(LIMITED.) 30 TO 34, NEW OXFORD STREET ,241. BROW. TON ROAD. S.W. BRANCH OFFICES ^ 48 QUEEN VICTORIA ST. E.G. SUBSCRIPTION. ,.,., !,.,'. \ui.um anl upwards. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHILD BY THE SAME AUTHOR " WYEMARKE'S MOTHER " "WYEMARKE AND THE SEA-FAIRIES" "MR. BLAKE OF NEWMARKET" THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHILD By EDWARD II. COOPER JOHN LANE : THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON & NEW YORK. MDCCCCV William Clowes & Sons, Limited, Printers, London PREFACE I HAVE understood, from a proverb to that effect, that "bachelors' wives and old maids' children " are objects of much scorn to the experienced married person and parent ; but no one has ever said a word in condemnation of bachelors' children. Another proverb which intimates that lookers-on see most of the game may apparently be applied to their case. A large number of children the majority, I suppose confide everything about them- selves to their parents, and nothing about their parents or home to anybody else. A certain number of others confide everything about their home and their parents to some outside friend, and regard all their guardians as quaint specimens of natural history, rather liable to bite, most comfortable at a distance, but quite interesting topics for conversation with intimate friends. The former and more common kind of home-life one watches with love and envy, but with no more intimate comprehension than may come from memories of one's own childhood. From youngsters Preface of the latter class one can learn everything that it is possible to know about a child of this kind of either sex and every age. In excuse for the defects of this book, which, of course, are many, I can only suggest that its general tendency must be to give slightly undue prominence to the minority of children who do not lead a purely normal home-life. One other word I want to add. The stories of children's humour in these pages are quite genuine for the simple reason that I hate taking any trouble, and it is so much easier to tell real child-stories than to make them up that I have adopted the former course. CONTENTS ("H.MTER PAfJfe I. THE TWKNTIETH CENTURY ClfILD . T II. WANTED, A NEW GUARDIAN. . . 14 III. PRAYKKS 38 IV. LESSONS . . . . . -59 V. DISAGREEABLE CHILDREN . . 86 VI. PUNISHMENT . . . . .107 VII. AT PLAY . -125 VIII. SOME FRENCH FRIENDS . 149 IX.--THE SICK CHILD . . . .164 X. A BIOGRAPHY ... .176 XI. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY . . . .196 XII. THE OLDEST TALE IN THE WORLD . 231 XIII. THE GREATEST OF WRITERS. . . 240 XIV. FOUR STORIES WRITTEN BY CHILDREN (Lady BEAUMONT, the lion. IVY STA- PLETON, Miss M. LUMLEY and Miss PHYLLIS TERRY) . . . -57 APPENDIX SOMK GHOSTS OF MY FRIENDS I. XANI Y ....... 260 II. THE \ir.nr LAUNDRESSES . . . 282 III. WYKMARKE DARCY'S TALK ->K THE CHILD IN \Vn 1 1 r . . . . .291 vii THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHILD CHAPTER I. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHILD. 1 question, "Do you like chil- dren ? " takes high rank in my mind among the foolish remarks of daily life. Men and women who entertain the more agreeable of their contemporaries, cultivating the society of royalties, millionaires, actors, peers, or ladies of the ballet, as the fancy takes them, are not asked, " Do you like grown-up people ? " Every one has his kindred spirit, to be found in a body now two feet high and now six feet, and he likes the spirit when found. The person who tells me that he detests all children means either that he has never spoken to a child in sympathy with himself, or that he hates a creature who beats a toy The Twentieth Century Child drum, or most often of all he means to assure me that he himself is a grown-up man, in spite of my obvious suspicion to the contrary. Childhood even wears different aspects under different names. Call it raw immaturity, and the professional cynic, who knows all things, and hopes very little and believes very little and fears very little, will scoff at it ; call it youth, and the world spends itself in a sigh of covetous longing. I find it hard to believe in some universal essential spirit of child- hood, some ewig kindliche, dressed here in furs, skirts or feathers, there in pig-tails, patched trousers, bangles or fez caps, some- times a year old and sometimes sixteen, but with the gist of the matter always present so that I can love or hate it. Innocence, faith, wonder, joy, reverence, these are common to all ages ; while many a thousand children lack them all. The story of one child-life may be spiritual beyond the power of human words to tell, a book of faith and innocence written in white on white ; the thoughts and daily life of another could be adequately described only by the dullest and most rigidly realistic pen. What have these two types in common which shall enable me to answer the question, " Do you like children ?." The Twentieth Century Child If one studies the friends not the chance acquaintances, but the intimate friends of any man or woman, one will mostly find a strong common characteristic among all of them, young and old, rich and poor ; and any new-comer of any age who possesses this characteristic has a good chance of being admitted into the friendly circle. A woman of my acquaintance, grown up to the extent of twenty-six years, a shining star in a social set whose motto was " The world goes fast, but we go faster," chose her intimate friends (unconsciously enough, I daresay, as a nerve sedative) according to their possession of some wit coupled with a power of sitting in motionless but expressive silence for unlimited hours. Naturally enough, therefore, she had a well-earned reputation for disliking all children, till one day at a children's party of mine she encountered a four-year-old lady whose method of showing displeasure at all the mishaps of life was to affect total inability to speak or hear. " I never saw any one pretend so well," said an admiring elder sister, whose account of the business I may perhaps be allowed to repro- duce : " When she is spoken to she looks up at the person quite quietly, like a baby beginning The Twentieth Century Child to take notice, and as if she had no more idea than a French baby what the person who was talking to her meant. Then if nurse or anyone gets angry, Kitty looks at them in a puzzled, helpless sort of way, as if she were a little frightened, and rather won- dered what all the fuss was about. She doesn't seem to care a bit if she has dry bread for tea, or no sugar, and if she is sent to bed she likes it ; so now when she has got a fit like this every one is perfectly helpless, and simply lets her alone, and they are all afraid of doing anything to get her into one of her states. Once when nurse shook her, and another time when Jim pulled her hair to make her speak, she only looked at them quite silently, and her lips pouted out, and her big blue eyes got all wet with tears, and you would think there never was such an ill- used child in England before. But me and Marjorie laughed." Such a form of wit completely vanquished the elder visitor, who for the next few months "disliked all children except one," and then added another slow-speaking humorist to her list of friends. As a rule, however, the child who sits on nursery or drawing-room chairs in motionless, philosophic silence, a wise arid 4 The Twentieth Century Child solid Sphinx looking out over the desert of human life, dissecting human motives, criti- cising silently all human speech and action, is an embarrassing person to deal with. It is a happy belief of many self-respecting men and women that the Sphinx in question is silent with admiration when they are present, and motionless from resolve to make the most of such an opportunity for absorbing wisdom and learning. It is my own highest hope that the Sphinx thinks me at worst rather queer, and perhaps capable of better things. The "rabble and rout" of babes of both sexes and all ages who form my own "set" have certain qualities in common. Without fully accepting the description of a (rare and unwilling) fellow-guest, that they are " a swarm of shrieking, stone-throwing, skirt- dancing, practical-joke-playing imps of mis- chief, ready to make three halves of any one who comes near them, and, like the much-quoted prophet Habakkuk, capable dc tout" I must admit some preference for the child who speaks when it is spoken to and sometimes when it is not. Shyness is not charming when it is the curtain of a vacuum, and in any case a little of it The Twentieth Century Child goes a long way in my mind. Downcast eyelids are very pretty if they are lifted up to display laughing, all-comprehending eyes ; nervously trembling lips are delightful when they are controlled at last to form the words of an epigram ; and it adds great zest to the softly whispered good-night and drowsy kisses of a little cherub-faced person of ten, to know that directly you have left the room the cherub will be out of bed, with a wet sponge and a brush, making the lives of room-companions a burden unless they get up and share some sinful escapade. Good behaviour is commendable but monotonous, and it can at least be said for my private circle of friends that they are insupportable to the nerves sometimes, confounding to the brain often, but dull never. In truth most of them seem to recognise that dullness, like the German description of poverty, is "not a crime, but ten times worse." I remember one lady at the age of four complaining of the repetition every day of the same prayers : " God must think me so stupid to say the same thing again and again ; " and another earnestly defending a small companion who was accused (most unjustly) of " waiting quietly " to know if she could go out. " Oh, . 6 The Twentieth Century Child no," said her champion, "she's in the hall, waiting fast" Critics of the new cult of the child are heard occasionally to express a wish that their own sayings and doings had been treasured carefully by admiring friends, which sayings would be found, they allege, to be quite as clever as those quoted from the nurseries of the twentieth century. Regret- fully and apologetically I doubt it. Even during the past ten or twelve years a close observer must have noticed the increasingly rapid development of the nursery intellect, a development which has taken place, perhaps, at the expense of physique, but is not the less noticeable for that. The child of to-day thinks more, knows more, questions more, talks a hundred times more than its con- temporary fifteen years ago ; it is a yet more advanced being than the child in whose company I viewed Christmas trees and did lessons twenty-five years ago. Laws of growth and change do not spare the spirit of the nursery any more than they spare its individuals. The reason for this particular change is very obvious. Fifty years ago children were unknown in society life ; a hundred years ago they were unknown in 7 The Twentieth Century Child any grown-up life at all. It has always seemed to me that if it were possible to suggest a blunder in ' Esmond,' that in- comparable masterpiece of the greatest novelist of Europe, one might hint that the continual presence of the little Beatrix and Frank with their parents, and among their parents' guests, is improbable. They lived, I am sure, on an upper floor in a far-off wing of Castlewood Hall, seeing only their mother and a few women specially appointed to their charge. They were not very happy, and were direfully and dreadfully though, let us hope, unconsciously dull. Their toys and books were few, their friends fewer, and among their friends they saw a good deal of parental neglect and cruelty. The warmest admirer of the "good old times " would, I imagine, excuse the children of the upper classes from desiring to return to the life and customs of these predecessors. And such a life did not tend towards brilliancy of speech. This is the property of the children who swarm round one at London " At Homes " and country garden parties, whom one is allowed to take to Hurlingham, Brighton, and garden parties at the Zoo, who sell at bazaars, distribute programmes - 8 The Twentieth Century Child at charity concerts, and bicycle in the Park instead of walking in Belgravian gardens. I call to mind one such young person now, a little maid of fourteen, clever, witty, beautiful to behold, a first-class cricketer, an admirable actress, reciter, and athlete, a business lady of high qualifications. I remember an occasion when she was given a batch of programmes to sell at a charity entertain- ment, and, the programmes being marked two shillings each, she returned with a sum representing their sale at an average price of three shillings and eightpence. Being asked to explain her methods she said simply : " I just had a good look at the people and asked any price, from one shilling to five shillings, which I thought they could pay. Sometimes I made a mistake, but mostly I didn't." Picture the fearful joy, the wonder, admiration, and envy with which such a child would have been regarded by her contemporaries fifty years ago ! Her life, with its running accompaniment of witty comment and naive questions, is new, and I doubt if the most carefully-kept records of the youth of my own generation would show a tenth part of its conscious or unconscious humour. Another new feature in the child-life of The Twentieth Century Child to-day is productive of much original thought and ideas. Social rush and restlessness, harrying the enfeebled bodies bequeathed to us by the drunkards and gluttons who did us the honour of becoming our great-grand- fathers, have filled modern nurseries with disease. Many of these new maladies neurasthenia, for instance, and all its accom- paniments are probably an inevitable ac- companiment of increased intelligence ; but others could easily be rectified. A man or woman who really likes children or to be precise, whose circle of friends includes many small folk will be endlessly discreet in all dealings with them, will study nursery hygiene as they study society etiquette, will offer no tempting, unwholesome food, no amusements at late hours or in hot buildings, no prolonged excitement or doubtful sights, and will keep strict silence about all illness. Above all they will tolerate no fashionable invalid talk. One must, of course, read the Lancet regularly in order to be equipped for modern dinner-table conversation ; but gossip culled from Little Folks is more profitable at the nursery tea-table. A sick child who has once realised from the conversation of its elders that they are seriously concerned 10 The Twentieth Century Child about its maladies, must be an idiot if at the end of a week it is not the Great Panjandrum of the nursery and practical ruler of the house. Governesses, nurses, guardians of every kind can hope at best to retreat in good order. " Jack isn't ever to get tired, and he's getting tired now," says a small person who is becoming bored with the morning walk, pointing to her brother ; and that walk is at an end. In the middle of a weary arithmetic lesson accusing fingers are pointed at the governess, accusing voices exclaim : " Eileen's going to cry ! Sir Thomas Barlow says Eileen's never to cry." Eileen takes the hint, fumbles in her pocket to see if haply it contains something which will do duty for a handkerchief, and there is no more arithmetic. The follies and crimes, too, of which a person especially, I dare to think, a woman can and will be guilty who entertains children because it is the fashion, are " wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping." The unfortunate little creatures who have the misfortune to be her guests are treated like mechanical toys, which are required to perform once and may then be thrown away. They must open round ii The Twentieth Century Child eyes of amazement and delight at the mag- nificence of this particular party, admire their hostess, say a few funny things expressive of excited pleasure, have too much of everything; and go back to the nursery to be as ill as they please. One may see supper-tables at a children's party which differ in no respect from those of a smart ball in a millionaire's house except that the champagne-cup is made of cheap and bad champagne. In the common sense of the babes themselves lies the chief hope of safety ; many of them are luckily proud of being dieted. Even the proffer of a box of sweets is not always received with enthusiasm. If you love many children and want their company, you will do well to remember that in the end these young folk, no less than their guardians, will genuinely prefer the person and house where joys are safe, where fun does not end in a riot and tears, where everything on the tea or supper-tables can be eaten without fear or disfavour, where in effect the whole situation is in the tight grasp of a man or woman who loves not only well but wisely. And I, who love untold scores of little folk, creatures of three and four, of fifteen and sixteen, cheeky schoolboys at Westgate, The Twentieth Century Child polite epigrammatic dinner-guests at Eton, riotous sea-side visitors, inhabitants of spinal carriages with all the qualifications for rioters except one, pink-cheeked little maidens in London nurseries, babes English, French, Finlander, American, Italian, and German I sit by the way-side and, the stars being too far off, ask no more of Fate than to watch this procession moving out of life's morning with faces set towards the noon-day. Times change, always for the better ; the old order changes, giving place to a better ; we need lament no change, nor spare the idlest regret for past child-fashions and laws, but go on falling in love with each new small thing which stands in the dawn, and pray the Eternal Pity to look down most mercifully on its journey. CHAPTER II. WANTED, A NEW GUARDIAN. AN eight-year-old lady, who honours me with her friendship, came to tea with me one day recently, and being offered a choice of toys to play with afterwards, chose unhesitatingly the typewriter. Such a decision is indeed invariable among her contemporaries, to whom all walking dolls, jumping snakes, steam-engines, and even a bath full of float- ing fishes and miniature fishing nets where- with to catch them, are slight fleeting joys compared to this wonderful machine which prints your thoughts by mysterious invisible clicks, and then suddenly displays them (and a good deal of extraneous lettering with them) to your admiring eyes. My present guest elected to write a story, and the mysteries of "spacing" having been explained to her, and some experimental words written, a small curly head and pursed- up lips and serious eyes were bent over the typewriter for ten or fifteen minutes. Then Wanted, a New Guardian I was shown the result ; which was, how- ever, rather the beginning of an essay on life, or of a new volume of philosophy, than of a story. The words, correctly spaced and spelt, were simply : " A sad life it is here, it may be better soon," and the small face was looking shyly up at me, scarlet with the pride of composition. The author's home, parents, governess and nurses being all ideally perfect, I do not think that this brief but comprehensive philosophic treatise meant, in her case, any- thing worse than the advent of bed-time, or (if she were looking yet farther forward) of arithmetic day. The little lady held with Emerson that there is something wrong with a person's brain who likes mathematics, and an approaching conflict with this loath- some and despicable science could cast a gloom over many previous hours. But the sentence, staying irrationally in my mind, as chance words will, has seemed to me at last to form rather a large and serious indictment against some of the conditions of modern young life, drawn up by this lady on behalf of her contemporaries. She, herself, as I have said, is personally unconcerned in the case, as a counsel for the prosecution should The Twentieth Century Child be. She gets up at half-past seven, goes to bed at seven, spends ten months of the year in the country, and for preference during her leisure reads fairy books to herself, you understand, with small lips murmuring the words, and one ridiculously small finger pointing along the line, and an occasional toss of the head when tiresome curls obscure her sight. Her judgment is very sound could I say less when she professes a warm admiration for my fairy books ? and I would not give a farthing for a book, toy, man, woman, or child whom she condemned as vulgar or silly. So it is that her indictment of the era, formulated on behalf of her generation, has weight with me ; and as I look round on certain modern nurseries full of nervous children, satiated with amusement, puzzling their own way through life with only a constantly-changing and carelessly- chosen nurse and governess to guard their minds and bodies and souls, I see that if the baby critic wished to call witnesses for her case she would not have far to seek. I have it in my mind now to enlarge somewhat upon her text, always premising that my remarks are limited strictly throughout to the children of busy women of the wealthy classes. There 16 Wanted, a New Guardian is an unreasonable belief prevalent, even in quite enlightened countries, that nursery affairs are exclusively the concern of women. This Eastern superstition becomes the more ridiculous when one looks round and sees that in a large portion of all classes of society it is the mother, aunt, or feminine friend who permits and encourages every sort of silly indulgence, late hours, abstention from school, general unpunctuality and grown-up amuse- ments ; while the father or male guardian insists on regular school attendance, punctu- ality, and such sane amusements as cricket- matches and the Zoological Gardens. During a period which included the first few months of the South African war, i.e., when the absence of male guardians would be per- ceptibly felt in London, the average attend- ance at evening continuation classes under the London School Board decreased, and the percentage of average attendance on the average roll in the ordinary schools also decreased ; while, in another class of life, is there not a regular family quarrel at the beginning of every school term between the man who insists that his children shall go back to Winchester, or Paris, or Cheltenham on the right day, and the woman who asserts * c The Twentieth Century Child that their colds are not well or their clothes not ready ? The idea that women are in- fallible and best left alone in their judgment of nursery affairs is mediaeval and oriental nonsense ; and in these days when women assert (and very clearly prove) that they can do what used to be thought men's work, men-folk need surely have no hesitation in making such a counter-claim as I now suggest. The nursery world, like Gaul according to Caesar, may be divided into three parts, which extend through all classes of society : (i) neglected children ; (2) actively ill-treated children, and (3) children who are tended to the very best of their parents' ability. Cynics, I am told, profess to confound the second and third of these divisions, but as both divisions are outside the scope of this chapter we need not argue the point. A mother's tender care can indeed produce some ex- tremely alarming consequences to mind and body, and if you like cheap sarcasm, you can probably lay a finger on a score of persons who are hopelessly sickly or irredeemably wicked for life owing to parental solicitude, and you may pass an hour in easy jesting about the system. Yet, taken as a whole, 18 Wanted, a New Guardian this careful English home-life cannot be described as a conspicuous failure in the world's history. Occasionally a parent, with erratic theories about education, has twisted some young mind all awry ; a half-witted man, out of his mind with vanity, has wearied his children, and wasted valuable years of their life by preaching some ill- digested, idiotic doctrine to them ; a woman with medical theories and a medicine-chest has killed and maimed one or two members of her family before her husband has time to interfere ; or the children are forced to live solely with the companionship of grand- parents, uncles, aunts and cousins who are dull, half-witted, uneducated bores, saturated with dreary country - village scandal, and without an intelligent interest in any subject in the world. You see blunders ; but much more widely and frequently you see the long successful years of this happy English home- life, the generations of men and women, pure, strong-limbed, high-minded, cultivated, brave, who emerge from it to rule one half of the outside world and extort unwilling admiration from the other half. liven among the blunders, among parents who are pains- taking, well-intentioned imbeciles, it is extra- 19 C 2 The Twentieth Century Child ordinary how little real lasting damage is done. Perhaps conspicuous good intentions are in themselves worth something in the scheme of education ; maybe the honesty which is mostly obvious in such persons counterbalances their injustice and shows it to the children as the result of mere stupidity ; perhaps one parent is sane and strong- minded, or good-natured relatives interfere and insist on school. However it may be, kindly Providence mostly arranges the rescue of the brood and gives them their chance. Sometimes it forgets altogether, but not often, and the exceptions may mitigate their anger by reflecting that they are no worse off than actively ill-treated children. With regard to these latter I have equally little to say here. Laws, which are becoming every year more numerous and more strict, deal with their hard lot to a great extent, and the splendid work of the Society for the Preven- tion of Cruelty to Children is proving yearly to parents with greater emphasis that the active ill-treatment of children is a very costly and dangerous business in all classes of society. The gentleman who sends his son up a drain in search of a favourite pigeon, and applies lighted matches tQ the boy's feet Wanted, a New Guardian when he asserts that he can get no further, finds with surprise that his plea " It was my own son, your worship"- is regarded by the magisterial mind as an aggravation of his offence ; the woman who is guardian to a ten-year-old owner of a fortune, which is to come to the guardian if the child dies, and who accordingly sets to work to kill the child by prolonged cruelty, finds, to her wrathful amazement, that in the house which was her grandfather's inviolable castle she is an object of keen, disrespectful and pressing attention from the ubiquitous officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Very possibly the work might be done faster and better ; that is a matter of money : but it is being done fast and well, and needs no recommendation from me. After this long list of matters which I do not propose to discuss, I come to the one which I do. If some virtues are new all vices are old, as a philosophic story-writer remarked when loaded dice were discovered at Pompeii ; and the neglect of children by otherwise quite amiable parents is a very old story. Men and women who are too occupied with amusement to see or notice a child from month's end to month's end form a perma- The Twentieth Century Child nent class, whose numbers may or may not be increasing, but always have been and always will be considerable. Lately, how- ever, there has been added to this another class, far larger and most unmistakably and rapidly increasing, of women who, without strict necessity, on behalf of a cause or a charity, to earn more money or assert liberty, for the sake of pleasure, profit or advertise- ment, or for a score of other reasons, good, bad and indifferent, have plunged into work and become completely absorbed in it. Iso- lated examples of such absorbed women workers, who are labouring from choice and not from necessity, have of course always existed. Dickens was very fond of carica- turing them, and apparently thought nothing too rude to say about them. Mrs. Jellaby in ' Bleak House,' as described by that dreadful young person Esther Summerson, is to my mind one of the few pieces of witless, unredeemed vulgarity in his books. But I do not think that I am misusing words o when I speak of such workers to-day as a new class, for they have been multiplied by ten thousand within the last few years, and are rapidly changing many of the social and economic conditions of English life. They 22 Wanted, a New Guardian have taken with grateful hands the liberty which has been won for them hardly and sternly by still living workers ; they do not mean to misuse such liberty in "having a good time " ; but neither, on the other hand, have they had time to fit in their new labours with the old-fashioned ones, which they do not wish to ignore, but which they cannot wedge in between a score of other important appointments. Committee meet- ings, literary and scientific tasks, meals, dressmakers' business and social engage- ments can be, and, in several cases which I know, are combined with managing a nursery and superintending the rest of the household, but it is not a day's work which the average person would care to repeat three hundred times a year. I should not. Once, while rather busy, I was left for some days with a six-year-old person, so I know what happens. A nurse bathed and dressed the creature in the morning, and at intervals during the day dusted it and did its hair ; but otherwise I was in sole charge. First she complained of " eternal " pains, and when I had diagnosed these to mean internal pains of a trifling character, and promised (preserved) ginger at lunch if the sufferer was o-ood for the rest o The Twentieth Century Child of the morning, she posed me and claimed half an hour of time by profound questions about original sin. Later still, when the necessity of finishing a certain task had become rather pressing for me, my little miss remarked casually (her temporary residence being at the seaside) : "I'm going out to paddle ; please keep an eye on me " ; and a prolonged tempest followed my demonstra- tion of the impossibility of this proceeding. Finally came her evening prayers, which meant an hour of stern and intricate theo- logical argument. And at the end of the day it did strike me that if I were this lady's mother, engaged in scientific studies or political intrigues, either the studies and intrigues or the lady would have to go to the wall. The difficulty of doing two women's work is no lighter than the difficulty, about which my sex complains, of doing two men's ; and it is not likely obligingly to disappear from this case. Neither is it, I imagine, at all likely that