FELLOWSHIP BOOKS Stratton CHILDHOOD COPYRIGHT 1913 BY E. P. BUTTON & CO. CHILDHOOD / 1De/u>fift& C&ffCamoTurfas new-Gom ffteses, PrtttecCuntfi. softies cf fas mothers kisses, vYfm ban, it upon, famjrom fUsfat&fs &&& I. TOYS EVEN when we are about buying for a child the pretty toy, one thing we al- ways say "And yet children love their ugly old toys best." It is not true, however, that children love ugly toys ; they like homely toys, toys that can be clasped very close; and though homely does mean ugly, in the Ameri- can and the obsolete English languages (be- cause we would hurt a word rather than our ugly fellow-creatures' feelings) , yet what chil- dren like in homeliness is precisely homeliness, something not too bright or good. Ugliness is dreadful to a child, especially at first sight. He may learn to love it in a dear parent or ^3 dear 2021CKO dear nurse, as the little boy evidently loves the bottle-nosed man in Ghirlandajo's delightful picture, but ugliness in a stranger is, in the strict sense, frightful. We are imposing our own sense of humour on children (as usual), and in its most ignoble form, when we give them grotesque toys. And as for guys, where- by we invert the natural veneration of images, the Fifth of November is a date which for the sake of Sylvia we all dread. <% When Sylvia was three, she wept and shuddered great part of a day, and some part of a night, because a guy had suddenly faced her on the pavement. Now she is four she cons the difficult task of assuring herself "They are boys, they are only little boys." You may watch through her delicate face the horrible misgiving, the resolute reply, succeeding each other in that innocent, fal- tering breast. She says little of her fear, but gently leads the talk that way; and, when she is told that the boy-guys have each received a penny, her dear effort is to establish a 2 human relation with them in her thoughts. "Pennies for them to buy nice sweets," she says to herself. There is the thing in common with her own beauty and tenderness and her little appetites : sweets, then boys not devils. ^fe But if we wrong our children by the grotesque we do so more commonly by the gift of the worthless toy, a thing that will not last. The doll is perhaps as significant as the statue, the gargoyle, the coin ; it is gen- erally worse than even the statue. The manufactured image of mankind given to our little girls to play with is not only ill-designed, but so fragile as to cause more weeping than joy. The doll of commerce is very heartlessly made so that she often goes to pieces on the very day of presentation. Her brief arm comes off first; it had been ineffectually glued on. Piecemeal she comes apart. She does not preserve such poor individuality as she had, long enough to get a name. She is never named, never grows old, never gets the love of habit, never ratifies the rapture of posses- 3 <% sion, sion, never justifies the first kiss. A little time at the best it is not long is all that we of larger than doll's growth have for that rati- fication and for that proof. Well, it is hardly moral that the child and the doll should kiss but for an hour. $s Why, the personality of an honest doll ought to outlast her head nay, several (re- sembling) heads. It was so with the dolls of an elder day and a simpler country. When one head was unfortunately walked upon, the old cook took the trunk and the pieces into the town, and matched the type of beauty he was very grave and intent, without con- descension, over the business. The face was renewed, but the name and the affection held on with a persistence that was almost worthy of party politics. % There have been charming toys in litera- ture, but none much dearer to the reader of good will than the little horse which Esther Summerson gave to Peepy after one of his misfortunes Esther, contemned by the 4 readers who think to crush Dickens by one word, "Sentimentality" (albeit this is an emo- tion that would be good for the majority, and the majority includes those critics), and by another word, "Caricature" (caricature being nevertheless a most admirable art). Dickens, of all the greater masters of our national Let- ters, has the most perfect memory of child- hood. Not by his strangely over-praised "little Nell" is this proved, nor by any but certain brief passages of Paul Dombey, but in his much less famous children, and in the little fists of these are toys. II. THE STRANGER'S CHILDREN *fe "Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?" "I do bite my thumb, Sir" "Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?" "No, Sir, I do not bite my thumb at you. Sir; but I bite my thumb, Sir." fe ACROSS the "backy-garden," at the rear of the house where the Children dwelt the child of tumult, his luminous little dark sis- 5 fcter, ter, and the somewhat older ones and over the young poplars from George Meredith's garden, ran a small street with shops and lodg- ings. It was very full of children, and some- times they leant so far out of the upper win- dows that the question arose in the Children's home, Would a neighbourly present of nur- sery window-bars be received with little or with much contempt, or perhaps declined, and if so with offended feelings or without? The Children themselves did not encourage the project. The children at the back were very proud, they said. And how did they show the passion? it was asked. "Well, mother, they come to the window, and black their boots at us." <% Of all the many surprises of childish re- plies, this was not the least. It was given