Is Childhood the Happiest or the most Miserable Period of One's
Existence?
[Sidenote: G. R. Sims says it depends upon the child.]
It depends so much upon the child. As a child, my greatest delight was
to give swagger dinner parties to my brothers and sisters in the nursery
on winter afternoons, when we could not go out. The principal delicacy
in these entertainments was an orange _sorbet_ specially prepared by my
own hands. Here is the recipe. Squeeze into a small cup the juice of
half an orange, fill up with snow, scraped from the outside window sill,
and serve cold. Now, although the preparation of this delightful
delicacy gave me an immense amount of happiness, I could rarely induce
any grown-up people to partake of it. Then there was a wine which always
graced the table at our nursery feasts. We called it currant wine, and
made it by putting a handful of grocer's currants into a wineglass,
filling up with cold water, and stirring the mixture up with a piece of
firewood until the liquid was a rich brown. I have often, in later life,
paid fifteen shillings for a bottle of champagne, and not felt half so
happy over it as I used to be over a teaspoonful of our own home-made
currant wine. In these matters childhood _was_ the happiest period of my
life. With regard to the enjoyment of "games," I never played many as a
child, but as a man I have derived the greatest possible pleasure from
them. I never learned to skip till I was thirty, and at thirty-five my
greatest delight was a game of battledore and shuttlecock. Now that I am
turned forty I have given up violent exercise, and taken to playing with
boxes of bricks and tin soldiers. I am sure that I am far happier with
them, now, than I was as a child. In my old nursery days I always
quarrelled with my brothers and sisters about our toys, and we
generally finished up by throwing them at each other. Now I can sit on
the floor in the long winter evenings and perform the most wonderful
architectural feats with my box of bricks, and nobody thinks of
interfering with me. With my soldiers, too, I am much happier. I can
place the French and German armies in battle array, and devote my mind
entirely to complex strategical operations without having to keep one
eye on the armies and the other on the baby. Our baby was always putting
my soldiers in his mouth; and, on one occasion, he completely crippled
the Russian forces by swallowing their only general at a critical
moment. So far as toys are concerned I am sure that childhood was _not_
the happiest period of my life. The real charm of childhood, however, is
its lack of the sense of responsibility. It is the sense of
responsibility which comes with manhood that destroys the charm of life,
and makes us think of our irresponsible childhood with regret. A child
hasn't to trouble about the rent, or the butcher's bill, or of what the
world will think of it, or of the duties it owes to society, to the
family, or to itself. At the cost of a few tears or a sustained shriek
it can get almost anything it wants, and it is waited on hand and foot
at somebody else's expense. It has absolutely no responsibility beyond
being occasionally left alone in the nursery with a little brother or
sister, with instructions to see that baby doesn't fall into the fire.
This, bar the bother of having to grab the baby violently by the hair to
keep it from mischief, is ideal happiness; and I have known some
children to whom the hair grabbing was a pleasure rather than a duty. It
is the "responsibility" which comes with age which always causes us to
compare it unfavourably with childhood. In another matter, manhood
compares favourably with childhood. A man can be as naughty as he likes,
and there is nobody to whip him unless he is a garrotter. Childhood is
_not_ the happiest period for those who like to be naughty, and
naughtiness is the general idea of happiness. If it were not so
everybody would try to be good. Up to the time of going to press no
really popular movement in that direction has been discovered by Reuter
or Dalziel, or "our own correspondent."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Miss Clo Graves thinks it an unpleasant period.]
The first thing a baby does is to howl. If that child knew that he had
got a joyous, gamesome time before him, he wouldn't. He would smile. But
one of the most endearing characteristics of childhood is its candour,
and the baby knows that croup lies waiting round the corner to seize him
by the throat, that thrush lurks in the imperfectly-washed
feeding-bottle, that wind-spasms and teething convulsions only wait
their opportunity to mark him for their prey, and so he howls:
"Ah! (_A pant._)
Ah-ha! AH! (_A pause to gather forces._)
Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha!
Ah! AH! E'EE!"
(_Fortissimo, crescendo_, and _ad libitum_.)
