🥀 Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be
wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as
children are they would yet find so many things at table to be
detestable. It is this childish dislike of many foods and drinks that
makes the once general rule of thwarting the tastes of children somewhat
cruel and more than a little unsalutary. For the omnivorous parent some
discipline of this kind might not be amiss; but for a critical and
discriminating child it was tyranny. Charles Dickens, to whom four or
five generations of children have owed a quite incalculable debt, shows
us Pip at the breakfast-table of Mr. Pumblechook. Dickens remembered, or
imagined perfectly, the thoughts hidden in a child’s heart at the sight
of the meal of an elderly _gourmand_ who asks questions in arithmetic
between his mouthfuls while the child, on a very ascetic diet, has to
guess the answers. Dickens was so dramatic that he could not see the
sombre children of discipline observing while the grown-up people ate,
without thinking their thoughts; he comes to the rescue of the desperate
insufficiency of their own expression.
🥀 Not only once, or twice, does he make their stature, their protest and
their lowering little vigilance his own. He knew what the deprived child
thought of him and of the other guests, and he was the only guest who
cared. That no one else seemed to have any sensitiveness as to the daily
incident of those times says much for the robust unconsciousness of the
old, and is really wonderful. How was it that people who cared at all
for any opinion should care nothing for the opinion of children because
it was disguised in the manners they were compelled to wear? Burns cared
somewhat for the ill-opinion of a field-mouse.
🥀 What an insensibility, too, to the after-judgments, to the memories
put away for the future! Ruskin has a certain unavowed pride in his
early hardships, seems to admire his mother for depriving him of toys,
and for making him peel the walnuts (of which he might never eat) for
his father’s portly guests. Well, as to health, walnuts for the elderly
who had just dined must needs be worse than walnuts for the child who
had dined long before. But if Ruskin, remaining, in his greatness, so
much the boy of his mother, the son of his father, even the child of his
nurse, in his lifelong duty to them, respected their administration,
there is another author who some years ago delighted to write of himself
chiefly owing to rancour against his aunts, long dead. Mr. Hare was a
child of that unjust time. Many scores of later wrongs must have been,
we must hope, forgiven by him during all the years in which he
remembered the oppressors of his early years. That he was really
oppressed he has left us no room to doubt; his uncles and aunts have not
been permitted to rest in the world’s oblivion—he has made a close
record of their tyrannies. But he does not seize the heart of the matter
as Dickens seizes it, reading in the urchin hearts of the children of
his friends. Neither Victor Hugo nor George Eliot has written quite like
Dickens, from within the boundaries of a child’s nature, from a child’s
stage of progress, and without the preoccupation and attitude of older
experience.
🥀 That children have to be taught self-denial is a truth that the
self-indulgent youth, middle-age, and old-age now alive, and having
children in charge, would blush to publish. Example is a good way to
teach them. Our immediate forefathers did not teach that way, if we may
judge from these records. They seem to have taught that self-denial was
good for the innocent but not for the more or less guilty. Let us
suppose then that they reasoned in this comfortable way: “Children have
a keen pleasure in life—among other things a perpetual appetite.” Here
is the injustice, for children have a thousand distastes; things are
tedious to them. We have no right to attribute to them a belief in
fairies or an unwearied delight in bread and milk, things which are
alien to their simple hearts. We have now learnt that the children
should have many and various pleasures; and we shall perhaps give them
their own when we no longer grasp so many kinds of delights for
ourselves, and when we thus gradually reverse the older order and
correct the newer.
🥀 If the French share their days and their dinners—perhaps their too
abundant dinners too abundantly—with their children more than we do even
yet, they have this in their favour—that no French Mr. Hare has so dealt
with his aunts, or has had so much unsalutary trouble, brought about
with infinite pains and deliberation, to outgrow and outlive as a memory
the better things of life.
🥀 Saint Monica did not impose all the fasting on the little Saint
Augustine. She took her share, and more.