in great gravity and good faith. To these young observers the action of their opposite neigh- bours admitted no other interpretation, albeit there had been no exchange of covert verbal defiances, such as, "Do you black your boots 6 at us?" "We "do black our boots." "Do you black your boots at us?" "We do not black our boots at you; but we black our boots." The demonstration was not of battle, as "I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list" but of sole, sufficient pride, silent, de- tached, lifted between heaven and earth, at the second-floor windows of its appropriate street. It was not for a mere grown-up per- son to introduce doubts, or to suggest how far from the usual manifestations of pride, how different from its customary pomps, is the symbolism of blacking and of boots. No doubt the children were right, and declined our symbolism on their own good authority. ^ Their conclusion as to the boots had prob- ably its own obscure justification, and was not due to unworthy suspiciousness, for the Chil- dren were disposed to friendliness, and would have inclined rather to a lenient than to a severe interpretation of the act of demonstra- tive blacking, had there been room for doubt. At a taller and quite remote row of windows 7 *fe appeared appeared the heads of other children, of whom Pride seemed to have made no victims. At least there appeared among them no signs of blacking. With these the more usually in- telligible language of toys was the means of communication. At long range so long that a walking duck could hardly be distinguished from a mechanical alligator, and dolls looked as much alike as the heroines of a year's novels toy was held up for sympathetic and com- panionable rivalry with toy; and across in- tervening roofs, by means that yet remain a mystery, the pet names of both batches of chil- dren had been announced and exchanged. Never was so enterprising and prosperous a friendship on facilities so slender. The de- lays, hesitations, and reserves of acquaintances begun in the ordinary ways, in houses, in Ken- sington Gardens, or otherwise on point-blank terms, never troubled these mutual advances. Or so it seemed. But with some surprise the mother of the Children, walking with them, perceived that they cast looks askance, neither 8 wholly strange nor in any wise intimate, at another walking group, equally lowering, gloomy with an equal kind of unavowed in- telligence, and with an equally embarrassed mother. The children of Pride, walking in the street perhaps with those very boots new- blacked, could hardly have been watched with more sombre or more cloudy eyes. Afraid lest her young ones should have committed the grosslerete of making enemies, the mother of the Children asked them, in their unwonted silence, who it was that they seemed to be cut- ting. With surprise she then heard that these strangers, seen at full length, were they whose distant eager heads were invested with so much childish friendship in the windows under the skies. Within an hour or so after that un- friendly encounter, with its shadowy strange- ness and vigilance of eyes, all was restored at the high back-windows, and a London sunset showed the ambiguous toys new ones, just bought in the course of that walk estranged the signalling hands, and the jostling heads 9 % unequal unequal of height, at their former intercourse, candid, clear, familiar, and full of spirit and drama. $fe Distance seemed to set these gallant little creatures free from some of the disadvantages of the world and from the uneasiness of crowds. They were released in a world barely sprinkled with people within hail of one another, glad of recognition, and made friends by intervening space, and liberty par- taken. *% Perhaps it was the childish solitude that made the window-communication so clear. Almost painful to the writer is still the mem- ory of introductions in childhood. Ah, to be placed in front of three little natives in white embroidery, and bidden to talk with them in Genoese, or in any human tongue, with parents artificially listening in compliment to the stranger's children, but solicitous for their ownl There are moments that are literally difficult to live through, and this was of them. Solitude and a garden hedge between, or some 10 such other slight defence and distance, and Genoese no doubt would have flowed. S& Nor can one easily forget the unexpressed misgivings at those invitations to play with the stranger's children in the gardens of the Tuileries. It was already depressing enough to stand on a counter to be fitted, and to hear the modiste tell one's mother that one ought to have the petit jupon bouffant which one had not, and that no coat could have justice without it. But to be accosted, under this visible disability, by the children of Paris, little girls obviously furnished with the petit jupon bouffant this was the cause of a dumb shyness. "Veux-tu venir jouer avec moi?" So ran the invariable invitation of the charm- ing Parisians, little citizens so well civilized as to need no defences, no barriers, no return to the space and the distances of birds in search of primitive confidence, or to the rarity of angels in quest of natural courage. The English child kept in the after years of life the sense of national defeat that attended the consent to n $s that that unequal game. If Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields of Eton, it has been many times avenged on the playing-grounds of the garden of the Tuileries. fife Otherwise, and the conditions being more free and