THE CHILDREN

Contents

Fellow Travellers with a Bird, I. Fellow Travellers with a Bird, II. Children in MidwinterThat Pretty PersonOut of TownExpressionUnder the Early StarsThe Man with Two HeadsChildren in BurlesqueAuthorshipLettersThe FieldsThe Barren ShoreThe BoyIllnessThe Young ChildrenFair and BrownReal Childhood

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, I. 

To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointedof your pathos, and set freshly free from all the pre-occupations. Youcannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do notcompose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, butthe note alters. So with the uncovenated ways of a child you keep notryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where youtarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You arethe fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of timeto your footing. 

No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of fouryears old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet andunimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls. "A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heightsand play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was adignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be alady frog. " None ever said their good things before these indeliberateauthors. Even their own kind--children--have not preceded them. Nochild in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whosefather made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, andhad 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 thingsfor 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 worthpursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don't like fat. "

The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to besoothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned inthe Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she shouldforget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject--herwishes. "Do you know, " she said, without loss of time, "what I shouldlike best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!" Her motherwas so overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offeras to the dolls. But the whistle seemed practicable. "It is for me towhistle for cabs, " said the child, with a sudden moderation, "when I goto parties. " Another morning she came down radiant, "Did you hear agreat noise in the miggle of the night? That was me crying. I criedbecause I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into hisnose. "

The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no, nothingfeminine--in this adult world. "I've got a lotter than you, " is the wordof a very young egotist. An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern'tI, mother?" He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "thebacky-garden. " A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder atluncheon--at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am thefavourite of the crust. " Moreover, if an author set himself to inventthe naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he would hardly light upon the device of the little _troupe_ who, havingno footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of--candle-shades!

"It's _jolly_ dull without you, mother, " says a little girl who--gentlestof the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes nosecret. But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats ofmetathesis, about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the"stand-wash, " the "sweeping-crosser, " the "sewing chamine. " Genoesepeasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian. 

Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they shouldby any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually. ALondon little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with herpointing finger, and names it "bird. " Her brother, who wants to playwith a bronze Japanese lobster, ask "Will you please let me have thattiger?"

At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the mosttouching 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" ofother things of interest--especially chocolate creams taken forsafe-keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me to-day? Nurse isgoing out, will you save me, mother?" The same little variant uponcommon use is in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help inthe arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at your ease. "

A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, wastaken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing fromher own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. Ashe dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, shenoted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for theymight be those of the _fournisseurs_ of her friend. "That is his breadshop, and that is his book shop. And that, mother, " she said finally, with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming _parterre_ ofconfectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose, is where he buys his sugar pigs. "

In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intentupon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector. We have allheard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collectingcocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs hernothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names over allshop-windows. No hoard was ever lighter than hers. "I began three weeksago next Monday, mother, " she says with precision, "and I have got thirty-nine. " "Thirty-nine what?" "Smiths. "

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A BIRD, II. 

The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collectingtogether a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of theirkind. In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is therejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reportedthem. They do not, for example, say "me is;" their natural reply to "areyou?" is "I are. " One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will havenothing but the nominative pronoun. "Lift I up and let I see itraining, " she bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes, "Lift I upand let I see it not raining. "

An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered forher by maternal authority. She wore the garments under protest, and withsome resentment. At the same time it was evident that she took nopleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend. Hehad imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and thedecreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"abrown tress. " She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress, " andshe silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory ofProvidence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy. Theunpractised ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrasefor snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. "That, " she said moreor less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story. "

The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the yearsof mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a current word intouse, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save theinterruption of a pause for search. I have certainly detected, inchildren old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word oftheir own making is as good a communication as another, and asintelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction among themthat the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasionbefalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day bringsforward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know howirritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks tobelong to the common world. 

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of achild on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so muchconfidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simpleadventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anythingstrange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trustsgenially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight ofsunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowinghimself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets. " This wassimple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very littleolder. "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 furtherquestion possible after an explanation that was presented thus chargedwith meaning. 

To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhatat random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to expressa meaning well realized--a personal matter. Questioned as to the eatingof an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "Itook them just to appetize my hunger. " As she betrayed a familiarknowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was askedwhether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables ontheir way from school. "I sometimes go in there, mother, " she confessed;"but I generally speculate outside. "

Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny withsomething so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Drydendoes the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. Butsometimes 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 withsomething of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of thesweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her to write, she and hermother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthyof a pen:--"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of thatarticle, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such aunletterary article. I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will notwrite any more such unconventionan trash. "

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 sheis, mother, then they would know she is onward. They can see she ispretty, but they can't know she is such a onward baby. "

Thus speak the naturally unreluctant; but there are other children who intime betray a little consciousness and a slight _mefiance_ as to wherethe adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure. Thesechildren 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 donot feel too sure. A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enoughto cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cupof tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feignedindignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "theinfusion. " "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother, " said the child; andthen, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was nottold, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon cupleft the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"thenceforward. 

CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER

Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise tosee them blooming in winter. Their tenderness, their down, their colour, their fulness--which is like that of a thick rose or of a tightgrape--look out of season. Children in the withering wind are like thesoft golden-pink roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathinga southern calm on the north wind. The child has something better thanwarmth in the cold, something more subtly out of place and moredelicately contrary; and that is coolness. To be cool in the cold is thesign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien from the common conditions ofthe world. It is to have a naturally, and not an artificially, differentand separate climate. 

We can all be more or less warm--with fur, with skating, with tea, withfire, 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 everywhereelse; he is "more lovely and more temperate" than the summer day and thanthe winter day alike. He overcomes both heat and cold by anotherclimate, which is the climate of life; but that victory of life is moredelicate and more surprising in the tyranny of January. By the sight andthe touch of children, we are, as it were, indulged with something finerthan a fruit or a flower in untimely bloom. The childish bloom is alwaysuntimely. The fruit and flower will be common later on; the strawberrieswill be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus dull in its day. Buta child is a perpetual _primeur_. 

Or rather he is not in truth always untimely. Some few days in the yearare his own season--unnoticed days of March or April, soft, fresh andequal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun. Then he looks asthough he had his brief season, and ceases for a while to seem strange. 

