is certain, as in the cases of Douglas or Greenville, it seems all one
from a personal point of view. The man who lost his life against a
henroost is in the same pickle with him who lost his life against a
fortified place of the first order. Whether he has missed a peerage or
only the corporal’s stripes, it is all one if he has missed them and is
quietly in the grave. It was by a hazard that we learned the conduct of
the four marines of the _Wager_. There was no room for these brave
fellows in the boat, and they were left behind upon the island to a
certain death. They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough it
was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood
upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried “God bless the king!” Now,
one or two of those who were in the boat escaped, against all
likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great thing for us; but
surely it cannot, by any possible twisting of human speech, be construed
into anything great for the marines. You may suppose, if you like, that
they died hoping their behaviour would not be forgotten; or you may
suppose they thought nothing on the subject, which is much more likely.
What can be the signification of the word “fame” to a private of
marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of past history beyond the
reminiscences of his grandmother? But whichever supposition you make,
the fact is unchanged. They died while the question still hung in the
balance; and I suppose their bones were already white, before the winds
and the waves and the humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had
decided whether they were to be unknown and useless martyrs or honoured
heroes. Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it is for fame that
men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows after all.
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose
actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The
Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful
carping, but in a heat of admiration. But there is another theory of the
personal motive in these fine sayings and doings, which I believe to be
true and wholesome. People usually do things, and suffer martyrdoms,
because they have an inclination that way. The best artist is not the
man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice
of his art. And instead of having a taste for being successful merchants
and retiring at thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we
call heroic forms of excitement. If the Admirals courted war like a
mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came gaily out
of the forecastle,--it is because a fight is a period of multiplied and
intense experiences, and, by Nelson’s computation, worth “thousands” to
any one who has a heart under his jacket. If the marines of the _Wager_
gave three cheers and cried “God bless the king,” it was because they
liked to do things nobly for their own satisfaction. They were giving
their lives, there was no help for that; and they made it a point of
self-respect to give them handsomely. And there were never four happier
marines in God’s world than these four at that moment. If it was worth
thousands to be at the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would
calculate how much it was worth to be one of these four marines; or how
much their story is worth to each of us who read it. And mark you,
undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation. The finest action
is the better for a piece of purple. If the soldiers of the _Birkenhead_
had not gone down in line, or these marines of the _Wager_ had walked
away simply into the island, like plenty of other brave fellows in the
like circumstances, my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a far lower
value to the two stories. We have to desire a grand air in our heroes;
and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put the dots
on their own i’s, and leave us in no suspense as to when they mean to be
heroic. And hence, we should congratulate ourselves upon the fact that
our Admirals were not only great-hearted but big-spoken.
The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is their object;
but I do not think that is much to the purpose. People generally say
what they have been taught to say; that was the catchword they were
given in youth to express the aims of their way of life; and men who are
gaining great battles are not likely to take much trouble in reviewing
their sentiments and the words in which they were told to express them.
Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite
different theory of life from the one on which he is patently acting.
And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought, but it
is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments of swift and
momentous decision. It is from something more immediate, some
determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the
breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting
an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most
commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will,
is not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is
difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so
formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes it. I suspect
that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent. of why Lord
Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of
Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why the
Admirals courted war like a mistress.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHILD’S PLAY
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CHILD’S PLAY
The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much
a man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry; for although we
shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse, we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity
to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at
soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see
the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go
to school no more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for
another (which is by no means sure), we are set free forever from the
daily fear of chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us;
and although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our
pleasure differently. We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold
mutton please our Friday’s appetite; and I can remember the time when to
call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have made
it more palatable than the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold
mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever
invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the
clamant reality, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive
figments. But for the child it is still possible to weave an enchantment
over eatables; and if he has but read of a dish in a story-book, it will
be heavenly manna to him for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise, if he is
not something positive in his tastes, it means he has a feeble body and
should have some medicine; but children may be pure spirits, if they
will, and take their enjoyment in a world of moonshine. Sensation does
not count for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear
through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough
to see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do not use
their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own;
and the things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beautiful in
themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I thought they
might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of touch
so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn
over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you
remember will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt,
general sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of
wellbeing in bed. And here, of course, you will understand pleasurable
sensations; for overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element
in life, and the true commander of man’s soul and body--alas! pain has
its own way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the
fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it
rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering
to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us
from this sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of
unmitigated sugar which delight a youthful palate, “it is surely no very
cynical asperity” to think taste a character of the maturer growth.
Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents,
many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in the woods. But
hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there
is all the world between gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and
the emotion with which a man listens to articulate music.
At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the definition
and intensity of what we feel which accompanies our growing age, another
change takes place in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are
transformed and seen through theories and associations as through
coloured windows. We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and
gossip, and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in
which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop windows
with other eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder, not always to
admire, but to make and modify our little incongruous theories about
life. It is no longer the uniform of a soldier that arrests our
attention; but perhaps the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a
countenance that has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an
adventurous story written in its lines. The pleasure of surprise is
passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts seem mighty tame to encounter;
and we walk the streets to make romances and to sociologise. Nor must we
deny that a good many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit
or in the interest of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look back
with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are in a better
case; they know more than when they were children, they understand
better, their desires and sympathies answer more nimbly to the
provocation of the senses, and their minds are brimming with interest
as they go about the world.
According to my contention, this is a flight to which children cannot
rise. They are wheeled in perambulators or dragged about by nurses in a
pleasing stupour. A vague, faint, abiding wonderment possesses them.
