams. No one can tell whether it is so with all
children, or even with a majority; but with some children, of passionate
fancy, there occurs now and then a children’s dance, or a party
of any kind, which has a charm and glory mingled with uncertain dreams.
Never forgotten, and yet never certainly remembered as a fact of this
life, is such an evening. When many and many a later pleasure,
about the reality of which there never was any kind of doubt, has been
long forgotten, that evening—as to which all is doubt—is
impossible to forget. In a few years it has become so remote that
the history of Greece derives antiquity from it. In later years
it is still doubtful, still a legend.</p>
<p>The child never asked how much was fact. It was always so immeasurably
long ago that the sweet party happened—if indeed it happened.
It had so long taken its place in that past wherein lurks all the antiquity
of the world. No one would know, no one could tell him, precisely
what occurred. And who can know whether—if it be indeed
a dream—he has dreamt it often, or has dreamt once that he had
dreamt it often? That dubious night is entangled in repeated visions
during the lonely life a child lives in sleep; it is intricate with
illusions. It becomes the most mysterious and the least worldly
of all memories, a spiritual past. The word pleasure is too trivial
for such a remembrance. A midwinter long gone by contained the
suggestion of such dreams; and the midwinter of this year must doubtless
be preparing for the heart of many an ardent young child a like legend
and a like antiquity. For the old it is a mere present.</p>
<h2>THAT PRETTY PERSON</h2>
<p>During the many years in which “evolution” was the favourite
word, one significant lesson—so it seems—was learnt, which
has outlived controversy, and has remained longer than the questions
at issue—an interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm
of thoughts. This is a disposition, a general consent, to find
the use and the value of process, and even to understand a kind of repose
in the very wayfaring of progress. With this is a resignation
to change, and something more than resignation—a delight in those
qualities that could not be but for their transitoriness.</p>
<p>What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the
world, for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with,
and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not
now hold, perhaps, that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if
we held it high, we should acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned
with its own conditions.</p>
<p>But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing
but a patient prophecy (the mother’s), so was education, some
two hundred years ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father’s)
of the full stature of body and mind. The Indian woman sings of
the future hunting. If her song is not restless, it is because
she has a sense of the results of time, and has submitted her heart
to experience. Childhood is a time of danger; “Would it
were done.” But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put it
to sleep and guard its slumbers. It will pass. She sings
prophecies to the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the
robe while she spins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn.
She bids good speed.</p>
<p>John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child—“that
pretty person” in Jeremy Taylor’s letter of condolence—was
chiefly precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of
the man he never lived to be. The father, writing with tears when
the boy was dead, says of him: “At two and a half years of age
he pronounced English, Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly
read in these three languages.” As he lived precisely five
years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this:
“He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French
primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into
Latin, and <i>vice</i> <i>versa</i>, construe and prove what he read,
and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses,
and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius’s
‘Janua,’ and had a strong passion for Greek.”</p>
<p>Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man
is not to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires;
it is the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those
hasty times. All being favorable, the child of Evelyn’s
studious home would have done all these things in the course of nature
within a few years. It was the fact that he did them out of the
course of nature that was, to Evelyn, so exquisite. The course
of nature had not any beauty in his eyes. It might be borne with
for the sake of the end, but it was not admired for the majesty of its
unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mourns with him “the strangely
hopeful child,” who—without Comenius’s “Janua”
and without congruous syntax—was fulfilling, had they known it,
an appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning
and closing a separate expectation every day of his five years.</p>
<p>Ah! the word “hopeful” seems, to us, in this day, a word
too flattering to the estate of man. They thought their little
boy strangely hopeful because he was so quick on his way to be something
else. They lost the timely perfection the while they were so intent
upon their hopes. And yet it is our own modern age that is charged
with haste!</p>
<p>It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn,
must rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not
slighting it, or bidding it hasten its work, nor yet hailing it, with
Faust, “Stay, thou art so fair!” Childhood is but
change made gay and visible, and the world has lately been converted
to change.</p>
<p>Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it
in the act. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage
is a goal, and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but
some of them wear apparent wings.</p>
<p><i>Tout</i> <i>passe</i>. Is the fruit for the flower, or the
flower for the fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed
to shelter and contain? It seems as though our forefathers had
answered this question most arbitrarily as to the life of man.</p>
<p>All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste,
this suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time of
fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because
they had the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of
this unpausing life.</p>
<p>Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon
as might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be
eight years old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had
no cause to be proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged
in idleness by an “honoured grandmother” that he was “not
initiated into any rudiments” till he was four years of age.
He seems even to have been a youth of eight before Latin was seriously
begun; but this fact he is evidently, in after years, with a total lack
of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of, and hardly acknowledges.
It is difficult to imagine what childhood must have been when nobody,
looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything that was proper to five
years old was defect. A strange good conceit of themselves and
of their own ages had those fathers.</p>
<p>They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn
has nothing to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile
in it. Twice are children, not his own, mentioned in his diary.
Once he goes to the wedding of a maid of five years old—a curious
thing, but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility. Another
time he stands by, in a French hospital, while a youth of less than
nine years of age undergoes a frightful surgical operation “with
extraordinary patience.” “The use I made of it was
to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been subject to this
deplorable infirmitie.” This is what he says.</p>
<p>See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
literature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that
there were in all ages—even those—certain few boys who insisted
upon being children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal.
Art, for example, had no little girls. There was always Cupid,
and there were the prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one
who is hauling up his little brother by the hand in the “Last
Communion of St. Jerome” might be called Tommy. But there
were no “little radiant girls.” Now and then an “Education
of the Virgin” is the exception, and then it is always a matter
of sewing and reading. As for the little girl saints, even when
they were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slipped
through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate
suitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval
mind, but mars them for ours.</p>
<p>So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat
hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most
admirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen
in the Court of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa
“who passed through all those turbulent waters without so much
as the least stain or tincture in her christall.” She held
her state with men and maids for her servants, guided herself by most
exact rules, such as that of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent
example and instruction to the other maids of honour, was “severely
careful how she might give the least countenance to that liberty which
the gallants there did usually assume,” refused the addresses
of the “greatest persons,” and was as famous for her beauty
as for her wit. One would like to forget the age at which she
did these things. When she began her service she was eleven.