more nearly equal, to play with strangers, to play internationally, was a great delight. The game, being all dramatic, did away with any need for close knowledge of the actor. Since yonder boy was a spirited horse of uncertain temper, his temper as a boy was of small importance. There was no need even for names when all the players alike were terra-cotta pipkins for sale, to be known as sound or cracked by their voices under a blow. Quarrels never arose in these encounters of an hour. Our playfellows were toys of the live- liest animation, but without so much percep- tible character as might chance to ruffle our own. The concert of Europe was undis- turbed. *% One only remembrance is fraught with some self-reproach. It is that of two little 12 English girls, who chose to frighten all the children of an Italian village and sweep the hill of them. It was done without malice, but with a horrid sense of dominance ; and without violence except that of mere running. The population sad to remember was so gentle that its full number of children, of several ages, were thus to be hunted down the slopes of the chestnut-woods, by the onset of a couple of capricious foreign girls. But so it was. The day was a festa,and the children, carrying their shoes, strolled on the hill-side, between the cy- presses and the belfries. All things go in un- equal groups on such an afternoon little com- panies of church-bell tunes, young men play- ing at bowls, no one alone. The village chil- dren loitered principally about the steep ave- nues to the church. But when the two slen- der invaders began to give chase, the first group scattered, and then the next, perhaps not knowing how little formidable were the hunters; then a third broke, a fourth wheeled. Young Italians do not run without clamour, 13 and the outcry of the dismay of all those children seemed the wilder that the two pur- suers kept their breath for the hunting. One swept the wood, another charged down the narrow road. They joined, they closed upon the quarry, or in open order cut off the escape of scattered fugitives. Of the little villagers there was not found one to resist, or so much as to question the attack. They cried out to each other, pointing the probable way to safety as they ran. That they must run was the one thing they were sure of, and they sped over rough and smooth, heads down, so that the heights were presently clear of them, and their last clamours dropped as they reached the shelter of the street, like the cries of birds that wheel and settle after an alarm. The two rep- resentatives of the predominant races, who can- not have measured nine feet between them, sat down in the conquered district, flushed with success. Alas! III. CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF THE PAST Yesterday Rebecca Mason, In the parlour by herself, Broke the handsome china basin Placed upon the mantel-shelf. ^ BY a kind of dreadful punctuality of rhythm and rhyme, by the forethought of the surname of Rebecca, by the unadorned auster- ity of the anecdote, the reader is fairly sub- dued. Here is the "inevitable" word of which, in recent literary criticism, we heard so much. That stanza is written for our over- throw and confusion. It is as though a sheep had butted us, and done it efficiently. A mother of to-day tested on her modern chil- dren the verses "Cautionary Verses" is the appropriate name of some of them written by the Misses Taylor (Jane and Anne) and by Mrs. Turner, the creator of Rebecca Mason, for the children of the earlier part of the nine- teenth century. The little hearers were not much more than bored. It was prose work 15 ^3 of of about the same period, and animated by the same spirit, that had the full success of irony. Mrs. Turner had as it were fixed us with her eye and challenged us to think Rebecca Mason's name to be artificially pre- pared ; she brought her stanza to a close which left the reader speechless. But Mrs. Fenwick must really "abide our question." Mrs. Fen- wick wrote a book about a Bad Family and a Good. She asks us to believe that these fam- ilies lived in the same town, in the same street, in "handsome houses" of equal size, and that they teemed with an equal brood of six chil- dren three good girls and three good boys, and three bad girls and three bad boys. There is a kind of heroic symmetry here which is ill- suited to the quality of Mrs. Fenwick's prose. Now, young children love to hear of large families, and to get their names and ages per- cisely right. But these two equal batches of six caused something like dismay; and when their names were disclosed the spirit of deri- sion sprang forth, and was not quenched again. 16 ^1 It is not wise to tempt too much that spirit of derision in children. Burlesque and irony do not accord with the simplicity which be- comes them. But there is derision and derision. In this case it was fresh, it was cordial, it was purely humorous, and as joyous as the laugh of running races. The Bad Family's names alliterative gave the signal for the first laugh: Greedy George and Selfish Sarah; but Manly Edward and Well-bred Charles in the Good Family were hailed with candid de- light. You might envy Manly Edward his reception, the generous laughter of a little girl of eight suddenly confronted with his mascu- line perfections ; Well-bred Charles never had in his own day of a hundred years ago, from any literal reader, the welcome he had from the honest irony of this child. Is scorn really joyous in the heart of man or woman? It was as joyous as ever Tennyson imagined