The Story of a Child Part 1

The Story of a Child.

by Pierre Loti.

PREFACE

There is to-day a widely spread new interest in child life, a desire to get nearer to children and understand them. To be sure child study is not new; every wise parent and every sympathetic teacher has ever been a student of children; but there is now an effort to do more consciously and systematically what has always been done in some way.

In the few years since this modern movement began much has been accomplished, yet there is among many thoughtful people a strong reaction from the hopes awakened by the enthusiastic heralding of the newer aspects of psychology. It had been supposed that our science would soon revolutionize education; indeed, taking the wish for the fact, we began to talk about the new and the old education (both mythical) and boast of our millennium. I would not underrate the real progress, the expansion of educational activities, the enormous gains made in many ways; but the millennium! The same old errors meet us in new forms, the old problems are yet unsolved, the waste is so vast that we sometimes feel thankful that we cannot do as much as we would, and that Nature protects children from our worst mistakes.

What is the source of this disappointment? Is it not that education, like all other aspects of life, can never be reduced to mere science? We need science, it must be increasingly the basis of all life; but exact science develops very slowly, and meantime we must live. Doubtless the time will come when our study of mind will have advanced so far that we can lay down certain great principles as tested laws, and thus clarify many questions. Even then the solution of the problem will not be in the enunciation of the theoretic principle, but will lie in its application to practice; and that application must always depend upon instinct, tact, appreciation, as well as upon the scientific law. Even the aid that science can contribute is given slowly; meanwhile we must work with these children and lift them to the largest life.

It is in relation to this practical work of education that our effort to study children gets its human value. There are always two points of view possible with reference to life. From the standpoint of nature and science, individuals count for little. Nature can waste a thousand acorns to raise one oak, hundreds of children may be sacrificed that a truth may be seen. But from the ethical and human point of view the meaning of all life is in each individual. That one child should be lost is a kind of ruin to the universe.

It is this second point of view which every parent and every teacher must take; and the great practical value of our new study of children is that it brings us into personal relation with the child world, and so aids in that subtle touch of life upon life which is the very heart of education.

It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have a high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood, and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be a.s.sociated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to read the lesson of the whole.

It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the t.i.tle of his own self-study.

Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because interpretative of the spirit.

It is peculiarly necessary that teachers hara.s.sed with the routine of their work, and parents distracted with the mult.i.tude of details of daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.

The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.

How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any one who will appreciatively respond to it.

A better ill.u.s.tration of the subtle worth of such literature, in developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is hardly a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was done to him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of impressions through the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of personality most necessary to understand. All that Loti is and has been is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child. Exquisite sensitiveness to impressions whether of body or soul, the egotism of a nature much occupied with its own subjective feelings, a being atune in response to the haunting melody of the sunset, and the vague mystery of the seas, a subtle melancholy that comes from the predominance of feeling over masculine power of action, leading one to drift like Francesca with the winds of emotion, terrible or sweet, rather than to fix the tide of the universe in the centre of the forceful deed--all these qualities are in the dreams of the child as in the life of the man.

And the style?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of his music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child he describes.

Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness. Such a type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it--the haunting hunger for the permanence of impressions that come and go, which pulsates through the book till we can scarcely keep back the tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries--Death and Life (and which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on--the fate of a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of fancy and speculation with the swift sword-stroke of an heroic deed.

It is fortunate that the translator has caught the subtle charm of Loti's style, so difficult to render in another speech, in an amazing degree. This is peculiarly necessary here, for accuracy of translation means giving the delicate changes of color and elusive chords of music that voice the moods and impressions of which the book is made.

Let us read the revelation of this book not primarily to condemn or praise, or even to estimate and define, but to appreciate. If it be true that no one ever looked into the Kingdom of Heaven except through the eyes of a little child, if it be true that the eyes of every unspoiled child are such a window, take the vision and be thankful. If, perchance, this window should open toward strange abysses that reach vaguely away, or upon dark meadows that lie ghost-like in the mingled light, if out of the abyss rises, undefined, the vast, dim shape of the mystery, and wakens in us the haunting memories of dead yesterdays and forgotten years, if we seem carried past the day into the gray vastness that is beyond the sunset and before the dawn, let us recognize that the mystery or mysteries, the annunciation of the Infinite is a little child.

EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS.

TO HER MAJESTY ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ROUMANIA.

December, 188-

I am almost too old to undertake this book, for a sort of night is falling about me; where shall I find the words vital and young enough for the task?

To-morrow, at sea, I will commence it; at least I will endeavor to put into it all that was best of myself at a time when as yet there was nothing very bad.

So that romantic love may find no place in it, except in the illusory form of a vision, I will end it at an early age.

And to the sovereign lady whose suggestion it was that I write it, I offer it as a humble token of my respect and admiration.

PIERRE LOTI.

THE STORY OF A CHILD.

CHAPTER I.

It is with some degree of awe that I touch upon the enigma of my impressions at the commencement of my life. I am almost doubtful whether they had reality within my own experience, or whether they are not, rather, recollections mysteriously transmitted--I feel an almost sacred hesitation when I would fathom their depths.

I came forth from the darkness of unconsciousness very gradually, for my mind was illumined only fitfully, but then by outbursts of splendor that compelled and fascinated my infant gaze. When the light was extinguished, I lapsed once more into the non-consciousness of the new-born animal, of the tiny plant just germinating.

The history of my earliest years is that of a child much indulged and petted to whom nothing of moment happened; and into whose narrow, protected life no jarring came that was not foreseen, and the shock of which was not deadened with solicitous care. In my manners I was always very tractable and submissive. That I may not make my recital tedious, I will note without continuity and without the proper transitions those moments which are impressed upon my mind because of their strangeness, those moments that are still so vividly remembered, although I have forgotten many poignant sorrows, many lands, adventures, and places.

I was at that time like a fledgling swallow living high up in a niche in the eaves, who from time to time peeps out over the top of its nest with its little bright eyes. With the eyes of imagination it sees into the deeps of s.p.a.ce, although to the actual vision only a courtyard and street are visible; and it sees into depths which it will presently need to journey through. It was during such moments of clairvoyance that I had a vision of the infinity of which before my present life I was a part. Then, in spite of myself, my consciousness flagged, and for days together I lived the tranquil, subconscious life of early childhood.

At first my mind, altogether unimpressed and undeveloped, may be compared to a photographer's apparatus fitted with its sensitized gla.s.s.

Objects insufficiently lighted up make no impression upon the virgin plates; but when a vivid splendor falls upon them, and when they are encircled by disks of light, these once dim objects now engrave themselves upon the gla.s.s. My first recollections are of bright summer days and sparkling noon times,--or more truly, are recollections of the light of wood fires burning with great ruddy flames.

CHAPTER II.

As if it were yesterday I recall the evening when I suddenly discovered that I could run and jump; and I remember that I was intoxicated by the delicious sensation almost to the point of falling.

This must have been at about the commencement of my second winter. At the sad hour of twilight I was in the dining-room of my parents' house, which room had always seemed a very vast one to me. At first, I was quiet, made so, no doubt, by the influence of the environing darkness, for the lamp was not yet lighted. But as the hour for dinner approached, a maid-servant came in and threw an armful of small wood into the fireplace to reanimate the dying fire. Immediately there was a beautiful bright light, and the leaping flames illuminated everything, and waves of light spread to the far part of the room where I sat. The flames danced and leaped with a twining motion ever higher and higher and more gayly, and the tremulous shadows along the wall ran to their hiding-places--oh! how quickly I arose overwhelmed with admiration for I recollect that I had been sitting at the feet of my great-aunt Bertha (at that time already very old) who half dozed in her chair. We were near a window through which the gray night filtered; I was seated upon one of those high, old-fashioned foot-stools with two steps, so convenient for little children who can from that vantage ground put their heads in grandmother's or grand-aunt's lap, and wheedle so effectually.

I arose in ecstasy, and approached the flames; then in the circle of light which lay upon the carpet I began to walk around and around and to turn. Ever faster and faster I went, until suddenly I felt an unwonted elasticity run through my limbs, and in a twinkling I invented a new and amusing style of motion; it was to push my feet very hard against the floor, and then to lift them up together suddenly for a half second.