It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year tochildren; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman weare naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviouslytheir own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, withoutrenewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that welook for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children--for awaxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shallnot be final, shall not be fatal. But every winter shows us how humanthey are, and how they are little pilgrims and visitants among the thingsthat look like their kin. For every winter shows them free from the eastwind; more perfectly than their elders, they enclose the climate of life. And, moreover, with them the climate of life is the climate of the springof life; the climate of a human March that is sure to make a constantprogress, and of a human April that never hesitates. The child "breathesApril and May"--an inner April and his own May. 

The winter child looks so much the more beautiful for the season as hismost brilliant uncles and aunts look less well. He is tender and gay inthe east wind. Now more than ever must the lover beware of making acomparison between the beauty of the admired woman and the beauty of achild. He is indeed too wary ever to make it. So is the poet. Ascomparisons are necessary to him, he will pay a frankly impossiblehomage, and compare a woman's face to something too fine, to something itnever could emulate. The Elizabethan lyrist is safe among lilies andcherries, roses, pearls, and snow. He undertakes the beautiful office offlattery, and flatters with courage. There is no hidden reproach in thepraise. Pearls and snow suffer, in a sham fight, a mimic defeat thatdoes them no harm, and no harm comes to the lady's beauty from acompetition so impossible. She never wore a lily or a coral in thecolours of her face, and their beauty is not hers. But here is thesecret: she is compared with a flower because she could not endure to becompared with a child. That would touch her too nearly. There would bethe human texture and the life like hers, but immeasurably more lovely. No colour, no surface, no eyes of woman have ever been comparable withthe colour, the surface, and the eyes of childhood. And no poet has everrun the risk of such a defeat. Why, it is defeat enough for a woman tohave her face, however well-favoured, close to a child's, even if thereis no one by who should be rash enough to approach them still nearer by acomparison. 

This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than thatbeauty of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred, and which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily. Thereare, indeed, other adult beauties, but those are such as make noallusions to the garden. What is here affirmed is that the beautifulwoman who is widely and wisely likened to the flowers, which areinaccessibly more beautiful, must not, for her own sake, be likened tothe always accessible child. 

Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is muchbeyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition, thiscompleteness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their beauty offinish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as yearsare added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection. Abloom disappears, for instance. In some little children the whole face, and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and thegrowth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft asbloom. Look then at the eyebrows themselves. Their line is as definiteas in later life, but there is in the child the flush given by theexceeding fineness of the delicate hairs. Moreover, what becomes, afterwards, of the length and the curl of the eyelash? What is there ingrowing up that is destructive of a finish so charming as this?

Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face "from the right orfrom the left" when her portrait was a-painting. She was an observantwoman, and liked to be lighted from the front. It is a light from theright 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 finishingand parting caress that infancy has given to his face. The down willthen be found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red ofhis cheek. His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are notmuch harder than petals. 

To return to the child in January. It is his month for the laying up ofdreams. No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even witha majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs nowand then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a charmand glory mingled with uncertain dreams. Never forgotten, and yet nevercertainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening. Whenmany and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there neverwas any kind of doubt, has been long forgotten, that evening--as to whichall is doubt--is impossible to forget. In a few years it has become soremote that the history of Greece derives antiquity from it. In lateryears it is still doubtful, still a legend. 

The child never asked how much was fact. It was always so immeasurablylong ago that the sweet party happened--if indeed it happened. It had solong taken its place in that past wherein lurks all the antiquity of theworld. No one would know, no one could tell him, precisely whatoccurred. And who can know whether--if it be indeed a dream--he hasdreamt it often, or has dreamt once that he had dreamt it often? Thatdubious night is entangled in repeated visions during the lonely life achild lives in sleep; it is intricate with illusions. It becomes themost mysterious and the least worldly of all memories, a spiritual past. The word pleasure is too trivial for such a remembrance. A midwinterlong gone by contained the suggestion of such dreams; and the midwinterof this year must doubtless be preparing for the heart of many an ardentyoung child a like legend and a like antiquity. For the old it is a merepresent. 

THAT PRETTY PERSON

During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, onesignificant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlivedcontroversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--aninteresting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. Thisis a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value ofprocess, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring ofprogress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more thanresignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for theirtransitoriness. 

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 forthe 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 shouldacknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions. 

But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but apatient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred yearsago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full statureof body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future hunting. If hersong is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results oftime, and has submitted her heart to experience. Childhood is a time ofdanger; "Would it were done. " But, meanwhile, the right thing is to putit to sleep and guard its slumbers. It will pass. She sings propheciesto the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while shespins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn. She bids good speed. 

John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child--"thatpretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was chieflyprecious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man henever 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 threelanguages. " As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done atthat little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost theentire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could makecongruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and _vice versa_, construeand prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made aconsiderable progress in Comenius's 'Janua, ' and had a strong passion forGreek. "

Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is notto be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is thevery fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hastytimes. All being favorable, the child of Evelyn's studious home wouldhave done all these things in the course of nature within a few years. Itwas the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, toEvelyn, so exquisite. The course of nature had not any beauty in hiseyes. It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was notadmired for the majesty of its unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mournswith him "the strangely hopeful child, " who--without Comenius's "Janua"and without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known it, anappropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning andclosing a separate expectation every day of his five years. 

Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flatteringto the estate of man. They thought their little boy strangely hopefulbecause he was so quick on his way to be something else. They lost thetimely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes. Andyet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!

It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, mustrightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not slightingit, 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 theworld has lately been converted to change. 

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in theact. 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 wearapparent wings. 

_Tout passe_. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for thefruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter andcontain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this questionmost arbitrarily as to the life of man. 

All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, thissuppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time offulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they hadthe illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this unpausinglife. 

Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon asmight be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight yearsold they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to beproud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness byan "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 ofeight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, inafter years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of, and hardly acknowledges. It is difficult to imagine what childhood musthave been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everythingthat was proper to five years old was defect. A strange good conceit ofthemselves and of their own ages had those fathers. 

They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has nothingto say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it. Twice arechildren, not his own, mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to thewedding of a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility. Another time he stands by, in a Frenchhospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes afrightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience. " "The use Imade of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not beensubject to this deplorable infirmitie. " This is what he says. 

See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed inliterature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there werein all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon beingchildren; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, forexample, had no little girls. There was always Cupid, and there were theprosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up hislittle brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might becalled Tommy. But there were no "little radiant girls. " Now and then an"Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always amatter of sewing and reading. As for the little girl saints, even whenthey were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slippedthrough their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunatesuitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaevalmind, but mars them for ours. 