it in the humorous heart of this childish listener: in- nocent scorn, liberal scorn, intelligent scorn, simple exhilaration of contempt. For really 17 *& studious studious Arthur, patient Emma, generous Susan and the rest deserved to be thus rejected with the most cheerful incredulity; they were intolerable. *% But perhaps scorn and contempt are not the just words. What the child expresses in her loyal laughter is derision without its sneer; a sally of cheerful astonishment at the book, at the children who took it seriously, at the authoress who administered it. It is in fact neither more nor less than good laughter at bad art. The child does not deride the virtues at all; the manliness of Edward and the good manners of Charles so far as those qualities accorded with human life would command her respect in any contemporary child. Hap- pily so, for the sense of humour is by no means the most important sense in a young child; credulity is better, admiration is much better, and simplicity is still much better. The sense of humour would be dearly gained at the ex- pense of these. But there is no such expense. The habit of burlesque and irony in childhood 18 is deplorable and unchildlike. But purely childlike and purely natural is the humour that rejects Mrs. Fenwick's families. She has what she merits, and even if the quality of the hilarity she causes now were questionable, the fault lies with her. She might have raised a better kind of laugh while she was yet at her authorship, and she did not. <% And if she refreshed no one with humour in her own day, did she fill her young readers with any good aspirations? She was really too dull to have any real appreciation of the manliness of Edward or of the industry of Arthur. And see how she rewards and how she avenges. To the Good Family she awards the approval of the street in which the two handsome houses were situated. The Bad Family she punishes with the ill opinion of the same neighbourhood. Mrs. Fenwick, and Mrs. Turner, and the Misses Taylor were very small writers in their day, but they share with two great most diversely great writers one certain character. They have as little spiri- 19 ^Ituality tuality as Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. And children are not without a sense of that defect when right things and wrong things, and their consequences, are the matter of a story. IV. CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF THE PRESENT % THE idea that dragons are not interesting characters in a romance for grown-up people is a modern idea. It is not a good idea, for an interest in dragons is quite as easy, and at least as pleasing, as a belief in some of the characters in contemporary fiction. That adult readers of the older romance were on easy and equal terms with dragons is clear from the fact that those romances were written not for children, but for their elders. Even the classic and un- dying fairy stories before Hans Christian Andersen were written neither about chil- dren nor for them. They have been rather left to children than given to them. The grown- up dropped them, content that the children 20 should believe (that is, rightly, pretend to be- lieve) in dragons, though we ourselves prefer to pretend to believe in the detestable people of the annual plays. Therefore we shed our an- cient love-stories and the children pick them up, with all their wizards, witches, transforma- tions, and delights, and thrive on them. One of the causes of their good fortune is that they were composed without condescension. % But the condescension of the new story- book is an offence. Some of our annual authors evidently think that the more nonsense they write for the little ones the better, and the more "fancy" the author displays the more flexible will he seem to be in his performance. What, we may wonder, if we cannot remem- ber, does the young child think of the flexibil- ity of the grown-up who perform? I think he knows all about that grimace and the value of it. Mrs. Fenwick, Mrs. Turner, and the Misses Taylor were at any rate not humorists. If they stimulate the sense of comedy in the child of our times, they must have quelled it 21 *fe in in the child of their own. Whereas, of some of our later writers, in whose eyes Mrs. Fen- wick and her like are doubtless nothing but ridiculous, it is to be feared that they have done worse than quell the sense of comedy in chil- dren ; that they have rather made it weak with the tension of their use; they have "practised upon it," as used to be said of unlawful arts. They have worn it out by too persistent appeal. I would rather have trusted to the recovery of a child's comic spirit after the negative opera- tion of a Mrs. Fenwick even in the days when she was taken seriously than I would hope for a healthy condition after a course of reading among the newer Christmas story- books of a comic character. All is not for self-congratulation as time brings its revenges, fife I find, in nearly all the little books of the day, the repeated and repeated stimulation of the spirit of fun in its thinnest shape; and sometimes there is to be perceived the author's courageous hope that the child will think better of the fun than he himself has succeeded 22 in thinking, when all is done; now and then the flagging heart is easily to be detected, and the misgiving that the wary little reader may find no more laughter in the matter than moved the writer at his work of humorous in- vention. ^s No such anxieties beset our Mrs. Fenwick. Her readers had to know their place. She