Life With Children.
There is a good deal of the life of boys and girls which passes when they
are with other boys and girls, and involves some difficulties with a great
many pleasures, all its own. It is generally taken for granted that if the
children are by themselves, all will go well. And if you boys and girls
did but know it, many very complimentary things are said about you in this
very matter. "Children do understand each other so well." "Children get
along so well with each other." "I feel quite relieved when the children
find some companions." This sort of thing is said behind the children's
backs at the very moment when the same children, quite strangers to each
other, are wishing that they were at home themselves, or at least that
these sudden new companions were.
There is a well-studied picture of this mixed-up life of boys and girls
with other boys and girls who are quite strangers to them in the end of
Miss Edgeworth's "Sequel to Frank,"--a book which I cannot get the young
people to read as much as I wish they would. And I do not at this moment
remember any other sketch of it in fiction quite so well managed, with so
little overstatement, and with so much real good sense which children may
remember to advantage.
Of course, in the first place, you are to do as you would be done by. But,
when you have said this, a question is still involved, for you do not know
for a moment how you would be done by; or if you do know, you know simply
that you would like to be let off from the company of these new-found
friends. "If I did as I would be done by," said Clara, "I should turn
round and walk to the other end of the piazza, and I should leave the
whole party of these strange girls alone. I was having a very good time
without them, and I dare say they would have a better time without me. But
papa brought me to them, and said their father was in college with him,
and that he wanted that we should know each other. So I could not do, in
that case, exactly as I would be done by without displeasing papa, and
that would not be doing to him at all as I would be done by."
The English of all this is, my dear Clara, that in that particular
exigency on the piazza at Newbury you had a nice book, and you would have
been glad to be left alone; nay, at the bottom of your heart, you would be
glad to be left alone a good deal of your life. But you do not want to be
left alone all your life. And if your father had taken you to Old Point
Comfort for a month, instead of Newbury, and you were as much a stranger
to the ways there as this shy Lucy Percival is to our Northern ways at
Newbury, you would be very much obliged to any nice Virginian girl who
swallowed down her dislike of Yankees in general, and came and welcomed
you as prettily as, in fact, you did the Percivals when your father
brought you to them. The doing as you would be done by requires a study of
all the conditions, not of the mere outside accident of the moment.
The direction familiarly given is that we should meet strangers half-way.
But I do not find that this wholly answers. These strangers may be
represented by globules of quicksilver, or, indeed, of water, on a marble
table. Suppose you pour out two little globules of quicksilver at each of
two points /. ./ like these two. Suppose you make the globules just so
large that they meet half-way, thus, /OO/. At the points where they
touch they only touch. It even seems as if there were a little repulsion,
so that they shrink away from each other. But, if you will enlarge one of
the drops never so little, so that it shall meet the other a very little
beyond half-way, why, the two will gladly run together into one, and will
even forget that they ever have been parted. That is the true rule for
meeting strangers. Meet them a little bit more than half-way. You will
find in life that the people who do this are the cheerful people, and
happy, who get the most out of society, and, indeed, are everywhere prized
and loved. All this is worth saying in a book published in Boston, because
New-Englanders inherit a great deal of the English shyness,--which the
French call "mauvaise honte," or "bad shame,"--and they need to be
cautious particularly to meet strangers a little more than half-way.
Boston people, in particular, are said to suffer from the habits of
"distance" or "reserve."
"But I am sure I do not know what to say to them," says Robert, who with a
good deal of difficulty has been made to read this paper thus far. My dear
Bob, have I said that you must talk to them? I knew you pretended that you
could not talk to people, though yesterday, when I was trying to get my
nap in the hammock, I certainly heard a great deal of rattle from somebody
who was fixing his boat with Clem Waters in the woodhouse. But I have
never supposed that you were to sit in agreeable conversation about the
weather, or the opera, with these strange boys and girls. Nobody but prigs
would do that, and I am glad to say you are not a prig. But if you were
turned in on two or three boys as Clara was on the Percival girls, a good
thing to say would be, "Would you like to go in swimming?" or "How would
you like to see us clean our fish?" or "I am going up to set snares for
rabbits; how would you like to go?" Give them a piece of yourself. That is
what I mean by meeting more than half-way. Frankly, honorably, without
unfair reserve,--which is to say, like a gentleman,--share with these
strangers some part of your own life which makes you happy. Clara, there,
will do the same thing. She will take these girls to ride, or she will
teach them how to play "copack," or she will tell them about her play of
the "Sleeping Beauty," and enlist some of them to take parts. This is what
I mean by meeting people more than half-way.