So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhathamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his mostadmirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in theCourt of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "whopassed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the leaststain or tincture in her christall. " She held her state with men andmaids for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as thatof never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instructionto the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might givethe least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there didusually assume, " refused the addresses of the "greatest persons, " and wasas famous for her beauty as for her wit. One would like to forget theage at which she did these things. When she began her service she waseleven. When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she wasnot thirteen. 

Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, andheroines, therefore, were of those ages. The poets turned April intoMay, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if theyshortened and abridged the spring of their many songs. The particularyear they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say afine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, andellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as Keats a poet would nothave patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimelyflowers. The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as hehas it. 

The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear oflosing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper with thebloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen in the_Spectator_ has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last sixyears. " The famous letter describing the figure, the dance, the wit, thestockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed to be written by a girlof thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can. " Sheadds, "I have a good portion which they cannot hinder me of. " Thiscorrespondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they havebought their wedding clothes. " There was no sense of childhood in an agethat could think this an opportune pleasantry. 

But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a latercentury--an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and allthings complete in their day because it is their day, and has itsappointed end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than asentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children to seem, at last, something else than a defect. 

OUT OF TOWN

To be on a _villeggiatura_ with the children is to surprise them in waysand words not always evident in the London house. The narrow lodgingscause you to hear and overhear. Nothing is more curious to listen tothan a young child's dramatic voice. The child, being a boy, assumes adeep, strong, and ultra-masculine note, and a swagger in his walk, andgives himself the name of the tallest of his father's friends. The toneis not only manly; it is a tone of affairs, and withal careless; it isintended to suggest business, and also the possession of a top-hat and apipe, 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 thanlife; 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 officialvoice at its very best: "No, little boy, I won't!" It was evident thatthe infant was not assuming the character of his father's tallest friendthis time, but had taken a role more exalted. His little sister of ayear older seemed thoroughly to enjoy the humour of the situation. "Listen to him, mother. He's trying to talk like God. He often does. "

Bulls are made by a less imaginative child who likes to find some reasonfor things--a girl. Out at the work of picking blackberries, sheexplains, "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 ofdodges to disguise her fear, which she has evidently resolved to keep toherself. She will set up a sudden song to distract attention from thefact that she is placing herself out of the dog's way, and she willpretend to turn to gather a flower, while she watches the creature out ofsight. On the other hand, prudence in regard to carts and bicycles isopenly displayed, and the infants are zealous to warn one another. Arider and his horse are called briefly "a norseback. "

Children, who see more things than they have names for, show a finecourage in taking any words that seem likely to serve them, withoutwasting time in asking for the word in use. This enterprise is mostactive at three and four years, when children have more than they cansay. So a child of those years running to pick up horse-chestnuts, forhim a new species, calls after his mother a full description of what hehas found, naming the things indifferently "dough-nuts" and "cocoa-nuts. "And another, having an anecdote to tell concerning the Thames and alittle brook that joins it near the house, calls the first the "front-sea" and the second the "back-sea. " There is no intention of takingliberties with the names of things--only a cheerful resolve to go on inspite of obstacles. It is such a spirit of liberty as most of us havefelt when we have dreamt of improvising a song or improvising a dance. The child improvises with such means as he has. 

This is, of course, at the very early ages. A little later--at eight ornine--there is a very clear-headed sense of the value of words. So thata little girl of that age, told that she may buy some fruit, and wishingto know her limits in spending, asks, "What mustn't it be more than?" Fora child, who has not the word "maximum" at hand, nothing could be moreprecise and concise. Still later, there is a sweet brevity that looksalmost like conscious expression, as when a boy writes from his firstboarding school: "Whenever I can't stop laughing I have only to think ofhome. "

Infinitely different as children are, they differ in nothing more than inthe degree of generosity. The most sensitive of children is a little gaygirl 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--forinstance, she cannot endure without a flush of pain to hear herselfcalled fat. But she always brings her little wound to him who haswounded her. The first confidant she seeks is the offender. If you havelaughed at her she will not hide her tears elsewhere than on yourshoulder. She confesses by her exquisite action at one her poor vanityand her humility. 

The worst of children in the country is their inveterate impulse to usedeath as their toy. Immediately on their discovery of some prettyinsect, one tender child calls to the other "Dead it. "

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 tothe level of their eyes, even then they are not greatly interested. Enormous clouds, erect, with the sun behind, do not gain their eyes. Whatis of annual interest is the dark. Having fallen asleep all the summerby daylight, and having awakened after sunrise, children find a stimulusof fun and fear in the autumn darkness outside the windows. There is afrolic with the unknown blackness, with the reflections, and with thecountry night. 

EXPRESSION

Strange to say, the eyes of children, whose minds are so small, expressintelligence better than do the greater number of adult eyes. DavidGarrick's were evidently unpreoccupied, like theirs. The look ofintelligence is outward--frankly directed upon external things; it isobservant, and therefore mobile without inner restlessness. For restlesseyes 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 insight, have many pauses as well as flights. This is the action ofintelligence, whereas the eyes of intellect are detained or darkened. 

Rational perception, with all its phases of humour, are best expressed bya child, who has few second thoughts to divide the image of his momentaryfeeling. His simplicity adds much to the manifestation of hisintelligence. The child is the last and lowest of rational creatures, for in him the "rational soul" closes its long downward flight with thebright final revelation. 

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, andis apt to cause us to exaggerate our sense of their expressiveness. Ananimal's eyes, at their best, are very slightly expressive; languor oralertness, the quick expectation, even the aloofness of doubt they areable to show, but the showing is mechanical; the human sentiment of thespectator adds the rest. 

All this simplicity the child has, at moments, with the divisions anddelicacies of the rational soul, also. His looks express the first, thelast, and the clearest humanity. He is the first by his youth and thelast by his lowliness. He is the beginning and the result of thecreation of man. 

UNDER THE EARLY STARS

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 insending 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 ofclose industries, breathing hard over choppings and poundings. But whenlate twilight comes, there comes also the punctual wildness. Thechildren will run and pursue, and laugh for the mere movement--it does sojog their spirits. 

What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatorydark? The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths andcrickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all fours. Thechildren lie in ambush and fall upon one another in the mimicry ofhunting. 

The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and arebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and the children are to gohome. But, with more or less of life and fire, they strike some blow forliberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual child, or thestroke of the conqueror; but something, something is done for freedomunder the early stars. 

