The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody
has sent him a box of chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a child's
style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden
self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They speak
prose and know it. But a young child possesses his words by a different
tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he
says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them. He is so
little taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches the
first that comes at random. A little child to whom a peach was first
revealed, whispered to his mother, "I like that kind of turnip."
Compelled to write a letter, the child finds the word of daily life
suddenly a stranger.
The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers
the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. Dickens, who
used his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of a child and his face
are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard.
His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony. The child
chatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there is no
inspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom he
probably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of anyone,
however vague and forgotten, without a mental image. As like as not he
pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut. No boy
wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut.
His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under these
discouragements, but to write to her in an artless and childlike fashion.
The child is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the
conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "I
send them their love," "They sent me my love," "I kissed their hand to
me." If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a
long effort. His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician who
cannot remember whether he began his sentence with "people" in the
singular or the plural, and who finishes it otherwise than as he began
it. Points of grammar that are purely points of logic baffle a child
completely. He is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is in
the use of his senses.
It is not true--though it is generally said--that a young child's senses
are quick. This is one of the unverified ideas that commend themselves,
one knows not why. We have had experiments to compare the relative
quickness of perception proved by men and women. The same experiments
with children would give curious results, but they can hardly, perhaps,
be made, because the children would be not only slow to perceive but slow
to announce the perception; so the moment would go by, and the game be
lost. Not even amateur conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of a
child's mind as does a little intricacy of grammar.