🥀 Some years ago a Paris paper opened a fund for the supply of the
diphtheria antitoxin. Public subscriptions are not so popular in France
as they are here, but this prospered. To its success went much of the
national love of children. Many of the subscribers sent their alms in
memory of children lost, and took an obscure pleasure in making their
grief half-public. They would not put into print the intimate name of
the child they had lost, but neither could they keep it altogether to
themselves. Thus they gave the initials. And when their offering was
made in the name of the _bébé attendu_ they gave their own initials.
They satisfied one hardly knows what desire to proclaim, a desire that
has no care whom the proclamation may reach, or how vaguely. Poor Grief!
Francis Thompson says she is not beautiful; she is unfortunately often
silly. It is by some such instinct that certain women are moved to tell
one another their affairs without much reference to the act of
listening, as in Mr. Pett Ridge’s stories. _Le besoin de parler de soi_,
even though restrained within the limits of initials, betrays women into
confidences without a confidant.
🥀 Yes, the French love their children, and by some good luck in their
tenderness they have not vulgarized them by bad art. Mediocrity and bad
art have been, and are, as widespread in France as in England. What
else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere? But it has
never made a topic of the children. There are annually pictures of a
First Communion at the Salon, but they are among the better in a mixed
company.
🥀 As to the United States, it is surely time that we heard something
newer and truer about American children than popular fiction has told
us. The tourist, especially the French tourist, is entirely occupied
with the women. One might gather, from the letters written by M.
Bourget, for example, that there are few men in America, and that there
are no children to speak of. Mr. Henry James gave us the boy in _Daisy
Miller_, and there was the little girl with long legs who used to go
into Dickens’s apartment at an hotel and look at him. But there are no
children in the later little books, the village stories we have all
liked so much. A baby may be introduced for the sake of grown-up
emotions—generally those of one of the spinsters so common in this
little fiction; but of the child for child’s sake there is nothing.
🥀 Now what I saw of American children was quite different from what is
thought to be true of them by English people at home. They were very,
and very unexpectedly, childlike; there seemed to be some resolve to
keep them so in their language; a child was not to say that the faces in
a picture were “sad,” but only that they “looked sorry.” The children,
however, were one and all trained to be sweetly courteous; it was not
held that roughness was childlike. They had lovely considerate ways, and
were readily affectionate.
🥀 Their fault, if it is a fault, was indeed that they were warmly
inclined to an eager and easy love of strangers. This, however, is so
frequent in charming children that any mother who is habitually prepared
for the sentiment of a heartache may find all the heartache she expects,
when a child runs to the stranger with the words of love over which she
herself is apt to brood fondly every time that they come her way.
Nevertheless this welcome to strangers is a fresh and generous thing in
children, and in those who are not children. There is an impulse, at
once natural and civilized, to meet new faces with a new greeting.
🥀 And in America are the little negro and negroid boys and girls with
their sharp eyes and tiny upright braids of hair, and their
extraordinary democracy and self-possession; a something more than
equality where you foolishly looked for some deference from the negro
and some further deference from the child of eight years old. They learn
their free composure from their frank fathers. One of that friendly race
was a conductor in a train. As we crossed another train on the prairie,
he was waving delighted hands, and trying to make his shout heard in the
uproar. And then he turned a beaming face to two English stranger ladies
with whom he had exchanged no previous word. “That,” he said, “was my
brother-in-law.”