This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict withthe weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy of menshould be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at sometime of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of thepoor. 

Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved bychildren. Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to beguile thetime. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another toplay. "Oh come, " she said, "and play with me at new maid. "

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 ofprehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity ofsome customs in mankind. But if the enquirers who appeal to thatbeginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek nofurther. See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in theirthralldom. Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction oftheir high antiquity weakens your hand. 

Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense ofmystery 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 asmust inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of theincalculable; and the songs themselves are old. _Le Bon RoiDagobert_ has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh. The nurse knows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that sheherself slept to when a child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in_Le Pont a' Avignon_, is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the_tete a tete of_ child and nurse, in a thousand little sequesteredrooms at night. _Malbrook_ would be comparatively modern, were not allthings that are sung to a drowsing child as distant as the day ofAbraham. 

If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some ofthem are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate racesthat are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the whitechild. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropicalnight. His closing eyes are filled with alien images. 

THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS

It is generally understood in the family that the nurse who menaces achild, whether with the supernatural or with simple sweeps, lions, ortigers--goes. The rule is a right one, for the appeal to fear maypossibly hurt a child; nevertheless, it oftener fails to hurt him. If heis prone to fears, he will be helpless under their grasp, without thehelp of human tales. The night will threaten him, the shadow willpursue, 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 andtempest of his blood. "The child shall not be frightened, " decreesineffectual 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 andcool, at their mercy. This is one of the points upon which a healthychild resembles the Japanese. Whatever that extreme Oriental may be inwar and diplomacy, whatever he may be at London University, or whateverhis plans of Empire, in relation to the unseen world he is a child atplay. He hides himself, he hides his eyes and pretends to believe thathe is hiding, he runs from the supernatural and laughs for the fun ofrunning. 

So did a child, threatened for his unruliness with the revelation of theman with two heads. The nurse must have had recourse to this man underacute provocation. The boy, who had profited well by every one of hisfour 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 adultact, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life, when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of settingforth. 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 himselfup to the last of his waking moments. Happily, in the search foramusement, he is apt to learn some habit or to cherish some toy, eitherof which may betray him and deliver him up to sleep, the enemy. Whatwonder, then, if a child who knows that everyone in the world desires hispeace and pleasure, should clamour for companionship in the firstreluctant minutes of bed? This child, being happy, did not weep for whathe wanted; he shouted for it in the rousing tones of his strength. Aftermany evenings of this he was told that this was precisely the vociferouskind of wakefulness that might cause the man with two heads to showhimself. 

Unable to explain that no child ever goes to sleep, but that sleep, onthe contrary, "goes" for a child, the little boy yet accepted thepenalty, believed in the man, and kept quiet for a time. 

There was indignation in the mother's heart when the child instructed heras to what might be looked for at his bedside; she used all her emphasisin assuring him that no man with two heads would ever trouble thoseinnocent eyes, for there was no such portent anywhere on earth. There isno such heart-oppressing task as the making of these assurances to achild, for whom who knows what portents are actually in wait! She foundhim, however, cowering with laughter, not with dread, lest the man withtwo heads should see or overhear. The man with two heads had become hisplay, and so was perhaps bringing about his sleep by gentler means thanthe nurse had intended. The man was employing the vacant minutes of thelittle creature's flight from sleep, called "going to sleep" in theinexact 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 themonstrous man in the ceiling, in a corner of the room that might be keptout of sight by the bed curtain. If that corner were left uncovered, thefear would grow stronger than the fun; "the man would see me, " said thelittle 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 hisman. The man was there, for he had been told so, and he was there towait for "naughty boys, " said the child, with cheerful self-condemnation. The little boy's voice was somewhat hushed, because of the four ears ofthe listener, but it did not falter, except when his mother's argumentsagainst the existence of the man seemed to him cogent and likely to gainthe day. Then for the first time the boy was a little downcast, and thelight of mystery became dimmer in his gay eyes. 

CHILDREN IN BURLESQUE

Derision, which is so great a part of human comedy, has not spared thehumours of children. Yet they are fitter subjects for any other kind ofjesting. In the first place they are quite defenceless, but besides andbefore this, it might have been supposed that nothing in a child couldprovoke the equal passion of scorn. Between confessed unequals scorn isnot even suggested. Its derisive proclamation of inequality has no stingand no meaning where inequality is natural and manifest. 

Children rouse the laughter of men and women; but in all that laughterthe tone of derision is more strange a discord than the tone of angerwould be, or the tone of theological anger and menace. These, littlechildren have had to bear in their day, but in the grim and seriousmoods--not in the play--of their elders. The wonder is that childrenshould 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 Englishart 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 probablyalways a mere reflection of the parents' vulgarity. None the less it isan unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity of father ormother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable resentmentof derision. 

John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn thatwas not angry, but familiar. It is true that the poor child had firstbeen burlesqued by the unchildish aspect imposed upon him by his dress, which presented him, without the beauties of art or nature, to all theunnatural ironies. Leech did but finish him in the same spirit, withdots for the childish eyes, and a certain form of face which is bestdescribed as a fat square containing two circles--the inordinate cheeksof that ignominious baby. That is the child as _Punch_ in Leech's daypreserved him, the latest figure of the then prevailing domestic railleryof the domestic. 

In like manner did Thackeray and Dickens, despite all their sentiment. Children were made to serve both the sentiment and the irony betweenwhich those two writers, alike in this, stood double-minded. Thackeray, writing of his snobs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse snobthan his snob-child. There are snob-children not only in the bookdedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels. There is afemale snob-child in "Lovel the Widower, " who may be taken as a type, andthere are snob-children at frequent intervals in "Philip. " It is notcertain that Thackeray intended the children of Pendennis himself to beinnocent and exempt. 

In one of Dickens's early sketches there is a plot amongst the humorous_dramatis personae_, to avenge themselves on a little boy for the lackof tact whereby his parents have brought him with them to a party on theriver. The principal humorist frightens the child into convulsions. Theincident is the success of the day, and is obviously intended to havesome kind of reflex action in amusing the reader. In Dickens's maturerbooks 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 withthe maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, fromsome hideous terror. 

