The Seven Ages of Man Part 1

The Seven Ages of Man.

by Ralph Bergengren.

I

BABY, BABY

_In meeting a baby, one should behave as much as possible like a baby one's self. We cannot, of course, diminish our size, or exchange our customary garments for baby-clothes; neither can we arrive in a perambulator, and be conveyed in the arms, either of a parent or a nursemaid, into the presence of the baby whom we are to meet. The best we can do is to hang, as it were on the hatrack, our preconceived ideas of what manner of behavior entertains a baby, as cooing, grimacing, tickling, and the like, and model our deportment on the dignified but friendly reticence that one baby evinces in meeting another._--BABY: HIS FRIENDS AND FOES.

Of the many questions that Mr. Boswell, at one time and another, asked his friend, Dr. Johnson, I can hardly recall another more searching than one that he himself describes as whimsical.

"I know not how so whimsical a thought came into my head," says Boswell, "but I asked, 'If, sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with you, what would you do?'

"JOHNSON: Why, sir, I should not much like my company.

"BOSWELL: But would you take the trouble of rearing it?

"He seemed, as may be supposed, unwilling to pursue the subject: but, upon my persevering in my question, replied, 'Why, yes, sir, I would; but I must have all conveniences. If I had no garden, I would make a shed on the roof, and take it there for fresh air. I should feed it, and wash it much, and with warm water, to please it, not with cold water, to give it pain.'

"BOSWELL: But, sir, does not heat relax?

"JOHNSON: Sir, you are not to imagine the water is to be very hot. I would not _coddle_ the child."

It appears, too, that the Doctor had given some thought to the subject, although never expecting to be a mother himself: his immediate insistence upon fresh air promises well for the infant, and the frequency with which he proposes to wash his little companion indicates that, so long as the water-supply of the castle lasted, he would have done his part. A cow in the castle seems to have been taken for granted; but, in 1769, even Dr. Johnson would have known little or nothing about formulas, nor would it have occurred to him to make a pasteurizing apparatus, as so many parents do nowadays, out of a large tin pail and a pie-plate. Here the baby would have had to take his eighteenth-century chance. And I wish, too, that he might have had a copy of "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide," that modern compendium of twenty-four exercises, by which a reasonably strongarmed mother may strengthen and develop the infant's tiny muscles; for I like to think of Dr. Johnson exercising his innocent companion in his shed on the roof. "Sir," he says, "I do not much like my employment; but here we are, and we'll have to make the best of it."

Such an experience, no doubt, would have been good for Dr. Johnson, and good for the baby (if it survived). "That into which his little mind is to develop," says "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide," "is plastic--like a wax record, ready to retain such impressions as are made upon it"; and on this wax some, at least, of the impressions left by Dr. Johnson must have been valuable. But on the real mystery of babyhood--the insoluble enigma that the "Guide" can only in small measure dispose of by comparing the rearing of an infant with the home-manufacture of a record for the gramaphone--the experience would have thrown no light.

The Doctor, I dare say, would have written a paper on the feeding and washing of infants, and later dictionaries of familiar quotation might perhaps have been enriched by the phrase,"'The baby is grandfather to the man.'--JOHNSON." But of this grandfather the man has no memory. His babyhood is a past concerning which he is perforce silent, a time when it is only by the report of others that he knows he was living. His little mind seems to have been more than a little blank; and although gifted novelists have set themselves the imaginative task of thinking and writing like babies, none, in my reading, has ever plausibly succeeded. The best they can do is to think and write like little adults. I recall, for example, the honest effort of Miss May Sinclair, whom I greatly respect as an adult, to see Mr. Olivier through the eyes of his baby daughter Mary. "Papa sat up, broad and tall above the table, all by himself. He was dressed in black. One long brown beard hung down in front of him and one short beard covered his mouth. You knew he was smiling because his cheeks swelled high up in his face, so that his eyes were squeezed into narrow, shining slits. When they came out again, you saw scarlet specks and smears in their corners." A fearsome Papa!--and, although I have no way of knowing that fathers do not present themselves in this futurist aspect to their helpless offspring, I am glad to think otherwise. At all events a baby is, and must be, well used to living in Brobdingnag.