When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she was not
thirteen.</p>
<p>Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and
heroines, therefore, were of those ages. The poets turned April
into May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if
they shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs. The
particular year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as
who should say a fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two
years old, and ellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as
Keats a poet would not have patience with the process of the seasons,
but boasted of untimely flowers. The “musk-rose” is
never in fact the child of mid-May, as he has it.</p>
<p>The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His
fear of losing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper
with the bloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen
in the <i>Spectator</i> has looked upon herself as marriageable “for
the last six years.” The famous letter describing the figure,
the dance, the wit, the stockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed
to be written by a girl of thirteen, “willing to settle in the
world as soon as she can.” She adds, “I have a good
portion which they cannot hinder me of.” This correspondent
is one of “the women who seldom ask advice before they have bought
their wedding clothes.” There was no sense of childhood
in an age that could think this an opportune pleasantry.</p>
<p>But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from
a later century—an age that has found all things to be on a journey,
and all things complete in their day because it is their day, and has
its appointed end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather
than a sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children
to seem, at last, something else than a defect.</p>
<h2>OUT OF TOWN</h2>
<p>To be on a <i>villeggiatura</i> with the children is to surprise
them in ways and words not always evident in the London house.
The narrow lodgings cause you to hear and overhear. Nothing is
more curious to listen to than a young child’s dramatic voice.
The child, being a boy, assumes a deep, strong, and ultra-masculine
note, and a swagger in his walk, and gives himself the name of the tallest
of his father’s friends. The tone is not only manly; it
is a tone of affairs, and withal careless; it is intended to suggest
business, and also the possession of a top-hat and a pipe, and is known
in the family of the child as his “official voice.”
One day it became more official than ever, and really more masculine
than life; and it alternated with his own tones of three years old.
In these, he asked with humility, “Will you let me go to heaven
if I’m naughty? Will you?” Then he gave the
reply in the tone of affairs, the official voice at its very best: “No,
little boy, I won’t!” It was evident that the infant
was not assuming the character of his father’s tallest friend
this time, but had taken a rôle more exalted. His little
sister of a year older seemed thoroughly to enjoy the humour of the
situation. “Listen to him, mother. He’s trying
to talk like God. He often does.”</p>
<p>Bulls are made by a less imaginative child who likes to find some
reason for things—a girl. Out at the work of picking blackberries,
she explains, “Those rather good ones were all bad, mother, so
I ate them.” Being afraid of dogs, this little girl of four
years old has all kinds of dodges to disguise her fear, which she has
evidently resolved to keep to herself. She will set up a sudden
song to distract attention from the fact that she is placing herself
out of the dog’s way, and she will pretend to turn to gather a
flower, while she watches the creature out of sight. On the other
hand, prudence in regard to carts and bicycles is openly displayed,
and the infants are zealous to warn one another. A rider and his
horse are called briefly “a norseback.”</p>
<p>Children, who see more things than they have names for, show a fine
courage in taking any words that seem likely to serve them, without
wasting time in asking for the word in use. This enterprise is
most active at three and four years, when children have more than they
can say. So a child of those years running to pick up horse-chestnuts,
for him a new species, calls after his mother a full description of
what he has found, naming the things indifferently “dough-nuts”
and “cocoa-nuts.” And another, having an anecdote
to tell concerning the Thames and a little brook that joins it near
the house, calls the first the “front-sea” and the second
the “back-sea.” There is no intention of taking liberties
with the names of things—only a cheerful resolve to go on in spite
of obstacles. It is such a spirit of liberty as most of us have
felt when we have dreamt of improvising a song or improvising a dance.
The child improvises with such means as he has.</p>
<p>This is, of course, at the very early ages. A little later—at
eight or nine—there is a very clear-headed sense of the value
of words. So that a little girl of that age, told that she may
buy some fruit, and wishing to know her limits in spending, asks, “What
mustn’t it be more than?” For a child, who has not
the word “maximum” at hand, nothing could be more precise
and concise. Still later, there is a sweet brevity that looks
almost like conscious expression, as when a boy writes from his first
boarding school: “Whenever I can’t stop laughing I have
only to think of home.”</p>
<p>Infinitely different as children are, they differ in nothing more
than in the degree of generosity. The most sensitive of children
is a little gay girl whose feelings are hurt with the greatest facility,
and who seems, indeed, to have the susceptibilty of other ages as well
as of her own—for instance, she cannot endure without a flush
of pain to hear herself called fat. But she always brings her
little wound to him who has wounded her. The first confidant she
seeks is the offender. If you have laughed at her she will not
hide her tears elsewhere than on your shoulder. She confesses
by her exquisite action at one her poor vanity and her humility.</p>
<p>The worst of children in the country is their inveterate impulse
to use death as their toy. Immediately on their discovery of some
pretty insect, one tender child calls to the other “Dead it.”</p>
<p>Children do not look at the sky unless it is suggested to them to
do so. When the sun dips to the narrow horizon of their stature,
and comes to the level of their eyes, even then they are not greatly
interested. Enormous clouds, erect, with the sun behind, do not
gain their eyes. What is of annual interest is the dark.
Having fallen asleep all the summer by daylight, and having awakened
after sunrise, children find a stimulus of fun and fear in the autumn
darkness outside the windows. There is a frolic with the unknown
blackness, with the reflections, and with the country night.</p>
<h2>EXPRESSION</h2>
<p>Strange to say, the eyes of children, whose minds are so small, express
intelligence better than do the greater number of adult eyes.
David Garrick’s were evidently unpreoccupied, like theirs.
The look of intelligence is outward—frankly directed upon external
things; it is observant, and therefore mobile without inner restlessness.
For restless eyes are the least observant of all—they move by
a kind of distraction. The looks of observant eyes, moving with
the living things they keep in sight, have many pauses as well as flights.
This is the action of intelligence, whereas the eyes of intellect are
detained or darkened.</p>
<p>Rational perception, with all its phases of humour, are best expressed
by a child, who has few second thoughts to divide the image of his momentary
feeling. His simplicity adds much to the manifestation of his
intelligence. The child is the last and lowest of rational creatures,
for in him the “rational soul” closes its long downward
flight with the bright final revelation.</p>
<p>He has also the chief beauty of the irrational soul of the mind,
that is, of the lower animal—which is singleness. The simplicity,
the integrity, the one thing at a time, of a good animal’s eyes
is a great beauty, and is apt to cause us to exaggerate our sense of
their expressiveness. An animal’s eyes, at their best, are
very slightly expressive; languor or alertness, the quick expectation,
even the aloofness of doubt they are able to show, but the showing is
mechanical; the human sentiment of the spectator adds the rest.</p>
<p>All this simplicity the child has, at moments, with the divisions
and delicacies of the rational soul, also. His looks express the
first, the last, and the clearest humanity. He is the first by
his youth and the last by his lowliness. He is the beginning and
the result of the creation of man.</p>
<h2>UNDER THE EARLY STARS</h2>
<p>Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random.