AUTHORSHIP

Authorship prevails in nurseries--at least in some nurseries. In many itis probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there hasnot been a large family without its magazine. The weak point of all thisliterature is its commonplace. The child's effort is to write somethingas much like as possible to the tedious books that are read to him; he isapt to be fluent and foolish. If a child simple enough to imitate werealso simple enough not to imitate he might write nursery magazines thatwould not bore us. 

As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageousspelling to make his stories go. "He, " however, is hardly the pronoun. The girls are the more active authors, and the more prosaic. What theywould write had they never read things written for them by the dull, itis 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 thewood where her aunt lived, she got down and pulled the donky on by thebridal . . . Alas! her troubles were not over yet, the donky would not gowhere she wanted it, instead of turning down Rose Lane it went downanother, which although Mrs. Bald did not know it led to a very deep anddangerous pond. The donky ran into the pond and Mrs. Bald was dround. "

To give a prosperous look to the magazine containing the serial storyjust quoted, a few pages of mixed advertisements are laboriously writtenout: "The Imatation of Christ is the best book in all the world. " "ReadThompson's poetry and you are in a world of delight. " "Barrat's gingerbeer is the only ginger beer to drink. " "The place for a ice. " Underthe indefinite heading "A Article, " readers are told "that they areliable to read the paper for nothing. "

A still younger hand contributes a short story in which the hero returnsto his home after a report of his death had been believed by his wife andfamily. The last sentence is worth quoting: "We will now, " says theauthor, "leave Mrs. White and her two children to enjoy the suddenappearance of Mr. White. "

Here is an editorial announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, every week atthe end of the paper there will be a little article on the habits of thepaper. "

On the whole, authorship does not seem to foster the quality ofimagination. Convention, during certain early years, may be a verystrong motive--not so much with children brought up strictly within itslimits, perhaps, as with those who have had an exceptional freedom. Against this, as a kind of childish bohemianism, there is, in one phaseof childhood, a strong reaction. To one child, brought upinternationally, and with somewhat too much liberty amongst peasant play-mates and their games, in many dialects, eagerness to become like "otherpeople, " and even like the other people of quite inferior fiction, grewto be almost a passion. The desire was in time out-grown, but it costthe girl some years of her simplicity. The style is not always thechild. 

LETTERS

The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebodyhas sent him a box of chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a child'sstyle; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a suddenself-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They speakprose and know it. But a young child possesses his words by a differenttenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things hesays every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them. He is solittle taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches thefirst that comes at random. A little child to whom a peach was firstrevealed, whispered to his mother, "I like that kind of turnip. "Compelled to write a letter, the child finds the word of daily lifesuddenly a stranger. 

The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingersthe older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. Dickens, whoused his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of a child and his faceare full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard. 

His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony. The childchatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there is noinspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom heprobably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of anyone, however vague and forgotten, without a mental image. As like as not hepictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut. No boywants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut. His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under thesediscouragements, but to write to her in an artless and childlike fashion. 

The child is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send theconventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "Isend them their love, " "They sent me my love, " "I kissed their hand tome. " If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make along effort. His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician whocannot remember whether he began his sentence with "people" in thesingular or the plural, and who finishes it otherwise than as he beganit. Points of grammar that are purely points of logic baffle a childcompletely. He is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is inthe use of his senses. 

It is not true--though it is generally said--that a young child's sensesare quick. This is one of the unverified ideas that commend themselves, one knows not why. We have had experiments to compare the relativequickness of perception proved by men and women. The same experimentswith children would give curious results, but they can hardly, perhaps, be made, because the children would be not only slow to perceive but slowto announce the perception; so the moment would go by, and the game belost. Not even amateur conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of achild's mind as does a little intricacy of grammar. 

THE FIELDS

The pride of rustic life is the child's form of caste-feeling. Thecountry child is the aristocrat; he has _des relations suivies_ withgame-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers. He has aperfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or a suburb. Noessayist has so much feeling against terraces and villas. 

As for imitation country--the further suburb--it is worse than town; itis a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child's mind ishardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his affairs tothink about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom of perpetualobservation. The child, compelled to walk, is the only unrestingobserver of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, andthe 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 ofabundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neitherin mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of hislittle gains. On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where maizeand grapes are carried in the _botte_, so usually are children expectedin the field that _bottes_ are made to the shape of a back and arms offive years old. Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold nomore than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans. You maymeet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score oftimes in the morning. Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit senseof what is due to that labourer. When the plums are gathered, forinstance, she bakes in the general village oven certain round open tartsacross which her arm can hardly reach. No plum tarts elsewhere areanything but dull in comparison with these. There is, besides, the firstloaf 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 alittle fire built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under thewood ashes. Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; evenwhen the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle achild's tooth. 

Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in areal field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothingbut play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest ofthe hedges. They have no little hand in the realities of cultivation, but wild growths give them blackberries. Pale are the joys of nuttingbeside those of haymaking, but at least they are something. 

Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memoriesfor the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, takingflight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreatinginto 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, theybreathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense ofplace, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot berecaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees ofthe personality of a person; to the child the accidents of voice and lookare charged with separate and unique character. Such a sense of place ashe got in a day within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that asound or odour can bring it back in after days, with a shock--even such asense of single personality does a little watchful girl get from theaccents, the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence ofa woman. Not all places, nor all persons, are so quick with theexpression of themselves; the child knows the difference. As for placesthat are so loaded, and that breathe so, the child discerns thempassionately. 

A travelled child multiplies these memories and has them in theirvariety. His heart has room for many places that have the spirit ofplace. The glacier may be forgotten, but some little tract of pasturethat has taken wing to the head of a mountain valley, a field that hassoared 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 farapart, who has helped, followed the wheat to the threshing-floor of aSwiss village, stumbled after a plough of Virgil's shape in remoterTuscan hills, and gleaned after a vintage. You cannot suggest pleasantermemories than those of the vintage, for the day when the wine will beold. 

THE BARREN SHORE

It may be a disappointment to the children each year at play upon so manybeaches--even if they are but dimly aware of their lack--to find theirannual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing, indeed, tothem, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once a year, butnot annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons, not waxing andwaning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons whereof noone knows which is the highest point and the secret and the ultimatepurpose, not recreated, not new, and not yielding to the child anythingraw and irregular to eat. 

Sand castles are well enough, and they are the very commonplace of therecollections of elders, of their rhetoric, and of what they thinkappropriate for their young ones. Shingle and sand are good playthings, but absolute play is not necessarily the ideal of a child; he wouldrather have a frolic of work. Of all the early autumn things to be donein holiday time, that game with the beach and the wave is the least goodfor holiday-time. 

