🥀 It is for fear of the grown-ups, or at least out of respect towards
them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not
care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. “Who is to care
if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?” It
was, accordingly, an illustrious grown-up who wrote (I am quoting
Francis Thompson) “Know you what it is to be a child?” Well, we all
should know, and we are generally anxious to teach one another. The poet
answers for us most eloquently, “It is to be so little that the elves
can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches,
and mice into horses ... for each child has its fairy godmother in its
own soul....” And previously he had written, “It is to have a spirit yet
streaming from the waters of baptism.” Were elves really of any
importance to him? We must take his word for it, even though we may make
a slight reservation because we know that even a great poet has some
regard to what is expected. But another great poet, who never paid any
attention to what is expected from him, has told us, out of his very own
experience, not what childhood, but what one childhood, was. To Coventry
Patmore it was a time rather of divination than of credulity. His “sweet
childhood,” he names it; but it was a time of secrets, of thoughts
wholly unsuggested by story-books, unprompted by authors, parents,
uncles, godmothers, or imaginative adult persons of any kind of
officiousness. It is certain that he did not think elves to be
whispering in his ear. But he contemplated a pebble in the gravel of a
garden path and conceived the thought that but for unrelaxing pressure
it would explode into dust. Another real child—but not a wonderful child
like Coventry Patmore—walking on grassy garden paths, was a little
troubled to think how many living creatures she might be crushing; and
how short their lives were, anyway. But, she thought, as the size and
space differed between very large beings (herself, for example) and very
small, so might time; and a minute of her life might be a full year of
successions of feelings and happenings to the ant. Six years old could
not put her speculation into appropriate words (a task which might tax
sixty years old), but the thought was very definite to her. One of the
privileges of a child is that he is very near the earth; he knows moss
and the scudding creatures near it. When Oliver Wendell Holmes found the
scent of a little box hedge to be suggestive of eternity, it was no
doubt merely suggestive of time—the incalculable remote time of
childhood, which stands very fairly for eternity—because he had smelt it
when he was on the level of its fresh leaves. So Patmore, a little child
on a garden path, found matter for close thought. Truth interested him,
and fiction did not. In later years he gave himself to the truth of
science, and finally to the truth of poetry. Truth was to him more
splendid and more mysterious than any tale.
🥀 It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous. It
may even be doubted whether Francis Thompson believed in his own elves
and their whispers—whether he cared for possible coaches and horses as
much as for real pumpkins and mice. It may be that those elves of his
were, in his wonderful boyhood, nothing other than symbols, believed in
with interpretation.
🥀 For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my
youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said “Of course
not—only I liked the stories.” Fiction to children is fiction and not
fact. They are artists enough for that. And it is strange indeed that
many elders have so forgotten childhood as to imagine that they believed
in fairies, if they honestly do imagine it. What dull years have so
blurred their past that they are willing to rehearse the sham memories
of others? A belief in fairies is no child’s play. Children have nothing
to do with it except as in some countries they tremble behind their
trembling fathers. It pleased Ruskin—and for once I marvel at his
pleasure—to think of fairies believed to be so disorderly in the woods
at the back of Joan of Arc’s country that a church service was held in
the forest depths once a year, and even then they were not quelled. I
think this is the only false passage of Ruskin—I know no other. A belief
in fairies is a terrible and an adult thing, a horrible heresy, and
nothing for a tourist’s smiles. It was the cause that a woman, in
remoter Ireland, believed to be not herself but a changeling left in her
likeness and in her place by fairies, was burnt by the father, husband,
and sons who loved the “lost” one—not many years ago. This is not
child’s play; it is faith. We indeed are child’s-playing with serious
things and with serious words when we ask our children to say they
believe in fairies. Not that our request will ever make them believe;
they are honest people. But in this appeal we tamper with the word
“believe,” and palter with its sense. The pretty game of calling on the
children of the audience of _Peter Pan_ to declare their faith in
fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense
of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous
use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I
could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them
than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J.
Barrie has written the most adorable “pretending” story ever written
about a child.)
🥀 No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but
because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal
to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put
aside while they “pretend.” That is their own word. Every child uses it,
and every child knows what he means by it. “Let’s pretend,” not “Let’s
believe.” Their mother does not put “Let’s pretend” into the child’s
mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the
pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception. Nay,
the more obvious the drama the better the child likes it, especially
when he is quite young and simple. I have always found the favourite
game of hide-and-seek to be that in which there is no mystery about the
hiding-place. The child loves best to know the cupboard in which his
mother is crouching; if he fairly sees her into it so much the better.
Then does he pretend to seek her, pretend to find her; then does she
pretend to amaze him with a rush; then does he pretend to be overcome
with the surprise of it. This game never tires. Do not tell me that this
splendid little actor is a “realist.” Even if you come to more elaborate
drama—his pirates’ lair behind the sofa, his Indians in the shrubbery,
if he deceived himself the whole play would immediately go out. You may
indeed see a nervous child deceived, and frightened, by a mechanical
toy. The mechanical toy is a silly blunder of the grown-up. The child
sees in it some ambiguous life, where life ought not to be, and cries.
There is no more fun in this than in the Irish peasant’s flames. In both
cases there is no fair pretending but faith perverted.