LITTLE GIRLS
A la pêche des moules
Je ne veux plus aller, maman.
A la pêche des moules
Je ne veux plus aller.
Les garçons de Marennes
Me prendraient mon panier, maman.
Les garçons de Marennes
Me prendraient mon panier.
Six year-old Barbara stood in her little frock of spotted muslin by
the side of the grand piano piping out in a thin treble the words of
this old French nursery rhyme. Her eyes were fixed on the illustration
by Boutet de Monvel which shows three most unmistakeable _gamins_
following in the wake of a fisher-girl who shrinks with a timid
expression from the words which one can almost hear on their naughty
little lips. Barbara understood the picture little more than she
understood the words of the song and really, I reflected, that was a
very good thing. The old French tune is very dainty, but there is in
the words that tang of sexuality which the French seem to imbibe with
their mother’s milk. “Ils vous font des caresses,” indeed! Six-year-old
Barbara has better things to do at her age than to imagine that she is
the quarry of the male with all the advantages and disadvantages of
this position. Little French girls, for all the superficial strictness
of their bringing up, are, apparently, never allowed to look on the
world with any other eyes than the eyes of the woman. Our English girls
learn to do this quickly enough, but at least they are allowed to
begin their lives in perfect innocence. If they pay for this by seldom
acquiring the last fine shade of attractive femininity, they gain in
the frankness and fearlessness which are the gift of our incomparable
English nursery ways. The bloom then fostered never entirely departs,
no matter how experience may try it. To the last the English woman
remains a sociable being with whom one could potentially set off with
on a walking tour, an inconceivable enterprise with a French one or an
Italian, who have learnt the grammar of passion and of its imitations
young, to be obsessed with it always, while the English girl has been
absorbing the grammar of health, of goodfellowship and of games.
I have no doubt of this, that one reason why the Englishwoman is a
success is that she starts as a good little English girl, or even
a bad one. No little girl in the world is so attractive, not the
overdressed _bébé_, all ribbons and laces, of the French, not the
dumpy product of the German, not the pallid _bambina_ of the Italian,
and least of all the spoilt little horror of the American. What can
equal the creamy satin of her complexion, the sturdy straightness of
her limbs, the curl of her hair, the joyous gleam of her eyes? Beauty,
it is sad to say, too often leaves them as they grow older, but, when
they are little girls, nearly all Englishwomen are not merely pretty,
but beautiful. There can be no sight more nearly approaching the ideal
of fairyland than Kensington Gardens on a fine morning of spring or
summer, when the sun is glinting through the elm trees and the Broad
Walk is all alive with hoops and perambulators. Nor is the sight less
enchanting by the sea in the later summer, when golden locks tumble in
the wind and bare legs twinkle in the waves. Even the little girls of
the back street, when they are not too dirty, and of the remote village
are beautiful with the glorious quality of British youth, which no
competition can take away from us. It is not a fragile beauty nor one
of languorous _morbidezza_, but it has a jovial quality, and breathes
the spirit of the opening lines of “L’Allegro,” yet its colours have a
delicacy in their brilliance which give it a special grace. Its merits
are not all chargeable to us, the dwellers in England. It is due in
part to the English climate which we ever curse and ever discuss, in
part to the mixture of races which were blended into our admirable
composition, and in part to our excellent nursery tradition and our
incomparable English nurses.
The English nurse, though we can see that she varies in excellence,
is supreme all over the world. We are all of us prone to idealise our
nurses, for we only remember the comfort of their presences and are
not aware of their acts of negligence or omission, such as giving us
comforters to suck—as I am told, a deadly sin—or letting us fall out
of perambulators while they were engaged in ambrosial dalliance. We
remember with affection their features and their voices, the Moody and
Sankey hymns that they used to sing us—diversified, in my own case,
with "Ehren on the Rhine"—and the stories which they used to tell. They
also used to have fascinating relations who were sometimes allowed to
penetrate to us or whom we were allowed to visit. Modern children, I
fear, miss these joys, for parents are getting so particular, no doubt
quite rightly. Nurses are now trained in special institutions, so
that they do all the right things and none of the wrong ones. They are
ladylike, oh, so ladylike, and parents obey their commands in fear and
trembling. You can see them any day in the Gardens walking along with
turned up noses and conscientious faces—the very last thing in baby
culture. But let not the Norland nurses take umbrage at these foolish
remarks, for their training gives them, as I readily recognise, a
superiority to the old-fashioned Nana which cannot be contested.