Not that the shore is everywhere so barren. The coast of theLondoners--all round the southern and eastern borders of England--isindeed the dullest of all sea-margins. But away in the gentle bays ofJersey the summer grows a crop of seaweed which the long ocean waveleaves in noble curves upon the beach; for under sunny water the stormshave gathered the crops. The Channel Island people go gleaning after thesea, and store the seaweed for their fields. Thus the beaches of Jerseybays are not altogether barren, and have a kind of dead and accessoryharvest for the farmer. After a night of storm these crops are stackedand carted and carried, the sea-wind catching away loose shreds from thesummits of the loads. 

Further south, if the growth of the sea is not so put to use, the shorehas yet its seasons. You could hardly tell, if you did not know themonth, 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 regionswhich are southern, yet not too southern for winter, and have thus thestrongest swing of change and the fullest pulse of the year, there are awinter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicatevariety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue ofSeptember. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, andunhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your headwhile your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and thevast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you canrest; and where you float, there float also by you opalescent jelly-fish, half transparent in the perfectly transparent water. An hour in the warmsea is not enough. Rock-bathing is done on lonely shores. A city may bebut a mile away, and the cultivated vineyards may be close above theseaside pine-trees, but the place is perfectly remote. You pitch yourtent on any little hollow of beach. A charming Englishwoman who used tobathe with her children under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villain 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 moonwould touch her. 

You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing in theworld is more uninteresting than eleven o'clock. It is the hour ofmediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o'clock on a shinglybeach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing. Twelve has adignity always, and everywhere its name is great. The noon of every daythat ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly. Oneo'clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hourof the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening andlingering life. To bathe at eleven in the sun, in the wind, to bathefrom a machine, in a narrow sea that is certainly not clear and is onlyby courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience to a tyrannical tide and inwater that is always much colder than yourself, to bathe in a hurry andin public--this is to know nothing rightly of one of the greatest of allthe pleasures that humanity takes with nature. 

By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea thanof mere straits. These temperate islands would be better called theOcean Islands. When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, hecomposed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter ofsome thought. The final decision was to direct it, "A Victor Hugo, Ocean. " It reached him. It even received a reply: "I am the Past, youare the Future; I am, etc. " If an English boy had had the same idea thename of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it. "A Victor Hugo, LaManche, " would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but"the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last issuggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland--formlessgrey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by aperpetual wind. 

As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea, machine-bathing at eleven o'clock will hardly furnish them with a magicalearly memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like therest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It wasvulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of allugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through theunfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, andreturned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile andsuperfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of water had they, " poorinfants. 

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 achild there. 

THE BOY

After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood offew explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phasewhich the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note asan impression. 

Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described but bynegatives. Above all, he is not demonstrative. The days are long goneby when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and a pipe. One or twoof these things he has, and he takes them without the least swagger. Heavoids expression of any kind. Any satisfaction he may feel with thingsas they are is rather to be surprised in his manner than perceived in hisaction. Mr. Jaggers, when it befell him to be astonished, showed it by astop of manner, for an indivisible moment--not by a pause in the thing hechanced to be about. In like manner the boy cannot prevent his mostinnocent pleasures from arresting him. 

He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told to doanything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home. His eldersprobably give him as few orders as possible. He will almost ingeniouslyevade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted upon him, but ifhe does but succeed in only postponing his obedience, he has, visibly, done something for his own relief. It is less convenient that he shouldhold mere questions, addressed to him in all good faith, as in some sortan attempt upon his liberty. 

Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage. But it isagainst impersonal and indifferent questions also that the boy sets hisface like a rock. He has no ambition to give information on any point. Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and there are even thosewho bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for the pleasure ofanswering them with animation. This, the boy perhaps thinks, is "fuss, "and, if he has any passions, he has a passionate dislike of fuss. 

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 putby for him, he abstains from taking an interest in the retrieval; he willdo nothing to restore them. To do so would mar the integrity of hisreserve. If he would do much rather than answer questions, he wouldsuffer something rather than ask them. 

He loves his father and a friend of his father's, and he pushes them, inorder to show it without compromising his temperament. 

He is a partisan in silence. It may be guessed that he is often occupiedin comparing other people with his admired men. Of this too he sayslittle, except some brief word of allusion to what other men do _not_ do. 

When he speaks it is with a carefully shortened vocabulary. As an authorshuns monotony, so does the boy shun change. He does not generally talkslang; his habitual words are the most usual of daily words made usefuland appropriate by certain varieties of voice. These express for him allthat he will consent to communicate. He reserves more by speaking dullwords with zeal than by using zealous words that might betray him. Buthis brevity is the chief thing; he has almost made an art of it. 

He is not "merry. " Merry boys have pretty manners, and it must be ownedthat 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 grotesquereticence, he has no secrets. Nothing that he thinks is very muchhidden. Even if he did not push his father, it would be evident that theboy loves him; even if he never laid his hand (and this little thing hedoes rarely) on his friend's shoulder, it would be plain that he loveshis friend. His happiness appears in his moody and charming face, hisambition in his dumbness, and the hopes of his life to come in ungainlybearing. How does so much heart, how does so much sweetness, allunexpressed, appear? For it is not only those who know him well thatknow the child's heart; strangers are aware of it. This, which he wouldnot reveal, is the only thing that is quite unmistakable and quiteconspicuous. 

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 theworld may divine in him is courage and an intelligence. But carryhimself how he will, he is manifestly a tender, gentle, and evenspiritual creature, masculine and innocent--"a nice boy. " There is noother way of describing him than that of his own brief language. 

ILLNESS

The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some littlebooks, but none the less a fresh fact. In spite of the sentimental, children in illness remain the full sources of perpetual surprises. Theirself-control in real suffering is a wonder. A little turbulent girl, brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might be thought, to deal in anyway with her own impulses--a child whose way was to cry out, laugh, complain, and triumph without bating anything of her own temperament, andwithout the hesitation of a moment, struck her face, on a run, against awall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed with pain and covered withblood. "Tell mother it's nothing! Tell mother, quick, it's nothing!"cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak. 

The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to liefor some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken littlebody might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure, painful;and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded bytwinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that hadcarried her through all her years--impulse. A condition of acuteconsciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of lifehad been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of achild's days and nights at eight years old. 

Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient, not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant tobe served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had neverused before. "You are exquisite to me, mother, " she said, at receivingsome common service. 

Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous childassumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience. Not thatillness is to be trusted to work so. There is another child who in hisbrief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally. The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but animpossibility; but in any case it would be a failure. You can bring thespoon to the child, but three nurses cannot make him drink. This, then, is the occasion of the ultimate resistance. He raises the standard ofrevolution, and casts every tradition and every precept to the wind onwhich it flies. He has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursuehim with a grotesque spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment, still more grotesque. He is committed to the wild novelty of absoluterefusal. He not only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throwseverything over. Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilistlaughs. 

Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy. "Am I unwellto-day, mother?" asks a child with all his faith and confidence at thehighest point. 

THE YOUNG CHILD

The infant of literature "wails" and wails feebly, with the invariabilityof a thing unproved and taken for granted. Nothing, nevertheless, couldbe more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child ofman catches his first breath. It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp andbrief, rather deep than shrill in tone. With all deference to oldmoralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts uphis new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and withmuch the same tone as some of the duck kind there. He does not weep forsome months to come. His outcry soon becomes the human cry that isbetter known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy. And if theinfant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still tooyoung to be gay. A child's mirth, when at last it begins, is his firstsecret; you understand little of it. The first smile (for the convulsivemovement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile)is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable. It isaccompanied by a single sound--a sound that would be a monosyllable if itwere articulate--which is the utterance, though hardly the communication, of a private jollity. That and that alone is the real beginning of humanlaughter. 

From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for thefirst time, and as it were flickeringly, the child's smile begins to growdefinite and, gradually, more frequent. By very slow degrees the secrecypasses away, and the dryness becomes more genial. The child now smilesmore openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing creature of so muchprose and verse. His laughter takes a long time to form. Themonosyllable grows louder, and then comes to be repeated with littlecatches of the breath. The humour upon which he learns to laugh is thatof something which approaches him quickly and then withdraws. This isthe first intelligible jest of jesting man. 

An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark thefeatures of faces near him. Whether because of the greaterconspicuousness of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, headdresses his looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to theheads, not the faces, of his friends. These are the ways of all infants, various in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the samethings. There are turns in a kitten's play--arched leapings and sidelongjumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances--which the sacred kittensof Egypt used in their time. But not more alike are these repetitionsthan the impulses of all young children learning to laugh. 

In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much ofhis 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 thatpleases, distresses, or oppresses the world. That he should be obligedto suffer the moods of men is a more important thing than that men shouldbe amused by his moods. If he is saddened, that is certainly much morethan that his elders should be gladdened. It is doubtless hardlypossible that children should go altogether free of human affairs. Theymight, in mere justice, be spared the burden they bear ignorantly andsimply when it is laid upon them, of such events and ill fortunes as maytrouble our peace; but they cannot easily be spared the hearing of adisturbed voice or the sight of an altered face. Alas! they are made tofeel money-matters, and even this is not the worst. There areunconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries, of which they do not knowthe names, but which change the faces where they look for smiles. Tosuch alterations children are sensitive even when they seem leastaccessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels ofelders. Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droopwhen their defied tyrants are dejected. 

For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is amere impulse and is easily disconcerted. They are gay without knowingany very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were, proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they arehelpless and find no stay. For this reason the merriest of all childrenare those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in a family nor in apublic 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 inperpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature. The separatenest is nature's, and the best; but it might be wished that the separatenest were less subject to moods. The nurse has her private business, andwhen it does not prosper, and when the remote affairs of the governess gowrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration of the mishap. 

The uniformity of infancy passes away long before the age when childrenhave this indefinite suffering inflicted upon them; and they have becomeinfinitely various, and feel the consequences of the cares of theirelders in unnumbered degrees. The most charming children feel them themost sensibly, and not with resentment but with sympathy. It isassuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue ofchildhood. What other thing are we to learn of them? Not simplicity, for they are intricate enough. Not gratitude; for their usual sincerethanklessness makes half the pleasure of doing them good. Not obedience;for the child is born with the love of liberty. And as for humility, theboast of a child is the frankest thing in the world. A child's naturalvanity is not merely the delight in his own possessions, but the triumphover others less fortunate. If this emotion were not so young it wouldbe exceedingly unamiable. But the truth must be confessed that havingvery quickly learnt the value of comparison and relation, a childrejoices in the perception that what he has is better than what hisbrother has; this comparison is a means of judging his fortune, afterall. It is true that if his brother showed distress, he might make hasteto offer an exchange. But the impulse of joy is candidly egotistic. 

It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask pity fortheir sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive thatthey are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and who makeno bargain for apologies--it is this that men and women are urged tolearn of a child. Graces more confessedly childlike they make shift toteach themselves. 

FAIR AND BROWN

George Eliot, in one of her novels, has a good-natured mother, whoconfesses that when she administers justice she is obliged to spare theoffenders who have fair hair, because they look so much more innocentthan the rest. And if this is the state of maternal feelings where allare more or less fair, what must be the miscarriage of justice incountries where a _blond_ angel makes his infrequent visit within thefamily circle?

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" inEngland is to say "fair-haired child, " even as in Tuscany to say "youngman" is to say "tenor. " "I have a little party to-night, eight or tentenors, from neighbouring palazzi, to meet my English friends. "

But France is a greater enthusiast than our now country. The fairnessand the golden hair are here so much a matter of orthodoxy, that they arenot always mentioned; they are frequently taken for granted. Not so inFrance; the French go out of their way to make the exceptional fairnessof their children the rule of their literature. No French child dareshow his face in a book--prose or poetry--without blue eyes and fairhair. It is a thing about which the French child of real life can hardlyescape a certain sensitiveness. What, he may ask, is the use of being adark-haired child of fact, when all the emotion, all the innocence, allthe romance, are absorbed by the flaxen-haired child of fiction? Howdeplorable that our mothers, the French infants may say, should havetheir unattained ideals in the nurseries of the imagination; how dismalthat 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 otherpoints, be compelled to yield on this point also, and reconcile our auntsto the family colouring?