It would be a surprising thing, if it were not so common, that a man shows so little curiosity about this forgotten period of his life. But such curiosity would be impossible to satisfy. Existing photographs of him at that time are a disappointment: he seldom admits seeing any resemblance, and, if he does, the likeness rarely, if ever, gives him any visible satisfaction. Nor can anything of real and personal interest be found out by interviewing those who then knew him. Of a hundred, nay, of a thousand or a million babies,--and though I cannot speak as a woman, it seems to me (except, perhaps, for a livelier interest and pleasure among them in their infant appearance) that everything I am saying applies equally to babies of that fascinating s.e.x,--the trivial details observed by those who are nearest them are practically identical. They thump their heads. They chew their fingers. They try to feed their toes; and, sillier yet, they try to feed them with things that are obviously inedible. And so forth. And so forth. If Dr. Johnson, actually shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with him, had kept a record, the result would have been very much like the records that mothers now keep in what, unless I am mistaken, are called "Baby Books."

If you've seen one Baby Book, as the cynical old man said about circuses, you've seen all of 'em.

Nor does any man take pleasure in preserving and reading over his own Baby Book. Hercules, to be sure, might have been interested to read in his mother's handwriting,--"_Tuesday._ An eventful day. Two big, horrid Snakes came in from the garden, and got in Darling's cradle, frightening Nurse into hysterics; but Darling only cooed and strangled them both with his dear, strong little hands. He gets stronger and cunninger every day. When the horrid Snakes were taken away from him, he cried and said, 'Atta! Atta!'"

But Hercules was an exceptionally interesting baby; and the average Baby Book records nothing that a grown man can regard with pride, and much, if he has any sensitiveness at all, that must make him blush. Nothing but respect for his mother, it is almost safe to say, would withhold him from hurrying the incriminating doc.u.ment to the cellar, and cremating it in the furnace.

For in the beginning Captain William Kidd, George Washington, Dr.

Johnson, the writer of this essay, and even the editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," looked and behaved very much alike. And so, for that matter, did little Moll Cutpurse and little Susan B. Anthony. So far as anybody could then have said, Captain Kidd might have become a thoughtful, law-abiding essayist, and I a pirate, handicapped, indeed, by changed conditions of maritime traffic, but unconscientiously doing my wicked best.

As the twig is bent, says the proverb, so is the tree inclined; but these little twigs are bent already, and I humbly submit, with all respect to my scientific friends, and their white mice and their guinea pigs, that where and how it happened remains an insoluble mystery.

Little as I know about myself, I know that I am neither a white mouse nor a guinea pig. And this, mark you, is no mere conceit. Scientists themselves have decided that when babies, in that remote past when they first began really to interest their parents, and the human mother, the most pathetic figure of that primitive world, first began the personal and affectionate observation that was to develop slowly, over millions of years, until it found expression in the first Baby Book--scientists, themselves, I say, have decided that, then and there, you and I, intelligent reader, began to differ essentially from every other known kind of mammal. There appeared--oh, wonder!--something psychical as well as physical about us; but _where it came from_, they cannot tell us.

"Natural selection," so John Fiske once summed up this opinion, "began to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes." Little enough there seems to have been to start with; little enough, indeed, there seems to be now--yet enough more to encourage us to believe that Baby is a lot further along in the right direction than he was a good many million years ago. And with this helpful conviction, Baby himself, whether he will grow up to write essays or commit picturesque murder, seems reasonably well satisfied. We solemn adults, standing around the crib, may well admire, not so much the pinkness and chubbiness of his toes, as the pinkness and chubbiness (if I may so express it) of his simple satisfaction with the mere fact of existence, his simple faith in the Universe. And when we think how impossible it is to think of its beginning, we, too, may capture something of this infantile optimism.

It is by no means impossible (though not susceptible of scientific proof) that Baby may have a life of his own; and, if we may a.s.sume Hercules weeping and saying, "Atta! Atta!"--because shrewd observers of babyhood declare it to be characteristic of babies to say, "Atta! Atta!"

when something desirable, in this case two dead snakes, is removed from their range of vision,--may we not a.s.sume also a universal language of babies, and a place, such as it may be, from which they have emigrated?