In any case, whether she be old-or new-fashioned, the English nurse is
supreme. She is in demand all over Europe, she condescends to South
America, and is worth her weight in gold in those far lands of the
Empire where the one drawback to serving the state is that it makes the
proper rearing of children an almost insoluble problem. To account for
this superiority of the English nurse is not so easy, for her obviously
high place in the ranks of good Englishwomen would, one might suppose,
not be so obvious to dwellers in foreign lands, whose women, it is to
be presumed, are fond enough of children and better acquainted with the
climate and constitutions of their own country than a foreigner could
be. A desire to implant early in their offspring a colloquial knowledge
of our language cannot be the only reason why foreign parents engage
English nurses. One of the real reasons is, I am sure, that the English
nurse knows how to combine friendliness with discipline: it is a gift
recognised in other relations as supremely belonging to the Englishman.
Her pride, also, which stands out against undue interference by the
parents in her administration of the nursery is another good reason.
Nurses in other countries, I suspect, are apt to humour children too
much, to spoil them themselves and to allow the parents to outrage
to any extent the proved rules and traditions of infant hygiene, to
dress them up and make dolls of them instead of treating them as the
immature little animals that they are, to take them out and give them
unwholesome food at restaurants, and, in general, to involve them too
early in the cogs of adult life. It was against this tendency that
Doctor Montessori made her protest, the gist of which is that the adult
home is not adapted for giving that scope which is necessary for the
proper bringing up of children.
It cannot be denied that an unnecessary fad may be made of the
Montessori system, especially in this country for which it was not
primarily invented, but the soundness of much that her theory contains
is incontestable. Yet the English nursery was evolved long before
Doctor Montessori, and it is there that most of what is valuable in her
theories had already been developed. There is nothing for which the
rather wasteful spaciousness of English life, as compared with that of
other countries, is so valuable as for the institution of the nursery.
We may overburden ourselves with bricks and mortar and insist on having
a house where our fellows abroad are content with a flat: we may use
two servants where they use one, and seem to them to strain a limited
income quite unreasonably by insisting on so large a shell. That this
habit is due to our reserve and the Englishman’s intense longing for
privacy in domesticity is undeniable, but it is not all. As a matter
of fact, the privacy of the Englishman’s home is, in a sense, far less
jealously guarded than that of the Frenchman. But besides privacy an
Englishman wants a little space before he can feel comfortable, and he
knows instinctively that children want space too. To an English child
the lot of a French, German or Italian child must seem intolerable. For
no single moment, except when in bed, is it out of the sight of its
elders’ eyes. It must always be good and always be tidy, or else in
the common living rooms of the _appartement_ it becomes an intolerable
nuisance. Where can such a child expand, where can it indulge in those
solitary dreams and quaint impulsive activities, the essence of whose
enjoyment is that they shall be pursued in secrecy, and whose memory
has an undying sweetness?
Contrast with this cramped life, even with an intense affection to
grace it, more ardent than that tolerant good comradeship of many
English parents with their little children, with the life of a child,
even in a quite modest household, who from its earliest moments has
had a part of the home sacred to it. That room, small or large,
was always loved: it was a peaceful haven to return to after the
adventures and exhibitions of a less sympathetic external world.
There Nana held beneficent sway, but the real inhabitants were the
children themselves and the favourite creatures of their play-world.
There was room for disorder in the disorderly mood, even though it
all had to be cleared up; there noise was not immediately hushed;
there one could loll or sprawl without being reproved; there nothing
was precious of that preciousness which meant that throwing cushions
was a crime and breakage a disaster; there the air was fresh and not
laden with the fumes of cigars or heavy perfumes; there meals could be
eaten in one’s own time, for, fearful as were the treats of feeding
with the grown-ups, it was discouraging to find that one’s efforts at
spritely conversation were apt to fall flat, and that one must get
finished about the same time as large people with large mouths who
were allowed to talk with their mouths full, at the risk of being told
that everybody was waiting and that one was not to talk any more.
The nursery is the enemy of self-consciousness, it is the home of
frankness and a light hearted innocence. No good Englishwoman is ever
out of place in a nursery, whether it be hers or another’s: she knows
instinctively that there are few places on earth where her virtues are
more obvious, and she herself has been a little English girl in that
happy nursery land which is the cradle of all good Englishwomen.