Here and there some specially remarkable circumstance, such as a
water-cart or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought
and calls them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may see
them, still towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort
of destiny, but still staring at the bright object in their wake. It may
be some minutes before another such moving spectacle reawakens them to
the world in which they dwell. For other children, they almost
invariably show some intelligent sympathy. “There is a fine fellow
making mud pies,” they seem to say; “that I can understand, there is
some sense in mud pies.” But the doings of their elders, unless where
they are speakingly picturesque or recommend themselves by the quality
of being easily imitable, they let them go over their heads (as we say)
without the least regard. If it were not for this perpetual imitation,
we should be tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only
considered us in the light of creatures brutally strong and brutally
silly; among whom they condescended to dwell in obedience like a
philosopher at a barbarous court. At times, indeed, they display an
arrogance of disregard that is truly staggering. Once, when I was
groaning aloud with physical pain, a young gentleman came into the room
and nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and arrow. He made no
account of my groans, which he accepted, as he had to accept so much
else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a
wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the subject. Those
elders, who care so little for rational enjoyment, and are even the
enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he had accepted without
understanding and without complaint, as the rest of us accept the scheme
of the universe.
We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until
the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the
while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly
what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find
anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When
his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a
sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of
breath. When he comes to ride with the king’s pardon, he must bestride
a chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and on which he will so
furiously demean himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody
with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance involves an
accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the chest of
drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination is
satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same
category and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child’s faith;
he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or
valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the
accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can
skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of
the enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the
gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day’s dinner. He can make
abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his
eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavory lane. And
so it is, that although the ways of children cross with those of their
elders in a hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction
nor so much as lie in the same element. So may the telegraph wires
intersect the line of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and
a bagman visit the same country, and yet move in different worlds.
People struck with these spectacles, cry aloud about the power of
imagination in the young. Indeed there may be two words to that. It is,
in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the
grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is
jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons why _Robinson
Crusoe_ should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in
this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts and had, in so
many words, to _play_ at a great variety of professions; and then the
book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so
much. Hammers and saws belong to a province of life that positively
calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most
ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively
simulated to the running burthen “On a cold and frosty morning,” gives a
good instance of the artistic taste in children. And this need for overt
action and lay figures testifies to a defect in the child’s imagination
which prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of his
own heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His
experience is incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we
call the memory is so ill provided, that he can overtake few
combinations and body out few stories, to his own content, without some
external aid. He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one
would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near
trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism with a
wooden sword, and mothers practice their kind vocation over a bit of
jointed stick. It may be laughable enough just now; but it is these same
people and these same thoughts, that not long hence, when they are on
the theatre of life, will make you weep and tremble. For children think
very much the same thoughts, and dream the same dreams, as bearded men
and marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and honour, the
love of young men and the love of mothers, the business man’s pleasure
in method, all these and others they anticipate and rehearse in their
play hours. Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly dealing with
the threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a
hint for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at
soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet
beings whom both are busy imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity
of all. “Art for art” is their motto; and the doings of grown folk are
only interesting as the raw material for play. Not Théophile Gautier,
not Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the
reproduction more highly over the reality; and they will parody an
execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of the young man of Nain, with
all the cheerfulness in the world.
The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious
art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract,
impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests
beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and
personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to
the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit
this personal element into our divagations we are apt to stir up
uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of
old wounds. Our day-dreams can no longer lie all in the air like a story
in the _Arabian Knights_; they read to us rather like the history of a
period in which we ourselves had taken part, where we come across many
unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly reprimanded. And
then the child, mind you, acts his parts. He does not merely repeat them
to himself; he leaps, he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his
body. And so his play breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion
than he gives it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to our
intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in
bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no outlet.
Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind, which desires the
thing itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one’s
enemy, although it is perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still
left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to
lead to a visit and an interview which may be the reverse of triumphant
after all.
In the child’s world of dim sensation, play is all in all. “Making
believe” is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a
walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some
suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business man in an office
before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your
memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith
and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some
invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of
spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of
mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are
even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow
to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together,
they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy
because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already
how even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled
and led by the nose with the fag-end of an old song. And it goes deeper
than this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an
interruption in the business of life; and they must find some
imaginative sanction, and tell themselves some sort of story, to account
for, to colour, to render entertaining, the simple processes of eating
and drinking. What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the
pattern upon tea-cups!--from which there followed a code of rules and a
whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a
game. When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a
device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and
explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine
with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual
inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an
island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what
inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and
travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest
grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides
and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of
altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so
long as we seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting
moments I ever had over a meal, were in the case of calves’ feet jelly.
It was hardly possible not to believe--and you may be sure, so far from
trying, I did all I could to favour the illusion--that some part of it
was hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret
tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some miniature _Red Beard_
await his hour; there, might one find the treasures of the _Forty
Thieves_, and bewildered Cassim beating about the walls. And so I
quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe
me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the
taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because the
cream dimmed the transparent fractures.
Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-minded
children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a
sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, and the actions and
the excitement to which it gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort
of fable. And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity,
palpably about nothing and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile
craving. It is a game, if you like, but not a game of play. You cannot
tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can
be justified on no rational theory. Even football, although it admirably
simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented
difficulties to the minds of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I
knew at least one little boy who was mightily exercised about the
presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to
play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a
sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian nations.
To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted about the
bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and
are not the contemporaries of their parents. What can they think of
them? what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look
down upon their games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown
designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest
solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of
their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes
the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever
such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know
what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child’s unvarnished feeling. A
sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very
feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for the untried
residue of mankind: go to make up the attraction that he feels. No
wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world in front of him,
if he clings to the hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole
affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. “O, why,” I remember passionately wondering, “why can we not all
be happy and devote ourselves to play?” And when children do
philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.