There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel
in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. Summer
dusk, especially, is the frolic moment for children, baffle them how
you may. They may have been in a pottering mood all day, intent
upon all kinds of close industries, breathing hard over choppings and
poundings. But when late twilight comes, there comes also the
punctual wildness. The children will run and pursue, and laugh
for the mere movement—it does so jog their spirits.</p>
<p>What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatory
dark? The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths
and crickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all
fours. The children lie in ambush and fall upon one another in
the mimicry of hunting.</p>
<p>The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and
a rebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and the children are
to go home. But, with more or less of life and fire, they strike
some blow for liberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual
child, or the stroke of the conqueror; but something, something is done
for freedom under the early stars.</p>
<p>This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict
with the weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy
of men should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens
at some time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts
of the poor.</p>
<p>Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved
by children. Three tiny girls were to be taught “old maid”
to beguile the time. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was
persuading another to play. “Oh come,” she said, “and
play with me at new maid.”</p>
<p>The time of falling asleep is a child’s immemorial and incalculable
hour. It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits.
The habit of prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation
of the fixity of some customs in mankind. But if the enquirers
who appeal to that beginning remembered better their own infancy, they
would seek no further. See the habits in falling to sleep which
have children in their thralldom. Try to overcome them in any
child, and his own conviction of their high antiquity weakens your hand.</p>
<p>Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense
of mystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby. The
French sleep-song is the most romantic. There is in it such a
sound of history as must inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep,
with a sense of the incalculable; and the songs themselves are old.
<i>Le</i> <i>Bon</i> <i>Roi</i> <i>Dagobert</i> has been sung over French
cradles since the legend was fresh. The nurse knows nothing more
sleepy than the tune and the verse that she herself slept to when a
child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in <i>Le</i> <i>Pont</i>
<i>a’</i> <i>Avignon</i>, is put mysteriously to sleep, away in
the <i>tête</i> <i>à</i> <i>tête</i> <i>of</i> child
and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night. <i>Malbrook</i>
would be comparatively modern, were not all things that are sung to
a drowsing child as distant as the day of Abraham.</p>
<p>If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some
of them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate
races that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to
the white child. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep
in the tropical night. His closing eyes are filled with alien
images.</p>
<h2>THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS</h2>
<p>It is generally understood in the family that the nurse who menaces
a child, whether with the supernatural or with simple sweeps, lions,
or tigers—goes. The rule is a right one, for the appeal
to fear may possibly hurt a child; nevertheless, it oftener fails to
hurt him. If he is prone to fears, he will be helpless under their
grasp, without the help of human tales. The night will threaten
him, the shadow will pursue, the dream will catch him; terror itself
have him by the heart. And terror, having made his pulses leap,
knows how to use any thought, any shape, any image, to account to the
child’s mind for the flight and tempest of his blood. “The
child shall not be frightened,” decrees ineffectual love; but
though no man make him afraid, he is frightened. Fear knows him
well and finds him alone.</p>
<p>Such a child is hardly at the mercy of any human rashness and impatience;
nor is the child whose pulses go steadily, and whose brows are fresh
and cool, at their mercy. This is one of the points upon which
a healthy child resembles the Japanese. Whatever that extreme
Oriental may be in war and diplomacy, whatever he may be at London University,
or whatever his plans of Empire, in relation to the unseen world he
is a child at play. He hides himself, he hides his eyes and pretends
to believe that he is hiding, he runs from the supernatural and laughs
for the fun of running.</p>
<p>So did a child, threatened for his unruliness with the revelation
of the man with two heads. The nurse must have had recourse to
this man under acute provocation. The boy, who had profited well
by every one of his four long years, and was radiant with the light
and colour of health, refused to be left to compose himself to sleep.
That act is an adult act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate
years of later life, when man goes on a mental journey in search of
rest, aware of setting forth. But the child is pursued and overtaken
by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to
sleep, than he takes a “constitutional” with his hoop and
hoopstick. The child amuses himself up to the last of his waking
moments. Happily, in the search for amusement, he is apt to learn
some habit or to cherish some toy, either of which may betray him and
deliver him up to sleep, the enemy. What wonder, then, if a child
who knows that everyone in the world desires his peace and pleasure,
should clamour for companionship in the first reluctant minutes of bed?
This child, being happy, did not weep for what he wanted; he shouted
for it in the rousing tones of his strength. After many evenings
of this he was told that this was precisely the vociferous kind of wakefulness
that might cause the man with two heads to show himself.</p>
<p>Unable to explain that no child ever goes to sleep, but that sleep,
on the contrary, “goes” for a child, the little boy yet
accepted the penalty, believed in the man, and kept quiet for a time.</p>
<p>There was indignation in the mother’s heart when the child
instructed her as to what might be looked for at his bedside; she used
all her emphasis in assuring him that no man with two heads would ever
trouble those innocent eyes, for there was no such portent anywhere
on earth. There is no such heart-oppressing task as the making
of these assurances to a child, for whom who knows what portents are
actually in wait! She found him, however, cowering with laughter,
not with dread, lest the man with two heads should see or overhear.
The man with two heads had become his play, and so was perhaps bringing
about his sleep by gentler means than the nurse had intended.
The man was employing the vacant minutes of the little creature’s
flight from sleep, called “going to sleep” in the inexact
language of the old.</p>
<p>Nor would the boy give up his faith with its tremor and private laughter.