Here, indeed, one follows M. Maeterlinck, except that, in his judgment, unborn babies speak French. Such a theory is no help to the novelist, for in that case baby Mary Olivier's impressions of Mr. Olivier must be rendered in baby--a language equally unknown to Miss Sinclair and to her readers. Babies have been heard to say, for example, "Nja njan dada atta mama papa atta na-na-na hatta meen[)e]-meen[)e]-meen[)e] m[)o]mm m[)o]mma ao-u"--and who but another baby knows whether this may not be speech? The a.s.sumption that this is an effort to speak the language of the baby's elders is academic, as, for that matter, is the a.s.sumption that they are his elders. There may even be no baby at all; for, as Schopenhauer has almost brusquely put it, "The uneasiness that keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence."

But this, I confess, is far too deep for me.

Baby, baby in your cot, Are you there?--or are you not?

If you're not, then what of me!

Baby, _what_ and _where_ are we?

For all practical purposes, however, Baby is sufficiently real--substantial enough, indeed, as "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide"

shows in Exercise 24, to be lifted by his little feet and stood on his little head; but, mercifully adds the "Guide," "do not hold Baby on his head very long." For all practical purposes we must, and do, a.s.sume our own existence. "Here we are," as I have imagined Dr. Johnson saying to his innocent new-born comrade, "and we'll have to make the best of it."

n.o.body has thought of a better way, or any other way at all, for us to get here; and the familiar Biblical phrase, 'born again,' may perhaps be more literal than we are wont to imagine, and apply to this world as well as the next. Baby himself may just have been born again. That innocent-seeming and rather silly-sounding monologue, which we flatter ourselves is an earnest attempt to imitate our own speech,--"Nja njan dada atta mama papa atta na-na-na hatta meen[)e]-meen[)e]-meene[)e]

m[)o]mm m[)o]mma ao-u,"--may it not be the soliloquy of a gentle philosopher, or, again, the confession of an out-and-out rascal, talking to himself of his misdeeds, chuckling and cooing over them, indeed, before he forgets them in this new state of being? May not Papa, waggishly shaking his forefinger and saying, "You little rascal, you,"

be speaking with a truthfulness which, if known, would make him sick?

Meanwhile, as says "The Baby's Physical Culture Guide," "Don't jerk Baby round. Never rush through his exercises, but talk to him in a happy, encouraging way. When he is able to talk he will be glad to tell you what great, good fun he has been having."

So speaks, I think, a mother's imagination; in sober reality, even the great good fun of Exercise 24 will be forgotten. Which is perhaps why, although I have heard men wish they could again be children, I have never heard any man say he would like to be a baby.

II

TO BE A BOY

_I love dearly to watch the boys at their play. How gayly they pitch and catch their baseball with their strong little hands! How blithely they run from base to base! How merrily their voices come to me across the green; for, although I cannot hear what they say, I know it expresses a young, innocent joy in this big, good world. Yet even in this Garden there is a Serpent, and one day two of the little innocents quarreled and came to blows. A real fight! I soon hurried out and stopped that, but the sight of their little faces distorted with rage, and one poor boy bleeding at the nose, upset me for quite a time._--AN OLD MAID'S WINDOW.

In "The Boyhood of Great Men," published by Harper and Brothers, in 1853, but now, I fear, very little read, it is told of Sir Isaac Newton that "An accident first fired him to strive for distinction in the school-room. The boy who was immediately above him in the cla.s.s, after treating him with a tyranny hard to bear, was cruel enough to kick him in the stomach, with a severity that caused great pain. Newton resolved to have his revenge, but of such a kind as was natural to his reasoning mind, even at that immature age. He determined to excel his oppressor in their studies and lessons; and, setting himself to the task with zeal and diligence, he never halted in his course till he had found his way to the top of the cla.s.s; thus exhibiting and leaving a n.o.ble example to others of his years similarly situated. Doubtless, after this, he would heartily forgive his crestfallen persecutor, who could not but henceforth feel ashamed of his unmanly conduct, while Newton would feel the proud consciousness of having done his duty after the bravest and n.o.blest fashion which it is in the power of man to adopt."