But what of the children whose only nursery is the streets and whose
only nurse is a sister but little older than themselves? Well, I
believe a great many of them have a happy childhood though they are
denied some of the privileges of more gently nurtured children. The
little girls with tattered frocks who dance so gaily to the wandering
barrel organ no more suggest despair than their brothers who, of a
Saturday afternoon, come to play noisy cricket and football outside my
window. Nevertheless we cannot afford to be complacent about them.
We have only to think of winter borne with poor food and decaying
boots; of the appeals for comforts from the poorer parishes of the big
towns where the children’s wants make education almost a mockery till
they can be to some extent filled. An Italian, or was it a Spaniard,
once commenting on our country said: “You have a society for the
prevention of cruelty to children: we have none in Italy because it is
not necessary. No Italian is cruel to children.” This was possibly an
exaggeration, for there are fiends in all nations; but it is a blot
on our country that such a society should be so vitally necessary to
counteract the harm that poverty and ignorance can do to the precious
young lives in whom lies the hope of the future. Dirt and ignorance,
drink and vice, these are the enemies of little English girls and boys.
The very excellence of children’s upbringing in the upper and middle
classes make the backwardness lower down all the more a disgrace. It is
a disgrace which we all share, for the responsibility for improvement
is incumbent on us all. In education alone is there any hope. All
honour therefore to those men and women who by the institution of
baby clinics and mothers’ classes endeavour to mitigate the evils
that should never exist. The spoiling of one Englishwoman would be
a grievous thing, yet thousands are spoiled every year by ignorance,
overcrowding, and bad example. The first few chapters of William de
Morgan’s “Alice for Short” are not the work of a romantic imagination,
but of an observant mind. How far is that wretched mite, who lived in
a damp cellar with two drunken parents, from the Alice of “Alice in
Wonderland,” who is the very soul of England’s childhood! Absolute
equality, no matter what some socialists say, can never exist, but the
chances for the two Alices should not differ by so vast a measure.
The burden of lessening it must be borne by us all, and no sudden
remedy will be of any use. One thing which English parents will never
allow is the assumption by the state of the duty of bringing up their
children. Nurseries wide enough to hold all the children in England
might be built with enough English nurses to staff them, clothes might
be provided, toys and even food, but it would be in vain. The cry of
pauperisation, or tyranny, or militarism, or some other cry would
go up, but the root of the matter would be that Alf Smith and Emma
his wife, whatever their views might be upon the nationalisation of
railways and mines, have no intention of demanding or submitting to the
nationalisation of children. The only alternative is to improve the
home of Alf Smith and Emma, or at least to see that little Susie and
Jane, their daughters, by some means or other, grow up determined to
give their children better training, more care, more space, and higher
ideals, though not necessarily greater joyousness, than were theirs in
early childhood.
But this is not a sociological treatise. There are people enough
already who have remedies to suggest for all the evils of the
day. Let me return to Lewis Carroll’s Alice who so engagingly
dreamed herself into Wonderland. She belonged to a day before any
remarkable innovations in children’s education had arrived among us.
The kindergarten may have been in existence then, but Montessori
and Dalcroze were not heard of. I have sometimes wondered, I must
confess, if the admirable principles of these and other educational
spell-workers are not too apt to develop into fads and poses. There are
people to-day, for instance, who have a passion for making education
play and and play education instead of keeping the two healthily
separate. Any decent English girl or boy, if not unduly forced, can
learn the rudiments of the three Rs without being beguiled into it by
an artful series of games with a purpose which have neither the fun of
hide-and-seek nor the zest of hunt-the-slipper. Surely it is a fallacy
to proceed on the assumption that children’s brains are sluggish and
revolt as naturally against systematic instruction as the palate
against unpleasant medicine: a child’s brain, on the contrary, is
extraordinarily active and pecks about after knowledge as keenly as any
farmyard chicken after grains. While we may be thankful that there is a
wholesome fear to-day of brutalising young minds by useless drudgery,
dull, formal methods and unsympathetic discipline, we should take care
to avoid the equally great danger of overstimulating that very delicate
and sensitive instrument, a child’s brain, by encouraging it to absorb
too much. After all, we do not encourage a child to eat more than
it can digest. Besides, a good trainer knows that conscious effort,
without which no activity can produce the best results, cannot grow
suddenly out of unconscious following of impulse. The period of effort
may be as short as you please and be followed by as long periods as
you like of pleasant relaxation, but the mind cannot be accustomed too
early to struggling against inertia, and a system of education which
only follows the path of inertia can hardly be the best one.