modern women will suddenly return en masse to the mediaeval occupations of jam-making, embroidery, tea-parties and child-nurture, any more than I myself propose to return to the occupations of the same 24 Wanted, a New Guardian period, i.e., to put on a helmet and sword and go forth to dispute with Messrs. Cook and Son the possession of Palestine. I do not despise jam and I love child-prattle, but when I hear a totally uneducated young gentleman, who has idled through five years at Harrow and three at Oxford, telling his sister or sweetheart that these two matters, varied by a little dressmakers' business, are their proper occupations in life, I marvel that the young women do not box his ears. When lecturers and writers, male and female, preach sermons on the same text I take time to consider which is the more wonderful, the stupidity and impudence of the preachers or the toleration of their audience. The future of marriage and population in this country is certainly a very serious matter if these preachers are to be believed, and a highly- educated, highly-cultivated woman is by her marriage to abandon valuable work, or even make it subservient to a cook with whims or a child with measles. A man coming to o some girl who is fresh from the lecture-rooms of Cheltenham and Cambridge, and pro- posing to make her a sort of combined housekeeper, monthly nurse, dressmaker's model, sick nurse and hostess of his dinner 25 The Twentieth Century Child parties, is likely to be sent about his business with scant politeness. Love has been a dominant influence in the lives of young women for many generations, because, except in a few rare cases, it has had no rival ; but a passion for work is a very serious rival, and if the other influence is to be handicapped by such penalties it will hardly be included, if I may be permitted a lapse into the picturesque parlance of Newmarket, as a " probable starter " among the influences of life, and will be knocked out in the betting to " 1000 to i offered." Without exactly putting forward my own experiences as typical, I suppose no one is concerned to deny that two healthy intelli- gent children can distribute attentions which will furnish most ample employment for a mother, governess, nurse, and nursery-maid ; and that an average woman who is occupied with scientific work, political juggling, literary undertakings, charitable management, and a host of social duties besides, with an occasional nervous breakdown to complicate matters, cannot possibly give proper attention to these children. If she is extremely fond of them, she will give up a portion of her work or - 26 Wanted, a New Guardian pleasure for their benefit ; but if she prefers her political salon, novel-writing, charity committees, Ascot, Henley, Goodwood, Scotch shooting-box, yachting trips, and month at Monte Carlo, I cannot conceive why she, any more than her husband, should abandon these in order to give the children their Bible lesson or see that their rice puddings are properly cooked. I myself like the latter occupations for a few days at any rate but my young Cambridge neigh- bour prefers the Differential Calculus, and the young and beautiful Duchess of A prefers to play at making and unmaking Cabinets in London and Washington. Grave Ambassadors and Ministers pace the lawns of A Castle, whispering toy secrets to her, asking with admirably grave faces what she thinks about Russia's designs in China. Would you have her dismiss them all and risk a European war in order to play spillikins with May in the nursery and hear about Jack's first battle with the Eton Latin Grammar ? One woman will manage both o the secrets and the spillikins, but the other says she can't and won't ; and (unless you assert roundly that in marrying she is once for all to place all other interests second to 27 The Twentieth Century Child her maternal ones) who has any right to make her try ? Nobody, I think ; but she might take some measures to safeguard these babes. One cannot, as I venture to think, in reason protest against the mathematicians and the politicians marrying, because, granted that they are perfectly healthy persons, the world will be worse for it if some portion of their brains, beauty, or other advantages are not transmitted to another generation. Neither can one force them to care for their children more than for any other interest or amuse- ment. In point of fact, you have only to pay visits in a dozen country houses, or lunch, dine, and have tea in a score of London houses, in order to discover that, to a considerable number of busy women, chil- dren are simply a nuisance ; while to many others they are mere playthings, pretty ornaments for the back seat of a carriage, amusing toys to relieve the ennui of a tea party, picturesque additions to the costume in which the hostess receives the Princess or the desirable millionaire. I stop there for the moment, and say nothing here about the women who have their children taught risqud dances and songs for the amusement of 28 Wanted, a New Guardian afternoon callers. We will refer to them later ; though really, since the rash and foolish abolition of the ducking-stool, there is no cure for persons of this description. I am merely now demanding guardians for the child of the student and business woman and reputable pleasure-seeker. A nurse is very often a most sensible and charming person, and in that case her guardianship for a few years leaves nothing to be desired. She is extremely practical. When she hands her small charges over to me at the Zoological Gardens, she does not vaguely request me to take great care of them, but gives brief specific directions about each. " Miss Alice wants to go and paddle with the penguin in the pond ; please don't let her. Master Jack always tries to shake hands with the chimpanzee ; please stop him. Miss Kate says she wants to go into the cage and play with the cobra, because it looked at her so kindly last time she was here ; please hold her hand in the snake- house." The babes will tell you reassuringly that they were only " funning," but their nurse knows better. When she reads aloud she goes straight ahead through fairies, escapes, disappearances, wrecks, desert The Twentieth Century Child islands, philosophic reflections, and historical allusions, so that her small hearers can attach to each incident an explanation evolved from their own strange little minds, and so treble the wonders of the story. I liked the candour of a seven-year-old listener, who said to a too explanatory story-teller : " Oh, do go on ! I can understand so much better when you don't explain." The confiding simple mind of this kindly soul is a very restful change from the drawing-room world. When one of her nurslings goes to school for his first term, and having lost a shilling in a bet, and also been tossed in a blanket, writes to her that, " The schoolroom is a gambling-hell and my dormitory is a torture- chamber," she weeps in sympathy, and sees to it that the next hamper is full of balm for such woes. I have heard complaints made of the grammar and pronunciation affected by her charges after prolonged residence with her and a nursery-maid ; but small people have in fact a resolute preference for this style of speech, only equalled by their readiness to drop it suddenly and completely later on. It was a lady who, throughout her four years of life had been surrounded by careful and adoring relations, who announced 30 Wanted, a Nerv Guardian to her fellow stall-holders at a bazaar : "I've tooked six pound and I'm awful 'ungry." It was this person, or an equally cared-for relation, who, during a stay at Southsea, told us that she and her nursery-maid had " bin to Paartsmouth," where "it was bilin' 'ot." But a well-chosen nurse, with her attendants, approaches so near to perfection that her government, even without superintendence, for the first six or seven years of her charges' life, cannot safely be replaced. Do not all of us know such a person, with strong, steady face, and quiet, firm voice which seems to begin all sentences with " dearie," and arms which seem to be always round some one, and eyes which are magnets to draw all children to her side ? Unfortunately, however, her powers have limits. Her babes become animated notes of interrogation ranging over the whole field of theology, physiology, social etiquette, and ancient and modern history, and it is but occasionally that they can be distracted now by offers to make toffee, or silenced by " that's not for a little boy to know." New theories and new lessons are introduced to her charges ; overwhelming quantities of new amusements, which the woman has no 31 The Twentieth Century Child authority to refuse, are offered to them, and merely create a demand for more ; new maladies called " nervous," but affecting no nerves with which she has ever been ac- quainted, invade her nursery and defy her remedies ; she becomes in her own language "flustered" and requests a conference with the mother, who sends for her accordingly while dressing for a State Concert, and says that she can now spare half an hour. The conference over, the woman much the wiser, do you think ? goes back to her ten-year- old nursling, who during the past week has been at three garden parties with her mother, two children's dances, two natural history lectures, and a theatre, has acted in some theatricals, been bridesmaid to a cousin, sold at a bazaar this afternoon, danced this even- ing to amuse some guests of her mother's <_> o who arrived early before dinner, and is now lying in bed, sleepless, crying, deadly tired, complaining of hunger, headache, and half- a-dozen other pains. What would you have ? The mother has compressed ten, twenty times that amount of entertainment into the same week, and addressed or presided over half a score of political meetings besides. She will come up to the nursery to-morrov/ Wanted, a New Guardian if she has time ; the child must have a tonic or see a doctor if she is really unwell, and go to Westgate for a week if she is tired. Two or three ladies at the concert have heard the story and have sympathised and given advice. Mrs. A. has recommended a new doctor. Every one, you understand, is anxious to do right and is being as kind as possible. But time is short, and calls on it are many. To suggest cruelty or wrong- doing in connection with this commonplace story is ridiculous. The mother and father have simply neither time nor inclination to study the extremely intricate phenomena of the nursery. No one, however, themselves least of all, would deny that they owe some care and consideration to these young lives. To choose a nurse, and watch her behaviour carefully at first till it is obvious that she is trustworthy, takes time and trouble, but as the result is to last, with good luck, for a considerable period, no one need, or probably docs, grudge the time and trouble. The next stage is, I humbly venture to think, a failure. Private governesses and tutors, whether they come by the day or as resi- dents, are nowadays brilliantly educated The Twentieth Century Child women and men, intimately acquainted with and capable of teaching more subjects than I know the names of. English education has had its dark days ; but I should think that, to-day, few except the most discontented critics would deny that it is equal to German education, and that the two systems are very easily first in the world. But in proportion as a teacher's work improves, his or her sphere of labour must contract. Their work, like all other good work, becomes specialised, their exact status in the house and family becomes more decidedly fixed, and their pay increases. You can find a hundred ladies to teach your little maid astronomy, Latin, logic, and other modern essentials ; but will two out of this hundred see to it that her clothes are at once smart enough to please her mother, and warm enough to be wholesome ? Will they return a decided refusal when her cousin calls to take the picturesque little person to an at-home for the third time that week, or when the Princess wants to carry her off to raffle dolls at a bazaar ? Will they take her to a Cornish seaside village for six months and soothe her racked nerves when the bazaars and at-homes have been con- ceded, and the inevitable end of all this 34 Wanted, a New Guardian business arrives ? And will they do the same for the eight-year-old brother and the seven- year-old sister ? How can you expect them to do such work ? They have never studied it, and it has nothing whatever to do with their present difficult and exacting pro- fession. Apparently, then, we want another pro- fession, the deputy-mother, the guardian with plenary powers, the mother's-help enlarged and glorified into a lady with authority over governess, nurse, and dressmakers, with power to refuse the requests of aunts, and to send the Princess' carriage empty away. I know two such persons among the homes of my clients, and their work is a brilliant success. The two mothers here are, in their children's eyes, clever and beautiful and favourite playmates with whom they occa- sionally have tea and romp ; the father (or uncle, as it is in one case) provides pocket- money, takes the party to the pantomime, chooses schools for the boys, buys guns, ponies, and fishing rods for their holidays, and joins their sport whenever he has time. I cannot describe the exact work of these ladies more simply than by saying that it is the doing of everything which I have de- 35 D - The Twentieth Century Child scribed in these pages as being now left undone. If the new guardian could add to this a little elementary teaching it would be useful, but my idea doubtless a very in- coherent one is that for educational purposes her little charge should either have a general day-governess or be taken the round of classes on different subjects, as is frequently done with children in London, and nearly always in Paris. To any one who may suggest that day-governesses are not pro- curable in the country, I can but reply that my proposal only applies (i) to intellectually busy women, and that these, in the nature of things, mostly live in towns ; (2) to socially busy women, who probably live in London, and if they have country houses besides, can obviously afford to engage a resident gover- ness, and fit up rooms for her in the village or house, according to their joint pleasure. As regards the cost of this arrangement, a difficulty certainly presents itself. For the position which I have attempted to describe, you must have a refined lady, with experience, resolute will, patience, tact, and a score of other qualities which, to put the matter plainly and coarsely, command a price in the market. When a daily governess, and a. Wanted, a New Guardian nurse and maid, and a school-bill for the boys have been added, the cost of two or three children has mounted up to a somewhat large sum. I can only repeat, however, that I am addressing this suggestion to persons who cannot or will not attend to their nurseries themselves, but quite recognise that such places require and merit attention, and are ready to do anything in reason to secure a proper amount of such attention. The matter may not be a pressing one, but it is not a fanciful difficulty. Numerically, these children are not of great importance ; such a vast majority of small persons have got parents to look after them that these others seem com- paratively but a small handful. But although, as a matter of numbers, they are " nobody much"- (as a four-year-old friend of mine answered diffidently when she had knocked at her mother's study-door during forbidden hours and was asked sharply, " Who's there ?") they are bound to have inherited rather more than an average amount of brains, and would appear therefore to merit a more than ordinary amount of attention. 37 CHAPTER III. PRAYERS. RELIGIOUS feeling may or may not be a matter of temperament in the case of grown-up folk ; in the nursery there is, I imagine, no emotion or lesson which can be less easily forced into the pupil's mind. Devotional- ism, irreverence, and indifference are three separate conditions of feeling which are born in a child like a good or bad temper, and have always seemed to me to be among the strongest and profoundest characteristics, and the most difficult for human guardians to change, of child-nature. I do not mean to suggest that it is impossible to make a certain child conform to all the outward observances of religion ; by example, precept, bribery, and a little judicious smacking, you can make him come down punctually to family prayers, sit still in church, learn the Cate- chism/study his Bible, and even say his prayers fairly regularly. But for any religious feeling which there may be in his regular perform- 38 Prayers ance of these duties, he might as well be reading the Koran and reciting Greek prayers out of the Iliad. On the other hand, there are a large number of children, boys as well as girls, to whom religion and theology are matters of absorbing interest, and who bom- bard their guardians at every hour of the day and night with a fire of questions displaying the most active and intelligent thought on these subjects. There are other little souls into whose devotional life one hardly dares to pry, who live all their hours in God's pre- sence, whose prayers are a communion with Him hardly closer than every other word which they have spoken during the clay. In my own experience these latter children are veryVare exceptions ; but I am assured by so many people, whose word I accept unhesita- tingly, that they are as numerous in life as in the pages of Charlotte Yonge's story-books, that I put aside my own experience, persist- ing, however, in my belief that the atmosphere and teaching of home and school have very little to do with this kind of character. An enchanting but irreverent four-year-old friend of mine who, on being taken to church for the first time, studied the business for half an hour, and then demanded, in a clear, firm 39 The Twentieth Century Child voice, " Give me my hat," had been brought up in a most devout atmosphere. Later on he came to grief on that rock which has caused the shipwreck of numerous juve- nile theologians ; he prayed for a large toy yacht, and did not get it, and declined to pay the slightest attention to the explanations furnished by his mother. Having listened to and weighed them carefully he shook his head, over which seven summers had now passed, and said almost regretfully, " I think I am too young to be religious." This simple fact of demanding something which is gen- uinely wanted, and not getting it, has, of course, been the undoing of many million small supplicants. Bewilderment and vexa- tion are followed by indifference and doubt, mostly, I am assured, from lack of clear and insistent explanation, but I cannot believe this. No explanation, I think, is really accepted, except one which appeals only to an already complete faith and devotion, viz., that God knows what is best, and does not think it good for the suppliant to grant this particular request. For the guardian to play deity and grant the prayer is not much use in the end. I remember an eight-year-old child whose maid was wont, as a rule, to 40 Prayers bring cake and milk for her final meal before she got into bed. But the meal was capri- ciously varied now and again by the sub- stitution of bread and butter for cake. This unkind proceeding occurred one night when the small person was unusually antipathetic to bread and butter, and she decided to test the efficacy of prayer. At the end of mur- mured petitions for parents and friends came a serious supplement : " Oh, God, I pray Thee to give me cake for supper to-night, instead of bread and butter." But when the prayer was finished and the little petitioner looked round for results, the tray stood there without change, and Annette, the maid, was stolidly folding up clothes in a corner. This was bewildering, but she judged it worth while to make another attempt. The prayer was resumed : " Oh, God, the bread and butter is still there. I pray Thee to turn Annette's hard heart." The intervention ot a weak-minded human listener caused the cake to be brought on this occasion, but the unwisdom of such intervention was obvious next clay. In my own experience of youthful religion (which, of course, has its limitations, and concerning which, as I say, I am perfectly 41 The Twentieth Century Child ready to accept corrections), religious feeling does not begin till the age of twelve or thirteen, and sometimes later in the case of boys. School confirmation-classes create it as a rule, so far as I see ; but by no means invariably. A youthful friend of mine told me once that the confirmation class at his school had other and more practical uses, since boys whose names were included in it could not be flogged. Their names were removed for one serious offence, and the next brought the more familiar punishment. He himself on a certain occasion was con- victed of one crime, and was aware that the discovery of another was a matter of a few hours ; so, in a moment of inspiration, he visited the headmaster, confessed both offences, and requested to have his name removed from the confirmation list on the ground that he was unworthy to be included in it. Pardon followed, and the young gentleman retired chuckling. The whole business of confirmation was devoid to his mind of the slightest religious meaning, and hours of explanation could not have shown him any harm in so taking advantage of a schoolmaster's whim with regard to an ordinary item of the school curriculum. To 42 Prayers say that a boy is not "nice" who does not become serious while being prepared for con- firmation is simply ridiculous. I know a dozen boys, clean-minded, honourable, truth- ful, and wholly delightful, to whom the rite is on a precise level with an ordinary Scripture class or history lesson. Reverence is not born in these children, and may or may not come to them suddenly later, and then for some reason which no man can tell. The most active belief in the presence of God, the most regular performance of religious duties, can exist without it. Two American friends of mine, aged ten and eleven, say their prayers regularly every night and morning, and learn hymns and texts by the yard, but play the most diabolical tricks on one another while so engaged. The boy's prayers are perfectly serious and real ; and God's presence is equally real, for on one occasion when his sister was indulging in the nefarious practice of beating his bare upturned feet with a hair- brush, he apologised to Heaven very seriously and soberly : " Excuse me, dear Lord, for a moment, while I get up and knock the stuffing out of Nellie " before he proceeded to rise from his knees and chastise the offender. 43 The Twentieth Century Child Certain grown-up proceedings, even in households filled with the best intentions, do not tend to encourage reverence. Funny stories about children's prayers are told frequently in the presence of children, and it may be taken as beyond doubt that no child who hears such a story will say his prayers again with complete devotion until he has forgotten the story, which he may do within the next few hours, and may not do at all. The majority of children's services which I have visited strike me as remarkably irreverent, a prominent feature of them being a long catechism, with plenty of funny answers and consequent laughter. I may be displaying much ignorance of ecclesiastical arrangements, but I cannot understand why this noisy and humorous conversation between clergyman and children cannot take place in the Sunday school. I remember thinking once, when some children were being asked the meaning of the pressing petition made by the nobleman of Capernaum : " Sir, come down, ere my child die," and a small boy answered, " He meant 'hurry up/" and the rest of the congregation laughed approvingly, how absurd it was, first, to teach these youngsters to approach Heaven with reverent 44 Prayers language, and then to invite them to para- phrase the stately English of gospels and prayers with their own horrible slang. I prefer the proceeding of a certain little lady who, whenever she wants to ask for some- thing unusual in her prayers, states her requirements to an elder sister, for whose literary talents she has a warm admiration, and asks that the petition may be written out in "religious" English. It is a fact for which I can vouch that these children's services disgust certain juvenile members of the congregation as much as they entertain others. A youthful but famous member of the theatrical profession, whose theological education is a little backward, and who was introduced to one of these juvenile entertain- ments for the first time, said decisively after- wards : " I will come with you to the proper morning service if you like next Sunday, but I shan't go there again." I am told, how- ever, by persons who know the business better than I do, that my complaint could not be upheld in London, where children's services are taken by the vicar or a most carefully selected substitute, and that the educational and devotional result is all that can be desired. 45 The Twentieth Century Child I wonder how far the practice of inviting visitors upstairs to " see the children put to bed and hear them say their prayers " is a common one. It is a repulsive proceeding which I have encountered several times, and heard years afterwards, from the outraged and insulted little victims themselves, remi- niscences of their shame and anger at being made to go through these duties in the presence of a whispering, giggling audience of relatives and friends. Of course this is just "nuts "to a portion of the nursery world. I know a young lady who has been pro- moted to say her prayers to herself, but scorns such dull business, and when it comes to a petition for blessings on relatives and friends, will settle down to enjoy herself like an actress in the crack scene of a play. Her parents come first ; then all such relations as are present, the suppliant keeping half an eye all the time on each person to see how he or she takes it ; then a long list of her mother's " young men " and her own, which (her acquaintances being chiefly military) gives her audience the impression that she is going straight through the Army List. Occasion- ally the name of one of her hearers is ostentatiously left out, but not often, because 46 Prayers the young person likes numbers. Her petition is an elaborately displayed visitors' list, in which quantity and quality are equally important. Another child gained a reputation for utter godlessness in the same surround- ings. One of the wearisome and foolish aunts who surrounded her, being desirous either of showing off before the rest of the company, or more probably of getting a " rise " out of the child, demanded : " Now, dear, will you think for a minute ; to whom are you going to say your prayers ? " The little maid looked gravely round the room till she espied a dark corner, with a low, broad chair in it, far removed from the audience, and she nodded towards it and answered briefly : " To that chair." Grown- up interference of this sort is in truth an extremely delicate and difficult business which may be resented even when coming from a recognised authority. An eight-year- old person of my acquaintance was extremely angry at being commanded to pray for the Boer wounded as well as the English during the late war. Her usual war prayer was a very bellicose affair : " Bless our dear, beautiful soldiers, and our darling sailors, and don't let any of them get hurt, and 47 The Twentieth Century Child make them well soon if they must be, and send all the Boers to hell." To this her guardian commanded that there should be added a petition for the Boer wounded ; but the little lady did not mean to tolerate such half-hearted nonsense. Under severe com- pulsion she added the required words, but a bystander overheard a soft whisper at the end of the prayer : " Never mind about the Boers." The South African War sent a wave of reality over juvenile religion which the young folk of that time are never likely to forget. The children who, with their mothers, crowded the churches during the dreadful December of 1899, the scared little folk whose prayers went out morning and night to far-off lands where fathers and brothers were fighting, were in such deadly earnest about their petitions that they wanted no lessons in devotion, and will probably never want any again. I think it also had a certain effect in stopping the more inane part of the chatter and story- telling on this subject, such stories just then being more likely to produce tears than laughter. Laxity of every sort is so intolerable to 48 Prayers youth, which so infinitely prefers regularity and discipline and the pleasing monotony of a life which is known, and loved because it is known, that one wonders at the foolishness of guardians who think it an amiable indul- gence to their children to let them stay away from church or omit prayers occasionally. A young person who has studied a good many contemporaries at home and at school during her twelve years, wrote me recently an extremely emphatic letter about the training of youth : " I think children ought to be trained severely, making Sunday a toyless day. See what nice people the elder generation is composed of now. Mow severely and primi- tively they were brought up ! Once there was a lady who had five children. Her four eldest were brought up very strictly, but the youngest always had his way. Left school because he did not like it. He grew up very different to his brothers and sisters. They all became charming people, and are alive now. All these people are closely related to me. The youngest grew up slovenly and wild, tried every way he could think of to get a living, but all to no pur- pose. He at last adopted a stern profession, 49 E The Twentieth Century Child in which he to this day slaves. I think children ought to be made to say a prayer every evening, and no more at three years old. They ought to have that prayer thoroughly explained to them. And I think they ought to learn a verse from the Bible every morning before breakfast, and the Collect every Sunday. I hope you will not think this very erratic, but it is my idea of bringing up a child." This, it must be admitted, is a stern pro- gramme for a person of three years old to carry out, and among other points in which I disagree with my correspondent's " idea of bringing up a child " is her appointment of the evening for prayer-time. There are a good many reasons why evening prayer should be shortened to the smallest possible proportions, chief among them being the fact that youth is mostly tired, and consequently cross and quarrelsome at bed-time. Children of the upper class (to whom I refer with no little trepidation, a critic of another child- book of mine having reproached me wrath- fully for writing about them. But for my part I cannot understand the modern ecclesi- astic's theory that this class is beneath notice, body and soul. I rather like studying Prayers the little souls of its junior portion, and introducing their small persons into a story in some other capacity than that of the haughty and insolent oppressor, who is at last moved by the good example of the other children to visit the poor) children of this class go to bed at late and irregular hours during the London season, Christmas holi- days, and country-house visits, and unless they are naturally devout, religious exercises will be as unprofitable as unpopular. The two nicest children of my acquaintance have a way when they are tired of resuming the day's quarrels in their evening prayers. "God forgive Frances," prays one of them, " for pushing me into the fountain to-day while I was standing on the edge, and then daring to say that I felled in. . ." It is not etiquette, of course, to interrupt a praying companion, so Frances reserves her answer lor her own prayers. "God forgive Marjorie for daring to say that I pushed her into the fountain, when she truthfully knows she idled in her own self, and that Xanna tellecl her not to stand near the edge. ..." 