The nurse will be likely to say it is a pin, but it is not. It is
because the baby guesses what it has got to go through before it grows
up. If ever it grows up at all. There is a period between childhood and
maturity of which one doesn't want to write. No man likes to remember
that he was once a long-legged, red-wristed hobbledehoy, who drowned his
freckles in blushes when girls, who did not happen to be his sisters,
looked at him, and shaved surreptitiously with his mother's scissors. No
woman cares about looking back to the days when she had thick ankles,
which her skirts were not long enough to cover; when she wore her hair
in a pigtail, because she was too old to wear it loose upon her
shoulders, and too young to turn it up; when the front hooks and eyes of
her frock were always bursting off, and her sister's sweethearts used to
call her "little girl." A humiliating experience altogether, the period
of adolescence. But more humiliating still it is to be a mature,
grown-up person, and know how far off you are from being the wonderful
creature you intended to be, when you began the world. You did not
contemplate being exactly beautiful--it is not for everyone to achieve
that--but you meant to be commanding. You were going to do everything
well: to succeed gloriously--to be distinguished and brilliant--knock
lumps off this poor old globe, in fact. And now--well--you haven't! The
clay you're made of is the ordinary kind: not the blue earth diamonds
grow in. You might make up for your absolute lack of individuality by a
brilliant suicide. But you don't. You're too commonplace. You're
contented to go on being nobody. This may be a calm state, but it is
certainly not a happy one.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: But there are exceptions.]
And yet there is a childhood which is, maybe, the happiest period of our
existence. Not the time of the shining morning face--of the curled
top-knot--for to the excoriating action of the soaped towel was due that
facial polish, and the twisting of the damped hair around the
long-tailed ivory brush was attended with the shedding of bitter tears
of rage and pain. But the second edition of the Book of Infancy, bound
in shrivelled yellow leather and printed in faded ink. "The world," say
the slippered pantaloon and the mumbling grandame, "was a fine place
when we were young." And what is more, they really believe it. He was
strong, fascinating and handsome--she was clever and beautiful. Both may
say so as often as they like, and everybody credits them--because they
are so old. _Comple et amur illam et amemus: plena est voluptatis si
illa scias uti_. Come, gentle Dotage! Shade me with thy kindly wing,
lend me thy rose-coloured horn-glasses! Let me view the Past, not as it
was, but as I would have had it. So shall the children cluster round my
knee, and listen, wide-eyed and envying, as I tell them of the golden
days of _my_ childhood, and the young people sigh, hearing of the brave
and brilliant, beautiful and noble things that never happened in the
bygone time when I was young. Only the middle-aged folk look a little
doubtful, and Death, leaning over the back of my armchair, laughs
outright, and taps me--as a reproving nurse might--on the withered lips
with one bony finger-tip. After which I fall asleep, and am carried away
to bed.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Alden philosophises.]
I have not been a child for several years; it is unnecessary to mention
the precise number, but I have a clear recollection of the period. My
childhood was certainly happy, so far as I was personally concerned, but
I will not go so far as to say that it was a source of unmixed happiness
to others. As to whether childhood is the happiest or the most miserable
part of our existence, there is so much to be said on both sides that I
am almost inclined to answer the question in a judicious and
statesmanlike way, by saying that I yield to no one in my profound
appreciation of the wide-reaching importance of the question, and that
the day will certainly come when the awakened conscience of the nation
will demand its settlement in accordance with right and justice. When
that time arrives I need hardly say that I shall be found on the side of
justice, but I am not yet wholly convinced that the time has fully
arrived. In the meantime, however, I do not hesitate to say that in
those cases where childhood is happier than mature age there can be but
little doubt among thinking men of all shades of belief that maturity
is, in some respects, at least less demonstrably happy than childhood.