Because a child has a place for everything, this boy had placed the
monstrous man in the ceiling, in a corner of the room that might be
kept out of sight by the bed curtain. If that corner were left
uncovered, the fear would grow stronger than the fun; “the man
would see me,” said the little boy. But let the curtain
be in position, and the child lay alone, hugging the dear belief that
the monster was near.</p>
<p>He was earnest in controversy with his mother as to the existence
of his man. The man was there, for he had been told so, and he
was there to wait for “naughty boys,” said the child, with
cheerful self-condemnation. The little boy’s voice was somewhat
hushed, because of the four ears of the listener, but it did not falter,
except when his mother’s arguments against the existence of the
man seemed to him cogent and likely to gain the day. Then for
the first time the boy was a little downcast, and the light of mystery
became dimmer in his gay eyes.</p>
<h2>CHILDREN IN BURLESQUE</h2>
<p>Derision, which is so great a part of human comedy, has not spared
the humours of children. Yet they are fitter subjects for any
other kind of jesting. In the first place they are quite defenceless,
but besides and before this, it might have been supposed that nothing
in a child could provoke the equal passion of scorn. Between confessed
unequals scorn is not even suggested. Its derisive proclamation
of inequality has no sting and no meaning where inequality is natural
and manifest.</p>
<p>Children rouse the laughter of men and women; but in all that laughter
the tone of derision is more strange a discord than the tone of anger
would be, or the tone of theological anger and menace. These,
little children have had to bear in their day, but in the grim and serious
moods—not in the play—of their elders. The wonder
is that children should ever have been burlesqued, or held to be fit
subjects for irony.</p>
<p>Whether the thing has been done anywhere out of England, in any form,
might be a point for enquiry. It would seem, at a glance, that
English art and literature are quite alone in this incredible manner
of sport.</p>
<p>And even here, too, the thing that is laughed at in a child is probably
always a mere reflection of the parents’ vulgarity. None
the less it is an unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity
of father or mother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable
resentment of derision.</p>
<p>John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn
that was not angry, but familiar. It is true that the poor child
had first been burlesqued by the unchildish aspect imposed upon him
by his dress, which presented him, without the beauties of art or nature,
to all the unnatural ironies. Leech did but finish him in the
same spirit, with dots for the childish eyes, and a certain form of
face which is best described as a fat square containing two circles—the
inordinate cheeks of that ignominious baby. That is the child
as <i>Punch</i> in Leech’s day preserved him, the latest figure
of the then prevailing domestic raillery of the domestic.</p>
<p>In like manner did Thackeray and Dickens, despite all their sentiment.
Children were made to serve both the sentiment and the irony between
which those two writers, alike in this, stood double-minded. Thackeray,
writing of his snobs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse
snob than his snob-child. There are snob-children not only in
the book dedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels.
There is a female snob-child in “Lovel the Widower,” who
may be taken as a type, and there are snob-children at frequent intervals
in “Philip.” It is not certain that Thackeray intended
the children of Pendennis himself to be innocent and exempt.</p>
<p>In one of Dickens’s early sketches there is a plot amongst
the humorous <i>dramatis</i> <i>personae</i>, to avenge themselves on
a little boy for the lack of tact whereby his parents have brought him
with them to a party on the river. The principal humorist frightens
the child into convulsions. The incident is the success of the
day, and is obviously intended to have some kind of reflex action in
amusing the reader. In Dickens’s maturer books the burlesque
little girl imitates her mother’s illusory fainting-fits.</p>
<p>Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque.
A little girl in <i>Punch</i> improves on the talk of her dowdy mother
with the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies,
hideous, from some hideous terror.</p>
<h2>AUTHORSHIP</h2>
<p>Authorship prevails in nurseries—at least in some nurseries.
In many it is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontës
there has not been a large family without its magazine. The weak
point of all this literature is its commonplace. The child’s
effort is to write something as much like as possible to the tedious
books that are read to him; he is apt to be fluent and foolish.
If a child simple enough to imitate were also simple enough not to imitate
he might write nursery magazines that would not bore us.</p>
<p>As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageous
spelling to make his stories go. “He,” however, is
hardly the pronoun. The girls are the more active authors, and
the more prosaic. What they would write had they never read things
written for them by the dull, it is not possible to know. What
they do write is this—to take a passage: “Poor Mrs. Bald
(that was her name) thought she would never get to the wood where her
aunt lived, she got down and pulled the donky on by the bridal . . .
Alas! her troubles were not over yet, the donky would not go where she
wanted it, instead of turning down Rose Lane it went down another, which
although Mrs. Bald did not know it led to a very deep and dangerous
pond. The donky ran into the pond and Mrs. Bald was dround.”</p>
<p>To give a prosperous look to the magazine containing the serial story
just quoted, a few pages of mixed advertisements are laboriously written
out: “The Imatation of Christ is the best book in all the world.”
“Read Thompson’s poetry and you are in a world of delight.”
“Barrat’s ginger beer is the only ginger beer to drink.”
“The place for a ice.” Under the indefinite heading
“A Article,” readers are told “that they are liable
to read the paper for nothing.”</p>
<p>A still younger hand contributes a short story in which the hero
returns to his home after a report of his death had been believed by
his wife and family. The last sentence is worth quoting: “We
will now,” says the author, “leave Mrs. White and her two
children to enjoy the sudden appearance of Mr. White.”</p>
<p>Here is an editorial announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, every
week at the end of the paper there will be a little article on the habits
of the paper.”</p>
<p>On the whole, authorship does not seem to foster the quality of imagination.
Convention, during certain early years, may be a very strong motive—not
so much with children brought up strictly within its limits, perhaps,
as with those who have had an exceptional freedom. Against this,
as a kind of childish bohemianism, there is, in one phase of childhood,
a strong reaction. To one child, brought up internationally, and
with somewhat too much liberty amongst peasant play-mates and their
games, in many dialects, eagerness to become like “other people,”
and even like the other people of quite inferior fiction, grew to be
almost a passion. The desire was in time out-grown, but it cost
the girl some years of her simplicity. The style is not always
the child.</p>
<h2>LETTERS</h2>
<p>The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody
has sent him a box of chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a
child’s style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden
self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They
speak prose and know it. But a young child possesses his words
by a different tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect
of the things he says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of
them. He is so little taken by the kind and character of any word
that he catches the first that comes at random. A little child
to whom a peach was first revealed, whispered to his mother, “I
like that kind of turnip.” Compelled to write a letter,
the child finds the word of daily life suddenly a stranger.</p>
<p>The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the
fingers the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting.
Dickens, who used his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of
a child and his face are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering
and haggard.</p>
<p>His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony.
The child chatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there
is no inspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom
he probably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of
anyone, however vague and forgotten, without a mental image. As
like as not he pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes
shut. No boy wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt
with her eyes shut. His thoughtless elders require him not only
to write to her under these discouragements, but to write to her in
an artless and childlike fashion.</p>
<p>The child is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the
conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: “I
send them their love,” “They sent me my love,” “I
kissed their hand to me.” If he is stopped and told to get
the words right, he has to make a long effort. His precedent might
be cited to excuse every politician who cannot remember whether he began
his sentence with “people” in the singular or the plural,
and who finishes it otherwise than as he began it. Points of grammar
that are purely points of logic baffle a child completely. He
is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is in the use of
his senses.</p>
<p>It is not true—though it is generally said—that a young
child’s senses are quick. This is one of the unverified
ideas that commend themselves, one knows not why. We have had
experiments to compare the relative quickness of perception proved by
men and women. The same experiments with children would give curious
results, but they can hardly, perhaps, be made, because the children
would be not only slow to perceive but slow to announce the perception;
so the moment would go by, and the game be lost. Not even amateur
conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of a child’s mind as
does a little intricacy of grammar.</p>
<h2>THE FIELDS</h2>
<p>The pride of rustic life is the child’s form of caste-feeling.