1 hen follows a series ot aggravations and insults familiar between this pair : " Good night, and God bless you, Lady Marjorie," says Frances 51 K 2 The Twentieth Century Child piously. " Don't dare to say ' God bless you ' to me, Lady Frances/' is the stormy answer ; and the nurse, who knows that when these two ladies use one another's titles a first-class storm is threatening, mur- murs to each pacifically : " Don't call one another names, dearie." Prayer-manuals for children have a good many disadvantages. The devout child, as I say, will be always devout ; but in the case of the others, the choice lies between irreverence without a manual and unreality with it. After looking through some fifty or sixty of these books, I am full of wonder and admiration at the care and thought which is spent on them, and at the success of the result. Instruction and prayers are alike admirable. Many of them, especially the Roman Catholic books, are charmingly illus- trated, and I am filled with astonishment at seeing how every feature of child-life is noticed and provided for with the most perfect sympathy and simplicity and com- pleteness. At least two-thirds of the books which I have looked through, French, Ger- man, English and American, Roman Catholic and Anglican, are simply faultless. In others the mistakes are very minor affairs, and many 5 2 Prayers of these mistakes are doubtless matters of opinion. Brevity being an important part of nursery devotion, it seems rather unnecessary to include prayers for the clergy of the parish, district visitors, Sunday-school teachers, and such-like persons, while the language of some of the prayers occasionally grows rather stilted, and more often rather vague. It is also noticeable that the manuals for boys are distinctly superior to those for girls, many of the latter containing passages of sickly senti- mentality, the quotation of which would be entertaining but unprofitable. A good many of these manuals attempt to teach highly exaggerated respect for the clergy and other ecclesiastical authorities, while they are also needlessly intolerant of idleness, allowing no moments of rest at all to their little readers, and some of the writing on the subject of Confession becomes hysterical and a trifle vulgar ; but vulgarity, as we all know, means other people's manners, and intolerance means other people's opinions, and there may be many hundreds of little maidens whose souls arc moved by the sentences whose senti- mentality offends me. Among the books which have especially delighted me are Mr. Linklater's Lent and 53 The Twentieth Century Child Advent Talks with Children, containing short and delightfully - worded advice to youngsters of ten or twelve. Who would not wish to " rub in " the following sentences in a discourse about dishonesty : " Very often people are most careless about using other people's things. That is quite wrong, you ought to be more careful over what is lent to o you than over your own things, just because it is not yours. How often the opposite is the case ! A book is lent and perhaps not returned for a very long time, if at all, and sometimes one can hardly recognise it ; covers loose, leaves lost, and the whole book spoilt, and the one who returns it would be most indignant if he were told he had broken the Eighth Commandment ; yet he certainly has, for he has stolen the nice appearance of the book from its owner." Among children's manuals which I have discovered in various Roman Catholic shops are some most ad- mirably illustrated books, such as the ' Child's Pictorial Mass Book,' and a manual compiled by Rosa Mulholland, containing a delightful " Hymn for a Child that cannot Sleep at Night," and prayers " For a Child who has spent a good Day," " For a Child who has fallen into a great fault," and " For a Child 54 Prayers whose Mother is dead," which are charming in their simplicity and devoutness ; the same book containing instructions for fitting up a " Holy Corner " in the nursery, which leave nothing to be desired. Other admirable Roman Catholic manuals are ' Der Kinder- freund Jesus,' written throughout in the form of a conversation between our Lord and a little child ; Mgr. de Segur's ' Manual of Instruction for Little Children,' and an American illustrated Prayer Book for chil- dren, whose pictures are novel and unusually well printed. Two other books are ' My Private Prayer Book,' by the Vicar of All Saints', Margaret Street, containing some admirably worded prayers, and a few blank pages at the end on which children may write special prayers and resolutions of their own ; and ' A Parent's Manual,' containing suggestions for the progressive teaching and prayers of children from their earliest years onwards. I have said that girls' manuals are, as a rule, inferior to boys', but I must make an exception of Miss L. H. M. Soulsby's ' Suggestions on Prayer,' They are written, I am told, for girls of fifteen or thereabouts, but I think she has spent a good deal of 55 The Twentieth Century Child time with the kind of children whom I know best, if I may judge by her protest against "rushing into prayer the moment we are on our knees, while the echoes of daily life are still vibrating in our ears. We say our prayers from end to end, and then feel ' I've done my prayers,' as if we had finished turning a handle of a praying machine." Her suggestions in one chapter for " Making a Prayer Book," each child for itself, are delightful ; and only too many of my young friends would, I fear, fall in with her notion that three minutes for prayer and two minutes for Bible-reading are a possible minimum. Miss Soulsby, however, like many others of these writers, has an astonishing idea of the amount of matter which can be compressed into a few minutes. " Im- perialism is in the air," she says; "how much of it penetrates our prayers ? We feel citizens of no mean city do we pray for our fellow-citizens ? We regret War Office mis- takes do we pray any harder about war ? Do we perhaps regret that we have no direct interest in public affairs, and yet neglect to pray that earnest public-spirited men may be elected ? Surely prayers are as powerful as votes ... I do not speak of missions and Prayers other religious works which need our prayers, for prayer for these seems an obvious duty. . . . People sometimes seem to think that religion means carefully keeping certain rules, and being very unhappy if you break them ; all their prayers are about being kept from sin and forgiven for failures." I cannot help thinking that a fairly large majority of children, even among Miss Soulsby's older readers, would be considerably dismayed by such teaching, and the whole idea of inviting a child to extend private prayer beyond its own personal needs, and those of a few friends, strikes me as of doubtful value. Surely, till the young folk are far on in their " teens," church services on Sunday may be considered as paying sufficient attention to public affairs. " Andere Zeiten, andere Vogel," says Heine ; " Andere Vogel, andere Lieder " ; and in the religious world we may hear the singing of new birds. They are more sceptical about old faiths, these modern nestlings, more resolute with questions, more critical of answers. New needs have come among them, a multiplicity of teachers, a confusion of creeds, a pandemonium of asser- tions, contradictions, doubts and arguments. 57 The Twentieth Century Child The little children, with their whispers from the threshold of life, their breath of faith and love and innocence, will accept most of the old lessons and repeat most of the old prayers willingly enough, and perhaps will be none the worse, morally or intellectually, for the additions of their new teachers. But let us see to it that the sacred minutes of their life are kept sacred. CHAPTER IV. LESSONS. 1 E acquirement of knowledge may be described by two expressions. It may be dignified by the name of education, under which title Houses of Parliament, famous chiefs of schools and universities, men of learning, and men who have passed examinations make speeches and write books about it. It can be described as "doing lessons"; and then the minor essayist emerges from his humble obscurity,- and struts about for a brief space coram puhlico, adding his little views about the school wall-paper, or the binding of the lesson-books, or the airing of the bedrooms ; perhaps even venturing on an occasional sly prod at the pundits to whom he has just been listening so respectfully. For it is a fact about educational authorities that their theories and systems are more easy to criticise intelligently than those of any other scientific leaders who illuminate the present age. By their fruits we know them, promptly, person- 59 The Twentieth Century Child ally, intimately. At the end of a prescribed course of educational treatment unfortu- nately only when it is too late to try another every intelligent man knows whether or not he has got what he required, and can judge the system by a most precise knowledge of such of its fruits as decorate himself or his children. In all matters of enquiry I am an advocate for going to the victim first ; and I cannot understand why a child of seven, with the wisdom and illumination of the dawn fresh on it, should not be listened to respectfully on the subject of its lessons. A Western American friend of mine once concluded an argument with his pompous English guardian by taking up a gun and saying irritably, " I have a right to an opinion on my own education ; " and, though I thought the gun a needless bit of emphasis, I quite agreed with his contention. Now, it is a noteworthy but seldom noted fact, that a large majority of children, including a fair proportion of clever ones, hate and despise their lessons. Their contempt for grammar, arithmetic and such-like matter is profound. "That's the sort of thing I only know in term-time," said a small person to me once, indifferently - 60 Lessons abandoning her untenable contention that Lake Superior was in Italy, " where it was called Lago Maggiore." " Grown-up people only learn to spell so that children mayn't read their letters," she said scornfully, later, and declined to accede to her governess' prayer and "be an example" to the younger members of her family. She preferred, she stated openly, to be a warning ; and wrote me her opinion that in the " hussell and bussell " of her family life her guardians lost all sense of proportion, and attached ludicrous import- ance to such petty matters as punctuality, meals, dates, tidiness, a surplusage of choco- late, and above all to that uninteresting relation between written and spoken language briefly known as spelling. Her opinion, the clearness and vigour of which I am feebly representing here, was that lessons went into too much detail at first ; she had no time to grasp the broad facts of arithmetic, the existence and meaning of multiplication, sub- traction and division, before she was harried by the pettiness of the multiplication table ; she was not allowed to realise and think out thoroughly the fact of a great and romantic past called history, before her soul was vexed by a dated catalogue of kings and battles. 61 The Twentieth Century Child Also the really important business of life the building-up and decoration of some mighty castle in the air, the consideration and solution of some newly-presented problem of life was constantly being interrupted by the interpolation of arbitrary and irrelevant events such as walks and bed time, which she was advised to submit to for the most trivial reasons, reasons which were found when pressed to their conclusion to be logically contemptible. " Miss Lester told me last night," she confided to me, "that all the little dickie birds had stopped singing and gone to bed, so it was time for me to go to bed too ; but she was quite vexed when I went into her room at five o'clock this morn- ing- and told her that all the little dickie-birds O had wakened up and begun to sing again, so it was time for us to get up too." I have many moments of sympathy with the little complainant. Lessons, moral and intellectual, are administered to the younger portion of the school-room, even to-day, in spite of much improvement, with a certain triviality of outlook, a dull uniformity, a dis- regard of individual temperament which is a matter for regret, more especially as the alternative is as easy as it is enlightening. 62 Lessons If a little child say under the age of ten- dislikes arithmetic, grammar or history very much, why force it to learn them ? The whole business of arithmetic, from simple addition to decimal long division, can be picked up by an intelligent child of ten in three months, while at that age history is purely delightful and grammar has already been learned by the simple process of listening to educated conversation. Somewhat later the young brain can master the elements of the most difficult subjects in a few weeks. A youthful and clever tutor told me once that a pupil of his was cramming for the Navy when, in the October previous to the exami- nation, the boy's eyes were found to be slightly wrong, so that he would certainly be refused at the medical examination. The parents then asked and insisted that he should be coached for a Winchester scholar- ship, though at that moment the boy did not know a word of Greek, and the scholarship examination was to take place in the following June. At the end of these eight months the boy, though he had begun in October at the Greek alphabet, and had been going on with his other lessons, did so brilliantly in the examination that he was given a nomination. 63 The Twentieth Century Child Why in the name of wonders should long hours of a baby's life be made hideous by confronting the creature with knowledge which, at that earlier age, is labour and grief to understand, and perfectly useless when understood ? Some small folk like sums, and run through them as easily and accurately as a calculating machine or a croupier at Monte Carlo ; others love history ; once I met a child who liked grammar. Let them learn such things if they will, devoting the barest possible modicum of time to the other disagreeable matters. Let us have more liberty in the home school-room. Judiciously granted and supervised it would impede neither the work nor the discipline of lesson- time. School-life of course demands a greater measure of uniformity in lessons, and in these days an increasing number of parents find it necessary to send their children to school at an early age. Tubercular diseases demand east coast sea-air, and what residence more simple and accessible than a school at West- gate ? Some small person is fretful, lonely, unmanageable, out of harmony with all its surroundings at home, and requires the corporate life of school for its well-being. 6 4 Lessons Parents cross far-off lands and seas to make and rule an Empire merciful Heaven, what tears and weary years and broken hearts of children have gone to its building! and a school is the best place for their family. In a thousand country homes and seaside lodgings in summer-time, you may see some father and mother, with the children, and a maid engaged for four months, who will all be parted in October when the " six months' leave " is over. Parents and children study one another curiously through a few weeks, come to know one another again in September, share jokes and escapades, whisper together of the mysteries of life and death and immor- tality. Love is at its zenith when the day of parting comes, an October afternoon with rain dripping drearily on Tilbury landing-stage, whence forlorn little figures watch the great o o P. and O. liner steaming out to sea. Quick ! if the small feet can run fast enough you may see the ship's crowded decks once more at the dock gates as she passes through, and even pick out two figures which are your world and life. A helter-skelter rush, more good-byes and promises, and the ship is a blur in a mist of fog and tears. For two more years we must make the best of school- The Twentieth Century Child masters and good-natured friends. Yet the tragedy is a mighty lesson in geography. Various Continental forms of education may or may not have certain advantages over our own ; but it is impossible to over-estimate the advantage of the immense breadth of view gained by English children from this intimate association of Imperial business with their daily life. How utterly parochial, if you come to think of it, is the history, for instance, of Germany ; how dull her quarrel with some out-lying Elector here, her annex- ation of some Grand Duchy there ! What a collection of dry names a book of travels must represent to many of these brilliantly educated children on the Continent! How dull must be geography lessons to them, or at most as impersonally interesting as" a lecture on astronomy ! Whereas, let there be a riot in Australia, an earthquake in some West Indian island, or a war in some Hima- layan fastness, and atlases are caught up nervously in a thousand English homes, and children's frightened prayers go out to lands whereof no other child in Europe ever has heard, or is in the remotest degree ever likely to hear, the name. You could count by the thousand children in England each 66 Lessons one of whom has travelled more than the whole population of a moderate-sized Conti- nental town. Three children were having tea with me recently, the eldest of whom had accomplished the journey between London and Bombay three times ; the youngest, aged five, had done the same journey four times ; the other, aged nine, had come from New Zealand for the summer. Three other ladies of my acquaintance, aged four, live and seven, have come over to England from the West Indies every summer since they were born, and they and their English nurses think much less of the voyage than a French bonne thinks of taking her charges to Dinard. I remember the open-mouthed amazement of two little Austrian maidens at a Christmas party in London one Friday evening, when a twelve-year-old boy with whom they had been dancing shook hands with them soon after eight o'clock, saying comfortably, "Well, good-bye. 1 must be off back to Egypt." 1 le had come over from Cairo for the Christmas holidays, and was going back that night under charge of a friend who was i)i route to Calcutta -rid Brindisi, and who was to meet him at Victoria; but you would not have been thanked for reminding 67 The Twentieth Century Child him of this fact. My young gentleman's haughty air and brown curls and vigorous dancing had made an impression on one of the little Austrian hearts, for whose owner Egypt had thenceforth some real meaning and existence. Lessons, we know, are not always written in books. I think it was the same youth who gave a delightful answer to a woman who was expressing her admiration for his eldest brother, a well-known soldier and traveller whom the speaker had "only seen once but liked very much." " I've only seen him twice," said the child gravely, "and I like him too." The management of an English school is a responsible and complicated business when half a dozen or so of these babies, who can hope for some considerable time to go on writing their age with one figure, whose sorrows can scarce put themselves into words, and about whose pains and maladies, though they come and go like summer clouds, you must write lengthily and frighten horribly some brooding heart ten thousand miles away, honour it with their patronage. What amuse- ments can be provided for these little things who ought to be making sand-castles or bowling hoops, but must play cricket and 68 Lessons hockey and football unless they would be laughed at by the others ? What lessons are they to learn, what faith in Heaven to be taught, who ought to ask all their questions and tell all their doubts and fears with their mother's arm round them ? How can you know whether the elder boys or girls, those just but most merciless judges of a " cad," "bounder," "sneak," or other unpleasing person, will accept this wretched baby into their delightful but exclusive society ? And what are you to do if the Vehmgericht of the school sits in judgment and pronounces against the new-comer ? You may command or beg for a reversal of the judgment ; the judges will listen respectfully, but they will not obey. You may tell the child to hope for better days, but he lives for to-day ; youth is the season of hope only in that our elders are hopeful for us. If any further proof were needed of the splendid management of English schools, it might be found in the fact that the immense majority of English parents whose work causes them to be confronted with this pro- blem, choose school-life for their children, and that the barest possible minority of these are dissatisfied with their choice. Such 69 The Twentieth Century Child parents, it must be remembered, are rarely without plenty of alternatives. Uncles, aunts, good-natured friends, with or without pay- ment, are willing enough to undertake the charge of the children. School-life is chosen deliberately, with plenty of experience and thought, and with no small financial self- sacrifice, for it certainly is not the cheapest solution of the difficulty ; English schools being without any rival or question the most expensive in Europe. A hardly less terrifying class of pupil, offered chiefly to the schoolmasters and mistresses of seaside schools, is the small convalescent with a weak spine or doubtful lungs or the malady known among little folk as "the glands." This doctor has advised Cornwall for one, that doctor commands Westgate for another ; and a school is the simplest solution of the problem. In this case one difficulty dis- appears ; for if the illness be genuine, no more sympathetic and charming companions could be found in the kingdom than the invalid's fellow-pupils ; but the responsibility to the master or mistress is beyond what any reasonable sum of money can pay for. There is no weapon in the nursery armoury more Lessons easy to learn to use, and more effective when skilfully used, than illness. To insist upon lessons where the professed headache or pain or fatigue is real may mean very serious disaster ; to give way when the child is "shamming" is a moral catastrophe; there is a precipice on either side of you, and your inclination (as no one knows better than the imp with whom you have to deal) is to "play for safety " on the physical side. A man has need to be a first-class character-reader, surgeon and nurse to judge correctly in some cases, and it is always a shade of odds on an intelligent child who has ever been really ill, humbugging its guardian five times out of six attempts. A great nerve-specialist told me once that he had been called in to look at a girl of fourteen who had suddenly dis- played every ordinary symptom of hip-disease ; the family doctor was convinced she had acute hip-disease and required an immediate operation ; a minor consulting surgeon thought she had "nerves" and wanted an immediate whipping. The latter turned out to be right. Since a normal healthy child of eight is the nearest approach ever seen to perpetual motion, and it is equally injurious and im- possible to keep him or her at work for 71 The Twentieth Century Child more than a few short periods of the day, such very young school-children also create difficulties. In one of the best boys' pre- paratory schools of my acquaintance the little ones (i.e. those under nine) are sepa- rated entirely from boys aged between nine and fourteen ; having a matron of their own, a governess instead of masters, and separate hours, playground, and class-rooms. The plan would not, I imagine, work very well in a girls' school, where the small children are less reticent about their private affairs, and require a good deal of the sympathy which they only obtain from their elders. Hurt toes and tempers produce tears here ; facile tears, received with scorn by one's contemporaries but apt to leave sore hearts unless they are dried ; and many other events require telling to sympathetic elder ears. I remember a little maid reading a home letter in her school garden, in company with three other juveniles and two elders ; suddenly she looked up, her small face scarlet with excitement : "Oh," she said, "Cynthia's had all her hair cut off!" The news was received coldly by the lady's three con- temporaries, who presumably had not the honour of Cynthia's acquaintance ; the pink 72 Lessons face grew a little blank, and its colour began to die away, when an elder girl fortunately saved the situation by a few interested questions and comments. The lesson-hours of these little people are probably a merciful relief from the trouble of looking after them out of lesson time ; and the former hours cannot in the nature of things be a third of the day. In truth, to the majority of such small folk four hours lessons per day is, as the Scotch minister said of Eternal Punish- ment, " exceeding abundant, above all that they desire or deserve ; " and a grievous sense of their mistake has probably come over a good many French and German governesses whose fond delusion about their duties has once been that of a fifteen-year- old school-girl of my acquaintance, who "could not think what the German matron does here. She has really nothing to do except hear my German irregular verbs and dry the little ones after their bath." In her retirement the matron more probably shared the lament of the old village school-dame over her former pupils : " Come the long- winter afternoons, and I misses 'em and I wants 'em. But I misses 'em more than I wants 'em." The Twentieth Century Child In these days of educational fervour, the lesson-hours of schools are increasing every year. Many sane persons are glad to see this beginning of the end of the athletic craze, which has been the curse of all upper-class education since the disastrous day for England when cricket and football were invented, and the Duke of Wellington made or did not make his unfortunate remark about the Battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton. Athletics have an ill-defined, doubtful, though conceivable value in a system of education ; but insanity is always a misfortune ; and no reasonable man would deny that the crazy, idiotic cultivation of athletics which dis- tinguished the upper class boys' schools of England during the second half of the nine- teenth century, is in large measure responsible for the commercial losses, military disasters and artistic decadence which doubtless in very exaggerated fashion we lament to-day. The increase of athleticism in o-irls' schools o would be noted with universal approval were it not for the suspicion of it engendered and most rightly engendered by noting its results elsewhere. It will be a national calamity of incalculable magnitude if ten 74 Lessons years hence the admirable preparatory girls' schools sprinkled over Westgate and Brighton, the girls' high schools and colleges in Winchester, Cheltenham, Bedford and Ealing, and such women's colleges as Newnham, Girton, and Somerville, have sunk to the level of imbecile uselessness attained by Oxford, Cambridge, and the majority of upper-class boys' schools ten years ago. We do not want any more famous institutions debased, nor old and noble endowments misappropriated, for the training of professional athletes. Yet these lesson hours sometimes strike me as severe. In a well-known school at Brighton the girls (of ages between eleven and seventeen) get up at 6, work (before breakfast) from 7 to 8, and again from 8.30 to 10, from ii to 1.15, from 2.30 to 5, and from 8.15 to 9 ; that is eight hours a day ; and punishment mostly takes the form of extra work. Even on Saturday afternoon there is an hour and a half of preparation. The teaching is first-class, the food and exercise are perfect ; and my chief friend among the children thrives as vigorously as she complains ; but this is stern work. It was from a school close by, conducted in The Twentieth, Century Child similar fashion, that another twelve-year-old lady wrote to her admiring parents that she " had joined the school debating society, and opened a debate last night on the emancipa- tion of women." I know three absolutely and ideally perfect boys' schools and two girls' schools, all at Westgate ; which small village is indeed a perfect place for a school. I have also the honour to be more or less acquainted with five or six dozen schools in other parts of England, and a dozen or so in other parts of Europe, a large majority of which are doing most admirable work ; the English schools, open to criticism, perhaps, in parts, chiefly when they try to rival German prices without German unscrupulousness in the matter of bad food and underpaid teaching ; yet in the main admirable. But as most of us have one supreme being among our friends who can do no wrong, and in whose presence there is always joy, so it is to me with a certain moderate-sized, red-brick, creeper- covered house on the sea-front at Westgate, whose inmates are dearer than all other friends. The memory of them is of some- thing which used to light up sea-walls and lawns and sands as though June flowers 76 Lessons were being blown backwards and forwards there by summer winds. The gloomiest November afternoon brightened as, strolling down the wet