kept the upper hand, serenely. She had no waverings, not she. But then she was doing straightforward work; she had no occasion for secret thoughts, and she knew none. She made no appeal to the chances of a child's spirit; she curried not his favour; the child had to take what was given him. But at the end of the account perhaps he was no more ill served. If the elastic childish sense of humour should fail in its spring and buoyancy by reason of so much straining by the child's authors, if it should grow lax and flaccid, there would be much loss rather than gain by the work of a century. <% Indeed the reaction againts the "Caution- 23 ^ary ary Stories" of 1813 has carried the modern author far; and it is a helpless and a weak thing to be carried by reactions. In all the children's books of a season you shall hardly find one "moral" at the close. Now children with erect minds like a moral. And the worst thing in all these happenings would be per- haps already is this: that a child of to-day would be afraid and ashamed to own that he liked a moral ; would be so aware of the light mind in his father and mother and his aunts yes, in his godfather and godmother so shy of their banter, so well-informed as to their habitual irony, so educated in paltriness and burlesque, that he would not confess that he likes a story with good people and bad in it, a story with free-will in it, and duty. What a misfortune! A little honest creature covertly compelled to deny the little simple lord of his breast! % Too much common sense and too com- mon was the fault of a hundred years ago. And now the fault is too much common non- 24 sense and far too common. Since we began to find children funny we seem unable to think them funny enough. Miss Austen did not think them funny at all. See the conscious Anne Elliot when an ungovernable nephew had her by the neck and Captain Wentworth disengaged her. Other children in her novels are as intolerable as those in Thackeray's. The children in Charlotte Bronte's novels are objects of her sombre dislike ; of anything ex- cept natural comedy. But even in our altered times, children are not necessarily farcical to themselves. They would not always be clowning. ^Ss Rossetti was harassed by the word "quaint" with which he was dogged. If modern chil- dren had a sense of that word and of what it implies, and were fully conscious of their own dignity, they too would find it harassing. ^ But between the old ways and the new came Robert Louis Stevenson, some of whose delightful verses have the sententiousness of Jane and Anne Taylor and Mrs. Fenwick, 25 $fe with with the important addition of genius; sen- tentiousness with an equal smile. He does not clown, he makes no grimace, but looks steadily and intelligibly into the child's eyes. V. FAIRIES Sfe IT is for fear of the grown-ups, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?" It was, accordingly, an illustrious grown-up who wrote (I am quoting Francis Thompson) "Know you what it is to be a child?" Well, we all should know, and we are generally anxious to teach one another. The poet answers for us most eloquently, "It is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses ... for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul. . . ." And previously he had written, 26 "It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism." Were elves really of any importance to him? We must take his word for it, even though we may make a slight res- ervation because we know that even a great poet has some regard to what is expected. But another great poet, who never paid any attention to what is expected from him, has told us, out of his very own experience, not what childhood, but what one childhood, was. To Coventry Patmore it was a time rather of divination than of credulity. His "sweet childhood," he names it; but it was a time of secrets, of thoughts wholly unsuggested by story-books, unprompted by authors, parents, uncles, godmothers, or imaginative adult per- sons of any kind of officiousness. It is certain that he did not think elves to be whispering in his ear. But he contemplated a pebble in the gravel of a garden path and conceived the thought that but for unrelaxing pressure it would explode into dust. Another real child but not a wonderful child like Coventry 27 fife Patmore Patmore walking on grassy garden paths, was a little troubled to think how many living creatures she might be crushing; and how short their lives were, anyway. But, she thought, as the size and space differed be- tween very large beings (herself, for example) and very small, so might time; and a minute of her life might be a full year of successions of feelings and happenings to the ant. Six years old could not put her speculation into appropriate words (a task which might tax sixty years old), but the thought was very definite to her. One of the privileges of a child is that he is very near the earth; he knows moss and the scudding creatures near it. When Oliver Wendell Holmes found the scent of a little box hedge to be suggestive of eternity, it was no doubt merely sugges- tive of time the incalculable remote time of childhood, which stands very fairly for eternity because he had smelt it when he was on the level of its fresh leaves. So Pat- more, a little child on a garden path, found 28 matter for close thought. Truth interested him, and fiction did not. In later years he gave himself to the truth of science, and fi- nally to the truth of poetry. Truth was to him more splendid and more mysterious than any tale. fife