Now that would be eminently judicious, but, on the other hand, it would
look like an underhanded attempt to introduce politics into the
_Idler_. It will be better, therefore, to treat the subject in a
philosophic way. The question which the Editors of the _Idler_ ask is,
after all, a question as to the relative advantages of Idealism and
Realism--spelled with the largest kind of capital letters. The small boy
is ordinarily an Idealist, unless, of course, he belongs to the unhappy
class of small boys who have to earn their own living when they ought to
be at play, and who, having no time for dreaming, become Realists of the
most hardened and painful type. In the former case the small boy is
happy, for he lives in a world of his own creation, and for the purpose
of happiness such a world is far better than the actual world. In the
latter case he is generally more or less unhappy, for he is compelled to
see the world as it really is, and he finds it not all nice. The
realistic small boy can have very little true happiness. Fancy M. Zola's
childhood: assuming, of course, that he was then a Realist, which he
probably was not, judging from the fact that he is only a Realist
professionally at the present day. To the childish Zola, life must have
presented itself as a series of human documents. He saw things as they
were, not as a small boy should see them. He could have had no genuine
longings for a life of piracy, for he saw that the pirate, instead of
being a gorgeously-dressed and nobly-chivalrous hero, was only a brutal
ruffian travelling on the road to Execution Dock. Tin soldiers could
have brought him no happiness, for he knew that they were only lifeless
bits of tin, as incapable of fighting as the army of Monaco. It gave him
no pleasure to be dressed in a pasteboard helmet and to wear a tin
sword, for he knew that grown-up people would not mistake him for a
soldier; and that a blue flannel shirt, and a cap with the name of some
frigate on a silk ribbon, would not lead foreigners to believe that he
was a French admiral at the age of seven. He may have found some little
pleasure in playing marbles--not, of course, for the sake of that silly
game, but for the reason that marbles are portable property, and that
the more marbles a boy wins the richer he is--but for all other boyish
diversions he must have felt a profound contempt.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: And doesn't know.]
Beyond all doubt M. Zola would say that he is happier to-day (with
"Nana" in its 150th thousand) than he was in his childhood, but that is
because his childhood was devoid of Idealism. On the other hand, if I
may be pardoned for mentioning myself in the same paragraph with the
greatest novelist of all time, my own childhood was happy because I
lived purely in a world of the imagination. There never was a bolder or
more truly noble pirate than I was during the hour of the Sunday sermon,
when I whiled away the good clergyman's discourse by sweeping the seas
in my piratical schooner, and harrowing the Spanish Main. My tin
soldiers were flesh and blood heroes, my kites flew nearly to the outer
limits of the solar system, and I never quite lost the belief that I
could dig a tunnel to China with the kitchen fire-shovel, had the cook
only had sufficient scientific zeal to be willing to lend it to me for a
few hours. I was very happy then, but I am equally happy now. I have
never got over the Idealism of my childhood, and I make my own political
and social world to-day quite as irrationally and delightfully as I did
eighty--well, when I was a child. I do find, I admit, that one cannot be
an Idealist in financial matters, which is, after all, the main source
of unhappiness in mature life, but if you ask me whether I was happier
in childhood than I am now, I should not know how to answer. All of
which goes to show that I might have done better if I had stuck to the
safe and judicious in my attempted answer, instead of yielding to the
temptation to be philosophical.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Miss Florence Marryat thinks it the most miserable.]
If I am to choose one, or the other, extreme, I should say decidedly the
most miserable, and made so by the folly, ignorance, or neglect of
parents. Not one-hundredth part of the men and women who marry are fit
to become fathers and mothers. Who does not pity the wretched little
mortal whom one meets, dressed up in some fantastic or grotesque
costume, to gratify the vanity of those who own it, forbidden to run or
play, for fear of spoiling the velvet tunic, or silken sash--unable to
be comfortable even, on account of buttoned boots and kid gloves? A
child is simply a young animal. Give it warmth and food and liberty, and
it will be happy and hungry and healthy! To dress it up in the fashion,
and let it be dragged at the heels of an indifferent nursemaid along a
pavement, is tantamount to confining a puppy by a heavy chain to a
kennel. I believe the greatest misery of children arises from their
being so culpably trusted to the care of servants. A fashionable mother
engages a head-nurse, who is well-mannered, respectful, and experienced,
and thereupon delivers over her children to her entire jurisdiction,
perfectly content if they appear before her, at stated periods, clean
and neat, with smiling faces. She little knows how (in the majority of
instances) the poor little creatures are coerced, by nursery discipline,
not to betray their real feelings for the woman who has them under her
influence day and night.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: And gives the reason why.]