wind-swept road, one passed these broad Elizabethan windows, against which, if fortune were very kind, some pink face framed in curls was pressed vaguely expectant, infinitely hopeful and faithful, seeing and hearing things in heaven above and the earth beneath which are now hid from older eyes for evermore. The owner of the house, most merciful in allowing rays of its sunlight to fall on world-weary way- farers, herself loving it enough to sympathise with those who are outside, admits sometimes a well-tried friend, who stands for a few moments, forgetting self with its endless regret, lost in a wave of love for these white souls who know no past nor its remorse, who laugh through to-day, and under God's grace are kings of the future. I know not why, but to this house no disagreeable children ever seem to come ; romps and idlers come, greedy little folk and vain, ladies with tempers, crochets and wills of their own ; but the really "horrid" child never; or maybe that under the kindly and well- practised hands of those in authority here 77 The Twentieth Century Child everything disagreeable retires for a time, finding the company uncongenial. Lessons are done sternly and steadily enough ; when a young person gets up at 10 p.m., lights some candles and tries on her best frock, she is punished ; when a little maid is found weeping one night because " Lily c-came and knocked at the d-door and said she was a g-ghost, and I was f-f-frightened," there is swift retribution for Lily. But life here is love and romping and laughter, with only such clouds as must blow across the sky of any spring day ; and in the winter of dis- content I am grateful when I may spend an hour inside these picture-windows, where the spring morning light brightens slowly over the young lives, where no more sorrowful or unkind feeling could intrude itself than envy of the folk who own these dainty jewels of white innocence, these pearls without price. To educate a child up to a point where it perceives the defects of its country's educa- tional methods, and condemns them root and branch, teachers, text-books, hoyrs, aims and results, is a not uncommon result of upper and middle-class teaching ; and the young person thereupon demands to be " finished " in another country for preference one of" 7$ Lessons which its parents disapprove. Thus I have heard the small German maiden complain that the music schools of her country are over-ridden by Wagner, so that no musical teaching worth the name is, in her fourteen- year-old opinion, to be had outside the Paris Conservatoire ; while two young French friends have lately discovered that no lan- guage will be any use for the future except that of England, in which country or none they accordingly propose to finish their education. Our own young folk are not backward in this cosmopolitan humility naturally enough, since the immediate out- come of it is travel, adventure, novelty, and liberty. I suppose that nobody, except a few cranks of a peculiarly foolish description, really imagines that the elementary education (in this sense) of France and Belgium is superior to our own, or that anything except a supe- rior French accent is to be gained by residence there ; or that even in Germany there is anything to be gained by young folk which is worth the slightest risk to body or soul. In fact, it is a less common practice than formerly to send young children as boarders to foreign schools, or lor a family to go and 79 The Twentieth Century Child live in Dresden, Brussels, Tours, or Lau- sanne for educational purposes ; though, on the other hand, there is a considerable increase in the number of women who love and lead a roving life on the Continent, and deposit their children in some French or German school with the silly and futile intention of keeping a certain amount of watch on them. I have personally discovered in such places many unhappy little mortals who ought to be playing with English friends at Westgate or walking two-and-two along the King's Road at Brighton. Numerous schools in Paris, Brussels, Wiesbaden, Hei- delberg, and so on, receive English children for a year or two, of course with profuse promises of exceptional kindness and atten- tion. But in fact such children are a nuisance to the mistresses, who must withdraw time and attention from the other children whom they are pushing forward for prizes and examinations, in order to teach the new- comers their language. It takes on an average about five months before an English child of eleven or twelve knows enough German to be placed in an ordinary class with German children ; and then for at least another term they are a drag on the rest of 80 Lessons the class. How popular this makes them with their class companions and teachers may easily be guessed. The whole school is full of arrangements which are unfamiliar and objectionable to the English child. Complaints about food are not, of course, worth much attention ; a school-child in any country in Europe who admitted that its food was satisfactory would be a rare and probably unpleasing phenomenon ; but foreign meals, good or bad, are wholly unsuited to nine English children out of ten. In many German establishments cooking-classes are part of the morning's work, and the children's dinner is partly cooked by themselves. There is no real harm in this, I suppose. A little maid did, indeed, once lament to me her fate in being obliged to help, and when I answered consolingly, " It is only play," she and her companion said ruefully, "Yes, but we have to eat the play." But the menu was sound, and the food looked q-oocl. O Religious differences, however slight, are a source of endless bewilderment, more espe- cially, of course, in France or Belgium. The promises of the mistress to respect the religion of her small English charges are mostly worthless ; if her own intentions are Si G The Twentieth Century Child good she cannot control her other pupils or under-mistresses. When you have once or twice received the sobbing confidences of some little person who has been told that she will go to hell if she dies that night, because she is not a Roman Catholic, you appreciate the value of such pledges. Child etiquette differs everywhere, and it is many weary months before the small English lady etiquette bound as the most world-worn mondaine is at home in foreign " society." The instruction administered to these young- sters, even in schools well accustomed to English children, like those of the Sacre Cceur or Englisher Fraulein, moves too rapidly ; what the instructress says is delight- ful, but there is a good deal of it. Scoldings are mostly incomprehensible ; the mistress who dispenses them has too great a com- mand of language or rather, language has too great a command of her for their point to be understood ; which is lucky, since in five cases out of six they are unjust. The pension-school-life of Hanover, Dresden and Leipzig is a different matter, and seems a harmless enough amusement for an ordinary girl of seventeen or eighteen with some money and sufficient good sense 82 Lessons to avoid unpleasing acquaintances. Lessons here are no doubt very good for their price, which rarely exceeds ten marks for the best, and the price of opera-seats and other details of a musical education are proportionately low. Everything could probably be got equally well in London, but the life is new and amusing and carefully supervised by competent people. The pupil picks up a little German, makes acquaintance with some American children living in similar fashion, gives tea-parties to five-year-old German babies who are working for one of the higher examinations, and chatters to the crowd of German children who flock along the streets with their happy, friendly faces and pretty English greetings. It is a decent, amusing, and not unprofitable life. In Belgium and France matters are very different, and no words, however strong, no repetition, however frequent, can sufficiently emphasise the risk of sending girls to either country without the most searching inquiries. In many of the school-pensions of Brussels rooms are let to chance tenants when there are not enough girls to fill the house. The charges for lessons here are small compared to Paris and London, but are not, in fact, The Twentieth Century Child especially low considering the very inferior quality of the education. There are one or two good boarding-schools in Brussels, but they are more expensive than Dresden boarding-schools, and the education is natu- rally no better than could be found in a hundred English establishments for the same price. It is, however, more especially the reckless manner in which English and American parents send their children to schools and families in Paris which amazes me. Women who consult the friendly station- master or hotel-keeper about a school some- times meet with tiresome results in England ; when they ask and adopt the advice of the concierge or tea-room-proprietress in France, they ought to be confined in an asylum for criminal lunatics till their daughters are of age. With the exception of two or three well-known convent schools (admission to which is by no means to be had for the asking) no school or pension in Paris should be considered for a moment unless the parents themselves have an intimate personal acquaintance with its head. There is no subject on which people are so totally unscrupulous as in recommending French schools. I have more than once heard 84 Lessons responsible and well-informed persons in Paris, whose advice might naturally be asked and taken by any parent, recommend some grossly incompetent acquaintance of their own with an effrontery which would be amusing in a less serious matter. Music and art lessons may be very good in Paris, but they are certainly not cheap ; fifty francs per lesson being quite a common price to pay for the former ; while in the good pensions children are charged 450 and 500 francs a month for food, lodging, and general super- intendence of their lessons. Amusement here is, of course, out of the question, except for an occasional visit to the Nouveau Cirque or an expedition to Versailles ; and the small Londoner, accustomed to a considerable amount of freedom and a very large amount of amusement, finds life in Paris extremely dull. French youth accepts this without question, but the continual excuses and lame explanations which have to be offered to English youngsters when they demand to go everywhere and see everything, have struck me sometimes as not the least unedifying portion of a most dangerous plan of educa- tion. CHAPTER V. DISAGREEABLE CHILDREN. I HAVE referred to the curious popular belief about a person who is seen fre- quently in the company of children, that he must like every creature under the age of sixteen. Most of us, however, who have much to do with the nursery, whether from choice or necessity, find that our acquaintances there divide themselves into groups, pleasing and unpleasing, very much as is the case with grown-up folk ; we love and hate a few, and like and dislike a good many. I, for instance, who know a very large number of children, am severely bored by at least half of them, and detest several of them as warmly as I dislike anyone in the world. A disagreeable child is in truth an extremely offensive person. It is restrained by no sense of decency or respec- tability ; it is unhampered by any of the ordinary conventions of society ; while its victim feels very erroneously that in his vexation he ought to make tolerant allowance 86 Disagreeable Children for the objectionable person's age, or with more reason that he will be expected by the little horror's parents to make such an allowance. For my own part, I make none. I know this young world so well it is a poor merit, but mine own that I recognise without any difficulty the rudeness, for instance, and tiresome rowdiness, which come sometimes to the nicest children as a result of over-excitement and over-fatigue, and the same evils in a child who is not indisposed but ill-disposed. No sensible human being would be seriously offended by the former ; while on the other hand a man must be indeed a foolishly sentimental lover of children and a most unwholesome companion for them who accepts the imper- tinence of some ill-mannered, radically vulgar boy or girl, because the offender is " only a child." I saw once an elderly lady fall in love with a little person of seven, pink cheeked, blue-eyed, beautiful to behold, and go through the whole familiar armoury of handkerchief tricks, baby stories and feats of modest legerdemain in making friends with C"> C3 it. This armoury becoming exhausted after a time, the child began to look bored, and presently terminated the interview with an 8? The Twentieth Century Child angry, " Oh, go away, you silly old thing." Her companion retired, and waited patiently till the child came near again in search of more amusement, when she obediently ad- ministered it. Subsequently the young lady used the same words to me, thinking perhaps not unnaturally that they were an accepted method of saying that she had had enough of a certain person's attentions. She is now, I believe, undeceived on this point. There is all the difference in life, too, between the character of a child, who in homely phrase "gives trouble" to servants or friends from mere impertinent idleness, and that of a child who is accustomed to being waited on, and asks from its attendants in perfectly polite language some ordinary service which they are there to render. " That boy," said an irascible tutor about one of the former kind, "wouldn't stir a finger to lift a herring off a gridiron ; but he'd ask me to shift the Rock of Gibraltar." On the other hand, people are continually criticising children unkindly for calling their maids to dress them, or to perform some other task which is part of the maid's duty, and which has been done for the child since the day she was born. I have heard similar 83 Disagreeable Children foolish criticisms passed on a six-year-old friend of mine, who had realised ever since she was two that all her acquaintances desired nothing more of life than the honour of waiting on her, and that her only business in the matter of demanding" suit and service from them was to distribute her favours equally. " Outrageous little nuisance she must be," murmured two visitors in the Hotel Meurice one evening, as they passed a room where the young lady was sitting on the floor in her nightgown, proclaiming : " I really cannot go to bed without my dear cat and my dear monkey ; " and half the staff of the hotel, her devoted friends and admirers, were searching for a stuffed cat and monkey ; not, perhaps, without an arricre pcnsfe that if they were found in some elderly visitor's bed as they subse- quently were there would be wrathful com- plainings next day on the part of that visitor. In theory this child should have grown up idle, capricious and intolerably selfish ; in fact, she is a charmingly courteous and con- siderate little lady, witty, gracious and beau- tiful : a living illustration of my favourite theory that "spoiling" does not spoil when it is mere love and care and tenderness 89 The Twentieth Century Child lavished on some person who is capable of repaying the love. The child who is really spoilt by love was probably never worth troubling about ; he was born almost incurably selfish, and his chances of cure (except by one means to which I refer later) were about equal with stern guardians or indulgent. We talk so much nowadays about the training of children, that we have lost sight of the fact that they possess a certain amount of individual character. Everybody has their own sometimes diametrically opposite ideal of the super- ficially unpleasant child. Some folk like a "nice, quiet" boy, others call him a muff. Lewis Carroll, whose liking for children was of a very circumscribed and highly senti- mental character, disliked all boys, and asked that they might not be brought to his rooms. A polite child is either " a prettily-behaved little thing," or a pest, according to one's mood. I remember an English child in a Dinard hotel who was immensely popular with every visitor for two or three days. If a lady lost a handkerchief the child would enquire anxiously : " Quand avez-vous dernierement frotte votre nez ? " and ransack the hotel for it. She got up pic-nics, 90 Disagreeable Children inviting numerous acquaintances, with the anxious preliminary enquiry : " Etes-vous vide (disengaged) demain ? " and was never so happy as when she was posing as an ingenue in the presence of a dozen guests, and making elaborately innocent remarks for their entertainment. Her life, like that of many public entertainers, was a busy and exacting- one. After church on Sunday she must be " drawn " about the sermon and theology in general ; a baby appeared suddenly in the hotel, and her observations on the origin of species were encouraged with delighted laughter ; privileged visitors went upstairs to say good-night to her in bed and brought down her latest bon-mot such a well-tried bon-mot ! one wonders what the child thought privately of the people who laughed at it. Three days hence this batch of visitors will have found out the small actress, and will denounce her to the next batch as a " poseuse " ; some of them, let us hope, with a penitent heart-ache under their most just reprobation. The little poseuse has but been acting as she has been taught to act by parents, elder sisters, and a host of sometime admiring neighbours ; she gets dreadfully tired of it now and then ; most 91 The Twentieth Century Child thankfully now and again she will creep into the arms of some friend who does not want her to do any tricks, and will let her rest there. I remember a little lady who came into her home garden one morning at break- fast-time and told a visitor that she had been sent to tell him " dinner was ready." "At least, not exactly dinner. The other meal. But everyone always laughs at me when I pronounce it. I expect that's why mother's sent me to you." The child, you see, quite understood the orders of the stage-manager, but was not in a mood to face the foot- lights. There are, however, a certain number of young people who, of their own free will and natural instinct, play to a gallery in this fashion from morning to night ; and I confess to loathing such children with a whole-hearted o loathing- These are the creatures whose C3 games, and meals, and life generally are an unredeemed nuisance in London and country houses, in sea-side hotels and lodgings. No genuine game can be played before a grown- up gallery ; your honest child wants to go into a remote back-garden, or on to wide sands with his trumpet, drum, reins, or bucket and spade ; it is only the thoroughly- 92 Disagreeable Children objectionable child who drags his companions close to the tennis-lawn, or hotel verandah, and blows his trumpet with one eye on the soldiers whom it summons, and the other on the grown-up folk who are watching and, he hopes and believes, admiring him. From this one may deduce the satisfactory con- clusion that noises, when objectionable, are nearly always made by objectionable children, and that to smack the head of a person who thus infuriates one is simply a duty which one owes to the world. If house and grounds O are of a certain size no toleration whatever need be extended to obtrusively noisy children. Always excepting the inmates of a small house, I know no exception to the rule that such children are all, boys and girls, radically and intensely offensive persons. In a small house some noise is inevitable, but beyond a certain point the amount of it depends entirely on the good or bad manners, the selfishness or unselfishness, of the children. '1 he majority of people are unconsciously and inevitably unjust in dealing with a world of which they have such slight and brief experience as of this nursery one. Neither duty nor inclination call them to decide 93 The Twentieth Century Child whether a boy in a temper is a radically vicious child or, in homely American par- lance, has stepped out of bed that morning on to the " business end " of a tin-tack. Another boy catapulting birds may be a sportsman or inherently cruel , a profoundly solemn child who declines to join games may be miserably shy or a self-conscious little prig. A kindly but uncomprehending friend of youth was dreadfully upset once when she found two small nephews quarrelling fiercely, and on asking nervously : " Oh, my dears, do you want to be like Cain and Abel ? " was met by the stern question : " Which of us would be Cain ? " She was induced to see that this lapse into sin was momentary, and my instruction to her was repeated when one of her charges made the goat eat the bath-sponge and then took it to a stream to drink ; after which she hopelessly misapplied her lesson j to a horribly cruel little imp who stood with her for a moment in the Tuileries Gardens, watching a man feeding the birds. Under a momentary pleasing delusion that the morsels of bread were deadly and subtly- destructive missiles, carrying death and mutilation among the birds, he watched the operations with a delighted smile, and readily - 94 Disagreeable Children accepted some crumbs which he was given to throw. But as the birds ate the crumbs one after another with obvious satisfaction, the young gentleman grew first suspicious and then furious. Finally he picked up a rock as big as himself, and flung it (and himself on the top of it) into the middle of the birds, frightening them away and damaging his own anatomy considerably. His mind had been an open book throughout the business ; but my good friend could only remember her recent lessons, and picked up the little imp, who had not hurt himself nearly as much as he deserved, and com- forted him with soothing words and much chocolate. It is so difficult for the most conscientious person to avoid the pit-falls and impassable mountains and culs-de-sac of this child-world ! Two or three joking allusions to getting into debt, without an accompanying sermon, may have a most disastrous eltect on some young lad ; yet what casttal jester would think of explaining to this listening child on each occasion that it is quite a common thing, and frequently done, even in the highest circles of society, to pay a man for what you buy from him ? And who, without making themselves 95 The Twentieth Century Child ridiculous, could mete out a precise measure of blame to a sixteen-year-old lady who aggressively and prematurely does up her hair, lets down her frocks, and gives out to all her former friends that she will make it hot for any of them who do not abandon her Christian name and call her Miss Smith ? Or devise reproofs for these small ex-friends who mock Miss Smith derisively, and con- clude each daily passage of arms with their last and worst insult: "You child?" Yet this is no joke ; there will be serious trouble for the guardian when Miss Smith mine in ovilia, mox in reluctantes draconcs demands parties at the Dieppe Casino instead of digging sand - castles, and young French officers to talk to instead of the admiring school-boys who yesterday gave her chocolate on \h& plage. I am minded to protest at greater length and with some emphasis against the con- tinual assertion or assumption that parents and grown-up friends and guardians are chiefly responsible for the defects of dis- agreeable children. A child, after all, is not invariably a colourless, helpless creature, on whose mind I can write any tale of good or evil which I choose. It is fre- 96 Disagreeable Children quently, in spite of precept and example to the contrary, a highly accomplished little liar, endlessly bad-tempered and sulky, prig- gish or selfish past power of belief. I remember a little maid who came to England from a small home in Australia, from parents who were modest, kindly souls, living com- pletely alone, devoting themselves entirely to their children and their farm. The child stayed for some weeks with some amiable, unambitious country relatives, among whom it behaved quite prettily, and then went on to a very large country house where all the surroundings and fashion of life were com- pletely new to her. My small Australian walked through this house-full of wealth and luxury (which had no ostentation about it, being alike to children and elders the mere natural inheritance of generations) with her little nose in the air and cold scorn on her lips. She examined the children's clothes and turned over the contents of their jewel- boxes with contemptuous smiles ; she had pink silk nightgowns in Australia, she said condescendingly, with priceless embroidery on them ; her frocks all came from Paris ; her petticoats and certain other garments had lace on them which cost pounds and 97 ii The Twentieth Century Child pounds ; she had also in Australia a diamond necklace, and pearl shoe-buckles, and more bracelets than she could count. She had left all these things in Australia because because The luncheon-gong rang at this point, in time to avoid the explanation of why she had brought none of these wonders to England. Every day added to her catalogue of them, till the other children grew sceptical, and said so ; and war raged. A prig is more often made than born ; but, after all, the much blamed guardian must have had some natural material on which to work. Two children once ran across from their convent school-room to the chapel in the rain, forgetting their umbrellas, with the result that their white linen bonnets collapsed, and they were told sternly by a Sister in the ante-chapel to go back, since " they were not fit to appear in Our Lady's presence." One, writing of the incident, recorded the rebuke with solemn acceptance of it, referring sorrowfully to her deprivation of the service ; the other mentioned that " I didn't mean to laugh, but my face slipped and Sister was quite vexed. I didn't want to vex her, I love her, she has a face like a 98 Disagreeable Children dear, dear, kind monkey. She told me after- wards to take example by H - who was quite miserable at not having been allowed to come to chapel, and she said she wished I would spend as long over my confession as H- . I didn't like to tell her that as H - cribs all her lessons from little L she probably has more to confess than I have." Here you have a spirited attempt to make prigs of two children, one attempt being successful and the other not. Let us apportion the blame fairly. Literary, artistic and religious prigs have all the root of the vice in them before anyone can cul- tivate the flower ; while on the other hand, perhaps, the sternest repression of all natural sentiment and expression cannot kill the human sympathy which lives in nice children. Yet doubtless a good deal of mischief is done, especially by excessive consideration lor chance listeners. 