The country child is the aristocrat; he has <i>des</i> <i>relations</i>
<i>suivies</i> with game-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers.
He has a perfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or
a suburb. No essayist has so much feeling against terraces and
villas.</p>
<p>As for imitation country—the further suburb—it is worse
than town; it is a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child’s
mind is hardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his
affairs to think about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom
of perpetual observation. The child, compelled to walk, is the
only unresting observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates
and railings, and the tedious people. He is bored as he will never
be bored when a man.</p>
<p>He is at his best where, under the welcome stress and pressure of
abundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neither
in mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of his
little gains. On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where
maize and grapes are carried in the <i>botte</i>, so usually are children
expected in the field that <i>bottes</i> are made to the shape of a
back and arms of five years old. Some, made for harvesters of
those years, can hold no more than a single yellow ear of maize or two
handfuls of beans. You may meet the same little boy with the repetitions
of this load a score of times in the morning. Moreover the Swiss
mother has always a fit sense of what is due to that labourer.
When the plums are gathered, for instance, she bakes in the general
village oven certain round open tarts across which her arm can hardly
reach. No plum tarts elsewhere are anything but dull in comparison
with these. There is, besides, the first loaf from the new flour,
brown from the maize and white from the wheat. Nor can a day of
potato-gathering be more appropriately ended than with a little fire
built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under the wood ashes.
Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even when the
apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a child’s
tooth.</p>
<p>Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked
in a real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with
nothing but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular
harvest of the hedges. They have no little hand in the realities
of cultivation, but wild growths give them blackberries. Pale
are the joys of nutting beside those of haymaking, but at least they
are something.</p>
<p>Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories
for the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing,
taking flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed,
retreating into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring
is for children, who look close. They know the way of moss and
the roots of ivy, they breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct.
They have a sense of place, of persons, and of the past that may be
remembered but cannot be recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot
see what a child’s eye sees of the personality of a person; to
the child the accidents of voice and look are charged with separate
and unique character. Such a sense of place as he got in a day
within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that a sound or odour
can bring it back in after days, with a shock—even such a sense
of single personality does a little watchful girl get from the accents,
the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence of a woman.
Not all places, nor all persons, are so quick with the expression of
themselves; the child knows the difference. As for places that
are so loaded, and that breathe so, the child discerns them passionately.</p>
<p>A travelled child multiplies these memories and has them in their
variety. His heart has room for many places that have the spirit
of place. The glacier may be forgotten, but some little tract
of pasture that has taken wing to the head of a mountain valley, a field
that has soared up a pass unnamed, will become a memory, in time, sixty
years old. That is a fortunate child who has tasted country life
in places far apart, who has helped, followed the wheat to the threshing-floor
of a Swiss village, stumbled after a plough of Virgil’s shape
in remoter Tuscan hills, and gleaned after a vintage. You cannot
suggest pleasanter memories than those of the vintage, for the day when
the wine will be old.</p>
<h2>THE BARREN SHORE</h2>
<p>It may be a disappointment to the children each year at play upon
so many beaches—even if they are but dimly aware of their lack—to
find their annual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing,
indeed, to them, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once
a year, but not annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons,
not waxing and waning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons
whereof no one knows which is the highest point and the secret and the
ultimate purpose, not recreated, not new, and not yielding to the child
anything raw and irregular to eat.</p>
<p>Sand castles are well enough, and they are the very commonplace of
the recollections of elders, of their rhetoric, and of what they think
appropriate for their young ones. Shingle and sand are good playthings,
but absolute play is not necessarily the ideal of a child; he would
rather have a frolic of work. Of all the early autumn things to
be done in holiday time, that game with the beach and the wave is the
least good for holiday-time.</p>
<p>Not that the shore is everywhere so barren. The coast of the
Londoners—all round the southern and eastern borders of England—is
indeed the dullest of all sea-margins. But away in the gentle
bays of Jersey the summer grows a crop of seaweed which the long ocean
wave leaves in noble curves upon the beach; for under sunny water the
storms have gathered the crops. The Channel Island people go gleaning
after the sea, and store the seaweed for their fields. Thus the
beaches of Jersey bays are not altogether barren, and have a kind of
dead and accessory harvest for the farmer. After a night of storm
these crops are stacked and carted and carried, the sea-wind catching
away loose shreds from the summits of the loads.</p>
<p>Further south, if the growth of the sea is not so put to use, the
shore has yet its seasons. You could hardly tell, if you did not
know the month, whether a space of sea or a series of waves, at Aldborough,
say, or at Dover, were summer or winter water; but in those fortunate
regions which are southern, yet not too southern for winter, and have
thus the strongest swing of change and the fullest pulse of the year,
there are a winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with
a delicate variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering
blue of September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled
by tides, and unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating
on your head while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun
has set, and the vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the
distance where you can rest; and where you float, there float also by
you opalescent jelly-fish, half transparent in the perfectly transparent
water. An hour in the warm sea is not enough. Rock-bathing
is done on lonely shores. A city may be but a mile away, and the
cultivated vineyards may be close above the seaside pine-trees, but
the place is perfectly remote. You pitch your tent on any little
hollow of beach. A charming Englishwoman who used to bathe with
her children under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villa in the
motionless white evenings of summer put white roses in her hair, and
liked to sit out on a rock at sea where the first rays of the moon would
touch her.</p>
<p>You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing
in the world is more uninteresting than eleven o’clock.
It is the hour of mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o’clock
on a shingly beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing.
Twelve has a dignity always, and everywhere its name is great.
The noon of every day that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven
is worldly. One o’clock has an honest human interest to
the hungry child, and every hour of the summer afternoon, after three,
has the grace of deepening and lingering life. To bathe at eleven
in the sun, in the wind, to bathe from a machine, in a narrow sea that
is certainly not clear and is only by courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience
to a tyrannical tide and in water that is always much colder than yourself,
to bathe in a hurry and in public—this is to know nothing rightly
of one of the greatest of all the pleasures that humanity takes with
nature.</p>
<p>By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea
than of mere straits. These temperate islands would be better
called the Ocean Islands. When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and
wrote poetry, he composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof
was a matter of some thought. The final decision was to direct
it, “A Victor Hugo, Océan.” It reached him.