At one time, when I walked daily in Hyde Park, I constantly met a nurse
whose behaviour to the children under her charge excited my greatest
indignation. If one of the little ones lagged behind with the nursemaid,
or whimpered, because it was cold or tired, the head-nurse would shake
it by the arm, or strike it across the head with such violence as to
upset its equilibrium, and her voice at all times was harsh and
repellent. I knew it would be useless to speak to her, but one day I
followed her home to a house in Park Lane, and, sending up my card,
asked if I could speak to the mistress of it. The flunky informed me she
was Lady--let us say, "the Lord knows who"--and I was presently admitted
to her presence. I did not stand on ceremony with "Lady the Lord knows
who." I told her I made no excuse for disturbing her, because if she
loved her children she would be very much obliged to me for telling her,
from my personal observation, that she had (unconsciously no doubt)
trusted them to the care of a woman who was not fit to take charge of a
dog. Her ladyship heard me to the end, and then, rising grandly, touched
the bell for her flunky and said, "Many thanks for the trouble you have
taken, but I have the utmost confidence in my attendants." And so I was
bowed out again. How many parents live with the little children they
have brought into the world? How many teach them, or explain to them,
all they want to know? It is too much trouble! All that sort of thing is
delegated to hirelings. How often has one heard an intelligent child
snubbed for the very questioning which should be encouraged! The bright,
eager little brain, just opening, as it were, to all the wonders of
living, is bursting to know the why and wherefore of everything it sees,
and for answer to its excited enquiries it only gets such rebuffs as
"Don't worry!" "Hold your tongue!" "If you don't behave yourself I'll
send you out of the room." Which of us who have brains cannot remember
the heart-sickening feeling of having in some unconscious manner done
wrong by asking questions which our elders were probably too ignorant to
answer? And then followed the intense longing to be "grown-up," and
independent. Can't we all remember that longing to be "grown-up?" Is it
not in itself an answer to the question if childhood is not a miserable
period, except perhaps for a favoured few?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Phillpotts temporises.]
I fail to see how you can assert or deny upon this question. There are
thousands of happy children in the world, and thousands as miserable as
any grown-up person. It depends entirely upon those responsible for the
individual infant; and a babe's environment is really unimportant,
because, before intelligence sets in, a child wants little more than
warmth and good food, and general looking after. At that early period
the human young are on much the same level as cats and dogs. My dog is
just as happy as the Prince of Wales's Pomeranian, because I satisfy
him; social distinction has no charm for him; bones and literary society
are sufficient for a creature devoid of conscious intelligence. In the
same way an infant may be happy at a workhouse, perhaps even more so
than in a Park Lane nursery--if there are such things as Park Lane
nurseries. But it is when intellect dawns, and a child is able himself
to say whether he is happy or unhappy, that he becomes interesting.
Then, as before, his measure of joy or sorrow must depend upon those
fellow-creatures who form his society. Probably the rule that obtains of
men and women holds good of children also: the less brain power the more
happiness. Intellect--especially a growing intellect--will give a child
lightning flashes of joy denied to his more thick-headed brother; but
much sorrow must also result from his extra intelligence. If he rises
higher, he will sink far lower, too. The placid, ordinary youth thinks
less, and digests his food better, and has a pleasanter time, on the
whole. A sensitive child feels with a keen freshness that only years can
blunt. To see some fool of a man crushing a clever child is
heart-rending. By curious, misguided instincts, children always look up
to their full-grown companions; and the result is, that any adult ass
can nip in the bud precious childish fancies, or make fatuous and
crushing replies to childish inquiries, which show in themselves the
trembling dawn of an intellect far superior to his own.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: And says that clever men loathe childhood.]
As a rule, you will find that clever men look back at their childhood
with lively loathing, while the average Briton, if Heaven has given him
enough memory to recall his earliest youth at all, says that it was all
right as far as he can remember. In my own small case (and, after all,
personal experience is never uninteresting--to the person), I can say
that until I went to a day-school at the age of seven, or it may have
been less, I had a fairly good time. Open air has a great deal to do
with happiness in a child--open air and plenty of wholesome food, and
satisfactory parents. Not that the victim cares overmuch for
rice-puddings or a good mother; but these things leave their mark. As to
mothers, I should say they have got more men and women into Heaven than
any bishop, priest, deacon, or professional Churchman whatsoever.
Personally, I am still here, and should be the last to make sure of
anything, or count my own chickens before they are hatched, but I have
the privilege of knowing men and women, to the number of at least five,
who are undoubtedly bound for Golden Shores; and it was their mothers'
doing in every case. Fathers, too, have their significance, but it is
purely temporal, and never much concerns an infant until the child
reaches that advanced platform of intelligence whereon questions
concerning pocket-money arise.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mrs. Panton thinks it _ought_ to be the happiest.]
