🥀 I have asked a man who evidently enjoyed his mature years what was his
principal remembrance of childhood, and he has answered, without
stopping to find something unexpected—as the man of the moment is too
apt to stop—“I was bored.” Too much time is what wearies childhood.
Although we are all surprised by the speed with which, in after years,
“time flies,” as we all say, not many of us understand that there is no
flying nor creeping on the part of Time; that his space is merely
relative, and that he seems to fly now because in childhood he went on a
halting foot; or rather because he too was small and went a little way
at his great pace. But there is no other manner of measuring the passage
of time than such an act of comparison, and those who do not make it
consciously must make it unconsciously. The childish measure of time,
moreover, it is that makes ancient history ancient. If we heard for the
first time, at forty, of Cheops, of Abraham, of the Argonautic
Expedition, of Romulus, of Charlemagne, their respective antiquity in
our imagination would be wonderfully lessened. Not childhood only but
infancy itself—infancy sung to sleep—conceives great mysteries of time.
But measure the centuries by the ten-years’ measuring rod of later life,
and see what little things they are, and to what small purpose even four
or five of them are added together. Our race’s sense of time, and sense
of history, and sense of mystery is formed of the impressions of its
successive childhoods.
🥀 To return to the contemporary but differing times of ourselves and our
children: they are not, as we are accustomed to life, but more
influential still is our habit of memory and their practice of oblivion.
They do not make a custom of remembering; and a morning not thought upon
becomes a distant thing in the afternoon; last year, not voluntarily
thought upon, grows dim; whereas ripe age pauses to remember, and old
age does more than pause. “There is always retrospect,” said an old
paper-seller to me one day; he had stood at the same corner for fifteen
short though weary years.
🥀 Children, then, find the time long. Wordsworth, who so freshly, so
observantly, remembered childhood, and whose childhood, was so
influential in our literature, characteristically remembered the length
of childish time as a length of happiness—the length of a lovely day in
the summer-country; it had the length of twenty days of summer-country
in older age—albeit older age that in him loved the summer as
passionately as, in him, childhood had loved it, older age that
reluctantly saw it fly, and whispered a “Stay—thou art so fair,” to a
thousand thousand moments. They would not stay, though they seemed to
have lingered at long-drawn play over the head of the boy he remembered.
But other men, who are not Wordsworths, or anything like Wordsworths,
have connected the slow time of childhood with other things than summer
loveliness and light. “I was bored,” said the cheerful and active man of
middle-age; and we may have to deal, in the persons of our younglings,
with the childhood of persons who are not Wordsworths—hard as this
saying may be in the parent’s ear.
🥀 We should not let our children be bored; they may, they must, be weary
of their education; but that is a different thing. It is an occupied
fatigue, an active distaste. What is to be avoided is _ennui_ and the
vacant hours. Our fathers guarded them against this austerely, by means
of duty and occupation, whether a child’s duty or a schoolboy’s;
we—lessons apart—are attempting that guard by means of amusement—whether
a child’s “fun” or a schoolboy’s. Now, it is with no sour discountenance
that we may question this amusement. The world has tardily decided that
if anyone ought to be happy it is a child, the sinless one; the decision
is made with a side-glance at the more completely sinless animal, and a
wish that this creature too might have the justice of happiness. And
this is a modern resolution, and a modern wistfulness; it does not
imply, as it would seem to imply, a “conviction of sin” in the adult
heart; it is therefore not solemn, but it is very kind and just. Not in
condemnation of that temper of mind is the inevitable warning to be
urged. No, the evil to be feared is not that of making the child too
happy; it is that of using up the capital estate of pleasure. If a child
is to continue happy, to continue amused and gay, he must be entertained
upon the usufruct and not upon the capital of pleasures. Nay, even
elders, considerate enough to hold that children should not have “fun”
too unmixed, lest it should lose its charm, hardly know that it is the
very fact of “fun” that is in danger. The child over-amused is in peril
of losing amusement itself within his own heart, and not merely the
pleasure in pantomime, or the pleasure in roller-skating, in other words
the need of a change of gaieties. Alas, it is gaiety itself that is at
stake. The man who confessed that his chief remembrance of his childhood
was that he had been bored, had kept his gaiety unimpaired in spite of
that uncheerful beginning. It would have been better for him, and more
just to his innocence, if he had not been bored, but it was better for
him to have been bored during the inconsiderate occupations of his
elders and by their dullness, than by his own amusements. That is,
better of two evils. Children should not be bored at all, or not more
than is human.
🥀 Not too often, not too long, should justly be the “fun.” As to its
length, the variations of contemporary time should teach us that one
hour of pantomime is to the average young child as long as an hour of
sunny summer was to Wordsworth—that is twenty times one hour—well,
Wordsworth liked round numbers, and I hope poets will continue to like
them; let us suppose he exaggerated somewhat. At any rate the amused
child lives quickly through a long hour, as the bored child lives
minutely through a long hour. Assuredly what we owe them both is our
judgment of their different, their childish, conditions; and a little
imagination that shall take their measure into our life-accustomed
hands, and with it rule the measure of cyclic, of weekly, of daily, and
of hourly time.
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