Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise to
see them blooming in winter. Their tenderness, their down, their colour,
their fulness--which is like that of a thick rose or of a tight
grape--look out of season. Children in the withering wind are like the
soft golden-pink roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathing
a southern calm on the north wind. The child has something better than
warmth in the cold, something more subtly out of place and more
delicately contrary; and that is coolness. To be cool in the cold is the
sign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien from the common conditions of
the world. It is to have a naturally, and not an artificially, different
and separate climate.
We can all be more or less warm--with fur, with skating, with tea, with
fire, and with sleep--in the winter. But the child is fresh in the wind,
and wakes cool from his dreams, dewy when there is hoar-frost everywhere
else; he is "more lovely and more temperate" than the summer day and than
the winter day alike. He overcomes both heat and cold by another
climate, which is the climate of life; but that victory of life is more
delicate and more surprising in the tyranny of January. By the sight and
the touch of children, we are, as it were, indulged with something finer
than a fruit or a flower in untimely bloom. The childish bloom is always
untimely. The fruit and flower will be common later on; the strawberries
will be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus dull in its day. But
a child is a perpetual _primeur_.
Or rather he is not in truth always untimely. Some few days in the year
are his own season--unnoticed days of March or April, soft, fresh and
equal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun. Then he looks as
though he had his brief season, and ceases for a while to seem strange.
It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to
children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we
are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously
their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without
renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we
look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children--for a
waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall
not be final, shall not be fatal. But every winter shows us how human
they are, and how they are little pilgrims and visitants among the things
that look like their kin. For every winter shows them free from the east
wind; more perfectly than their elders, they enclose the climate of life.
And, moreover, with them the climate of life is the climate of the spring
of life; the climate of a human March that is sure to make a constant
progress, and of a human April that never hesitates. The child "breathes
April and May"--an inner April and his own May.
The winter child looks so much the more beautiful for the season as his
most brilliant uncles and aunts look less well. He is tender and gay in
the east wind. Now more than ever must the lover beware of making a
comparison between the beauty of the admired woman and the beauty of a
child. He is indeed too wary ever to make it. So is the poet. As
comparisons are necessary to him, he will pay a frankly impossible
homage, and compare a woman's face to something too fine, to something it
never could emulate. The Elizabethan lyrist is safe among lilies and
cherries, roses, pearls, and snow. He undertakes the beautiful office of
flattery, and flatters with courage. There is no hidden reproach in the
praise. Pearls and snow suffer, in a sham fight, a mimic defeat that
does them no harm, and no harm comes to the lady's beauty from a
competition so impossible. She never wore a lily or a coral in the
colours of her face, and their beauty is not hers. But here is the
secret: she is compared with a flower because she could not endure to be
compared with a child. That would touch her too nearly. There would be
the human texture and the life like hers, but immeasurably more lovely.
No colour, no surface, no eyes of woman have ever been comparable with
the colour, the surface, and the eyes of childhood. And no poet has ever
run the risk of such a defeat. Why, it is defeat enough for a woman to
have her face, however well-favoured, close to a child's, even if there
is no one by who should be rash enough to approach them still nearer by a
comparison.
This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than that
beauty of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred,
and which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily. There
are, indeed, other adult beauties, but those are such as make no
allusions to the garden. What is here affirmed is that the beautiful
woman who is widely and wisely likened to the flowers, which are
inaccessibly more beautiful, must not, for her own sake, be likened to
the always accessible child.
Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is much
beyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition, this
completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their beauty of
finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as years
are added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection. A
bloom disappears, for instance. In some little children the whole face,
and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and the
growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft as
bloom. Look then at the eyebrows themselves. Their line is as definite
as in later life, but there is in the child the flush given by the
exceeding fineness of the delicate hairs. Moreover, what becomes,
afterwards, of the length and the curl of the eyelash? What is there in
growing up that is destructive of a finish so charming as this?
Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face "from the right or
from the left" when her portrait was a-painting. She was an observant
woman, and liked to be lighted from the front. It is a light from the
right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows.
And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing
and parting caress that infancy has given to his face. The down will
then be found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red of
his cheek. His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not
much harder than petals.
To return to the child in January. It is his month for the laying up of
dreams. No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even with
a majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs now
and then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a charm
and glory mingled with uncertain dreams. Never forgotten, and yet never
certainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening. When
many and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there never
was any kind of doubt, has been long forgotten, that evening--as to which
all is doubt--is impossible to forget. In a few years it has become so
remote that the history of Greece derives antiquity from it. In later
years it is still doubtful, still a legend.
The child never asked how much was fact. It was always so immeasurably
long ago that the sweet party happened--if indeed it happened. It had so
long taken its place in that past wherein lurks all the antiquity of the
world. No one would know, no one could tell him, precisely what
occurred. And who can know whether--if it be indeed a dream--he has
dreamt it often, or has dreamt once that he had dreamt it often? That
dubious night is entangled in repeated visions during the lonely life a
child lives in sleep; it is intricate with illusions. It becomes the
most mysterious and the least worldly of all memories, a spiritual past.
The word pleasure is too trivial for such a remembrance. A midwinter
long gone by contained the suggestion of such dreams; and the midwinter
of this year must doubtless be preparing for the heart of many an ardent
young child a like legend and a like antiquity. For the old it is a mere
present.