1 suppose that one reason for the toleration and encouragement of priggish children is that they never shock the casual friend or bystander, and this "shocking" process is a great terror to many feeble-minded guardians of youth. A small child who called the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris " a stuffy old place," 99 H 2 The Twentieth Century Child and a six-year-old lady who studied the Venus de Medici for a moment and then pronounced that " she wouldn't have a silly old statue like that in her bedroom " " bed- room " being presumably suggested by the lack of clothing were both sternly rebuked, and may end in becoming artistic prigs of the most hopeless description. I imagine there is scarcely anyone who, if asked for his or her ideal of a radically offensive, as opposed to a superficially un- pleasant child, would not agree that selfish- ness was the most intolerable vice of all in young folk. Here, indeed, is a quality born in children, growing with their growth, fed by punishment, thriving on lectures and rebuke, ineradicable by the example or pre- cept of any human guardian. Who has not sat down helpless and furious before the demands and complaints of some child who will only play one game and one part in it, who wants one present from the Christmas- tree or one especial place to see some spectacle, and deliberately sets to w r ork to make life intolerable to everyone else till he or she has got that present or place ? Who has not encountered the little fiend in a house full of illness or trouble, and longed to IOO Disagreeable Children shake the life out of it ? At the age of eight or thereabouts many of these imps have a peculiar, nerve-harassing, whining cry which they can keep up for a perfectly indefinite period, and do keep up till they get what they want. The ordinary man settles him- self in a chair at first, with clenched teeth, and the iron resolution which is born of justice in his soul, resolved that this child shall scream itself hoarse and sick before he will give way ; but the contest is a ludicrous one ; he might as well resolve to sit quiet with a cobra's teeth in his neck. The odds are 1000 to i on the child, and in their souls both combatants know it. Most for- tunately there is a remedy to hand which will relieve all the grown-ups and may partially cure the child. This sort of person wants school-life, a life among contemporaries who do not keep nerves, but do keep varied and highly-effective remedies for his com- plaint. The treatment is a stern and searching one ; not always successful, since the thoroughly selfish child will frequently succeed in dominating the school as he has dominated his world at home. Also the cure leaves a good many scars behind ; and the scars are unluckily not only physical 101 The Twentieth Century Child ones. But such treatment is this child's last hope of salvation, and only the most weak-minded sentimentalist would disapprove of it. The majority of people, as I say, are unjust in dealing with the world of which I am writing, and one of the most common forms taken by this injustice is to dislike a child with whom one has been badly bored. Dullness, when one comes to reflect seriously on the matter, is not a crime at any age or in any part of the social world, and it really is not fair to condemn a child, body and soul, as past hope of redemption, for an affliction which falls upon all mankind, sometimes permanently, and often for long periods. It is not the duty of anybody under the age of eighteen to entertain the neighbours with whom they are left alone for a short time. It is my duty to do this ; it is the duty of my grown-up neighbour to do it. If we are put together at a dinner-party, or find our- selves sitting together in a drawing-room, concert-hall, or other place where people make a regular practice of conversation, convention decrees that we are not to sit and stare at one another, but must say something at regular intervals. No such custom binds . J02 Disagreeable Children younger folk ; indeed, if there be any law in their case at all, it is that they are to be "seen and not heard." Presumably, there- fore, the child who sits opposite to you in stolid, stony silence, with a vacuous stare and an occasional heavy sigh, is not only within its strict rights in so behaving, but is actually doing its duty. There are, however, two ways of doing one's duty, and I should still venture to class a good many of these silent young people in the category of disagreeable children. The majority of them are not really so painfully shy that they cannot speak, but are merely very much annoyed at being dressed up in party clothes and party manners, and sent among their elders for an hour or two. One would be inclined to o;rant them license for a certain amount o of resentment at this fate. One understands their declining to make advances to anybody except under compulsion, and even sulking during the first few minutes of overtures from the most well-meaning guest ; but at that point excuses must stop, as a rule. The young person who receives kindly conversa- tion, except from intimate friends among his or her own contemporaries, in sulky silence, The Twentieth Century Child is a person addicted to sulks under a good many other circumstances, and is therefore disagreeable. There are, however, as I have suggested, many legitimate excuses for youthful resent- ment at this kind of ordeal ; and final judg- ment on the matter of sulks is extremely difficult. Numberless people are annoyed by having a child in the room at all, and intensely indignant if compelled to talk to it ; others are frantically and genuinely terrified by such a necessity ; others, with the best intentions in the world, have an impression that nursery conversation is a special art of its own, and spend their time wondering where to begin. All these sensations of vexation, fear, and bewilderment are perfectly evident to their young companion, who is, naturally enough, somewhat annoyed by them, and by the de haut en das tone which is their result when conversation does beo-in. o " Why does he talk as if he was mocking at me the whole time ? " asked a child once, after a conversation with a very patronising elder ; and this same young person was very angry when she detected a certain familiar trick played on her by a young man, whose proceedings are best described in his own" 104 Disagreeable Children words : " Did you see me manoeuvring to get near Lady F ? " he asked me. " I was resolved to find out the truth about Jack and Ella, and she was talking to Jack, and obviously did not mean to let me have a word with her. But I got hold of little- Muriel, and worked her down the room till I got her between Lady F - and the door. You see, I knew Jack had to go at five. Then, directly he said good-bye, I stepped into his place. But it was heavy driving talking to that child for twenty minutes. I tried her on the alphabetical system : ' Have you ever been to the Alps ? ' ' Do you keep Bees ? ' ' Do you like Cows ? ' But I think she spotted it, and spotted what I was after too, for just as I got to the ' G ' she looked up at me and said, ' I think your friend's Going.' Good Lord, what a lot these children do know nowadays ! " Muriel undoubtedly had "spotted" the whole business, and if it did not give her a very high opinion of her elders' behaviour, that is hardly a matter for surprise. Again, the massive silence in which a good many children accept reproofs is sometimes a com- bination of sulking and of a desire to note carefully how far they can go in future The Twentieth Century Child without a first-class tempest. The degree of iniquity of a sulky child requires some skill to detect ; but when you have found a young person who owns the vice unalloyed and unashamed, you have found a very disagreeable child. D 06 1 C H A PT K K VI. PUNISHMENT. ) a world so easily thrilled and shocked as the present one, the word " punishment " is not lightly to be spoken. A man who is knocked down at night by a gang of roughs, who rob him of his possessions and add a little kicking de gaictd de cceur, must not invite society to avenge him, but must get up and devise sweet and kindly measures for providing his uninstructed but well-intentioned assailants with more educated amusement. The man or woman who has to bring up half-a-dozen children may take his or her choice among a score of new methods of training. But punishment is taboo. Long moral lectures, full of well- balanced argument, interspersed with an occasional intimation that the lecturer has been deeply grieved and hurt, are, if I understand the advice tendered to the managers of modern nurseries, to take the place of old-fashioned punishments. Before 107 The Twentieth Century Child even these mild correctives are administered, a doctor must be called in to see if the fault is due to some defect of health ; and, generally speaking, the business of correcting thumb-sucking, nail-biting, small tempers, or the vagaries of some seven-year-old lady who proposes to change the order of her lessons because " her arithmetic brain goes dead on Wednesday," will occupy the entire time and attention of one medical specialist, one ethical lecturer, two parents, and a nurse, who must all be possessed of a considerable share of patience. And so must the child. I have wondered sometimes how far this teaching is a result and how far a cause of the nervous, fractious, unquiet state of mind which prevails to-day, and to which its doctrines are so admirably adapted. These moral lectures, inculcated by so many American and English writers, are admirable when they are delivered in church by a trained and detached lecturer ; in ninety-nine other cases out of a hundred they are fretful scoldings with a grand name. The grand name does not at all impress the child, who for many generations has called them "sermons," "pi-jaws," "raggings," and so on, and loathes them no less, and listens ta 108 Punishment them no more, under their new title. Now, as always, the child wants a command, with a calm assumption that he will obey it, and a short emphatic reprimand or a smacking if he doesn't. Brevity is the soul of punish- ment. There are a few logical, reasonable little souls in the world who prefer to know the meaning of orders, but I fancy the majority of small folk are admirably repre- sented by two ladies of ten and twelve who once honoured me with a long visit, and with whom I attempted an occasional dose of reason. The autumn morning was cold, and paddling was in question : " No, it's too cold to paddle to-day." " Oh, but we're not a bit cold ; mayn't we paddle ? " " You said the water was cold yesterday, and it will be much colder to-day. Besides, it's beuinninix to rain." *5 O " Oh, we were only funning yesterday ; and indeed there was only one teeny weeny spot of rain. Mayn't we go and paddle now ? " " Look here, Beatrice, do you remember last week when you both had colds, and had to stay in bed for breakfast, and cried and said it was hateful ? ' 109 The Twentieth Century Child " Yes, of course." " Well, paddling about in icy cold water, catching crabs, would give you another cold exactly like that, and you would have to stay indoors ; and even if it got quite hot again for two or three days you wouldn't be able to paddle. Surely there is no sense in risking all that, just in order to go into the sea this morning, when you wouldn't enjoy it a bit because it is too cold, and no other children would be there for you to play with. Surely you must see the sense of that ? " "Oh, yes . . . and now may we go and paddle ? "' It has struck me sometimes, too, that the people who are really able to generalise about children (so far as such a thing is possible, which is not very far) must be extremely few fewer than the authors of books about their management. The ordinary parent knows only his own children intimately ; the casual friend of numerous families knows the small folk chiefly in their party frocks ; the schoolmaster and schoolmistress in many cases only know the "lessons" side of their charges' characters. Extraordinary revela- tions can, and sometimes do, come to such persons about a child whom they think they no Punishment know quite intimately. The polite, graceful little guest of an afternoon has party manners to match her party frock, and it is only when she comes to spend a month with you that she brings the other frocks and the other manners. You have heard that she can be very naughty ; you know from experience that she can be very good ; but you suspect that she is not always " on the mountains " if I may adopt an expressive phrase from the Salvation Army vocabulary. I listened once to an interview between a small day- scholar who had just returned from school, and her mother : ' Have you been very good to-day, chick ? " " N no " (hesitatingly). " Oh, fie ! You were naughty ? " - N n no." " What then, clearest ? " 'Well . . . comfortable." '1 he question which will concern your daily life most, if this lady comes to stay with you, is what she means precisely by that word " comfortable." It is all the minor evil deeds which she will perpetrate during the " comfortable " period which will puzzle you. Scoldings and moral lessons will avail in The Twentieth Century Child very little ; they will be received either with polite silence and resignation, or with the stern rebuke once administered by a seven- year-old-gentleman whose morning ride had to be delayed by a lecture on the impropriety of keeping dead crabs in all his trouser pockets : " They were alive when I put them in. You are wasting a gweat deal of my pwecious time." In dealing with very small children there is one fact no less inconvenient than certain ; it is impossible to be sure what they are really thinking. You give a country boy two shillings to come home from some pro- vincial theatre in a cab if it is raining ; it rains heavily, he engages the cab, and comes home on the box because he wants to drive. A child appears with her fringe cut off, and asserts vehemently that it was all an accident. " I was bending over the fire, and snipping with the scissors ; and then quite suddenly I saw the hateful fringe go up the chimney." A small lady demands " a bigger doll than Patty's," and is given one, on the under- standing that she shall not go and triumph over Patty with an assertion that her doll is biggest ; but presently Patty is found in a high state of indignation, while the other 112 Punishment lady stands by protesting eagerly : "I didn't say mine was the biggest ; I truthfully didn't ; I only came to Patty and said, ' Let's measure dolls.' " How much of all that is wilful and deliberate i.e., punishable naughtiness ? These are trivial types of far more serious problems which are not all, by the way, confined to sinners of this age. I remember once having a little sick person of fourteen to stay with me, with whom some small surgical matter went wrong ; producing rather serious results because she kept silence about it, in spite of a previous promise to tell at once about such accidents. She protested resolutely that she " hadn't wanted to worry me, and didn't think it would matter " ; but probably the child was afraid of what the doctor would do, and was now telling stories, and had in any case broken a promise with most serious consequences. Was it a case for punishment ? It is ridiculous to assume that children are always telling the truth ; it is criminal to assume that they are frequently telling stories, and the person who boasts about any child on earth, as a schoolboy of my acquaintance once boasted about his master, that he " knew his mind as well as The Twentieth Century Child if he had been down there with a candle," is talking utter nonsense. The funny little brain works in a fashion of its own. We ourselves introduce with one hand the con- fusion which we try to smooth away with the other. How on earth, for instance, can a child of to-day understand the meaning of politeness ? What can its idea be of good manners when in one sentence we inculcate some old-fashioned piece of good behaviour, and in the next nine sentences narrate to a bystander as a good joke some shocking piece of rudeness of our own ? A small person was once scolded for rudeness because, a recently-departed visitor having stroked her hair for ten minutes, till the ribbon had come off, and a curl was in her eye, and nursery tea was waiting, she had at last lifted up her voice and announced very softly and politely : " I should like to go away." The woman who was scolding her had just been narrating how she had at last driven away a thick-headed and fatiguing visitor by sheer open insults. I think most children have sufficiently pretty manners to know instinc- tively that they had better not do a third of the things which they see their elders doing ; but in this matter of manners, modern grown- 114 Punishment ups have disqualified themselves for the position of teachers. If there is a business in life where an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory, it is in the social education of youth. If one can imagine the case of a person who has really grasped the precise extent of a child's fault, and has so avoided that most fatal and irremediable of all faults, unjust punishment, one sees this person confronted next by an extremely difficult question : What punishments are possible for this fault ? Nowadays, every form of punishment which affects the health of the sinner has been put aside ; and quite right, too. The de- privation of food and fresh air, the boxing of ears, the terrors of dark rooms, and a score of other similar tortures which seem, by the way, to have done remarkably little harm to our ancestors --have been denounced and expelled from the regime of the nursery. Furthermore, every little novelty in this line, harmful or harmless, seems fated to be con- nected with some sensational case of cruelty, and to be swept away into the limbo of the impossible by an outbreak of idiotic, indis- criminating popular fury. If a woman in- tends to be cruel to her child, everything that The Twentieth Century Child she does bears the taint of malice and cruelty, and ought to be denounced accordingly. But unfortunately popular indignation (which is mostly a fine name for the reckless raving of autumn evening newspapers whose readers will have no more of the sea-serpent) fastens on any such strange-sounding penalties, in the case of a man or woman whose treat- ment of their children brings them into the grip of the law, and makes it absolutely im- possible for any parent to adopt the new penalties, however effective and proper. I have no desire to discuss any familiar legal cases, but two or three of the hysterically- denounced " tortures " which I read of in them struck me as highly original and harm- less punishments, which would be worth remembering and recommending if their use had not been rendered practically impossible by popular hysteria. The fact is that when you have put whipping aside, effective punish- ment can hardly be said to exist ; the guardian is helpless before a resolute and reckless child of twelve or thirteen, and the child very soon knows it. To send a person of this sort to bed, and pull down the blinds and lock the door, may be a dire penalty for a heinous crime if your moral authority happens to be 116 Punishment sufficient to keep the person in bed. Other- wise the culprit gets up, dresses and gets out of the window if he is a boy, or makes up stories to herself and plays original games with the pillow and bolster for playmates if it is a girl. This is to assume quite gratui- tously that the child does not like lying in bed with nothing to do except dream. Again, punishment by deprivation of certain plea- sures such as parties, coming in to dessert in the evening, hockey matches, pocket money, etc., implies, first, the existence of these plea- sures, which in a quiet country house is not always certain, and, secondly, which is much less certain, that the child has weighed its treats and its naughtiness in the balance, and deliberately preferred the treats. A young person of my acquaintance was fined two- pence every morning by her governess for being late for breakfast ; but, unluckily, she had soberly considered the question whether a quarter of an hour extra in bed was worth twopence, and had decided that it was. The absence of sugar in tea has a faint pleasing aroma of fashion about it which makes up for its nastiness ; and, so long as you cannot force a small person to eat dry bread, its appearance on her plate is a punishment 117 The Twentieth Century Child which simply means that she does not have sufficient food. These time-honoured pen- alties are admirable so long as the culprit feels the disgrace attached to them ; if he does not mind that, you have merely made yourself ridiculous, and might as well resort at once to my method when I am in charge of a child who cannot be persuaded or threatened into some necessary action or abstinence. I simply offer a shilling ; and make it two if necessary. I fancy that a good many experiments in the management of children, made by persons without autho- rity to take extreme measures, have ended in similar fashion. Sentencing and executing criminals outside the nursery must be an extremely easy matter to a person who has ever tried it inside. The prisoners who are removed protesting angrily that they are innocent, that they are always being punished unjustly, and that this is the most flagrantly unjust sentence of which even you have ever been guilty, are repeating words with a very familiar ring about them, but which have moved you more when the court of justice was being held in the nursery. Again, in the case of the out- side prisoners, you have no uneasy feeling i 18 Punishment that your own carelessness and spoiling have helped to produce the disaster. But, above all, these prisoners whom you sentence to twelve months' hard labour cannot punish you ten times more than you can punish them. They cannot move about your path for dull days afterwards, murmuring with ostentatiously ready obedience : " Yes, if you want to " ; " Of course, if you choose " ; to all propositions of work or amusement ; nor say good-night and good-morning with the minutest possible kiss which small round lips can give ; nor tell you in deeply hurt martyr voices, when you visit them in bed, that they "want nothing more, thank you." Perhaps women-folk are less easily to be " got at " by these affecting ways than the other sex ; indeed, I am told that they are reserved for fathers, uncles and male hosts. Yet I should doubt whether the martyr's mother is altogether impervious to such arts, which alone can put to rout all mathematical precision in the management of the nursery and the schoolroom. In home life, I am inclined to repeat, the thorough-paced rebel cannot really be dealt with by any practicable punishment. He or she starts the fight with odds of a hundred to one on him, and wins 119 The Twentieth Century Child in a canter. Violent, continual, corporal punishment is an absolute impossibility as regards one's own children; and other punish- ments are either farcical, or liable to produce unpleasant comments among servants and neighbours. This new interference of public opinion with the relations of parents and children has done so much good since Mr. Waugh created and fostered it, that the world must be content to pay a certain price for it. When you let loose public feeling into a new channel, you have released a great flood of common sense, Christian charity, hysteria, prompt sound action, and garrulous idiotic chatter. Is it worth the price ? I say yes, but I can conceive the possibility of another answer. The influence of corporate life is so great and immediate that schoolmasters and mis- tresses are well accustomed, first, to hearing about the difficult character of some new pupil, and the desperate measures which they will be obliged to take with him, and then to seeing him subside at once into the ordinary school life with no more incursions into sin than any healthy-minded child ought to make. Presumably, from the complaints which one used to hear some years ago, 120 Punishment this corporate sense was strong only in boys' schools ; but all that appears to have changed. The youth of girls is for many reasons more difficult to deal with than that of their brothers ; but, on the other hand, girls' schools are founded and superintended nowadays by women with very high qualifications for their work, so that the education and morale of their establishments is quite equal to that of first- class boys' schools and colleges, and the corporate sense can be trusted to do equally good work in both cases. A few rules with inevitable penalties for breaking them ; a careful study of each child's character for at least a term, and no serious penalties until the study is complete ; non-intervention so long as the child's companions can deal with the case, and absolute accuracy and justice when intervention becomes necessary ; that is the modest receipt for making a good school, given to me by the headmistress of one of the best schools with which I am acquainted. A well-balanced sense among the pupils that they are trusted almost absolutely, but that here, as in the world outside, retribution for wrong-doing is almost inevitable, takes from punishment all that The Twentieth Century Child notion of personal revenge which is the cause of half the rebellion against it. Yet boys' schools have still one immense advan- tage over the others ; they have one punish- ment left in them to which the most reckless inmate really objects. That power possessed by a schoolmaster, with the full approval of popular opinion inside the school and out, to apply the birch to soft and safe places in his pupil's anatomy, is an advantage in his favour which it is hardly possible to exaggerate. No boy engaged in some piece of wickedness could sit down for a minute without an un- comfortable recollection that he may have to pay a short, sharp, but exquisitely painful price for it. There was a little maid once who had been punished for some wrong- doing by a long and highly complicated pro- cess, including a prolonged lecture, various periods of silence, and some extra bed-time, and who, being reproached afterwards by her brother for brooding over her wrongs instead of banishing them at once from her thoughts, answered wearily : "I can't make my mind sit down." Her brother, who had not quite caught the point of the remark, said to me afterwards: "Very often I can't sit down either after Mr. B - has punished Punishment me, but I'm hanged if I sulk as long as Betty does." He was quite right. With a few exceptions, men, children, and horses sulk under punishment in proportion to its duration. On the other hand, I have had my moments of sympathy with Betty's mother. Betty required a good deal of correction, and punishment becomes difficult in proportion to its necessity. When you have eliminated corporal punishment from your weapons, you have kept nothing for the final conflict, and have allowed any resolute opponent to see that his ultimate victory is a foregone conclusion. The conclusion of the whole matter is, I suppose, that punishment is only a valuable part of the education of children when wielded by a perfectly just guardian who is prepared to go all lengths in using it. If the child's naughtiness has no limits, and your punishments have, a small sinner will realise this fact quite as soon as the judge, and, having reached your limits, will proceed to enjoy himself. There will always indeed rest a certain doubt as to the power of the Deity to interfere with a decisive stroke. "If God wanted me to be good, and I wouldn't be good, which would win ? " is The Twentieth Century Child an eternal nursery problem. But the earthly guardian's retribution will soon become con- temptible. It counts for little enough, I suppose, in any case. Love and patience are the last secret of child management, the innermost writing in the innermost adytum of nursery life love, which can force a response at last from the chilliest little soul ; humble patience which knows how to wait for the harvest. 124 CHAPTER VII. AT PLAY. I E modern child at play is a subject concerning which, to put it mildly, more nonsense has been written in the course of the last five years than on most others. The habit of generalising from newspaper paragraphs is a very natural one among the (rapidly diminishing) number of persons who are not behind the scenes of the newspaper world. There are, I am told, several people left in this country who are not aware that penny weekly newspapers which devote themselves to chronicling the thrilling movements and actions of people in "society" are not always easy to fill, and that blanks in certain pages arc occasionally filled up by the office boy or some one equally responsible with state- ments which show a high degree of imagina- tive genius, meriting payment and pro- motion, but which do not require the attention of the more serious sociological student. These innocent persons are thrilled '25 The Twentieth Century Child and impressed and pained to the bottom of their honest souls by descriptions of the life so feelingly described by the office boy. So deep is the impression, especially when the young man's imagination has been playing round the lives of upper-class children, that such tales are remembered for months, repeated continually, and finally weld them- selves together into a conviction that these children are lost body and soul. This, I say, is a perfectly natural con- viction. The wife of the country clergyman is quite aware that her own children get up at half-past seven ; breakfast with the governess in the schoolroom soon after eight ; do lessons, with an interval for cake and milk and a walk, till lunch-time ; lunch on beef, mutton and milk pudding, with chicken and bread-sauce for a treat ; do lessons and walk, bicycle, or ride till tea-time ; go to church at proper intervals in the week, and to mild children's parties once or twice a month, and otherwise to bed at half-past eight every night. She is equally aware that all her neighbours' children clo the same ; that she herself, and all the women of her acquaintance would go out of their minds with rage if anyone told an improper 1 26 At Play story in the children's presence, and would regard as a pestilential nuisance anybody who proposed, except at Christmas, to take the children to more than four parties a month. But all these folk have the most touching- faith in the newspaper paragraph, and are sure that the world outside their own quiet country-side is peopled with white-faced children who drink champagne, and flirt, and go to bed at ten, and generally speaking have forgotten more vice than their grand- mothers ever knew. As I have said in an earlier chapter in this book, these children do exist, and since many of them arc the offspring of brilliantly clever men and women, it is most desirable that their lives should be reformed. With all due respect to the office boy of that penny social paper, I doubt whether he or his readers are very intimately acquainted with the precise portions of these children's lives where reform is possible or even desirable. When a child has inherited the wits of clever parents, it is good to cultivate them, and it is impossible to cultivate them in absolute tranquillity. Moreover, I was told once by a great medical authority I think I may say, as regards the nursery, the highest medical authority in The Twentieth Century Child London that the visible ill-effect of high pressure is not at present considerable among youngsters of this class. With their immense recuperative power and easy adaptability to change, children go back to school after their Christmas holidays, and to the seaside after the riot of a London season, and show few signs of being the worse for it all. There are exceptions, as I say ; if you will, many painful exceptions ; and it is quite probable that we are laying up a store of disaster for the next generation. Yet the sober fact is, as regards the present one, that these children can stand an incredible amount of racket, over-eating, over-study and variety without being an atom the worse for it ; and that waves of nasty talk and nasty sights can pass before their minds without the slightest ill- effect. I am a warm advocate for remon- strance with the mother who permits the first, and the ducking-stool for her, as I have said before, when she allows the second, because, though the mischief may pass by in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, in the hundredth it does not pass by, and it is a sin and a scandal that such a risk should be run without the slightest object except amuse- ment ; but I do allege that the amount of- 128 At Play this mischief actually in progress, even in London, is greatly exaggerated. In the country it is for all practical pur- poses unknown. The nursery and school- room departments of a large country-house might be the ghost-room of Glamis Castle, as a rule, for anything that the ordinary guest sees of them. There is a separate staircase, whose carpet is half-way in grandeur between the pile of the grand staircase and the linoleum of the kitchen stairs ; there is a long passage with mats and steps which are deadly traps for the unwary ; the schoolroom and children's bedrooms are furnished and decorated on a scheme of their own ; here are sofas on which one jumps as often as one lies ; here is a table on which the ink is upset at least twice a week, and a bookcase whose top shelves are surrendered to litter because they are uselessly out of reach even with the aid of a chair ; and here are great maps of Europe and England on the walls, and between them one or two old family portraits of eighteenth - century boys and maidens, banished from the rooms below ; little folk who have once pored tearfully over the same dreadful compound multiplication sums ; whose hearts, too, have once be.it hi ( '~h with o 1-9 K. The Twentieth Century Child youth, and love, and ambition, and are now quiescent in a little dust. The children who work here to-day can see from their own separate seat in church on Sunday the huge old-fashioned monuments, with swords and urns and a score of heathen emblems, nar- rating pompously how the folk who bore these names found it "duke et decorum" to die for their country. The life of such children by far the commonest life in their class does not strike one as especially un- wholesome, nor its ideals reprehensible. The abnormal child-life, common in a very small portion of London society - it is called, I believe, by certain persons "the smart set"; but as every woman in London who perpetrates some more than usually outrageous piece of folly is said to belong to it, one must use charity and dis- cretion before including people in it is a bad business, but, I repeat, a very, very restricted one. It is utterly beyond hope of redemption, since it depends on the idiotic whims and selfish fancies of offensively wicked women whose rule is paramount in their nurseries, except in the numerous cases where they care nothing at all about exercising such rule, or in the equally numerous cases 130 At Plvj where it is cut short by proceedings in the divorce court. At the risk of making vain repetitions, I want again to insist on the fact that the numbers of these persons are as contemptible as their morals, and that the accounts of their doings which fill certain papers are wildly out of proportion to their importance in the world. Such narratives are, in point of fact, paid for at so much per inch in hard cash ; the women advertise themselves as openly and freely as a soap- maker advertises his wares ; there is a tariff for such advertisements in every newspaper office in London, and the dinner-parties and receptions of these women, their costumes at Ascot, their departures to Paris, and house- parties in Scotland are the principal source of revenue of one or two daily and a large number of weekly papers in London. When, as at present, it is the fashion to be seen with children, this class of woman takes hers out with her to Cannes or the theatre, just as the soap-maker adds a new and fashionable scent to his soaps; and both of them adver- tise the fact in the newspapers, and at the same charges. It would be a pity, how- ever, if the people who are induced by common-place advertisement columns to buy 131 K J The Twentieth Century Child the soap were persuaded by the other adver- tisements to believe that the ladies in question either are at present, or are ever likely to be, of any influence in the social world. They mix a little with the saner part of the world, and are tolerated with lazy contempt until they do something which puts them alto- gether outside the social pale ; but to suppose that their actions, especially their dealings with children, are at all ordinary, or admired, or are in the least likely to become more common, is a very foolish idea. They have humble and respectful imitators, just as every dancing girl has who raises herself from the Paris gutters to fame at the Moulin Rouge, but the proud eminence of one and the other has an equally limited circle of admirers. With the overwork and foolish amuse- ments of children whose parents are simply too busy to look after them, I have dealt in another chapter. In their case it is more the quantity than the quality of such enter- tainments which is foolish. Exaggeration j s oo the note of the age, but one cannot too often, or too seriously, protest against the mischief which it does in the nursery. The excess pleases nobody. Host and hostess cannot give any pleasure to tired and fractious little 132 At Play guests at a party if they turn their house into a temporary combination of the Al- hambra and the Savoy Restaurant. The effort too often ends in the fashion of a little scene which was once enacted at a children's fete at the Botanical Gardens, when the hostess was trying to organise a game of ' Zoological Gardens ' : " What animal will you be, Kitty ? " " The bear, please." " And you, Geoffrey ? " " I don't know." " Oh, think ! Will you be a snake and crawl ? " " No. Thank you." " Would you like to be a tiger and roar ? " " N-n-no." " Well, what do you want to be ? " " I want to be sick." This is the most entirely stupid treatment of a child in the world. Even during the Christmas holidays one party more or less does not greatly concern these little folk. A small friend once told me that her brother was " quite moderately vexed " because he was not going to a certain garden-party one afternoon in the season ; he had been to a dance the previous evening and had eaten The Twentieth Century Child too much ; he was going to another party the following afternoon, and would probably again have too many ices ; his " appetite and drinkatite," the sister assured me gravely, would be better for a rest. Again, however, let me assert that even in the middle of the London season, and at Christmas-time, the immense majority of parents, so far as my acquaintance goes, are adamant in restricting the amount of this amusement. The ten-year-old daughter of a great lady, who is sometimes (quite falsely, and to her own boundless rage) accused of being in the " smart set," received over sixty invitations to parties one summer ; her mother accepted five of them for her, and sent her into the country to avoid two of these. There is no surer way of getting oneself disliked among schoolroom guardians than by issuing invitations direct to ithe children without asking leave first, so that they may be declined if prudent. Outside the objectionable set of people to whom I have referred, I doubt if there are a dozen houses in London where such direct indis- criminate invitations would be tolerated for a moment, or the individual who issued them allowed any longer to play about in the 134 At Play nurseries which he was thus trying to demoralise. The three or four weeks of the Christmas holidays, and the ten frenzied weeks to which the London season is now reduced, may, I think, however, be put aside when considering whether the amusements of English children do or do not conduce on the whole to a sound mind in a sound body. This latter is the more important a matter because at present the large majority of English children of all classes and all ages are the most charming companions in the world ; from no point of view can the little folk of any other country with which I am acquainted bear comparison with them ; and this state of affairs must not change for the worse. They are more picturesque and better dressed even than their French contem- poraries, whose costumiers never, it appears to me, take the trouble to devise an indi- vidual dress for their young customers, but merely cut grown-up models in half. Their perceptions are quicker and their sympathies wider than those of German children, who arc too much and at too early an age absorbed in the 1 routine of school-work and examinations. Personally I like the children The Twentieth Century Child of Finland next to the little folk of our own country ; the effect of the mixed boys' and girls' schools of Finland is an admirable one ; the influence of that most charming story- teller, the late Herr Topelius, was as wide as it was excellent, and the mixture of Swedish, Finnish and Scots' blood has pro- duced a delightful result. But such generali- ties though I must protest that in my own case they are the result of some experience are uninteresting. I should doubt very much whether the brief, happy riot of Christmas ever did much permanent harm to a child. The fun of a London season at this age has, on the con- trary, nothing whatever to be said in its defence. Outside these inconsiderable areas of time and space, how do the children of England amuse themselves ? Well, in the first place they amuse them- selves. The outsider must be a person of very wide and intimate knowledge of his world before his proferred entertainment will count for much against home-made amuse- ments. New parties, and novelties at them, are not really very thrilling incidents in this world : " It's the going which matters to us, not the where," a small excited bundle of 136 At Play wraps once explained to me ; but a prolonged cross-examination at the end of the Christmas holidays discovered the fact that the parties where she had enjoyed herself most were two small ones, of extreme simplicity, in very familiar houses. Cataracts of new toys which pour into the nursery on birthdays and other festivals are equally a mistake, especially the mechanical ones. " I hate toys which play with me, instead of letting me play with them," said a discontented ten-year-old child once ; and any nurse will tell you that after these have been played with for a day or two, and their antics regarded with a grave wonder which has always seemed to me to indicate rather more contempt for the in- ventor than any other feeling, such toys are put away once and for ever. A small child of my acquaintance who had sixty-three toys given her one Christmas, and could with difficulty be persuaded to finish unpacking them, and showed me a nursery cupboard ten feet high as the place where she kept her old toys, never paid the slightest heed to old toys or new except when unsympathetic guardians interfered with her own private amusement of turning on taps all over the house and watching the result. It was during o o 137 The Twentieth Century Child a gloomy period following a certain occasion when she had discovered a new and fascinat- ing looking tap in the cellar (presenting her- self later in the drawing-room, dripping with beer, and murmuring anxiously: " I do fink vere's a new tap in the cellar what wants a jug under it ") that she wound up three or four mechanical toys, and studied their move- ments with eyes which said plainly, " Here, indeed, is one of the mysteries of life. I am being punished for playing with an en- chanting tap by people who think this sort of thing funny ! " To play at bears, lions and wolves, to paddle, bathe, run races and climb trees these and everything else that is perfectly simple and happy and proper are the eternal tastes of childhood, which no man or woman could ever really supersede, thank goodness, if they lavished time and money on the effort. I have never myself met any one under the age of twelve in any rank of life who would not sacrifice nine- tenths of the amusements which you could offer them for a donkey-ride at the seaside. The donkey-man at Westgate, who is a philosopher and a warm personal friend of mine, is of opinion that they prefer this even to bathing: "They takes to it instinctive- At Play like," he told me once ; "big and little they'd ride them sooner than anything, and cry to go on a donkey afore they can speak. It's because our Lord rode one : and for the same reason, too, you may see a cross on the back of every donkey." Six or seven weeks of thoroughly evil amusements could be com- pletely obliterated from almost any child's mind in any class of life by a short stay at the seaside, where every hour (except the rainy ones) is full of the profound satisfying pleasure belonging only to occupations which are known and loved because they are known. The joy of the seaside is the only perfect and universal joy of childhood ; it differs hardly at all at any age or in any class of life. The sand-castles of Westgate may be a trifle more elaborate than those of Margate, where the pure pleasure of digging has rarely time to get exhausted ; nurses dry your feet after paddling at Westgate, whereas at Margate you dry your own ; at Margate the mid-morning refreshment is limited to nougat, whereas buns and chocolate and milk are spread out on the Westgate sands towards half- past-eleven ; but the mind and soul of this sea holiday are the same from Tynemouth to Land's Knd. Indeed, I am 139 The Twentieth Century Child not quite sure that the small folk whose parents' incomes are written in two figures, have not certain advantages. The pro- cessions of babes made up on the sands by the Margate niggers, who march round and dance, and curtsey and sing to the inspiriting sounds of the banjo, are watched with deeply envious eyes by nurse-guarded ladies and gentlemen on the promenade above. I remember, with secret joy, the shattered nerves and blanched cheeks of a "society" personage who was honouring the Cliftonville Hotel with a short visit, and who, descending into Margate for a brief survey of this unknown and vulgar territory, found the two nurses appertaining to her six-year-old daughter conversing with a friendly cabman, while the small child herself was taking her turn of being instructed by " Uncle Bones " in the art of curtseying. The poor woman stood for a moment, just long enough to see her offspring reseated in the circle of bare- legged, beaming contemporaries, while another nigger prefaced a comic song by a command to the children to "sing up in the chorus, or I'll come and scratch your feet ; " then she searched out the nurses and sent one of them for the child, and I fear that, in 140 At Play the words of an old and famous song, " The rest of that story was smack, smack, smack." Yet I have grievous doubts as to where I should find that small person if her nurses' attention had become once more engaged in the neighbourhood of those niggers ; she confided to me (having been condemned to talk French for the rest of the day, and being a little mournful in consequence, with a tendency to drop into poetry) that : " Ouand je suis grown-up j'irai toujours jouer avec les niggers ; dans le doux achetez-et-achetez " [in the sweet by-and-by?] "je serai un nigger moi-meme." Unfortunately her return to London became necessary, and even promises of the water-chute and the Hippodrome could hardly mitigate my little maid's sorrow : " London's so stately," she lamented, " one must always wear one's best hat. Oh, I wish I could live in a bathing- machine here, or in a red house in a dear squeezy little town like \Yestgate ! Men wouldn't come to lunch there, and stroke your hair, and make jokes all the time, and sit at the table long, long after you've finished, talking as if their reputations were at stake." Apropos of these latter words, by the way, I have wondered sometimes why people who 141 The Twentieth Century Child profess to know something about the nursery world express their disbelief in the wit and wisdom which comes from it. It is so much easier to repeat genuine childish humour than to make it up, that nobody in their senses would take the trouble to manufacture it. Yet my wonder at this is not quite without comprehension, as I remember my own astonishment on being confronted for the first time with a nursery philosopher and humorist, whose mother had declined to allow her to come with me to Southsea for some naval pageant or other, I forget what. " You have deprived me of a life-long memory," was the stern rebuke administered by this eleven-year-old person to her parent ; and then she turned away in dignified anger to join in a conversation which was going on about the arrangement of a charity concert. Someone suggested that Maurice Farkoa I am sure he will forgive my mentioning his name here would sing without charge for this charity, as "he was fond of saying he had been hungry himself once, and must be ready to help anyone else who is." " Suppose," suggested the small lady, " he is merely resolved never to be hungry again himself ? " And the promoters of the concert" 142 eyed her doubtfully, feeling that there was more in her suggestion than had any right to be there. In an earlier part of this chapter I have referred to the amazing number of toys given to some children nowadays. These are, in fact, sometimes only a small part of the presents which some of them are allowed to receive, and over which, I should say, some kind of censorship might well be established. The free acceptance of presents of any sort or value, from anybody who likes to send them, on any occasion, is not very wise ; nor, in the case of a good many children, does it conduce to pretty manners. Men and women who are not governed in all their thoughts and words by strict reason- occasionally ask a child what it would like for a birthday present, and then express the freest disgust on receiving a full and com- plete answer. But if the question has been put to some very popular little: person, who throughout her short years has been loaded with useless gifts by all her acquaintances, is she likely, unless her mind is unusally ada- mant against such corruption, to refuse this chance of getting something which she really wants ? The lists drawn up by children at M3 The Twentieth Century Child Christmas (always excepting that famous one which began : " A desert island. A baby of my own. A Shetland pony . . .") are abhorrent to my mind. The whole essential pleasure of a gift, alike to recipient and donor, is gone if it is taken for granted that the gift will come ; it is no more a present than new boots are presents, or new summer vests, or the German story-books for which the gover- ness has asked with strictly educational intent. When the whole affair has been a systematised business in your child's mind, he will not think very much of the gifts, nor be in any way chary of criticising them, nor, perhaps, be backward in asking for them. It is impossible too often to repeat the unkind and ungracious remark that three-quarters of the givers of children's presents and children's parties are persons who desire their own amusement as much as that of their guests. We like these wondering exclamations from the beginning of life ; we like to see the excited pleasure, to hear this pretty gratitude, so freely expressed, so cheaply bought, com- pared to the hardly-won thanks of experi- enced and critical elder guests. The ordinary parent owes us nothing for administering such pleasures. 144 If I owned a popular family to revert for one last moment to the question of amusements I should demand two con- ditions for the parties to which I allowed them to go ; simplicity in winter and open air in summer. Likewise I should claim and freely exercise the right to refuse an invitation, without giving any reason, at any moment between its receipt and the hour of the party. Life is not long enough, nor is the human brain always sufficiently alert, to devise pretty excuses for your children not going to eight parties a week, and then to remember which lie you have told to which person. Three small people go to A. on Tuesday, and for that reason, and that reason only, they are not going to 13. and C. on Wednesday and Thursday ; this is the simple truth, and as it does not look nice in black and white (especially when A. is a duchess and the other two arc not ; an accident which happens constantly, sometimes not without foresight, but mostly by sheer malignant bad luck) it is best to say nothing at all. The rule of simplicity would be equally easy to enforce. It is an obvious rule, carrying its own recommendation and explanation on the face of it ; moreover, houses where it is '45 ' The Twentieth Century Child enforced, and houses where frantic exag geration is the rule, are equally well-known, and can be marked for the future. Open-air entertainments are, of course, the rule in the country during summer-time, but in point of fact are hardly less easy in London. The trees of Kensington Gardens are quite as delightful a place for a tea-picnic as any country wood, and have no single drawback except that you may not light a fire under them, and must clear away the bits rather more carefully than usual afterwards. Kew Gardens and the Zoo are incomparably superior to any open-air entertainment which could be found within ten miles of any ordi- nary country house, and an afternoon at either place offers the additional attractions of a drive in cabs, motor-cars, or on the top of an omnibus. Combinations of health and pleasure are the easiest things in the world to arrange if you honestly wish to arrange them, and have the most ordinary acquaint- ance with juvenile tastes. It is worth while, perhaps, even to take a little trouble to study these tastes and com- bine this health and pleasure, especially in the case of a girl who, less often than a boy, has the routine of school life to counteract the 146 At Play other mischief. I doubt whether a girl of eighteen, standing on the brink of an older society world, looking back on her childhood, judging its hopes and aims and fruition as such young folk will, would have anything but gratitude for a parent who had so guarded some of her freshness, who had held back something of novelty for the second act of her life's drama. This is often a stern and just young judge, whose love and grati- tude will not be granted without cause. If her presentation at Court to-morrow is but one item in a long, gorgeous succession of parties stretching back to her fourth year ; if the future holds no possibility of new pleasure, no scrap of amusement which she has not long ago tried and liked, and tried again and liked less, will she say thank you now for the carnival time of those Christmas holidays and London summers ? Satiety is a horrible sensation. To begin routine labour listlessly, wearily, hopelessly, with the brain-fag of yesterday's work heavy on us, with the feeling that we have done too much of this task already, and must do much more ; such a fate is almost intolerable. Init what must be the depression of an educated, intelligent boy or girl when, added to all this 147 i. 2 The Twentieth Century Child is the touch of self-contempt which affects the resolute pleasure-seeker ? To stand in the white dawn of youth and feel satiated with jam-puffs ! To be eighteen and feel so tired out with theatrical mummery and fancy dress balls that we must abandon all hope of fame and go to bed ! That is not a very glorious ending to the years of child- hood, nor do we owe many thanks to the guardian who has compassed it for us. 148 CHAPTER VIII. SOME FRENCH FRIENDS. "^HERE is a popular idea in England, arising, I think, from the inanities of French writers for the young no one in France can write a child's book that French children do not exist, but only men and women of the world in trousers and frocks of various lengths, who make love, and know all things, and never tret into mischief. The belief that o there is any essential difference between the small boys of different countries and centuries (though one may have preferences among them) is a strange one to people who have studied them in life and history. I have been privileged to know intimately two twelve- year-old boys, one French, sleepy-eyed, beau- tiful to behold, roaming the lanes of the Loire Inierieur country and the Boulevards of Paris in a pink print suit, with brown socks and a white cap ; the other English, freckled, grubby, running riot amid Hampshire woods in clothes which, like the grass of the field, M9 The Twentieth Century Child to-day were and to-morrow were cast into the old clothes - basket ; I have been honoured, I say, with the frequent com- panionship and most intimate confidences of both, and I would not like to say in a hurry which was the more sinfully delightful person of the two. Both these persons had that awesome love of snakes, toads, guns, fire- works, crabs and ferrets which is the founda- tion of every healthy boy ; both could eat any given quantity of food at any moment ; both had spent a day in prison, been wrecked several times, broken a front tooth, and been blown up by gunpowder experiments ; and I should be perfectly contented to be cast on a desert island with either of them, provided that he retained the ordinary contents of his trouser pockets. The return of both for the summer holidays was equally greeted by their respective neighbourhoods with lamen- tation and prophetic sorrow. One small difference existed ; for, whereas the good folk of Hampshire would narrate, with very precise knowledge of the fact and its con- comitants and consequences, how they had met my friend Bertie, with a small case of dynamite cartridges in one pocket, and a ferret in the other, and meditating fondly 150 Some French Friends over a couple of Board of Trade life-saving rockets which he had bought in Portsmouth ; the peasants round St. Nazaire on the other hand regarded my friend Paul with super- stitious awe, alleging that he walked along the road with his hands in his pockets, and could wreck boats on the Loire, and cause houses to fall down and windows and gates to break, merely by looking at them. The result was that Paul was not laid in wait for, chased, and occasionally caught and smacked with (mite the frequency which was desirable. I suppose it is true that the boys' schools in and round Paris are not very desirable places ; but per contra I have met some extremely unpleasant young gentlemen from London schools ; and it strikes me as unreasonable to expect perfect cleanliness of mind near any big city. Yet it is the rule in most people's experience. I know a fifteen-year- old Paris schoolboy (an excellent all-round athlete) whose affection for the society of his sisters and their girl-friends (a matter of comment to certain Knglish visitors) was due solely to the fact that I had lent him an india-rubber snake, which curled and wriggled about in such enchanting and life-like fashion that a boy who did not scheme to drop it The Twentieth Century Child accidentally in a room full of girls would be dead to all healthy ideas of wit. Another fourteen-year-old acquaintance of mine called Rene, whose parents were not especially strict, had never been inside a single Parisian place of entertainment in his life except the Nouveau Cirque ; he collected stamps ; had never heard of Cleo de Merode ; and, one day when he was coming somewhere with me, and had finished his school dejeuner before I arrived to fetch him, he came and ate another lunch in my company with perfect satisfaction. The prompt and complete success of the Nouveau Cirque in Paris is at once a proof of the innately healthy taste of French children and of the care taken of these little folk by the upper and upper-middle classes of Paris. No one except foreigners or the most countrified of provincials is taken in nowadays by the "family" and "school" matinees advertised by the Parisian theatres and music halls ; and the Nouveau Cirque is frankly recognised as the only possible place of amusement for nice children. Even here the extraordinary love of French man- agers for dull indecency leads occasionally to blunders, though they are, I think, the- Some French Friends result of mere stupid thoughtlessness. I remember once noticing a nasty little incident here ; and on a subsequent evening when I wished to take a large nursery party I sent a message to the manager asking that the objectionable bit might be left out. The request was granted immediately, and I believe that the incident in question was permanently expunged. The strict care of their children attributed to the provincial middle and lower classes in France is, how- ever, either a myth or, if it ever existed, is dying. I have seen more than two or three instances of this. I remember a certain typical occasion when I was lunching with the village doctor and his wife in a country district in Eastern France. Two daughters, one twelve, the other fourteen or fifteen, were present, but this did not prevent the host from relating to another guest how a certain irregular manage in the village had just broken up, the man taking another mistress and the woman another lover. " But, father, aren't M. and Mmc. B married ?" asked the younger girl in bewil- derment ; and she was told no. " But they have got three children," she insisted ; at which the doctor and the other idiot who r 53 The Twentieth Century Child had been taking part in the conversation looked at one another and laughed. " These things arrange themselves sometimes," said the doctor, and his little daughter went on eating her lunch in silence, with puckered forehead and puzzled eyes. Presently her mother asked if she wanted some more pudding, and had to repeat her question before the little maid could be roused from her reverie. She was engaged, you see, in reconstructing the theories of life which so far had served to satisfy her mind. It struck one as a pity. Accidents of climate and custom make it more easy to amuse children in France than in England. The Boulevards of Paris, with their shops and toy-sellers and picture- covered kiosques, are a scene of perfect bliss to your small companions, who will watch it all with a contentment which would not be increased, if you could believe it, by the purchase of the toys and flowers. The dolls and dolls' furniture in the Nain Bleu are more tempting ; but here the choice is too bewildering for any one desire to become insupportable. I think the happiest of the little mortals out walking here are some brother and sister strolling about with a - Some French Friends silent and slightly embarrassed uncle. Un- comprehending but docile he stops when they stop, goes on when and whither they desire, buys only two sticks of chocolate, and speaks but to ask occasionally : " Tu t'amuse, dis ? Quelle *mien scrieuse ! " not understanding the extreme gravity with which such youth accepts its happiest moments. I was amazed on returning to England, after some months in Paris, to note afresh how much effort and money is spent on amusing children of all classes here. The Children's Happy Evenings Association and innumerable boys' and girls' clubs make young lives in London almost as happy as they ought to be ; ladies demand funds for summer holidays for every little Londoner who would otherwise stay at home ; the Invalid Children's Aid Associa- tion requires toys quite as much as ban- dages ; TntlJi sees to it that every sick child in London has a Christmas present ; and the children's ward of the London Hospital is about the gayest nursery in the country. The person who really wants to appreciate this should apply to the Director of the Assistance Publique in Paris for an order to go and play with the children in the French State hospitals. The order (which '55 The Twentieth Century Child is a necessity for every visitor except the Sisters of Charity, who come twice a week and read religious books to the babes) admits you to the barest (and doubtless most sani- tary) wards in Europe, round which a good- natured but puzzled nurse conducts you as speedily as possible, stopping only to explain certain "show " cases as she goes. Nobody has got anything to read, to do, to look at, or (except for two hours on Sunday afternoons, when relations come in) to speak to ; no one complains or asks for anything ; the little folk just lie waiting to get well, quite patient, but direfully and dreadfully dull. If you explain politely to the nurse that you are not interested in the latest treatment of appendi- citis, and would rather talk to her patients, she is quite willing to allow it ; and your feeblest jokes and dullest stones will be a succes fou. Nobody has the slightest objec- tion to your bringing books or toys or even sweets here, provided that they do not offend against the last sanitary fad ; it is merely that these hospitals being under State con- trol, no private person thinks of interfering, and the result if