It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous. It may even be doubted whether Francis Thompson believed in his own elves and their whispers whether he cared for possible coaches and horses as much as for real pumpkins and mice. It may be that those elves of his were, in his wonder- ful boyhood, nothing other than symbols, be- lieved in with interpretation. <% For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said "Of course not only I liked the stories." Fiction to children is fiction and not fact. They are artists enough for that. And it is strange indeed that many elders have so for- gotten childhood as to imagine that they be- 29 fife lieved lieved in fairies, if they honestly do imagine it. What dull years have so blurred their past that they are willing to rehearse the sham memories of others? A belief in fairies is no child's play. Children have nothing to do with it except as in some countries they trem- ble behind their trembling fathers. It pleased Ruskin and for once I marvel at his pleasure to think of fairies believed to be so disorderly in the woods at the back of Joan of Arc's country that a church service was held in the forest depths once a year, and even then they were not quelled. I think this is the only false passage of Ruskin I know no other. A belief in fairies is a terrible and an adult thing, a horrible heresy, and nothing for a tourist's smiles. It was the cause that a woman, in remoter Ireland, believed to be not herself but a changeling left in her like- ness and in her place by fairies, was burnt by the father, husband, and sons who loved the "lost" one not many years ago. This is not child's play; it is faith. We indeed are 30 child's-playing with serious things and with serious words when we ask our children to say they believe in fairies. Not that our re- quest will ever make them believe; they are honest people. But in this appeal we tamper with the word "believe," and palter with its sense. The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of Peter Pan to de- clare their faith in fairies seemed to me dis- astrous a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescen- sion. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever writ- ten about a child.) %, No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That 31 % sense sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word. Every child uses it, and every child knows what he means by it. "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe." Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception. Nay, the more obvious the drama the better the child likes it, especially when he is quite young and sim- ple. I have always found the favourite game of hide-and-seek to be that in which there is no mystery about the hiding-place. The child loves best to know the cupboard in which his mother is crouching; if he fairly sees her into it so much the better. Then does he pre- tend to seek her, pretend to find her; then does she pretend to amaze him with a rush; then does he pretend to be overcome with the surprise of it. This game never tires. Do not tell me that this splendid little actor is a "realist." Even if you come to more elabo- 32 rate drama his pirates' lair behind the sofa, his Indians in the shrubbery, if he deceived himself the whole play would immediately go out. You may indeed see a nervous child deceived, and frightened, by a mechanical toy. The mechanical toy is a silly blunder of the grown-up. The child sees in it some ambiguous life, where life ought not to be, and cries. There is no more fun in this than in the Irish peasant's flames. In both cases there is no fair pretending but faith perverted. VI. THE INFLUENTIAL CHILD %s LOVE is not a mystery in Japan. It would not have been a mystery in Europe if a child Dante had not been in love. For mystery, religious and passionate alike, has its source and sanction in the heart of child- hood. In like manner the love of Nature of the landscape and the heavens was a spir- itual mystery in the boyish hearts of Vaughan and Traherne (repeated in that of their son and brother Wordsworth, the boy whom the 33 % cataract cataract haunted like a passion). By these boyhoods, remembered very seriously in after- life, European literature has been converted to two mystical passions which, century by century, are its very life. Without those boy- hoods these two loves might have been fer- vent, exalting, poignant, but not mysterious, not spiritual with the "golden purity," the ignorant spirituality of childhood. % It is said that our European manner of ro- mantic love (strictly speaking romantic) is scandalous to the Japanese. They can have had no Dante. And, in spite of their pleasure in blossoms their annual popular tryst with cherry and chrysanthemum it is doubtful whether the love of Nature has ever taken an illustrious or mysterious form with these little people. Their landscape art is gay, observ- ant, and arbitrary ; but it is as far as an Oc- cidental student can interpret it not passion- ate. For landscape that proves a passion for Nature and for mystery both the legacies of man's dead childhood we must look to 34 the great painters of two countries, France and England ; to Turner, Wilson, Crome, and Corot, and thus especially to the country that produced the boyhoods of Vaughan, Tra- herne, and Wordsworth. Many a child of our race has received that early inspiration, and 'these men of early genius not only re- ceived and remembered but put it on such record as to make it thenceforward a part of our literature. It