The Children Part 2

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 p.r.o.ne 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.

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 j.a.panese. 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.

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 "const.i.tutional" with his hoop and hoopstick. The child amuses himself up to the last of his waking moments. Happily, in the search for amus.e.m.e.nt, 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.

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.

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 a.s.suring 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 a.s.surances 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.

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.

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.

CHILDREN IN BURLESQUE

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 pa.s.sion 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 _Punch_ in Leech's day preserved him, the latest figure of the then prevailing domestic raillery of the domestic.

In like manner did Thackeray and d.i.c.kens, 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 sn.o.bs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse sn.o.b than his sn.o.b-child. There are sn.o.b-children not only in the book dedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels. There is a female sn.o.b-child in "Lovel the Widower," who may be taken as a type, and there are sn.o.b-children at frequent intervals in "Philip." It is not certain that Thackeray intended the children of Pendennis himself to be innocent and exempt.

In one of d.i.c.kens's early sketches there is a plot amongst the humorous _dramatis personae_, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 d.i.c.kens's maturer books the burlesque little girl imitates her mother's illusory fainting- fits.

Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque.

A little girl in _Punch_ improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from some hideous terror.

AUTHORSHIP

Authorship prevails in nurseries--at least in some nurseries. In many it is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes 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.

As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageous spelling to make his stories go. "He," however, is hardly the p.r.o.noun.

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 pa.s.sage: "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."

To give a prosperous look to the magazine containing the serial story just quoted, a few pages of mixed advertis.e.m.e.nts 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."

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."

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."

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 pa.s.sion. The desire was in time out-grown, but it cost the girl some years of her simplicity. The style is not always the child.

LETTERS

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.

The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. d.i.c.kens, 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.

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.

The child is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the conventional messages but he loses his way among the few p.r.o.nouns: "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.

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.

THE FIELDS

The pride of rustic life is the child's form of caste-feeling. The country child is the aristocrat; he has _des relations suivies_ 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.

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.

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 _botte_, so usually are children expected in the field that _bottes_ 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 repet.i.tions 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.

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.

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 pa.s.sionately.

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 pa.s.s 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.