hygienically admirable is horribly dull. In the Rue de Sevres chil- dren's hospital, with its six hundred beds, 156 Some French Friends I have seen a bound volume of " Chatterbox " in English passed round a ward for the sake of its pictures. In all my life I have never seen a more admirably managed or more mournful establishment than the big home of the Enfants Assistes in the Rue Uenfert Rochereau. During half-a-dozen visits here I never caught sight of a toy or a picture- book, and among the numerous gloomy uniforms of such institutions which I have seen in different parts of Europe this is certainly the gloomiest. Even in the poverty- stricken children's hospital in Rome there is some attempt at decoration and amusement, and an occasional relaxation of rules. I remember a "Teat friend of mine who was O taken there, and was allowed to keep on her curls, instead of having them cut off accord- ing to regulation, because she was an artist's model and the only support of her family. Her income the tiling was seven years old would of course have been seriously diminished by the loss of the curls. Flowers and pictures surrounded her ; by her side was a little wooden brush, and when you wanted to please her particularly you brushed the soft black locks, while the babe sat up in bed, looking with grave dark eyes across The Twentieth Century Child the palms and roses of her hospital garden to Frascati, where her mother and sister lived on a pension paid temporarily by some artists while the family bread-winner was being "cured" of consumption. And now that Beatrice is cured of that and all other earthly ills, I really do not know what happens to her family. Perhaps it is only in contrast to the activity and gaiety of English schools ; but this air of dullness seems to hang, too, over a large number of French upper- class schools. The convent schools, about whose suppression so much genuine vexation was felt, and so much indignation manu- factured, may have educated the soul, but they were good for neither the mind nor the body ; though it is true that French children prefer and can thrive under stricter regulation, less liberty and more religious exercise than English or Germans. Though the latter have far more work from their earliest years, those whom I have encountered have always struck me as unusually con- tented persons. The streets of these Ger- man towns at mid-day are gay with their friendly faces ; it takes you but a very few days to make acquaintance with all their 158 Some French Friends brothers, sisters and cousins, who honour you with their company at lunch, band- parties and tea in riverside gardens. Un- hesitatingly they accept your statement that you can't know too many of them or see them too often. " Come to the Kurgarten this afternoon," whispered a small maiden to whom I was proffering an invitation for the following Sunday : " Gretchen and Elsa will be there, and then you can invite them too." Lest I should seem by implication to accuse the rulers of these schools of allowing any casual male visitor to explore their establishments at his own will, let me explain that long experience in many climes and languages has brought to perfection my knowledge of the weak points of foreign school authorities. I speak of foreigners only, because, as a rule, in England there is no difficulty in gaining access to a child with whom or with whose parents one has any acquaintance ; liberty here being only bounded by the dictates of common sense. But it is not everyone I boast openly and without stint- who in the presence of a French or German school-mistress has my rapid percep- tion and ready action. Yet even to my skill and experience the first call upon a '59 The Twentieth Century Child child at a new foreign school is nervous work. You arc shown in to the salon, and the mis- tress comes in saying plainly with her eyes : " Who on earth are you, and how dare you come here ? " You answer first with a conciliatory look, every scrap of German or French having probably fled in the stress of this alarm, and then murmur some words about desiring to see Marie or Elsa or whoever it may be. To represent yourself as the small person's uncle is a worn-out, stupid device, inducing immediate suspicion. It is best to tell the truth, merely insinuating your knowledge of schools and willingness to conform to their customs, and hastily disclaiming any intention of taking the young person out to eat ices. The child having arrived, I have sometimes found it sound policy to pretend to be a little shy with her, and to talk mostly to her mistress ; the idea to be conveyed being that you are there more as a duty than as a pleasure. But infinite variety must be introduced into these proceedings, and success the success which means that ever afterwards the young lady and several of her best friends will be allowed to come to tea with you, and even to Ver- sailles on Sunday to see the fountains play 160 Some French Friends is only granted to a rare combination of genius and experience. I think that the most inaccessible young persons I ever encountered were two ten- year-old ladies at the school for daughters of officers of the Legion d'Honneur. The earliest preliminaries of a visit here are a written permit from the parents and a signed order from the Chancellor of the Legion d'Honneur, but these are minor matters. On arriving at the school, buried in the lovely forest of St. Germain, you are con- fronted at the outer gate by a deeply sus- picious concierge, who looks contemptuously at your permit, hardly troubling to hide her conviction that it is forged, and then passes you on into a passage where you undergo another searching examination from a lady sitting at a sort of ticket-office in the wall. She, eyeing you with even more pronounced disfavour and suspicion, passes you on into the visitors' room, at one end of \vhich sits another stern personage in a glass case, who commands the room with all-seeing eyes, and who on my first visit paralysed me to such an extent that my French verbs and pronouns reeled to and fro in frantic con- fusion, and I gave her to understand that a T 6 I M The Twentieth Century Child certain dolls' toilet apparatus which I had with me was brought as a present for herself. Then Helene and Jeanne come in, and on subsequent occasions bring various Maries and Lucies and Madeleines goodness knows what all their surnames are and, sitting on benches round the walls, the little maids talk in half-scared whispers of their quarrels and lessons and dinner. They are all dressed in black, with class-ribbons of different colours, and hair cropped short, " till our premiere communion," explains Helene, " after that we are supposed to be able to brush it our- selves even if it is quite long." On the walls of the room are the Tableaux d'Hon- neur, where are inscribed every Sunday the names of the young persons who have behaved with perfect decorum during the past week. Helene's and Madeleine's names are nearly always there, Lucie's having, I regret to say, only appeared there once ; and, from my private knowledge of certain previous proceedings, I fear that even this solitary appearance reflected more credit on the young lady's powers of dissimulation than on the mistresses' judgment. Prize- giving day here, to which I had the honour of being invited Mademoiselle Helene, who 162 Some French Friends was to receive five first and three second prizes, saw to that was a long and magnifi- cent ceremonial. The children sat in lines down the room, while behind a long table on a raised dais were generals and marshals, resplendent in blue and scarlet and gold, and a few ladies, who smiled kindly as someone read out names and awards, and the little maids came up one by one to receive their pile of books. Madeleine returns smiling gravely with a prize for unblemished good conduct during the year. But, oh, cherie ! what about that afternoon in the garden when you and Lucie ... I forgot. I promised not to tell. '63 CHAPTER IX. THE SICK CHILD. ONCE upon a time I had the pleasure of accompanying a woman to the sick-room of a young lady who had been condemned to spend two or three days of her tenth Christmas in bed, and listened to the following conver- sation. " Dr. Ellis came straight in," said the sick babe, indignantly, " and asked me if I had had too much plum pudding. I simply stared at him." " He was only joking, beloved." " Joking ? " The little lady wrapped her night-gown round her, and shook her curls angrily : " It is disgusting. I shan't speak to him to-morrow ; I shall just look at him. There are some people with whom one must put on one's haughtiest manner." " Well, what would you like to do now ? Will you have the cards and picture-books which came yesterday ? " " N-no, thank you. I did look at them while I was unpacking them." 164 The Sick Child " Shall I go on reading you ' Alice in Wonderland ' ? " " Oh, no ! It makes my head go all wagglety. Tell me just one thing if I am very good all day mayn't I go with the others to-night ? " " Dearest, I am afraid you mustn't. I am so sorry. Perhaps on Saturday. Please do try and forget about the party to-night." " I c-can't m-make my thinking s-stop while I'm in b-b-bcd." 41 Can't you think, now, of anything you would like to do ? " " May I have Binkic and all the kittens ?" " Won't they fi O J unwell one hour, with their own and every- body else's muscles and nerves on the jump, 165 The Twentieth Century Child and crying out for new food, amusements, companions, and stories with an untiring resolution beside which the clamour of the Athenians would have sounded infantine ; the next hour they are delirious, or in a state of collapse which terrifies the household out of its wits. This rapidity of collapse is the schoolmaster's chief difficulty when one of his charges falls ill. How much and at what moment is the parent to be told ? An in- cautious word in his telegram, and the boy's mother arrives by the next train to take up her residence in the house for a fortnight, while the headmaster, his wife, the matron, and most of the under-masters may as well abandon all pretence of school-work and resign themselves to an endless discussion of whether Tommy can have chicken for dinner or go out for an hour in the sun. There was a school once upon a time where Tommy had a cold which ended in a touch of pneumonia. His mother arrived, and, after an interview with the headmaster, stayed until the end of the term. While she was there the school had, for practical purposes, one boy in it and one supreme ruler. At the beginning of the following term she returned with Tommy, saying that he was 166 The Sick Child still delicate, and she would like to keep him under her eye for another week. This time, however, she interviewed the headmaster's wife, and as a result was obliged to super- intend Tommy and Tommy only from a neighbouring hotel. At home retribution comes for many a sin of mismanagement when some child must be shut up in its room even for a day or two. Fractious and uncomprehending, half-indig- nant and half- frightened, the small person lies in bed, asking for amusement and bored by it when it is given, demanding favourite companions, puddings, and toys, and turning away from them all with petulant distaste when they come. The nurse gets nervous at this endless fretfulness, which is making her small patient worse, and grows alarmed by the disobedience which later on may be a vitally dangerous matter ; the child reads her nervousness by lightning flashes, after the manner of such small folk, and his own uneasiness grows. The conditions are not favourable if a crisis comes. There is a homely proverb which applies with great force to illness in the nursery. However much you may have spoilt your children, " it is never too late to mend " ; and 167 The Twentietli Century Child the first moment of even the most common- place malady is a very good time to begin. Brutal as it must seem to be stern now, it is worth remembering that discipline will mitigate your patient's malady even to-day, while to-morrow it may be a matter of life or death. Stop arguing about rules and begin to enforce them ; get a trained nurse, if necessary, in spite of the patient's wrathful protestations and tears, and your own probably quite erroneous belief that he "will not obey a stranger"; do not fetch every book, picture, dog, cat and toy which he asks for. Above all do not let the young person's contemporaries into the room when- ever they or the other child please ; children are delightful companions for grown-up sick folk who know exactly when they have had enough of them, and can say so and take measures to give effect to their belief; but with very rare exceptions they are the worst in the world for their own kind. This fact would probably be denied by most guardians, whose own duties would grow very severe if they might not occasionally send Betty and Jack to " sit with poor Jim for an hour and amuse him," but no sick-nurse would dispute it. 168 The Sick Child flat major, by Dussek, and some more ' Etudes de Velocite.' He says he finds me a little more advanced than he really had thought. March ^th. When I get into bed at night, whatever time it is, Madge always wakes up The Twentieth Century Child and says : " Are you warm enough ? " If I don't answer immediately, a quarrel is certain to arise in the morning, and then we fight like cats and dogs. I have got a cough, and Madame Berg has been giving me some morphine pills, which always stop it. Madame Vidal was very angry when she came this afternoon, and threw them away, and I told Madame Berg, and she said the horridest things about her, but I did not know what she was talking about, and I only cried a little. Madame Vidal took me to my lesson, and I played the ' Mouvement Perpetuel,' by Weber. Monsieur Conte said it was all wrong, and was very angry, and made me cry. Madame Vidal said to him that we were not going to stand many more scenes of this description, and that she would have me taken somewhere else, and that I was the only pupil he had whose playing was worth two sous. He calmed down at last, and said, " Certainly she is a little miracle. I would not lose her for anything." And then we went home quite happy. I have finished ' John Halifax.' The hero and heroine both die the same day and hour. I have begun ' Sans Famille/ by Hector Malot. 224 An Autobiography March \^th. Very wet day. We want rain, but this world is always uncontent. If it rains their clothes get spoilt ; in hot weather the sun is too strong. Mr. and Mrs. Love- grove came to lunch to-day. They were frightfully rude, staring at Madame Vidal as if they had never seen a French person before. The Due de Lille came in, but we all talked English. The Lovegroves do not know any French. When Mr. Lovegrove tried to talk to the Duke I got so red with trying not to laugh that father thought I was choking. I played afterwards the ' Mouvement Perpetuel' and the ' Bee Song,' and Mrs. Lovegrove was so very funny. She said patronisingly : " Why, you play as well as Sophie, who is nearly twice as old as you are." I suppose she thinks that music grows up in you like your legs and arms. If so, Methuselah must have been the greatest musician in the world. I made that joke myself. We are all goin to lunch at Paillard's to-morrow. March 3O///. We had a letter this morning from Monsieur Conte, asking if I might play at the concours of his pupils next week. It is so strange to get a letter asking if I may do something, instead of telling me to, that we are quite puzzled, and think he must be 225 Q The Twentieth Century Child ill. Father took me this afternoon to the Salon an exhibition of pictures. It was perfectly hateful. I do not know how people can go to such hateful places. I was so miserable that I cried a little, and then I suddenly saw Madame Vidal. She came to us, and father said, "What on earth's the matter ? " but she did not say anything. She laughed a little, and put her hand over my eyes, and took me away, and we went to tea at Columbia's. She says she will take me to the Nouveau Cirque again to-morrow night. I will not go to a single other place in this hateful town unless she says I may go and she conies too. IV. HOTEL LAFOND, PARIS. MY DARLING EDIE Thank you so much for your letter. 1 do hope baby is better. Madge says she hopes so too, and that she liked your letter so much, and that she would write to you herself, but she has got to write to Cousin George, who has sent her a Pound. She o ' writes now without anyone guiding her hand, 226 An Autobiography and won't let anyone read her letters, so I don't expect you will be able to read much of it when it comes. She wants a watch, and says she is going to have an extra birthday next week, when she will be six and a-half. Usually I should not have very much to write to you this time, because we have seen nearly everything in Paris, and I have told you all about it ; but, as it happens, there is a most interesting piece of news. Father is going to marry Madame Vidal. He came and told me about it before any body, except grandfather, before Uncle Hugh or anybody. He didn't say to me, " You are going to have a new mother," like the fathers do in all the books ; he told me just simply, like he would tell anyone else. I was so glad he didn't say that. I have told you a good lot about Madame Vidal, but now I must tell you a lot more. In the first place, she is very beautiful, much more beautiful than anybody I ever saw, so she must, of course, be more beautiful than anybody you ever saw, because, of course, I have travelled more. I hope you don't mind my saying that. I dare say you will travel quite as much some day. She has been married before. I think it is most --7 (J 2 The Twentieth Century Child proper for a man who has been married before to marry a woman who has been married before, else it would be a disad- vantage for one of them. She has not got any children, but I do not know whether she will have any. I do hope so, because it is so nice to undress and bath them, and then your baby would have some one to play with. She acts in a theatre now, because she was quite poor, and I daresay some silly people will think from that that she is not as good as they are ; but she is, and nobody had better say she isn't, before me. When she danced at the Opera, and I told you about her skirts being short, of course you must remember that people there have to dress up. Father calls her Yvonne, and she says I may call her that, or anything I like. I don't know yet what I shall call her. If she has any babies, they would be my "half- brothers," which is just the same, really, as being brothers, so it would seem rather funny to call them by their Christian names, and her too ; but I may do just as I like ; father says so too. Madge says she sup- poses she will have to spend all her pound in giving them wedding presents. She says she will be a bridesmaid, and have a blue 228 An Autobiography frock, and the big imitation diamond locket which is in the jeweller's window at Chichester ; and that she will have white ventilated stockings. She always calls her embroidered stockings with the little holes in o them, ventilated stockings, but I do not expect they will have any bridesmaids. They are going to be married at the beginning of May. Grandfather said a lot of horrid things about it, and is constantly saying sarcastic things, and making me low bows in the way that I hate. He said to me yesterday, " You who know the world so well, Helen, and can read all the characters in it at a glance, as you can one of your Chopin morceaux " (but he was not talking sarcastically then, because he has said that to me several times before, and, of course, I have seen a great deal of the world) of eight and eighteen (presuming that the ' Little Duke ' is comprehensible by the former, and ' Heartsease ' and ' Unknown to History ' still acceptable to the latter), and Miss Yonge wrote for them believing, as she said herself, that she would have to give an account at last to their Maker for every word she had written. Now, these are ages when exact accuracy of historical detail (so far as such a thing is possible at all, which is not very far : " Thank goodness," said a companion of mine in the History School at Oxford, who got a brilliant class with eight months' reading, " history is an iiu-xact science:, and my imagination is as good as most men's "), such accuracy, I repeat, matters far less than a sound appre- ciation of general life and atmosphere. A very clever young lecturer in history told -45 The Twentieth Century Child me once that Miss Yonge's ' Cameos ' of history are of the greatest use to her in teaching. " I do not go to them for facts," she told me, "but for colour, and a com- pound of Stubbs and Cameos in my brain produces rather a serviceable lecture." In an historical novel it is surely a well- recognised rule that the story comes first ; if you over-load it with dates, explanations, theories and facts, your laudable work will die young, as it deserves to die. Similarly with jokes, which the average child detests in a story ; they are passed over with im- patience or blank uncomprehension, and an author who is always " funning," as the small folk call it, would simply be put aside. A sense of humour Miss Yonge certainly had, but a cascade of jokes would have alienated half her young readers. At that age we want a long, full, clear narrative, telling very simply of a simple, familiar life a life where the same motives which yesterday prompted the young reader to smack her sister, or rebel against the governess, are to-day prompting the heroine of this book to do the same thing. Charlotte Yonge's power of describing, in interesting fashion and great detail, this family life, and 246 The Greatest of Writers telling a charming story about it, is simply unrivalled and unapproached by any author I know in England or France. Madame de Segur, to whom I should assign second place in this art of describing family life, has no grasp of her story. Charming incidents succeed one another in ' Les Vacances ' and ' Les Malheurs de Sophie ' ; the little people's chatter and games and woes are photographed one by one as correctly as the crowd in a biograph- picture ; jokes and double entendre are rigorously excluded, and philosophical re- flections are written (metaphorically) in words of one syllable, but Madame de Segur has absolutely no idea of writing a consistent, well-knit dramatic story. In historical romance no one would deny, I suppose, that Miss Yonge's power of re-creating the atmosphere of by -gone centuries in a few words is extraordinarily vivid ; the authors of ' Kenilworth ' and 'Esmond' were not greater artists in this respect than the authoress of the ' Caged Lion ' or the ' Dove in the Eagle's Nest,' and I doubt whether Scott himself ranged over a wider field of history. The ' Patriots ot Palestine ' (to mention a few stones which = 47 The Twentieth Century Child occur readily to one's mind) begins in the year 174 B.C.; the 'Little Duke' takes us into the tenth century ; the ' Caged Lion ' and the ' Penniless Princesses ' are pictures of the fourteenth century ; the ' Dove in the Eagle's Nest/ of Germany, under Maximilian ; the ' Prince and the Page,' of the last Crusade ; while the ' History of France,' the ' Story of the Christians and Moors in Spain,' and the nine volumes of ' Cameos from English History,' are not light tasks or open to any very serious accusation of inaccuracy. Miss Yonge, in fact, cared a great deal about truth, and some very incisive remarks were written to me once about a fairy-book in which I had made some blundering reference O to the battle of Agincourt. I remember on another occasion I was having tea with her, and fell into conversation with another guest about some point connected with the growth of pineapples. The lady in question "wondered" whether they grew in a certain way, and I "believed" they grew best in a certain other way. At the end of a minute or two Miss Yonge's voice broke into the discussion with a quiet, " Let us now find out ; " and we were soon provided with a horticultural book which settled the question. 248 The Greatest of Writers Truly, when you have finished or even embarked on a course of literature which comprises the ' Yellow Aster ' and the ' Beth Book,' Miss Yonge's psychology does seem a little tame, though I hold a private opinion that if two or three of her stories had not been written by a lady whose work was already labelled " for children only," they would have been greeted with general delight. How many a score of writers have had cause to sympathise with Voltaire's wrathful cry to the audience who yawned over one of his adaptations of Greek tragedy, " Applaudissez done, imbeciles ! C'est de Sophocle ! " But again, I ask, who are the readers chosen by Miss Yonge ? I know large numbers of them rather well, and I really doubt very strongly whether Madame Sarah Grand would interest them. I have not the slightest desire to preach against the modern novels of London and Paris. Adultery and seduction, sermons on the equality of the sexes, and pages of epigrams mostly quite honestly come by (for, after all, an epigram only requires pen, ink, paper and an idea, of which the first three may be one's own) all these command large and interested audiences, and 1 say why not ? But the editor of a popular -49 The Twentieth Century Child and by no means "goody" magazine once returned a doubtful story to a popular writer with the comment that he preferred interesting stones "with a true gospel tone," and an immense majority of readers, young and old, agree with this taste. Is Miss Yonge interesting ? Of course, when Laura puts on a bonnet and shawl, instead of a golf cape and sailor hat, to go out and meet Philip, the young reader of the ' Heir of Redclyffe ' fidgets for a moment ; and Amy's tears (a famous critic has calcu- lated that she cries 369 times in the course of the story, a number which is only exceeded by the lachrymose Ellen Montgomery in the * Wide Wide World ') are a tiresome part of that rather morbid work, which, personally, I like the least of all Miss Yonge's stories. But Sir F. Palgrave tells a story of how he and Tennyson were once travelling in Corn- wall, and occupied the same bedroom in an inn. For hours during the day-time Tennyson had been reading the ' Young Stepmother,' and in bed he went on reading it. Suddenly he cried out, " I see daylight now ; he is going to be confirmed ! " and, well satisfied, he put out the candle and went to sleep. Dr. Whewell, the well-known Master of The Greatest of Writers Trinity, described the ' Clever Woman of the Family' as the best novel in the English language ; and Dr. Randall Davidson once said that, though it was thirty years since he had read the ' Little Duke,' he remembered perfectly every detail of the story. The influence exercised by the ' Heir of Redclyffe ' on William Morris, Burne-Jones, and some of their friends at Oxford, has been quoted so frequently from Morris's biography that it need not be dwelt on here. A thousand grown-up folk, yesterday, to-day, and for years to come, have gone and will go to Charlotte Yonge's book for pure love of studying such serene faith and high ideals as live in them. Most of us to-clay know rather intimately what it means to be tired in mind and soul and body deadly tired, so that movement is hardly possible and quiet hardly tolerable so that the thought of theatres and dinner-parties is horrible, and the idea of solitude is worse ; when a man who sympathises with us would rouse us to a frenzied denial of any malady, and a man who made a joke or told a funny story in our presence would endanger his life. It is in these moods that literature like the ' Daisy Chain,' is a necessity, and I sympathise with The Twentieth Century Child an admirer of Miss Yonge who has worn out two copies of ' Pillars of the House,' to which she always resorts when tired or not well. It is not only that its story can distract attention ; a hundred books can do that, and your tortured nerves would not give a penny for such distraction. A soul in torment does not want to have a string of epigrams dangled and danced before its sick eyes ; it wants medicine ; the quiet pure narrative of men and women who are living lives with something in them besides fret and hurry and money-making, the gentle tonic of a well-described spiritual conflict fought on some narrow Christian field, with the simplest alternatives, and victory assured beforehand to the right side ; with, above all, a well-knit story to which such victory will make a clear difference. A theological tract bound up as a novel will not answer the same purpose. One of the points about Miss Yonge's books which apparently irritates many readers is that she quietly takes for granted the truth of her own theological views ; but, as the ' Spectator ' remarked in an able article about Miss Yonge's work : "In this country and America a story, if it has any strength of 2 5- The Greatest of Writers its own, gains instead of losing in popularity from a religious flavour. No novel with power in it will now fail because it is intended to inculcate a particular belief, and no character will be despised because it is the product mainly of a special creed." It is not, however, as a nerve-doctor, an historian or a rival of Madame Sarah Grand that Miss Yonge finally appeals to our judgment, but as a writer of stories for young folk. Do children to-day read her books ? Is she still a living active influence among them ? I feel myself on surer ground in answering these questions. About his- torical accuracy, theology, nerves and literary style I speak (or ought to speak) in diffident tones ; but the other is a matter of fact or the contrary, and from wide, real, personal knowledge I can assert that the modern child does read Miss Yonge's books reads them again and again, reads three, four, half- a-dozen of them straight on end, chooses them for prizes, asks friends to buy them for him or her, quotes them consciously and unconsciously, and alters habits and speech according to some hero or heroine in them. I am sorry to disagree so positively with far abler critics of literary work, who call The Twentieth Century Child Miss Yonge out of date and unknown to the rising generation ; but the critics are abso- lutely wrong. A little lady of my acquaint- ance, one among a score of such devotees, lately read ' The Daisy Chain,' finished it, put it away and looked for another book. Not immediately finding anything to her taste she began ' The Daisy Chain ' again and read it straight through once more. As she was bringing it down to the library after this she opened the volume, caught sight of a description whose