The infant of literature "wails" and wails feebly, with the invariability
of a thing unproved and taken for granted. Nothing, nevertheless, could
be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child of
man catches his first breath. It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and
brief, rather deep than shrill in tone. With all deference to old
moralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts up
his new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and with
much the same tone as some of the duck kind there. He does not weep for
some months to come. His outcry soon becomes the human cry that is
better known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy. And if the
infant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too
young to be gay. A child's mirth, when at last it begins, is his first
secret; you understand little of it. The first smile (for the convulsive
movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile)
is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable. It is
accompanied by a single sound--a sound that would be a monosyllable if it
were articulate--which is the utterance, though hardly the communication,
of a private jollity. That and that alone is the real beginning of human
laughter.
From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for the
first time, and as it were flickeringly, the child's smile begins to grow
definite and, gradually, more frequent. By very slow degrees the secrecy
passes away, and the dryness becomes more genial. The child now smiles
more openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing creature of so much
prose and verse. His laughter takes a long time to form. The
monosyllable grows louder, and then comes to be repeated with little
catches of the breath. The humour upon which he learns to laugh is that
of something which approaches him quickly and then withdraws. This is
the first intelligible jest of jesting man.
An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark the
features of faces near him. Whether because of the greater
conspicuousness of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, he
addresses his looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to the
heads, not the faces, of his friends. These are the ways of all infants,
various in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the same
things. There are turns in a kitten's play--arched leapings and sidelong
jumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances--which the sacred kittens
of Egypt used in their time. But not more alike are these repetitions
than the impulses of all young children learning to laugh.
In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much of
his effect upon the world; not much of the effect of the world upon him.
Yet he is compelled to endure the reflex results, at least, of all that
pleases, distresses, or oppresses the world. That he should be obliged
to suffer the moods of men is a more important thing than that men should
be amused by his moods. If he is saddened, that is certainly much more
than that his elders should be gladdened. It is doubtless hardly
possible that children should go altogether free of human affairs. They
might, in mere justice, be spared the burden they bear ignorantly and
simply when it is laid upon them, of such events and ill fortunes as may
trouble our peace; but they cannot easily be spared the hearing of a
disturbed voice or the sight of an altered face. Alas! they are made to
feel money-matters, and even this is not the worst. There are
unconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries, of which they do not know
the names, but which change the faces where they look for smiles. To
such alterations children are sensitive even when they seem least
accessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels of
elders. Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droop
when their defied tyrants are dejected.
For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is a
mere impulse and is easily disconcerted. They are gay without knowing
any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were,
proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they are
helpless and find no stay. For this reason the merriest of all children
are those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in a family nor in a
public home by paid guardians, but in a place of charity, rightly named,
where impartial, unalterable, and impersonal devotion has them in hand.
They endure an immeasurable loss, and are orphans, but they gain in
perpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature. The separate
nest is nature's, and the best; but it might be wished that the separate
nest were less subject to moods. The nurse has her private business, and
when it does not prosper, and when the remote affairs of the governess go
wrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration of the mishap.
The uniformity of infancy passes away long before the age when children
have this indefinite suffering inflicted upon them; and they have become
infinitely various, and feel the consequences of the cares of their
elders in unnumbered degrees. The most charming children feel them the
most sensibly, and not with resentment but with sympathy. It is
assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue of
childhood. What other thing are we to learn of them? Not simplicity,
for they are intricate enough. Not gratitude; for their usual sincere
thanklessness makes half the pleasure of doing them good. Not obedience;
for the child is born with the love of liberty. And as for humility, the
boast of a child is the frankest thing in the world. A child's natural
vanity is not merely the delight in his own possessions, but the triumph
over others less fortunate. If this emotion were not so young it would
be exceedingly unamiable. But the truth must be confessed that having
very quickly learnt the value of comparison and relation, a child
rejoices in the perception that what he has is better than what his
brother has; this comparison is a means of judging his fortune, after
all. It is true that if his brother showed distress, he might make haste
to offer an exchange. But the impulse of joy is candidly egotistic.
It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask pity for
their sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive that
they are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and who make
no bargain for apologies--it is this that men and women are urged to
learn of a child. Graces more confessedly childlike they make shift to
teach themselves.