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 assoon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair everin it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue, and nocheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses. Victor Hugo, whodiscovered the child of modern poetry, never omits the touch ofdescription; the word _blond_ is as inevitable as any epithet marshalledto attend its noun in a last-century poet's dictionary. One would nothave it away; one can hear the caress with which the master pronouncesit, "making his mouth, " as Swift did for his "little language. " Nor doesthe customary adjective fail in later literature. It was dear to theRealist, and it is dear to the Symbolist. The only difference is that inthe French of the Symbolist it precedes the noun. 

And yet it is time that the sweetness of the dark child should have itsday. He is really no less childlike than the other. There is a prettyantithesis between the strong effect of his colouring and the softness ofhis years and of his months. The blond human being--man, woman orchild--has the beauty of harmony; the hair plays off from the tones ofthe flesh, only a few degrees brighter or a few degrees darker. Contrastof colour there is, in the blue of the eyes, and in the red of cheek andlip, but there is no contrast of tone. The whole effect is that of muchvarious colour and of equal tone. In the dark face there is hardly anycolour and an almost complete opposition of tone. The completeopposition, of course, would be black and white; and a beautiful darkchild comes near to this, but for the lovely modifications, the warmth ofhis white, and of his black alike, so that the one tone, as well as theother, is softened towards brown. It is the beauty of contrast, with asuggestion of harmony--as it were a beginning of harmony--which isinfinitely lovely. 

Nor is the dark child lacking in variety. His radiant eyes range from abrown so bright that it looks golden in the light, to a brown so darkthat it barely defines the pupil. So is his hair various, answering thesun with unsuspected touches, not of gold but of bronze. And his cheekis not invariably pale. A dusky rose sometimes lurks there with such aneffect of vitality as you will hardly get from the shallower pink of theflaxened haired. And the suggestion is that of late summer, the colourof wheat almost ready for the harvest, and darker, redder flowers--poppiesand others--than come in Spring. 

The dark eyes, besides, are generally brighter--they shelter a moreliquid light than the blue or grey. Southern eyes have generally mostbeautiful whites. And as to the charm of the childish figure, there isusually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener that is at leastas young and sweet as the round form of the blond child. And yet thepainters of Italy would have none of it. They rejected the duskybrilliant pale little Italians all about them; they would have none butflaxen-haired children, and they would have nothing that was slim, nothing that was thin, nothing that was shadowy. They rejoiced in muchfair flesh, and in all possible freshness. So it was in fair Flanders aswell as in dark Italy. But so it was not in Spain. The Pyrenees seemedto interrupt the tradition. And as Murillo saw the charm of dark heads, and the innocence of dark eyes, so did one English painter. Reynoldspainted young dark hair as tenderly as the youngest gold. 

REAL CHILDHOOD

The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoodsand of their impressions. Your hours when you were six were the enormoushours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quickforgetfulness. Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long athis 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 calledminutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and thenwhat desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulatinghands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its rightvalue, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile, were infinitelytired of watching the play of his conversing moustache. 

Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm isinevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the witfully to confess it. 

You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some suchspace as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly thatyou spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as adreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain of it tothe talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management ofthe world in their hands--your seniors. You remembered the duration ofsome such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered ituntil now, and so now, of course, will never forget it. 

As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawingroom, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greaterthan Beethoven had any idea of. You sat and listened, and tried to fix apassage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark, with the deliberateprovident intention of helping yourself through the time during a futurehearing; 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 morefatiguing, they were more or less different each time. 

While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--anda very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every houseyou lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence ofmind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it. As to the lengthof a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words donot measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleepin childhood. Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from theduration 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 thoseof your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially. Nor wereyou bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless they heldyou, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible voicesand so look at their mannered faces that they released you an older childthan they took you prisoner. But--it is a reluctant confession--you weretired of your relations; you were weary of their bonnets. Measured byadult time, those bonnets were, it is to be presumed, of no more thanreasonable duration; they had no more than the average or common life. You have no reason, looking back, to believe that your great-aunts worebonnets for great and indefinite spaces of time. But, to your sense as achild, long and changing and developing days saw the same harassingartificial flowers hoisted up with the same black lace. You would havehad a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but youdeliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet. So with dresses, especially such as had any little misfit about them. For you it hadalways existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing. You seemed tohave been aware of it for years. By the way, there would be less cheapreproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knewhow immensely old their old clothes are to them. 

The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary uglinessof things, and that--apart from the effects of _ennui_--they reject thatugliness actively. You have stood and listened to your mother'scompliments on her friend's hat, and have made your mental protest invery definite words. You thought it hideous, and hideous things offendedyou then more than they have ever offended you since. At nine years oldyou made people, alas! responsible for their faces, as you do still in ameasure, though you think you do not. You severely made them answer fortheir clothes, in a manner which you have seen good reason, in laterlife, to mitigate. Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, youhad no mercy. To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they werefriskiness of manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with ratherbygone or frumpish fashions. Too much childish dislike was wasted so. 

But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learntlater. At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the contrastof a white kid glove and a bright red wrist. Well, this is not thereceived arrangement, but red and white do go well together, and theirdistribution has to be taught with time. Whose were the wrist and glove?Certainly some one's who must have been distressed at the _bouquet_ ofcolour that you admired. This, however, was but a local admiration. Youdid not admire the girl as a whole. She whom you adored was always amarried woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but alwaysdivinely elegant. She alone was worthy to stand at the side of yourmother. You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for achance of holding her bracelet when she played. You composed prose inhonour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown toyourself) a "catalogue. " She took singularly little notice of you. 

Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature. The light ofsummer morning before sunrise was to you a spiritual splendour for whichyou wanted no name. The Mediterranean under the first perceptible touchof the moon, the calm southern sea in the full blossom of summer, theearly spring everywhere, in the showery streets, in the fields, or atsea, left old childish memories with you which you try to evoke now whenyou see them again. But the cloudy dusk behind poplars on the plains ofFrance, the flying landscape from the train, willows, and the last of thelight, were more mournful to you then than you care to remember now. Sowere the black crosses on the graves of the French village; so werecypresses, though greatly beloved. 

If you were happy enough to be an internationally educated child, you hadmuch at heart the heart of every country you knew. You disliked theEnglish accent of your compatriots abroad with a scorn to which, needlessto say, you are not tempted now. You had shocks of delight from Swisswoods full of lilies of the valley, and from English fields full ofcowslips. You had disquieting dreams of landscape and sun, and of manyof these you cannot now tell which were visions of travel and whichvisions of slumber. Your strong sense of place made you love some placestoo keenly for peace.