There would be no difficulty whatever in replying to the question, if it
runs, "_Should_ childhood be the happiest or most miserable period of
our existence?" because, I am sure, we should one and all agree that it
most certainly should: for we have no cares then, no responsibilities;
our clean pinafores are worn without the least notice of what they cost
to wash; our dinners, if unappetising, are regular, and, if they are not
paid for, do not weigh upon either our minds or our bodies; while we
neither look forward nor backward, and enjoy our existence from day to
day with all the freedom from care and anxiety which, we suppose,
characterises the life of a puppy or a kitten. But all this presupposes
that we are not in the group of tyrants, either in the nursery,
schoolroom, or dining-room, and that those who have charge of us
remember their own days of childhood: recollect all the dreams, threats,
and fancies which can turn them into a period of absolute torture; and,
above all, consider that a child is not a sheet of plain blank paper,
but that it is a composite arrangement of all the ancestors that one can
remember, and of many that one cannot: for unless this is so, no words
of mine can describe the misery that can be inflicted on a sensitive,
dreamy child, who, to a certain extent, is heavily handicapped in the
race of life by the feeble vitality which, as a rule, accompanies such a
disposition, and who all too often is made a liar by harsh dealing, and
an invalid in life by the hardening process, so dear to the hearts of so
many fathers, mothers, and governesses. If, on the contrary, a child is
carefully studied--if it be regarded as one by itself and not a sample
of a batch, which must be just as are its brothers and sisters--I
maintain that childhood must be the very happiest time that we can have:
the dreams and happenings, which fill our nights and days, make both
equally delightful, while if we are tired to death by lessons and the
daily walk, we soon grow out of this, because we can build our own
castles in the air out of the driest possible task, and make long and
elaborate romances for ourselves out of the--most likely very
commonplace--people we meet on our morning scamper. Then, too, was there
not the never-to-be-forgotten joy of the yearly visit to the sea, and an
equally well-loved return to our usual routine in London, to say nothing
of the fascinations of making up one's mind on the subject of what one
was going to be, and how one was to benefit and astonish a world that up
to the present time has not seemed quite to come up to our expectations
on the subject? Undoubtedly then I say, if the child is in proper hands,
that childhood is the happiest time we can possibly have.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Barry Pain says childish happiness is a delusion.]
I have never understood the feelings of those who are sorry that they
are full-grown. To different children there is, of course, a different
childhood; but, as a rule, the happiness of childhood is a delusion, and
the peace of the perambulator a myth. I believe that any brave and
intelligent man can count on the fingers of one hand the things that
would really hurt him seriously; the longer you live, the more you
realise how few things are really important. But the troubles of
childhood are numberless. The agony of terror is alone enough to make
childhood the most miserable part of one's existence. The dead came out
of their graves and walked into my nursery by night; I dared not open my
eyes lest I should see them. There was a waiting figure behind every
curtain in dim-lit passages. There were pictures in books that haunted
me; I knew two or three of them well--I knew the page on which they
came. I opened the book and turned almost up to the dreaded page, and
then waited; but I had to go on always. I had to see the eyes staring
into mine, and the lips writhing. Then I shut the book quickly, and went
away to do something or other that would take my mind away from the
picture. I am glad that I am grown-up; I should not care to endure such
maddening terrors again. I was far too much ashamed of them then to
speak of them; that made them worse. I think that no one who, as a
child, was afraid of the dark, would look back upon childhood as the
pleasantest period of his life. And, if a child has more troubles than a
man, he undoubtedly has fewer pleasures. A child's pleasures are mostly
due to its love of acquisition, its vanity, or its appetite being
temporarily satisfied. From its natural affection for its parents or
friends--if that affection is very strong--it gets far more suffering
than pleasure. Any man of average intelligence can do better than that;
he has work that interests him, books, or music, or pictures that mean
far more to him than any child's pleasure means to the child. It is easy
to love children; one of the chief reasons is that pity is akin to love.
And on this question of the unhappiness of childhood, I would sooner
trust a man's memory than a child's direct statement.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Barr is sorry for the small boy.]
The small boy, poor little chap, lives under the most galling despotism
that exists on the face of the earth. There is no court of appeal for
him. His father is at once his judge, his opposing counsel, his public
prosecutor, as it were, his jailer, and his executioner. Every man is a
natural tyrant. It has taken centuries of bloodshed and martyrdom on the
part of the oppressed to obtain even the poor semblance of liberty that
we flatter ourselves we possess. Kings have been beheaded, thrones have
been overturned, cities have been given to the flames, and countries
have suffered pillage and rapine, all to knock it into the head of that
tyrannical brute, man, that, on the whole, it is better not to force his
despotism on his fellow-creatures. Yet, human nature has not changed in
the least, and where man has full sway, he is as much a tyrant to-day as
he was five hundred years ago. Nations have been emancipated, but the
kingdom of which the small boy is a subject remains what it always was.