When Alice met the Dodo and his companions she proposed a race not a
bout of Dalcrozian eurhythmics, and I do not know that she was much to
be pitied. Eurhythmics are excellent things in themselves, but mothers
who see in them a complete substitute for reading and racing are making
a sad mistake. Every Alice, like Lewis Carroll’s heroine, lives in a
dream-world which gradually fades away with the trailing “clouds of
glory” into reality, but some parents seem to delight in artificially
increasing the fairylike mist of unreality, or at least unworldliness,
which surrounds the marvellous time of childhood. They try to keep
the child in a kind of mental incubator with elaborate stained glass
walls, as if the “dome of many coloured glass” under which we are all
born were not enough to stain “the white radiance of eternity.” To do
this, in my opinion, is unkind to little Alice. She cannot remain the
sleeping beauty for ever, and the odds are that it will not be a Prince
Charming who arouses her, but some ugly apparition of the everyday
for which her experience has in no way prepared her. As a nation we
are mightily fond of illusions, and suffer sadly from indulgence in
them. We can overcome best by seeing clearly what it is that stands
over against us, and dreamy Alice will be none the worse for being
allowed to see a little clearly among the many happy fantasies of her
days of wonderland. Old Kingsley had his cranks, but he did not wander
far from the mark in his “Waterbabies.” Poor little Tom, the sweep’s
lad, came up too hard against bitter realities of a certain material
kind, from which his creator rescued him by handing him over to the
jolly water babies in the river at the bottom of Harthover Fell. But
the fairy life and the caresses of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby could not
save Tom from coming up against certain harder spiritual realities, by
mastery of which alone could he become a man. His soul was saved by
the uncomfortable Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, tempered by the loving care
of little Effie. If you object that he had much better have became a
complete fairy or a Peter Pan who never grew up, then I disagree with
you, and the fairies do not agree with you either. They would prefer
to have the immortal soul in the perishable body like Hans Andersen’s
mermaid who gave up her tail to walk among men, though to walk was like
treading on sharp knives. Good Englishwomen are such admirable mortals
that it would be a thousand pities to make bad fairies of them. Some
mothers of little Alices like to think of life as a long episode in
the Russian ballet, all gay colour and perfect pose: they forget that
Madame Karsavina works more hours in a day to attain this perfection
than they do in a week to attain nothing at all. They are unaware
of the surprising fact that it is possible to be more than a little
ordinary and only moderately ornamental, and yet to be reasonably happy
and useful. What I should like to see to-day would be more reality in
the nursery and more dreams in the board school.
If more reality is wanted in the nursery, it is still more wanted in
the schoolroom, though fortunately there is a great deal more there
now than in the day of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. She, if you remember,
in a moment of bewilderment reflected that she could answer some of
Mangnall’s questions. You will only find Mangnall’s questions to-day
in some dusty bookshelf of a country inn with the maiden name of
a portly landlady in faded ink upon the flyleaf. It was simply a
portable dictionary of elementary and usually inaccurate knowledge,
dished up with most undesirably stuffy maxims, to be learned by rote
and not to be understood at all. It could only convey the impression
that the aim of lessons was to imbibe a certain quantity of dry
facts without the slightest connection and forming no pathway to any
connected presentation of reality. The old methods of the Misses
Pinkerton’s academy and the old bogey-morality and dragon-instruction
of the Goodchild family were still thriving when Alice passed into
the looking-glass. The aim of that education was not to make a child
an intelligent being or to bring out its natural talents by careful
nurture, but, especially if it was a girl, to produce a docile
parrot which could read, write and do sums, without asking too many
inconvenient questions. To the arch priests and priestesses of that
dead formula the idea of a child’s having tastes would have been
a dreadful heresy: a child, at all events a girl, had no business
with such subversive things. Her business was to acquire humility,
deportment and a use of the globes, in fine to learn the things, and
those only, which “a lady should know.”
Schools and governesses are better now, but some of the old confusions
still hover round the education of a girl. Nowadays everybody airs his
views about the public schools in print, but there is a certain element
of simplicity in a boy’s education: in most cases, after all, he has
got to be prepared for a definite profession. There is no definite
profession for which little Alice is to be prepared, unless she takes
the reins into her own hands in time, as some of our older Alices are
learning to do. There is still the impression abroad, even among
the wage-earning classes, that, until it is more or less discernible
whether and what she is going to marry, it does not matter very much
what she learns or what she does, provided that she keeps out of
mischief. In those families, especially, where in the last resort it
is not necessary for the daughters to earn their living in the labour
market, this policy of drift is most obvious. A little French, a little
music, a little history, a little recitation of approved poets—that
is the recipe for the education of a “nice, refined girl.” As if any
girl worth her salt would be content with a diet of spoon feeding. It
is only those who have never learnt anything that imagine any useful
learning to be possible without the desire to know more than it was
good for you to be taught. The child’s mind is a bursting reservoir of
energy, and it is hard that it should be wasted by being drained to
make imitation waterfalls in an artificial garden. It usually shows a
tendency to flow in some definite direction: why, in Heaven’s name,
should it be diverted?