is accepted, it is orthodox, it is expected of our poets. And this ortho- doxy, due to these great men, is due originally to these great boys. ts But for them these wonders of childhood would have been forgotten, or put away as childish things, by sensitive spirits who had likewise experienced them. They would not, at any rate, have gained this high literary honour and this literary authority. As it is, we are not ashamed to remember what mid- summer early morning was to us at nine years old, because literature gives us authority. The Jight to our adult eyes is lovely still, but 35 *the the magic of its quality is gone, the memory remaining, or the memory of the memory, or perhaps no more than the grace of knowing that there was once a memory Not to forget that I forget. fifc It is their own landscape, their own hour, that moves children not to words but to emo- tions. Great views, I think, give them a more ordinary and grown-up pleasure; they do not love formal gardens, even Italian for- mal gardens; and on this point certainly the child is not the father of the man. But hill- sides in wild flower, calm summer seas, and those aspects and phases of landscape to which Tennyson gave his perfect word in return for a perfect emotion these are wonderful to children. When Tennyson is restored, after the indiscriminate honour and the indiscrimi- nate disesteem that have befallen him, to his own place, it will be because his sense of landscape, his sense of light and of sun, is like a child's. Sfc As to Dante's love, the presence of an 36 adult sentiment in a boy's heart one should rather say in his soul and in the topmost places of his soul is a heavenly incident of human history and therefore may be subject to the worst parody. I find, for example, an exceeding vulgarity in the coquetting of boys and girls in certain kinds of American stories. It is not a corruption of things innocent to evil; but it is the corruption of an extreme and lofty wisdom, and that corruption, I think, is silly. fife Let us place next to Dante's sacred love for a child the love of a man not sacred but profane a man in fiction as the great genius of Emily Bronte conceived him. Heath- cliff's tempestuous love for Catherine re- mains throughout the horrible story a child's fresh love, even though Heathcliff is worse than a man. And, albeit Catherine dies a woman, it is to her childish ghost that he cries out of that window on the heights before his own death; the ghost of a child, and she has been long a dead woman, and he is old. 37 VII. FISHER CHILDREN IN FRANCE Sfe WITHIN a walk of industrial Boulogne is the little village without hotels or a "sea- son," left altogether to the fisher families. fife The propriety of the little boy of these fishermen is so great that when he bathes on Sundays having no gear for that occasion, he does not enter the sea unless encumbered by an apron of his mother's, secured round his neck. Nor does he set his feet into the first shallow ripple until he shall have crossed himself with the sea-water. In his own bays, apart, on his own sands untrodden by strangers and out of view, should you follow this coast of Boulogne towards the south, you may surprise him fulfilling thus his modest rites. fife Nothing was ever more uncentralized than the fishing village of the Pas de Calais. Except that Paris eats its fish, and that there- fore from Paris must filter down a little nar- row gain how narrow when it reaches the 38 hand that set the sail and drew the net, one must gather from the poverty of these clam- bering streets the village is separate, and there is no cord of communication. Does music, for example, travel these few miles, this longer distance made by the bad roads, the smell of fish, and the incommunicable poverty? The boys here do not sing the tunes that run in cities. Does the press cross the boundaries that close that village to the world? A woman, trim and talkative, walks over from Boulogne in the morning with so few newspapers that if the vigour of her race should fail her for once, and she should take the little diligence, her profits would be gone at a blow. There is indeed that barrier to literature a dialect that has to be reckoned with. That dialect is mixed with old and alienated English; surely not because of the small intercourse with our sailors when the fishermen go to Boulogne, but perhaps by reason of old colonizing of a coast which, in our aggressive days, we not only conquered 39 ft but but inhabited. Those colonists were, it is true, so dealt with by the plague that not many of them remained to improve the height and diminish the pelvic breadth of these French people; but language is of more sub- tle penetration than the influences that com- mand the body; it prevails and clings, per- sists, outlives, and wears the local accent rather than die. fe The way from Boulogne lies through the quarter devoted to the factories the usines that call the regiment of very young girls, marching in rows, companies of friends ten strong, linked by the arm, daily to thirteen hours' labour. The streets of this industrial quarter of Boulogne are old, well-built, high- roofed, shuttered, full of character; but the factory-smoke hangs about them, and be- tween this road and that lie those damaged lands, neither free nor captive, subject to ac- cidents of country and borough, that have everywhere been laid out by the hand that broke down the walls of cities. And then, 40 as you climb the hill, and turn from the fac- tory to the road leading stumblingly to the fishing-village, you