It even received a reply: “I am the Past, you are the Future;
I am, etc.” If an English boy had had the same idea the
name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it. “A Victor
Hugo, La Manche,” would hardly have interested the postal authorities
so much; but “the Channel” would have had no respect at
all. Indeed, this last is suggestive of nothing but steamers and
of grey skies inland—formless grey skies, undesigned, with their
thin cloud torn to slender rags by a perpetual wind.</p>
<p>As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea, machine-bathing
at eleven o’clock will hardly furnish them with a magical early
memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like
the rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It
was vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type
of all ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through
the unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them,
and returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and
superfluous saltness of tears. “Too much of water had they,”
poor infants.</p>
<p>None the less is the barren shore the children’s; and St. Augustine,
Isaac Newton, and Wordsworth had not a vision of sea-beaches without
a child there.</p>
<h2>THE BOY</h2>
<p>After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood
of few explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phase
which the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note
as an impression.</p>
<p>Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described
but by negatives. Above all, he is not demonstrative. The
days are long gone by when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and
a pipe. One or two of these things he has, and he takes them without
the least swagger. He avoids expression of any kind. Any
satisfaction he may feel with things as they are is rather to be surprised
in his manner than perceived in his action. Mr. Jaggers, when
it befell him to be astonished, showed it by a stop of manner, for an
indivisible moment—not by a pause in the thing he chanced to be
about. In like manner the boy cannot prevent his most innocent
pleasures from arresting him.</p>
<p>He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told
to do anything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home.
His elders probably give him as few orders as possible. He will
almost ingeniously evade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted
upon him, but if he does but succeed in only postponing his obedience,
he has, visibly, done something for his own relief. It is less
convenient that he should hold mere questions, addressed to him in all
good faith, as in some sort an attempt upon his liberty.</p>
<p>Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage.
But it is against impersonal and indifferent questions also that the
boy sets his face like a rock. He has no ambition to give information
on any point. Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and
there are even those who bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for
the pleasure of answering them with animation. This, the boy perhaps
thinks, is “fuss,” and, if he has any passions, he has a
passionate dislike of fuss.</p>
<p>When a younger child tears the boy’s scrapbook (which is conjectured,
though not known, to be the dearest thing he has) he betrays no emotion;
that was to be expected. But when the stolen pages are rescued
and put by for him, he abstains from taking an interest in the retrieval;
he will do nothing to restore them. To do so would mar the integrity
of his reserve. If he would do much rather than answer questions,
he would suffer something rather than ask them.</p>
<p>He loves his father and a friend of his father’s, and he pushes
them, in order to show it without compromising his temperament.</p>
<p>He is a partisan in silence. It may be guessed that he is often
occupied in comparing other people with his admired men. Of this
too he says little, except some brief word of allusion to what other
men do <i>not</i> do.</p>
<p>When he speaks it is with a carefully shortened vocabulary.
As an author shuns monotony, so does the boy shun change. He does
not generally talk slang; his habitual words are the most usual of daily
words made useful and appropriate by certain varieties of voice.
These express for him all that he will consent to communicate.
He reserves more by speaking dull words with zeal than by using zealous
words that might betray him. But his brevity is the chief thing;
he has almost made an art of it.</p>
<p>He is not “merry.” Merry boys have pretty manners,
and it must be owned that this boy’s manners are not pretty.
But if not merry, he is happy; there never was a more untroubled soul.
If he has an almost grotesque reticence, he has no secrets. Nothing
that he thinks is very much hidden. Even if he did not push his
father, it would be evident that the boy loves him; even if he never
laid his hand (and this little thing he does rarely) on his friend’s
shoulder, it would be plain that he loves his friend. His happiness
appears in his moody and charming face, his ambition in his dumbness,
and the hopes of his life to come in ungainly bearing. How does
so much heart, how does so much sweetness, all unexpressed, appear?
For it is not only those who know him well that know the child’s
heart; strangers are aware of it. This, which he would not reveal,
is the only thing that is quite unmistakable and quite conspicuous.</p>
<p>What he thinks that he turns visibly to the world is a sense of humour,
with a measure of criticism and of indifference. What he thinks
the world may divine in him is courage and an intelligence. But
carry himself how he will, he is manifestly a tender, gentle, and even
spiritual creature, masculine and innocent—“a nice boy.”
There is no other way of describing him than that of his own brief language.</p>
<h2>ILLNESS</h2>
<p>The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some
little books, but none the less a fresh fact. In spite of the
sentimental, children in illness remain the full sources of perpetual
surprises. Their self-control in real suffering is a wonder.
A little turbulent girl, brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might
be thought, to deal in any way with her own impulses—a child whose
way was to cry out, laugh, complain, and triumph without bating anything
of her own temperament, and without the hesitation of a moment, struck
her face, on a run, against a wall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed
with pain and covered with blood. “Tell mother it’s
nothing! Tell mother, quick, it’s nothing!” cried
the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.</p>
<p>The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged
to lie for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken
little body might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure,
painful; and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and
guarded by twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing
that had carried her through all her years—impulse. A condition
of acute consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition
of life had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of
ten of a child’s days and nights at eight years old.</p>
<p>Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but
patient, not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests,
reluctant to be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that
she had never used before. “You are exquisite to me, mother,”
she said, at receiving some common service.</p>
<p>Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous
child assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience.
Not that illness is to be trusted to work so. There is another
child who in his brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against
medicine finally. The last appeal to force, as his distracted
elders find, is all but an impossibility; but in any case it would be
a failure. You can bring the spoon to the child, but three nurses
cannot make him drink. This, then, is the occasion of the ultimate
resistance. He raises the standard of revolution, and casts every
tradition and every precept to the wind on which it flies. He
has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursue him with a grotesque
spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment, still more grotesque.
He is committed to the wild novelty of absolute refusal. He not
only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throws everything over.
Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilist laughs.</p>
<p>Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy. “Am
I unwell to-day, mother?” asks a child with all his faith and
confidence at the highest point.</p>
<h2>THE YOUNG CHILD</h2>
<p>The infant of literature “wails” and wails feebly, with
the invariability of a thing unproved and taken for granted. Nothing,
nevertheless, could be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive
cry whereon the child of man catches his first breath. It is a
hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and brief, rather deep than shrill in tone.
With all deference to old moralities, man does not weep at beginning
this world; he simply lifts up his new voice much as do the birds in
the Zoological Gardens, and with much the same tone as some of the duck
kind there. He does not weep for some months to come. His
outcry soon becomes the human cry that is better known than loved, but
tears belong to later infancy. And if the infant of days neither
wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too young to be gay.
A child’s mirth, when at last it begins, is his first secret;
you understand little of it. The first smile (for the convulsive
movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile)
is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable.
