The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods
and of their impressions. Your hours when you were six were the enormous
hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick
forgetfulness. Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at
his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up,
he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called
minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then
what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating
hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right
value, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile, were infinitely
tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.
Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is
inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit
fully to confess it.
You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such
space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly that
you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a
dreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain of it to
the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of
the world in their hands--your seniors. You remembered the duration of
some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it
until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.
As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawing
room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greater
than Beethoven had any idea of. You sat and listened, and tried to fix a
passage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark, with the deliberate
provident intention of helping yourself through the time during a future
hearing; for you knew too well that you would have to bear it all again.
You could not do the same with sermons, because, though even more
fatiguing, they were more or less different each time.
While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--and
a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every house
you lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence of
mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it. As to the length
of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words do
not measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleep
in childhood. Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from the
duration of time--the names of streets, the names of tradesmen,
especially the _fournisseurs_ of the household, who lived in them.
You were bored by people. It did not occur to you to be tired of those
of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially. Nor were
you bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless they held
you, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible voices
and so look at their mannered faces that they released you an older child
than they took you prisoner. But--it is a reluctant confession--you were
tired of your relations; you were weary of their bonnets. Measured by
adult time, those bonnets were, it is to be presumed, of no more than
reasonable duration; they had no more than the average or common life.
You have no reason, looking back, to believe that your great-aunts wore
bonnets for great and indefinite spaces of time. But, to your sense as a
child, long and changing and developing days saw the same harassing
artificial flowers hoisted up with the same black lace. You would have
had a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but you
deliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet. So with dresses,
especially such as had any little misfit about them. For you it had
always existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing. You seemed to
have been aware of it for years. By the way, there would be less cheap
reproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knew
how immensely old their old clothes are to them.
The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary ugliness
of things, and that--apart from the effects of _ennui_--they reject that
ugliness actively. You have stood and listened to your mother's
compliments on her friend's hat, and have made your mental protest in
very definite words. You thought it hideous, and hideous things offended
you then more than they have ever offended you since. At nine years old
you made people, alas! responsible for their faces, as you do still in a
measure, though you think you do not. You severely made them answer for
their clothes, in a manner which you have seen good reason, in later
life, to mitigate. Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, you
had no mercy. To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they were
friskiness of manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with rather
bygone or frumpish fashions. Too much childish dislike was wasted so.
But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learnt
later. At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the contrast
of a white kid glove and a bright red wrist. Well, this is not the
received arrangement, but red and white do go well together, and their
distribution has to be taught with time. Whose were the wrist and glove?
Certainly some one's who must have been distressed at the _bouquet_ of
colour that you admired. This, however, was but a local admiration. You
did not admire the girl as a whole. She whom you adored was always a
married woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but always
divinely elegant. She alone was worthy to stand at the side of your
mother. You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for a
chance of holding her bracelet when she played. You composed prose in
honour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown to
yourself) a "catalogue." She took singularly little notice of you.
Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature. The light of
summer morning before sunrise was to you a spiritual splendour for which
you wanted no name. The Mediterranean under the first perceptible touch
of the moon, the calm southern sea in the full blossom of summer, the
early spring everywhere, in the showery streets, in the fields, or at
sea, left old childish memories with you which you try to evoke now when
you see them again. But the cloudy dusk behind poplars on the plains of
France, the flying landscape from the train, willows, and the last of the
light, were more mournful to you then than you care to remember now. So
were the black crosses on the graves of the French village; so were
cypresses, though greatly beloved.
If you were happy enough to be an internationally educated child, you had
much at heart the heart of every country you knew. You disliked the
English accent of your compatriots abroad with a scorn to which, needless
to say, you are not tempted now. You had shocks of delight from Swiss
woods full of lilies of the valley, and from English fields full of
cowslips. You had disquieting dreams of landscape and sun, and of many
of these you cannot now tell which were visions of travel and which
visions of slumber. Your strong sense of place made you love some places
too keenly for peace.