The Children Part 4

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?

All the schools of literature are in a tale. The cla.s.sic 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 _blond_ 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 p.r.o.nounces 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.

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 ant.i.thesis 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.

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.

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.

REAL CHILDHOOD

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 pa.s.sive 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.

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.

You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such s.p.a.ce 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.

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 pa.s.sage 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.

While your elders pa.s.sed 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 _fournisseurs_ of the household, who lived in them.

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 s.p.a.ces of time. But, to your sense as a child, long and changing and developing days saw the same hara.s.sing 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.

The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary ugliness of things, and that--apart from the effects of _ennui_--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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and curls combined with rather bygone or frumpish fashions. Too much childish dislike was wasted so.

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 _bouquet_ 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.

Wordsworth cannot say too much of your pa.s.sion 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.

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.