It is accompanied by a single sound—a sound that would be a monosyllable
if it were articulate—which is the utterance, though hardly the
communication, of a private jollity. That and that alone is the
real beginning of human laughter.</p>
<p>From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for
the first time, and as it were flickeringly, the child’s smile
begins to grow definite and, gradually, more frequent. By very
slow degrees the secrecy passes away, and the dryness becomes more genial.
The child now smiles more openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing
creature of so much prose and verse. His laughter takes a long
time to form. The monosyllable grows louder, and then comes to
be repeated with little catches of the breath. The humour upon
which he learns to laugh is that of something which approaches him quickly
and then withdraws. This is the first intelligible jest of jesting
man.</p>
<p>An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark the
features of faces near him. Whether because of the greater conspicuousness
of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, he addresses his
looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to the heads, not the
faces, of his friends. These are the ways of all infants, various
in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the same things.
There are turns in a kitten’s play—arched leapings and sidelong
jumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances—which the sacred
kittens of Egypt used in their time. But not more alike are these
repetitions than the impulses of all young children learning to laugh.</p>
<p>In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much
of his effect upon the world; not much of the effect of the world upon
him. Yet he is compelled to endure the reflex results, at least,
of all that pleases, distresses, or oppresses the world. That
he should be obliged to suffer the moods of men is a more important
thing than that men should be amused by his moods. If he is saddened,
that is certainly much more than that his elders should be gladdened.
It is doubtless hardly possible that children should go altogether free
of human affairs. They might, in mere justice, be spared the burden
they bear ignorantly and simply when it is laid upon them, of such events
and ill fortunes as may trouble our peace; but they cannot easily be
spared the hearing of a disturbed voice or the sight of an altered face.
Alas! they are made to feel money-matters, and even this is not the
worst. There are unconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries,
of which they do not know the names, but which change the faces where
they look for smiles. To such alterations children are sensitive
even when they seem least accessible to the commands, the warnings,
the threats, or the counsels of elders. Of all these they may
be gaily independent, and yet may droop when their defied tyrants are
dejected.</p>
<p>For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness
is a mere impulse and is easily disconcerted. They are gay without
knowing any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is,
as it were, proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet,
they are helpless and find no stay. For this reason the merriest
of all children are those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in
a family nor in a public home by paid guardians, but in a place of charity,
rightly named, where impartial, unalterable, and impersonal devotion
has them in hand. They endure an immeasurable loss, and are orphans,
but they gain in perpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature.
The separate nest is nature’s, and the best; but it might be wished
that the separate nest were less subject to moods. The nurse has
her private business, and when it does not prosper, and when the remote
affairs of the governess go wrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration
of the mishap.</p>
<p>The uniformity of infancy passes away long before the age when children
have this indefinite suffering inflicted upon them; and they have become
infinitely various, and feel the consequences of the cares of their
elders in unnumbered degrees. The most charming children feel
them the most sensibly, and not with resentment but with sympathy.
It is assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue
of childhood. What other thing are we to learn of them?
Not simplicity, for they are intricate enough. Not gratitude;
for their usual sincere thanklessness makes half the pleasure of doing
them good. Not obedience; for the child is born with the love
of liberty. And as for humility, the boast of a child is the frankest
thing in the world. A child’s natural vanity is not merely
the delight in his own possessions, but the triumph over others less
fortunate. If this emotion were not so young it would be exceedingly
unamiable. But the truth must be confessed that having very quickly
learnt the value of comparison and relation, a child rejoices in the
perception that what he has is better than what his brother has; this
comparison is a means of judging his fortune, after all. It is
true that if his brother showed distress, he might make haste to offer
an exchange. But the impulse of joy is candidly egotistic.</p>
<p>It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask pity
for their sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive
that they are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and
who make no bargain for apologies—it is this that men and women
are urged to learn of a child. Graces more confessedly childlike
they make shift to teach themselves.</p>
<h2>FAIR AND BROWN</h2>
<p>George Eliot, in one of her novels, has a good-natured mother, who
confesses that when she administers justice she is obliged to spare
the offenders who have fair hair, because they look so much more innocent
than the rest. And if this is the state of maternal feelings where
all are more or less fair, what must be the miscarriage of justice in
countries where a <i>blond</i> angel makes his infrequent visit within
the family circle?</p>
<p>In England he is the rule, and supreme as a matter of course.
He is “English,” and best, as is the early asparagus and
the young potato, according to the happy conviction of the shops.
To say “child” in England is to say “fair-haired child,”
even as in Tuscany to say “young man” is to say “tenor.”
“I have a little party to-night, eight or ten tenors, from neighbouring
palazzi, to meet my English friends.”</p>
<p>But France is a greater enthusiast than our now country. The
fairness and the golden hair are here so much a matter of orthodoxy,
that they are not always mentioned; they are frequently taken for granted.
Not so in France; the French go out of their way to make the exceptional
fairness of their children the rule of their literature. No French
child dare show his face in a book—prose or poetry—without
blue eyes and fair hair. It is a thing about which the French
child of real life can hardly escape a certain sensitiveness.
What, he may ask, is the use of being a dark-haired child of fact, when
all the emotion, all the innocence, all the romance, are absorbed by
the flaxen-haired child of fiction? How deplorable that our mothers,
the French infants may say, should have their unattained ideals in the
nurseries of the imagination; how dismal that they should be perpetually
disillusioned in the nurseries of fact! Is there then no sentiment
for us? they may ask. Will not convention, which has been forced
to restore the advantage to truth on so many other points, be compelled
to yield on this point also, and reconcile our aunts to the family colouring?</p>
<p>All the schools of literature are in a tale. The classic masters,
needless to say, do not stoop to the colouring of boys and girls; but
as soon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair
ever in it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue,
and no cheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses. Victor
Hugo, who discovered the child of modern poetry, never omits the touch
of description; the word <i>blond</i> is as inevitable as any epithet
marshalled to attend its noun in a last-century poet’s dictionary.
One would not have it away; one can hear the caress with which the master
pronounces it, “making his mouth,” as Swift did for his
“little language.” Nor does the customary adjective
fail in later literature. It was dear to the Realist, and it is
dear to the Symbolist. The only difference is that in the French
of the Symbolist it precedes the noun.</p>
<p>And yet it is time that the sweetness of the dark child should have
its day. He is really no less childlike than the other.