It may be that some of the chances of life pitchfork in upon you and your
associates a bevy of little children smaller than yourselves, whom you
are expected to keep an eye upon. This is a much severer trial of your
kindness, and of your good sense also, than the mere introduction to
strange boys and girls of your own age. Little children seem very
exacting. They are not so to a person who understands how to manage
them. But very likely you do not understand, and, whether you do or do
not, they require a constant eye. You will find a good deal to the point
in Jonas's directions to Rollo, and in Beechnut's directions to those
children in Vermont; and perhaps in what Jonas and Beechnut did with the
boys and girls who were hovering round them all the time you will find
more light than in their directions. Children, particularly little
children, are very glad to be directed, and to be kept even at work, if
they are in the company of older persons, and think they are working with
them. Jonas states it thus: "Boys will do any amount of work if there is
somebody to plan for them, and they will like to do it." If there is any
undertaking of an afternoon, and you find that there is a body of the
younger children who want to be with you who are older, do not make them
and yourselves unhappy by rebuking them for "tagging after" you. Of
course they tag after you. At their age you were glad of such improving
company as yours is. It has made you what you are. Instead of scolding
them, then, just avail yourselves of their presence, and make the
occasion comfortable to them, by giving them some occupation for their
hands. See how cleverly Fanny is managing down on the beach with those
four little imps. Fanny really wants to draw, and she has her
water-colors, and Edward Holiday has his and is teaching her. And these
four children from the hotel have "tagged" down after her. You would say
that was too bad, and you would send them home, I am afraid. Fanny has
not said any such thing. She has "accepted the position," and made
herself queen of it, as she is apt to do. She showed Reginald, first of
all, how to make a rainbow of pebbles,--violet pebbles, indigo pebbles,
blue pebbles, and so on to red ones. She explained that it had to be
quite large so as to give the good effect. In a minute Ellen had the idea
and started another, and then little Jo began to help Ellen, and Phil to
help Rex. And there those four children have been tramping back and forth
over the beach for an hour, bringing and sorting and arranging colored
pebbles, while Edward and Fanny have gone on quietly with their drawing.
In short, the great thing with children, as with grown people, is to give
them something to do. You can take a child of two years on your knee,
while there is reading aloud, so that the company hopes for silence. Well,
if you only tell that child to be still, he will be wretched in one
minute, and in two will be on the floor and rushing wildly all round the
room. But if you will take his little plump hand and "pat a cake" it on
yours, or make his little fat fingers into steeples or letters or rabbits,
you can keep him quiet without saying a single word for half an hour. At
the end of the most tiresome railway journey, when everybody in the car is
used up, the children most of all, you can cheer up these poor tired
little things who have been riding day and night for six days from
Pontchatrain, if you will take out a pair of scissors and cut out cats and
dogs and dancing-girls from the newspaper or from the back of a letter,
and will teach them how to parade them along on the velvet of the car.
Indeed, I am not quite sure but you will entertain yourself as much as
any of them.
In any acting of charades, any arrangement of _tableaux vivans_, or
similar amusements, you will always find that the little children are well
pleased, and, indeed, are fully satisfied, if they also can be pressed
into the service as "slaves" or "soldiers," or, as the procession-makers
say, "citizens generally," or what the stage-managers call
super-numeraries. They need not be intrusted with "speaking parts"; it is
enough for them to know that they are recognized as a part of the company.
I do not think that I enjoy anything more than I do watching a birthday
party of children who have known each other at a good Kinder-Garten school
like dear Mrs. Heard's. Instead of sitting wearily around the sides of the
room, with only such variations as can be rendered by a party of rude boys
playing tag up and down the stairs and in the hall, these children, as
soon as four of them arrive, begin to play some of the games they have
been used to playing at school, or branch off into other games which
neither school nor recess has all the appliances for. This is because
these children are trained together to associate with each other. The
misfortune of most schools is that, to preserve the discipline, the
children are trained to have nothing to do with each other, and it is only
at recess, or in going and coming, that they get the society which is the
great charm and only value of school life. In college, or in any good
academy, things are so managed that young men study together when they
choose; and there is no better training. In any way you manage it, bring
that about. If the master will let you and Rachel sit on the garden steps
while you study the Telemachus,--or if you, Robert and Horace, can go up
into the belfry and work out the Algebra together, it will be better for
the Telemachus, better for the Algebra, and much better for you.