We cannot all be Sir Isaac Newtons, and, although I may wish for a pa.s.sing moment that some st.u.r.dy little school-fellow had kicked me too in the stomach, the resulting sequence of events would probably have been different, and the world would have gained little or nothing by my natural indignation. Having an impartial mind, I should like to know also _why_ Sir Isaac was kicked in the stomach, and what became afterward of the boy who kicked him. As his fame grew in the world, the reflected glory of having thus kicked Sir Isaac Newton in the stomach would presumably have brightened in proportion, but, lacking other distinction, the kicker served his evolutionary purpose and has now vanished.

But this much remains of him--that his little foot kicks also in the stomach the widely accepted fallacy that boyhood is an age of unalloyed gold, to which every man now and then looks back and vainly yearns to be a boy again. "Oh! happy years!"--so sighed the poet Byron,--"once more, who would not be a boy?" And so to-day, as one may at least deduce from his general newspaper reading, sigh all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States. Not, indeed, for a boyhood like Sir Isaac Newton's, but for the standard American boyhood, to which, in theory, every ageing American looks back with tender reminiscence--that happy time when he went barefooted, played "hookey" from school, fished in the running brook with a bent pin for a hook, and swam, with other future bankers, merchants, clerks, clergymen, physicians and surgeons, confidence-men, pickpockets, authors, actors, burglars, etc., etc., in an old swimming-hole. The democracy of the old swimming-hole is, in fact, the democracy of the United States, naked and unashamed; and even in the midst of a wave of crime (one might almost imagine), if the victim should say suddenly to the hold-up man,--

"Oh, do you remember the ole swimmin' hole, And the hours we spent there together; Where the oak and the chestnut o'ershadowed the bowl, And tempered the hot summer weather?

Ah, sweet were those hours together we spent In innocent laughter and joy!

How little we knew at the time what it meant To be just a boy--just a boy!"

--the hold-up man would drop his automatic gun, and the two would dissolve on each other's necks in a flood of sympathetic tears.

It is a pleasant and harmless fallacy, and I for one would not destroy it; I am no such stickler for exact.i.tude that I would take away from any man whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a barefoot boy, even if circ.u.mstances were against him and his mother as adamant in her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is indestructible: the symbols may not have been universal, but it is true enough of boyhood that time then seems to be without limit; and this comfortable, unthinking sense of immortality is what men have lost and would fain recover. One forgets how cruelly slow moved the hands of the school-room clock through the last, long, lingering, eternal fifteen minutes of the daily life-sentence. One forgets how feverishly the seconds chased each other, faster than human feet could follow, when one's little self was late for school, and the clamor of the distant bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the opportunity for stout heart to play "hookey," and to lure the finny tribe with a poor worm impaled on a bent pin; and that, in the opinion of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always did. But in the painful reality most of us, I think, tried to overtake those feverish seconds, seeking indeed to outrun time, and somehow or other, though the bell had stopped ringing, get unostentatiously into our little seats before it stopped. And so we ran, and ran, and ran, lifting one leaden foot after the other with hopeless determination, in a silent, nightmare world where the road was made of glue and the very trees along the way turned their leaves to watch us drag slowly by.

Little respect we would have had then for the poet Byron and his "Ah!

happy years! once more, who would not be a boy?"

But even when time seemed to stand still, or go too fast, we had no consciousness that the complicated clock of our individual existence could ever run down and stop; and so happily careless were we of this treasure, that we often wished to be men! "When I was young," says the author of "The Boy's Week-Day Book,"--another volume that is not read nowadays as much as it used to be,--

I doubted not the time would come, When grown to man's estate, That I would be a n.o.ble 'squire, And live among the great.

It was a proud, aspiring thought, That should have been exiled:-- I wish I was more humble now Than when I was a child.

I wonder what proud, aspiring thought Uncle Jones, as he called himself, just then had in mind; but it was evidently no wish to be a boy again: perhaps he meditated matrimony.