are compelled to know that the refuse of a fishing-village is fish. ^ Everywhere is woman thick-set woman, warmly clad and with well-drawn-up stock- ings evident and active out of doors. But on Sunday only is the fisherwoman to be seen with her baby out in the sea air. Where, one wonders, does the baby abide all the week by day (he has a clean little home by night with a religious picture over his neat bed) whilst his mother is bent under the burdens, or strid- ing on the errands, or pushing the carts, or hauling the ropes, of the labour of the little port? She is too much and too continually bent, strained, and striving. She is cloudily, though not stormily, grave, so that after one has seen her for six days earning so violently her bare bread, it is almost a surprise to find her long-captive and long-diverted smile set free on Sunday for her child. She suns him, sitting on a stone in front of her own momen- 41 ^ tous tous and perpetual sea; and after this brief play he disappears again from the light of sea and sun. The older children have their reunited Sunday also. You may find on the grassy cliff two families and one pack of cards; two fathers, two mothers, and all the children at a game. VIII. INTERNATIONAL % SOME years ago a Paris paper opened a fund for the supply of the diphtheria anti- toxin. Public subscriptions are not so popu- lar in France as they are here, but this prospered. To its success went much of the national love of children. Many of the sub- scribers sent their alms in memory of chil- dren lost, and took an obscure pleasure in making their grief half-public. They would not put into print the intimate name of the child they had lost, but neither could they keep it altogether to themselves. Thus they gave the initials. And when their offering was made in the name of the bebe attendu they gave their own initials. They satisfied one hardly knows what desire to proclaim, a desire that has no care whom the proclama- tion may reach, or how vaguely. Poor Grief! Francis Thompson says she is not beautiful; she is unfortunately often silly. It is by some such instinct that certain women are moved to tell one another their affairs without much reference to the act of listening, as in Mr. Pett Ridge's stories. Le besoin de parler de sol, even though restrained within the limits of initials, betrays women into confidences without a confidant. % Yes, the French love their children, and by some good luck in their tenderness they have not vulgarized them by bad art. Medi- ocrity and bad art have been, and are, as wide- spread in France as in England. What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere? But it has never made a topic of the children. There are annually pictures of a First Communion at the Salon, but they are among the better in a mixed company. 43 ^3 As *fe As to the United States, it is surely time that we heard something newer and truer about American children than popular fiction has told us. The tourist, especially the French tourist, is entirely occupied with the women. One might gather, from the letters written by M. Bourget, for example, that there are few men in America, and that there are no children to speak of. Mr. Henry James gave us the boy in Daisy Miller, and there was the little girl with long legs who used to go into Dickens's apartment at an hotel and look at him. But there are no children in the later little books, the village stories we have all liked so much. A baby may be in- troduced for the sake of grown-up emotions generally those of one of the spinsters so common in this little fiction ; but of the child for child's sake there is nothing. ^ Now what I saw of American children was quite different from what is thought to be true of them by English people at home. They were very, and very unexpectedly, 44 childlike; there seemed to be some resolve to keep them so in their language; a child was not to say that the faces in a picture were "sad," but only that they "looked sorry." The children, however, were one and all trained to be sweetly courteous; it was not held that roughness was childlike. They had lovely considerate ways, and were readily af- fectionate. <% Their fault, if it is a fault, was indeed that they were warmly inclined to an eager and easy love of strangers. This, however, is so frequent in charming children that any mother who is habitually prepared for the sentiment of a heartache may find all the heartache she expects, when a child runs to the stranger with the words of love over which she herself is apt to brood fondly every time that they come her way. Nevertheless this welcome to strangers is a fresh and generous thing in chil- dren, and in those who are not children. There is an impulse, at once natural and civil- ized, to meet new faces with a new greeting. 45 % And % And in America are the little negro and negroid boys and girls with their sharp eyes and tiny upright braids of hair, and their ex- traordinary democracy and self-possession; a something more than equality where you fool- ishly looked for some deference from the ne- gro and some further deference from the child of eight years old. They learn their free composure from their frank fathers. One of that friendly race was a conductor in a train. As we crossed another train on the prairie, he was waving delighted hands, and trying to make his shout heard in the uproar. And then he turned a beaming face to two English stranger ladies with whom he had ex- changed no previous word. "That," he said, "was my brother-in-law." IX. INJUSTICE