connection with the story she had forgotten, and stopped to find out to what it referred. The temptation was irre- sistible, and she took the book back and read it through again for the third time. Another small person, somewhat younger, who was allowed a fairly free choice of books, can hardly be made to read or listen to any stories except a selection of Miss Yonge's and two of Mrs. E wing's. New books are nearly always greeted half-way through with : " Oh, it is so dull ! Do read me 'The Little Duke' again!" In an ex- tremely modern school, patronised by some small friends of mine, and where the children range in age from twelve to eighteen, I" caused an enquiry to be held recently about 254 The Greatest of Writers the popularity of story-writers. Every one had read some of Miss Yonge's books. Tastes differed about all of them, but on the whole ' The Heir of Redclyffe ' was the least popular and ' Unknown to His- tory ' the most popular. ' The Stokesley Secret ' was praised by a large chorus, because "the children are so natural." Comparisons were made between Mr. Stan- ley Weyman's and Miss Yonge's his- torical novels, and a girl said : " I like Miss Yonge's muck the best ; she makes the history seem so real, as well as the other part, so that they are much more interesting ; " thereby obviously summing up her com- panions' opinion. I could repeat a hundred of such stories. In London and country houses kind hostesses often indulge my preference for having breakfast in the school- room, tea in the nursery, and a child com- panion on each side of me at lunch ; our conversation, like that of our elders, ranges over art, literature, games, scandal, money- spending, and parties, and I should be sorry to have to bear a part in it without an intimate knowledge of Miss Yonge's story books. If this love of her work has gone on for half-a-century ; the sermons preached in TJie Twentieth Century Child these seventy volumes, by the noble and pure young lives therein described, being sent far and wide over the English empire and half Europe and America besides, am I wrong in claiming for their authoress immense power in the past and present, and long years of life to come ? The quiet faith and the note of high triumph which rings through these histories of endurance and struggle are qualities which make books live on. A thousand literary vivisectionists, a hundred or two of whom might disappear any day without any one being much the wiser or the worse, are at hand to pick to pieces our souls, and show us where the machinery goes wrong, and why ; but the few torch-bearers who show us the way to victory always, and whose work leads young enthusiasms, and shapes young ambitions and dreams, cannot be allowed to die. In truth they do not die. The face and voice which a few lucky mortals knew and loved pass out of sight for a ^time, but round and above their empty places is "a light shining in darkness," and an echo of the voice to which children, and even some of their elders, were well content to listen when it said, " This is the way, walk ye in it." 256 CHAPTER XIV. STORIES TOLD BY CHILDREN. The following stories are all " origonel," as one writer describes her own. Originality is so easily blotted out from a story that I have not interfered with these in any respect not even to regulate punctuation or spelling, which by the way are identical with those of the familiar Board School essay. Children of all classes spell alike at this age, and have an equally noble disregard for stops. The authoress of the first story is the ten-year-old Lady Beaumont, that of the second her younger sister, the Hon. Ivy Stapleton, that of the third Miss M. Lumley, grand-daughter of Mrs. John Wood, and that of the fourth Miss Phyllis Terry, the eleven-year-old daughter of Mr. F. Terry and Miss Julia Neilson (Mrs. F. Terry). THE CIRCUS CHILD. I am 10 years old, so I thought I would beagen a story of my life. My name is Mona, my brother jack is 12. we have a governess called Miss Trent we simply hate her she is of fly fat, one day she eat a hole plum tart and the next day she was ill so we escaped Lessons that day, in -57 s The Twentieth Century Child the morning jack said lets have a game of Hiden seek, in the middle miss Trent sent a message to tell us that we werent to play such a noisy game as it kept her awake. In a few minnets we crept in to see if she was asleep, then we took the key out of the lock and locked her in, soon after we herd her bell ring, we hid our selfs behinde a door to see what would happen. Then Mary the maid came up to see what she wanted she could not get in and was furis, so then we thought it was time to go for a picnic so we crept down into the Scurly and got some cold pheasent and bread and butter and put it into a baxet, then we walked about two miles and at the corner of the road we saw some gpyses and they said " come a long and we will show you a lovely Kiten." We thought it was realy a kiten and foiled, but when we got thier she took hold of us and took us into a sort of tent where some women took off our clothes and put on some dirty ones, we cried and cried, then we camped at a town 10 miles off called Selby, and we were never alloed to go out alone, then I founde that I was to be made to ackt in the cirques and jack was to be made to take care of the poor little ponys. Stories told by Children I was very glade that he was to take care of them, beaucause he would be kind to the poor little things, as they looked so wretched. My part was not so easy as I had to walk on rope ai)d ride the pony bare backs, they vvhaked us if we did things badly. One day they told me to go in the ring I was frigted at first but I did it better and better. One day I was in the ring when I saw Mother, I called out " Mother, mother, dont you know me ! I am Mona " I rushed to her and I fainted in her arms, I was very pleased to be at home again I can tell you. Written by me BEAUMONT. A STORY OF HUNTING. This is a story about myself, I am called Betty, do you want to know what I am like ? I am 9 years old, big blue eyes my nose from year to year and red cheeks. I went out hunting one day, on my pony " Brandy," the hounds met at our house, so my pony was very fresh ; a lot of people came and had lunch, and I gave them cakes and biscuits, they ate such a lot, then the master drew a little gorse in the park, then I saw a fox and -59 The Twentieth Century Child called out taly-ho ! taly-ho ! The hounds would not come, but at last they did so, then the hunts-man came over and asked me, how he could get over the other side of the great big drane, at the end of our park, I said " come along with me, and I will show you the way," I whiped up my pony galoped all I knew how and called out, " go over this bridge, and there you are," and then all the people laughed at me showing the hunts-men the way. Then there was another drane to get over and 5 people got into it, and the horses swam about, a poor girl wet thro her face all scratched with her hat hanging off her head, asked me, if she could come in and get on some clean clothes, she did look so funny, and the men were so cross, trying to get there horses out of the drane, one poor grey horse broke its back or neck, being puled out, and I went and showed her the way home, and then I galaped off and found the hounds again, then I saw a little fox hiding under the hedge the huntsman came up and asked me if I had seen the fox, I said no (a horid story but I felt sory for the fox) trie- hounds smelt the fox and caughted him, I o could have cried I was so sory, the hunts- 260 Stories told ly Children man puled the hounds away, caught hold of the dead fox, one of the whips took off the head and brush and the master said "this is for you " and gave me the brush. I was so pleased, the hounds made such a noise ; an old man came up to me and said that I had a nice pony and some others made stupid old jokes about its name and asked where was the " soda." I must tell you my pony Brandy is a chestnut, he is 9 years old, and over 13 hands, he looks like a hunter and has a nice long tail. Written by IVY STAPLETON. A FIRE. It was a dull night in November about eleven o'clock. Two boys of about ten and eleven lay awake in bed, they had been telling each other adventursome stories of daring deeds, and now they lay awake thinking of all the awful things that happened in their stories of murders, fires, midnight fights and desperate things. Presently the youngest whose name was Dickie said to his elder brother Edward " I say I am sure I can see a flame down- stairs." "Nonsense" retorted his brother. The Twentieth Century Child A few minutes had passed when Dickie said " Oh Edward I am sure I saw a flame shute up from downstairs, I am so frightened." Dick got out of bed and went to the window and looking out leaned over and looked down to the bottom of the house. "Oh Edward" exclaimed Dickie "there is a bright light in the kitchen and the servants came up to bed a long time ago, I heard them." At this Edward sprang out of bed and opening the window he looked down and saw the flames and upset the candle and bringing his head in he told his brother to wait and he rushed into his father's room and in a few breathless words explained what he and his brother had seen, and with an alarmed look in his eyes he went outside the room with his father and they saw the bright flames had already reached the hall. They had just got their mother and father down when little Dicky went into the house again, evidently to fetch something the father called to him and the mother turned deadly white and did not dare to look, for she was afraid she would never see him again, and indeed she was right, for when the fireman had got there he found little Dickie lying dead, he was smothered, a little box was in 262 Stories told by Children his hand, the fireman took the box to his father and mother and his brother recognized it to be a present that a dead boy had given him and asked him not to lose, and so he died trying to keep it. TRIXIE. I. Trixie was a little girl of 1 2 with a dark curly mop of hair, black eyes, and very wild. Her mother absolutely didn't know how to manage her and her brothers. She had 2, Cicil and Frank, and two wild young cousins, Dora and Gerald. All the children were brought up together and were awfully naughty. For instance, they would think nothing of going into the conservatory and smash the flowers playing brigans. Now they all lived in a very big house in the country. But I must start with my story as I myself am getting awfully sick of the introduction. II. "Trixie Trixie boys, will you come in! It is the- hour for you to get ready for ze lunch." Trixie heard the voice ot Fraulein but 263 The Twentieth Century Child took no notice. "Come," she said, "let's go and hide in our den." " Right ! What a good idea," answered Gerald. " I'm not a bit hungry, are you, kids ? " he said, starting to run at full speed down the drive and through the bushes to a small-sized, dirty-looking hut. " Dora Trixie vill you come in, I vill go and tell your mother and vather if you will not come in," came Frau's small voice from the distance. "Go!" shouted back Cicil. "We aren't afraid, you old sneak." Frau's steps were heard coming down the avenue. " I know ver you are ; you is in de hut, de hut vull of bats and spider. I vill not come in, but you must come out, or I vill go and tell madame your mother." " Oh ! you old sneak," burst out Frank. " But all the same, we had better cut along now. Mother and father will nearly have finished lunch." So the children scampered back. " Children, how dare you be so late ? " said Mrs. Ross sternly ; " did you not hear Fraulein calling you ? " " Oh, yes, we heard her all right, but you see we didn't feel hungry," said Cicil calmly. 264 Stories told by Children "Cicil, Frank, and Gerald shall go to the punishment room and learn six pages of Latin," said Mr. Ross rising. He paused, but continued : " As to the girls, they shall have absolutely the same ; but instead of Latin they shall be put in their room with six pages of German " ; and with that he left the room with his wife. III. "Are you awake?" A clumsy hand shook Dora. " Do wake up, stupid ; don't you know it's twelve o'clock. Mother and father are sound asleep, and we mean to romp "and a wet spunge came down on Dora's face. " Do shut up ! I'll wake up in a minute if you don't all stand round shouting and J o shaking me for all you're worth." In a few moments we were all together and started having a pillow fight in the nursery. All of a sudden a splash of water caught Cicil on the lace ; of course all of us went and got water-gugs and you never saw such a mess as we made. "I do hope no one will come up ; we have got in a row 5 times this week," said Gerald. 265 The Twentieth Century Child " I believe you're afraid, you funk," cried Frank, as he threw a gallon of water at him. " No, he's not," cried Trixie. " Cave ! Here comes someone." All of us flew, but in a few moments the door opened and in stepped Father. " Children," he said, " I am ashamed of you. I knew you were naughty, but this beats all. I never thought it would come to this sort of thing late at night. You shall all go to school next month, and there I hope you will become better children. Back to bed all of you, and not another word." " What rot ! " echoed from all as the door closed. IV. "Good-bye, dear, and be good children," said Mrs. Ross, as the train puffed out. " I will try," said Trixie, as she blew a kiss to her mother. So here ends my story, and Trixie was always a good little girl. But sometimes she was naughty, and she would remember the promise she made her mother, " I will be good," and she would be sweet again. APPENDIX SOME GHOSTS OF MY FRIENDS I. NANCY. 1 house," Monica told me impressively, " is stuffed with ghosts ; they walk all over the old wing in crowds." " That's where your bed-room is," added Sylvia pointedly. " Oh, please don't let them begin talking about the ghosts again," cried May. " I know they'll do it all the evening now. Can't I not go to bed to-night ? For pity's sake, can't I sleep with you, Monica ? " "You may sleep with me," said Monica, who was evidently laying herself out for a ghostly debauch, " if you promise to lie as quiet as a mouse when you wake up to- morrow morning, and not wake me up too." " If I was a mouse you wouldn't lie quiet very long," said the practical May ; and then we blew out the school-room lamp and conjured up the ghosts of the old Northum- brian Castle till I felt inclined to protest on May's behalf. But the babe had been sung to sleep with these legends in her cradle, and 269 The Twentieth Century Child knew them all by heart, and her preliminary terror was only an artistic touch of colour lent to the opening scene. To find a man who had never heard their stories before, and was possibly susceptible to alarm, and must subsequently sleep in the midst of their ghostly heroes and heroines, was just nuts to these three small ladies. I did my duty, I hope, in the matter of shudders and thrills and notes of exclamation, but speaking en connoisseur, the ghosts, with one or two exceptions, were a trifle too noisy to be impressive. The children's favourite was a gentleman of the early eighteenth century whose custom it was in life to go out before breakfast and slay seven or eight Scots, and come home saying : " Fie on this quiet life ! I want work." He now walked the stairs, it appeared, brandishing his sword, muttering, and a practice which somewhat restricted the hostess in making up her house parties slashing at any Scots folk who passed him by. We talked a good deal about this person, who was certainly the noisiest ghost I ever met in fact or fiction. In contemptible contrast (in the story-teller's mind) to this spirited gentleman were various quiet persons who walked about and looked Nancy at you appealingly, as if asking for some help. There was a woman who was reported to have hidden the family jewels in the '45 Rebellion, and to have died before she could reveal their hiding-place : a child called Nancy, who had been ill-treated by her mother ; and an old man who had betrayed the hiding-place of two priests to a Protestant mob of Charles I.'s clay. They struck me, especially Nancy, as capable of producing a thrill or two under more dramatic treatment, but we passed them over rather lightly in order to return to the sword-brandishing Border warrior. The conclusion of the seance came prematurely, the romantic atmosphere being rudely dissipated by the concluding incident. A stern-looking north- country woman appeared in the school-room at seven o'clock, requesting " Miss Sylvia" to " come to bed at once." I saw that something was wrong, and looked aside discreetly, while Sylvia protested that it was only seven o'clock. "Have you forgotten," asked the new- comer, sternly, "that you are to come to bed to-night and to-morrow night at seven ? " " Oh," sighed Sylvia, " no ; but I hoped you had." The Twentieth Century Child A cold command to make haste was the only reply, followed by an undignified scene of kicking and screaming, and concluding with the exit of Miss Sylvia in the arms of her nurse, a whirling tornado of brown curls and white lace garments. I do not know whether May detected in my face any other feeling than seemly grief and reprobation, but she assured me in tones of jealous pride, " I'm often naughty like that." I went to bed early, and slept soundly and undisturbed, coming down, therefore, in the morning with the feeling that I should be met with disapproval and almost with con- tempt in the schoolroom. Such, in fact, proved to be the case, and I heard no more that day about the ghosts ; their patrons evidently thinking me an unprofitable auditor if, at the end of such an evening's prepara- tion, I could do no better than pass the night in mere sleep. But the following night, when I went to my room, there was work to be done ; and as no occupation is too trivial when its object is the postponement of work, I walked round the panelled walls, lifting the mouldy, colour- less tapestry which covered them in places, fingering some empty cabinets, and generally 272 Nancy exploring. The exploration yielding no result, except a great deal of dust and a slight pleasing suspicion that one of the panels could be opened if there were time to investigate it, I pulled the table in front of the fire, put two candles on it, and sat down to write a fairy story. The clock struck one, and two ; the fire was going out, and it was too much trouble to put coal on, though a north-east sea wind was rattling at the windows and creeping in through many a crack and cranny. The supreme silence which reigned over the house, except when the sea wind shook walls and windows, brought back memories of the children's stories, and the moment of their return was rather a nervous one. Yet this work must be finished to-night ; and I went on with it, refusing with an effort even to look round at my bed, the thoughts of which were so enticing. I would write steadily on ; I would not look round would not look round at what ? There was no thought of bed in my mind when I repeated the words to myseli. I did not want to look round, and could not work. That, however, was a state of mind which for business reasons could not be allowed to continue. I turned and looked. The Twentieth Century Child A child was standing at the foot of the bed, a little maid of about eleven, in a long dark frock, with short sleeves and a wide flounce of old English lace round it. Her face was white and not pretty ; her hair hung down in long straight lines, and her hands, folded in front of her, were white and thin, with the veins showing blue in them. She was standing there quite quietly, looking at me, and did not move when I got up. The apparition was not a very frightening one, and my chief thought about it at the moment was that it would please the children to-morrow. They would have preferred the sword-brandishing person, but this was better than nothing. Who was it ? " Are you Nancy ? " I asked. The child-figure answered no word, only its sad grey eyes looked at me with a shade more of life in them. I glanced away for a moment, presuming that this apparition was merely the result of late hours and Monica's stories, and willing to give every chance to science. In truth, when I looked back, the figure had left the bottom of the bed, but it was only moving towards the far wall. To my great satisfaction it went to the panel 2/4 Nancy which I had suspected of a capacity for opening, and stood there for a moment. All the lore gathered from seers and ghost books forsook me in this emergency, and I quite forgot that I ought to have followed. The small maiden looked at me for a moment, sorrowfully and reproachfully ; then she vanished. A feeling that the school-room would hardly say thank you for such a story, coupled with another vague idea that my little visitor might be unhappy if she were the subject of chatter and laughter among this houseful of people, held me silent next day about her. Perhaps as a reward for this she came back next night, and stood for a moment at the bottom of the bed, and then moved towards the wall with appeal in her eyes. My manners came back to me, and 1 followed her to the panel ; and when she vanished through it, I made various clumsy attempts to open it. Hut no sign of an opening could be found, and at this hour of the night decent regard for one's fellow creatures forbade an attempt to kick it down. I went to bed in a temper, resolving that the panel should be opened to-morrow, even if it had to stay open nil ni;yht and admit the The Twentieth Century Child whole army of Monica's ghosts, from the anti-Scot demonstrator downwards. Next day, however, the question was settled in the simplest possible way. I asked Monica for more details about Nancy, whose history she had slurred over so slightingly on the evening of my arrival ; and Monica, weary of such a long silence about her favourite ghosts, and thankful for anyone who would take an intelligent interest even in the least exciting of them, told me the child's story. She and her brother had been objects of bitter hatred to a stepmother, whose own children they would prevent from inheriting a title and large estate. She had resolved to et rid of them, and had o apparently succeeded. The boy had fought on the English side in the '45 Rebellion and had been killed ; and the sister, a sickly scared child, had died of ill-treatment. There was an old letter among the family papers describing how the writer had found Nancy living alone day and night in two rooms in a deserted, tumble-down part of the house, ill with cold and starvation, seeing and speaking to nobody except the evil woman whose visits to her were always followed by outcries and sobs which the 276 Nancy servants talked about in frightened voices. When she was between eleven and twelve Nancy died. One of the rooms described in the letter was apparently the room in which I was sleeping, the other being connected wuh it bv a sliding door and > o short passage, which Monica proposed to show me. The panel opened readily enough under the accustomed fingers of my guide, and we passed on into the next room. It was a smaller room than the other, unused and completely neglected. Two chairs stood against the wall, their covering moth-eaten and stained. The window was cobwebbed over so that the dull li^ht of o the winter afternoon could hardly struggle through its dark panes, while the mouldy curtains hancrinof over it tore into holes at o o a touch. The floor was bare, and in the middle of it stood a round empty table thick with dust. There were some curious three- cornered drawers in the table, which swung open sideways instead of allowing themselves to be pulled out ; and we looked into them hurriedly, hastening to see what was to be seen while the fast-dying daylight lasted. In the first two drawers were only scraps 277 The Twentieth Century Child of paper ; in the third was more paper, and a small square picture-book with old- fashioned coloured prints of prim-looking children playing various games. Some of the pictures were crinkled as if they had been wetted, and I passed my fingers gently over the pages, thankful to think that the little reader's tears had been long since dried. The next and last drawer was locked, and as I moved it about, wondering how readily the lock would yield, I felt Monica's hand suddenly clasped on my arm with a clutch of terror ; her face was gone ashen white, and her frightened eyes were staring into a corner of the room. Following their look I saw Nancy there. She was standing very quietly with her hands folded in front of her, but there was a new look of contentment on her face as if she were thankful that we had found our way at last to this lonely prison- room. Peering forward I saw for a moment c> the quaintly-dressed little lady, and the grey eyes with this new light of pleasure in them ; then the figure vanished. I turned to console my weeping, trembling companion, who was protesting that she didn't mind seeing a ghost, but this one had " come in so quietly."" Unfastening the locked drawer seemed the o 278 Nancy best chance of making her forget her fears ; there must be something interesting in it, we agreed, or, perhaps, something which Nancy wanted. With one or two vigorous pulls we wrenched the drawer open. It drew out lengthways like an ordinary specimen of its kind ; but two very blank faces stared into it when open, for it was empty. Then with a simultaneous flash of intelligence Monica and I are the same age really, though I have lived in the world a few more years than she has I and my companion began to feel about for the spring which should open one of those secret drawers familiar to so many gener- ations of youth. We found it at last ; it was but an ill-fitting false back to the drawer, an amateurish-looking affair ; and with vague awe o o we picked up a small wooden doll which was lying there. Its face was wooden, the features and hair being merely painted on, and the arms and legs were unbending and roughly shaped, resembling in no way the graceful and agile limbs of its modern descendants. It was dressed in clothes which, although made ot coarse material, were evidently, even to the male eye, possessed of some striking feature ot superiority over ordinary dolls' clothes. It was Monica who pointed The Twentieth Century Child out to me at last that every garment was covered with the most beautiful needlework, which must, she explained, have taken months and months to do ; and my little companion fell into a silence, turning over and studying each garment with sympathising admiring eyes, and holding it up for me to see. The last ray of daylight was dying away as she and I stretched out our hands thus across the centuries to touch the little fingers which had worked at this lonely task, and then I brought my thoughts back to the table and drawer, and to a piece of paper which was lying in the latter, half covered with round, faded child-writing. Monica and I took it to the window, and having sacrificed a handkerchief to the removal of a few cobwebs, we read the sheet, which was something in the nature of a last will and testament : " Betty has told me to-night that I am very ill and perhaps I shall die. If I die I want my doll to be buried with me. She is the only person I love in the world, and the only person who loves me. NANCY." The instantaneous action proposed by Monica was not possible, for certain reasons of politeness ; but the permission of various 280 Nancy authorities having been obtained next day, the doll was buried as near as possible to the little maid who had come to us in this regulation ghostly fashion to plead that her last wish might be carried out. 2Sl II. THE NIGHT-LAUNDRESSES. 1 AMONG the towns and villages of Southern Brittany, where tourists wander, starved and solitary but resolute to explore, Auray has points of superiority. It is a shade less dirty and many degrees less dreary than its companion villages ; eatable food is to be procured by the man who does not too soon despairingly abandon search for it ; and the sights of the neighbourhood are not merely such as are to be found, incomparably better arranged by art and nature, in every country- side in England, but are clean-smelling and original. Peasant-folk, too, wear their Breton costume for their own comfort and not only for the amusement of visitors ; civilisation has just reached the point where cleanliness begins ; and, above all other merits, the strong Atlantic winds sweep across the plains of Quiberon and Carnac, bringing to Auray 282 The Night- Laundresses the fresh salt breath which banishes even the memory of previous Breton dwelling-places. It was this last consideration which had induced Geoffrey Vernon to bring his child here the nervous little white-faced babe whose frail life was fought for month by month, and whose eight years seemed to her father to have been eight victories snatched from Fate by long desperate fighting. The prescription of " quiet and fresh air, with some occasional unexciting novelty " seemed to be well met by this comfortable Breton town, where the dress of every passer-by was a matter of ever-fresh interest to childish eyes, and the breeze blowing down the river brought the son^s of fishermen in weird un- O o known language and high unfamiliar tones. Woods and fields along the river banks were slowly darkening in the June evening, and faint breaths of a scented evening wind _> broke through the trees, cooling the hot bracken and sunburnt flowers. Yernon and his child had left the long hotel dinner half finished to come for a stroll, and the little one, tired by the first hot day of summer, was slowly reviving in these cool breezes. She had begun one of the long rambling fairy- stories with which she beguiled such walks, 283 The Twentieth Century Child Vernon's attention being at liberty to wander as it pleased during the narration, so long as he occasionally threw in a word of surprise and interest. It was wandering now in realms of unwonted contentment, for the quiet beauty of woodland and river was soothing his strained nerves, and yesterday a local doctor had told him that Kathleen was certainly better. "And then," went on the soft monotone at his side, " God gave the angel a bun " " My dear Kitty ! What on earth I mean," added Vernon, subsiding from his startled exclamation into stammering apology for it, "I mean, why did the angel want it just then ? " " I told you," said the narrator reproach- fully, " that he was to have it directly he came back. Of course he would want it after that long, long journey." " Oh yes, of course. Would you," asked the man with sudden inspiration,