There is a pretty antithesis between the strong effect of his colouring
and the softness of his years and of his months. The blond human
being—man, woman or child—has the beauty of harmony; the
hair plays off from the tones of the flesh, only a few degrees brighter
or a few degrees darker. Contrast of colour there is, in the blue
of the eyes, and in the red of cheek and lip, but there is no contrast
of tone. The whole effect is that of much various colour and of
equal tone. In the dark face there is hardly any colour and an
almost complete opposition of tone. The complete opposition, of
course, would be black and white; and a beautiful dark child comes near
to this, but for the lovely modifications, the warmth of his white,
and of his black alike, so that the one tone, as well as the other,
is softened towards brown. It is the beauty of contrast, with
a suggestion of harmony—as it were a beginning of harmony—which
is infinitely lovely.</p>
<p>Nor is the dark child lacking in variety. His radiant eyes
range from a brown so bright that it looks golden in the light, to a
brown so dark that it barely defines the pupil. So is his hair
various, answering the sun with unsuspected touches, not of gold but
of bronze. And his cheek is not invariably pale. A dusky
rose sometimes lurks there with such an effect of vitality as you will
hardly get from the shallower pink of the flaxened haired. And
the suggestion is that of late summer, the colour of wheat almost ready
for the harvest, and darker, redder flowers—poppies and others—than
come in Spring.</p>
<p>The dark eyes, besides, are generally brighter—they shelter
a more liquid light than the blue or grey. Southern eyes have
generally most beautiful whites. And as to the charm of the childish
figure, there is usually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener
that is at least as young and sweet as the round form of the blond child.
And yet the painters of Italy would have none of it. They rejected
the dusky brilliant pale little Italians all about them; they would
have none but flaxen-haired children, and they would have nothing that
was slim, nothing that was thin, nothing that was shadowy. They
rejoiced in much fair flesh, and in all possible freshness. So
it was in fair Flanders as well as in dark Italy. But so it was
not in Spain. The Pyrenees seemed to interrupt the tradition.
And as Murillo saw the charm of dark heads, and the innocence of dark
eyes, so did one English painter. Reynolds painted young dark
hair as tenderly as the youngest gold.</p>
<h2>REAL CHILDHOOD</h2>
<p>The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods
and of their impressions. Your hours when you were six were the
enormous hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and
quick forgetfulness. Therefore when your mother’s visitor
held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish
of the grown-up, he little thought what he forced upon you; what the
things he called minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what
passive and then what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly
gesticulating hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by
you at its right value, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile,
were infinitely tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.</p>
<p>Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm
is inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the
wit fully to confess it.</p>
<p>You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some
such space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour—so poignantly
that you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still
as a dreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain
of it to the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management
of the world in their hands—your seniors. You remembered
the duration of some such separate half-hour so well that you have in
fact remembered it until now, and so now, of course, will never forget
it.</p>
<p>As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the
drawing room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something
greater than Beethoven had any idea of. You sat and listened,
and tried to fix a passage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark,
with the deliberate provident intention of helping yourself through
the time during a future hearing; for you knew too well that you would
have to bear it all again. You could not do the same with sermons,
because, though even more fatiguing, they were more or less different
each time.</p>
<p>While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of
road—and a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance
of every house you lived in or stayed in—in their usual state
of partial absence of mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch
of it. As to the length of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness
at night, adult words do not measure it; they hardly measure the time
of merely waiting for sleep in childhood. Moreover, you were tired
of other things, apart from the duration of time—the names of
streets, the names of tradesmen, especially the <i>fournisseurs</i>
of the household, who lived in them.</p>
<p>You were bored by people. It did not occur to you to be tired
of those of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially.
Nor were you bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless
they held you, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible
voices and so look at their mannered faces that they released you an
older child than they took you prisoner. But—it is a reluctant
confession—you were tired of your relations; you were weary of
their bonnets. Measured by adult time, those bonnets were, it
is to be presumed, of no more than reasonable duration; they had no
more than the average or common life. You have no reason, looking
back, to believe that your great-aunts wore bonnets for great and indefinite
spaces of time. But, to your sense as a child, long and changing
and developing days saw the same harassing artificial flowers hoisted
up with the same black lace. You would have had a scruple of conscience
as to really disliking the face, but you deliberately let yourself go
in detesting the bonnet. So with dresses, especially such as had
any little misfit about them. For you it had always existed, and
there was no promise of its ceasing. You seemed to have been aware
of it for years. By the way, there would be less cheap reproving
of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knew how immensely
old their old clothes are to them.</p>
<p>The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary
ugliness of things, and that—apart from the effects of <i>ennui</i>—they
reject that ugliness actively. You have stood and listened to
your mother’s compliments on her friend’s hat, and have
made your mental protest in very definite words. You thought it
hideous, and hideous things offended you then more than they have ever
offended you since. At nine years old you made people, alas! responsible
for their faces, as you do still in a measure, though you think you
do not. You severely made them answer for their clothes, in a
manner which you have seen good reason, in later life, to mitigate.
Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, you had no mercy.
To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they were friskiness of
manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with rather bygone or frumpish
fashions. Too much childish dislike was wasted so.</p>
<p>But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learnt
later. At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the
contrast of a white kid glove and a bright red wrist. Well, this
is not the received arrangement, but red and white do go well together,
and their distribution has to be taught with time. Whose were
the wrist and glove? Certainly some one’s who must have
been distressed at the <i>bouquet</i> of colour that you admired.
This, however, was but a local admiration. You did not admire
the girl as a whole. She whom you adored was always a married
woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but always divinely
elegant. She alone was worthy to stand at the side of your mother.
You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for a chance
of holding her bracelet when she played. You composed prose in
honour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown to yourself)
a “catalogue.” She took singularly little notice of
you.</p>
<p>Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature.
The light of summer morning before sunrise was to you a spiritual splendour
for which you wanted no name. The Mediterranean under the first
perceptible touch of the moon, the calm southern sea in the full blossom
of summer, the early spring everywhere, in the showery streets, in the
fields, or at sea, left old childish memories with you which you try
to evoke now when you see them again. But the cloudy dusk behind
poplars on the plains of France, the flying landscape from the train,
willows, and the last of the light, were more mournful to you then than
you care to remember now. So were the black crosses on the graves
of the French village; so were cypresses, though greatly beloved.</p>
<p>If you were happy enough to be an internationally educated child,
you had much at heart the heart of every country you knew. You
disliked the English accent of your compatriots abroad with a scorn
to which, needless to say, you are not tempted now. You had shocks
of delight from Swiss woods full of lilies of the valley, and from English
fields full of cowslips. You had disquieting dreams of landscape
and sun, and of many of these you cannot now tell which were visions
of travel and which visions of slumber. Your strong sense of place
made you love some places too keenly for peace.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN***</p>
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