The two great needs in education are enthusiasm and personality,
enthusiasm in the pupil and personality in the teacher. Personality
is the great wizard who can produce water from stones and gold mines
from sand. It would be better to learn skittles from a great man than
all the graces in the world from a mere practitioner of knowledge.
No system is bad enough to withstand the electric influence of
personality, and none is so good that it will succeed if there is no
personality to give it life. We have strong characters in England: it
is a matter in which we flatter ourselves that we are not behind the
rest of the world: yet so often our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
seem to be inanimate beings, mere machines for hearing lessons, setting
papers and giving marks. Those to whom learning has been a perfunctory
business bear the signs of it all their lives. There are too many of
them, and the majority of them are women. They are the people who care
to know nothing for its own sake; they regard the suggestion that one
could read any book but a light novel as humorous; there is no subject
that they can discuss intelligently or with any sign of original
reflection. Where they so far rouse themselves as to express views, the
views will be nothing but the expression of their appetites, desires
and prejudices given by the particular penny paper which they read.
They have no interests outside housekeeping, and they don’t take the
trouble to do even that scientifically. One sees them in shoals in
teashops and on beaches, with their cheap novel in their hand and a
vaguely discontented look upon their faces. Their discontent is not
surprising, for how can anyone be contented who has never taken a
lively interest in anything but food and clothing? If little Alice’s
mother lets her become as one of these she is cruelly betraying a
sacred trust: she is doing her best to turn the living thing to which
she gave birth into a dead one. If she has not the personality herself
to turn Alice’s enthusiasms, about which there will be no doubt at all,
to good account, then let her have the sense to look for somebody who
has.
Little Alice before long will probably make clear what she wants to
learn: if so, she may as well learn it. Nobody has yet formulated the
end of education with final completeness: it is largely a matter of
acquiring good habits and an internal harmony which ensure smooth and
profitable running when the engine is competent to run by itself. It
certainly does not matter much what is learnt, provided that it is
learned thoroughly and with eagerness. Some people insist that mastery
of tools is the ideal of education: but what are little Alice’s tools?
They are partly physical, partly emotional and partly intellectual:
her great charm, in contrast to her sisters in Latin countries and
in America, is that she is not encouraged to learn the use of her
physical attractions and feminine emotions too early. Mastery of tools
and mastery of self are formulas better applicable to the maturer
education of the young man. The tools of a woman are hardly suitable
in the hands of a little girl, whose older self is still to be. If I
were to invent a formula for little Alice it would be something like
“happiness, eagerness and enthusiasm.” If she has these while she is
young, misery, apathy and boredom are not likely to be hers when she is
older.
Barbara has finished her song, and has settled down to give the Teddy
Bear a teaparty. There she sits, the acutest judge and observer of her
father in all the world. She is gathering memories which will never
leave her, as I gathered them from my father—the smell of his shaving
soap in the morning, the scratch of his rougher cheek in the good-night
kiss, the feel of his clothes, the tones of his voice in pleasure and
in anger, his difficult standard of good manners, his awful moments of
irritation when he was almost too dreadful to look on and his voice was
like the rumbling of an earthquake, his little mysterious jokes with my
mother at which I laughed without in the least knowing why, the way in
which he could be humoured, the hush that was expected when he was said
to be tired or busy, his real but diffident sympathy in tragedies,
the jolly way he took sovereigns out of his waistcoat pocket, his one
glorious outburst when bicycling against the driver of an obstructive
dray, the radiance shed by his approval and the gloom of his, as I now
suspect, often legendary displeasure, his never failing urbanity, of
a consistency almost comic, amid the extemporary and the haphazard.
A sensitive plate is now taking in my own foibles and mannerisms.
When in after years that plate is fully developed and the results are
contemplated with amused commiseration, I shall be content if there is
no injured comment on the chance given to the owner and developer of
that plate of becoming what she ought to be, an Englishwoman of the
best kind.