Nature, who is a well-meaning blunderer, has tried to set things right,
first by planting some natural affection for his small boy into the
stony heart of the parent, and, second, by making the small boy himself
an optimist. Happily, there is always a silver lining to the cloud that
hovers over the small boy, even when the cane is descending upon him.
Trifles please the poor little fellow and help him to forget the gloom
which surrounds him. Coventry Patmore, in that most touching poem, "The
Toys," tells of a father who struck his motherless son, and sent him
weeping to bed, and, being tardily remorseful, the father looked at the
sleeping boy, whose undried tears were still on his cheek, and found
that before going to sleep the stricken lad had arranged his trivial
toys, all the cherished possessions of his pocket, so that his eyes
might rest on them "to comfort his sad heart."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: But the future small boy will have still more trouble.]
The small boy does not gain much when he exchanges the tyranny of the
home for the tyranny of the school. The schoolmaster is naturally a
despot, but he is a despot, limited. To make up for any advantages
accruing from the master's limitations, the urchin has to put up with
the bullying of the big boy. Possibly there are teachers who have human
feelings, as far as the small boy is concerned. We read of such persons
in books like "Tom Brown's Schooldays," but it must not be forgotten
that these books are works of fiction. The lad who wrote that his master
was a beast, but a just beast, may not have been exceptionally lucky,
but it is sad to think that the small boy often comes under the dominion
of beasts who are not just. But even if masters were all that could be
desired, think of the amount of perfectly useless knowledge that a small
boy is expected to acquire. How happy was the small boy of 1065 compared
with the small boy of 1893. When William the Conqueror, with a man's
usual heedlessness of the comfort of small boys, came over in 1066 and
popularised that date, he inaugurated a long succession of useless dates
that the small boy is compelled to learn. Every monarch has had four
figures attached to him, like a picture in an exhibition. Yet was there
ever a man stopped in the streets of London, and suddenly confronted
with the question, "What year did Henry VIII. come to the throne?"
Certainly not. A man would be considered insane who expected any
rational being to burden his mind with such trivialities. Yet the small
boy is caned if he doesn't know. The only consolation I can offer the
unfortunate small boy of to-day is that it will be ever so much worse
for the small boy born 3000 years from now. Every day, objectionable and
thoughtless men are discovering new things. Then dates will keep
accumulating just as they have always been in the habit of doing.
Possibly a new specimen of that detestable type of humanity, Euclid,
will arise, and perhaps some conscienceless villain may invent a more
complicated system of mathematics than algebra. You never can tell what
may happen in 3000 years. So the small boy of 1893 may congratulate
himself that he is not the small boy of 4893.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mrs. Fenwick Miller thinks it depends upon the parents.]
Childhood ought to be the happiest period of humanity's course; for
children are free from the two great sources of grief and
wretchedness--the struggle for money and the consciousness of sex. The
children of the poor know a want of many comforts, but this is not a
source of unhappiness. Absolute necessities of life, the only true wants
of childhood, are so few, and all that is really needed by anybody apart
from custom or imagination is so cheap, that I do not think that more
than a small minority of children are unhappy from actual want. But we,
their elders, painfully and acutely want a thousand things because we
have tasted them, or because we have imaginations developed to fancy
effectively how we should enjoy them; and then we must needs try to get
them, and make ourselves wretched in the furious effort after satisfying
our desires, and more wretched still because we don't fully succeed. If
we could take life as children in this respect, actively wanting only
absolute necessaries, and not having to ourselves strive for even the
money by which that minimum of wants is to be supplied, would not most
of our troubles of this actual moment vanish? Those that remained, would
they not nearly all (given health) hang on the tragic fact of sex? Oh,
that garden of Gethsemane of humanity, with its blighted seedlings and
its blasted blossoms! How keen are its sorrows of desires ungratified
and desires satiated--its cruel losses and its yet more cruel relics
that _will_ remain. Oh, that dreadful fact of sex, with its emotional
agonies, its moral problems, its intellectual interruptions, its social
burdens, and only too often its physical pangs--if we were rid, as
children are, of all that, and of the struggle for means to meet the
daily material wants, should we not be fairly happy? Then childhood,
free of all this, must needs be the happiest time of life!