When I fell, up I sprang and recommenced my play. Bang! Bang! With every increasing noise I went against the floor, and at last I began to feel a singular but agreeable giddiness in my head. I knew how to jump! I knew how to run!

I am convinced that that is my earliest distinct recollection of great joyousness.

"Dear me! What is the matter with the child this evening?" asked my great-aunt Bertha, with some anxiety. And I hear again the unexpected sound of her voice.

But I still kept on jumping. Like those tiny foolish moths which of an evening revolve about the light of a lamp, I went around in the luminous circle which widened and retracted, ever taking form from the wavering light of the flames. And I remember all of this so vividly that my eyes can still see the smallest details of the texture of the carpet which was the scene of the event. It was of durable stuff called home-spun, woven in the country by native weavers. (Our house was still furnished as it had been in my maternal grandmother's time, as she had arranged it after she had quitted the Island, and come to the mainland.--A little later I will speak of this Island which had already a mysterious attraction for my youthful imagination.--It was a simple country house, notable for its Huguenot austerity; and it was a home where immaculate cleanliness and extreme order were the sole luxuries.)

In the circle of light, which grew ever more and more narrow, I still jumped; but as I did so I had thoughts that were of an intensity not habitual with me. At the same time that my tiny limbs discovered their power, my spirit also knew itself; a burst of light overspread my mind where dawning ideas still showed forth feebly. And it is without doubt to the inner awakening that this fleeting moment of my life owes its existence, owes undoubtedly its permanency in memory. But vainly I seek for the words, that seem ever to escape me, through which to express my elusive emotions. . . . Here in the dining-room I look about and see the chairs standing the length of the wall, and I am reminded of the aged grandmother, grand-aunts and aunts who always come at a certain hour and seat themselves in them. Why are they not here now? At this moment I would like to feel their protecting presence about me. Probably they are upstairs in their rooms on the second floor; between them and me there is the dim stairway, the stairway that I people with shadowy beings the thought of which makes me tremble. . . . And my mother? I would wish most especially for her, but I know that she has gone out, gone out into the long streets which in my imagination have no end. I had myself gone to the door with her and had asked her: "When returnest thou?" And she had promised me that she would return speedily. Later they told me that when I was a child I would never permit any members of the family to leave the house to go walking or visiting without first obtaining their a.s.surance of a speedy homecoming. "You will come back soon?" I would say, and I always asked the question anxiously, as I followed them to the door.

My mother had departed, and it gave my heart a feeling of heaviness to know that she was out. Out in the streets! I was content not to be there where it was cold and dark, where little children so easily lost their way,--how snug it was to be within doors before the fire that warmed me through and through; how nice it was to be at home! I had never realized it until this evening--doubtless it was my first distinct feeling of attachment to hearth and home, and I was sadly troubled at the thought of the immense, strange world lying beyond the door. It was then that I had, for the first time, a conscious affection for my aged aunts and grand-aunts, who cared for me in infancy, whom I longed to have seated around me at this dim, sad, twilight hour.

In the meantime the once bright and playful flames had died down, the armful of wood was consumed, and as the lamp was not lighted, the room was quite dark. I had already stumbled upon the home-spun carpet, but as I had not hurt myself, I recommenced my amusing play. For an instant I thought to experience a new but strange joy by going into the shadowy and distant recesses of the room; but I was overtaken there by an indefinable terror of something which I cannot name, and I hastily took refuge in the dim circle of light and looked behind me with a shudder to see whether anything had followed me from out of those dark corners.

Finally the flames died away entirely, and I was really afraid; aunt Bertha sat motionless upon her chair, and although I felt that her eyes were upon me I was not rea.s.sured. The very chairs, the chairs ranged about the room, began to disquiet me because their long shadows, that stretched behind them exaggerating the height of ceiling and length of wall, moved restlessly like souls in the agonies of death. And especially there was a half-open door that led into a very dark hall, which in its turn opened into a large empty parlor absolutely dark. Oh!

with what intensity I fixed my eyes upon that door to which I would not for the world have turned my back!