To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed
of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations. You
cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not
compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but
the note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways of a child you keep no
tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you
tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You are
the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of time
to your footing.
No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four
years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and
unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls."
A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights
and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was a
dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be a
lady frog." None ever said their good things before these indeliberate
authors. Even their own kind--children--have not preceded them. No
child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose
father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different,
perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and
had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies.
"Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things
for you." "Do you work," she asked, "to buy the lovely puddin's?" Yes,
even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth
pursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don't like fat."
The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to be
soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned in
the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she should
forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject--her
wishes. "Do you know," she said, without loss of time, "what I should
like best in all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!" Her mother
was so overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offer
as to the dolls. But the whistle seemed practicable. "It is for me to
whistle for cabs," said the child, with a sudden moderation, "when I go
to parties." Another morning she came down radiant. "Did you hear a
great noise in the miggle of the night? That was me crying. I cried
because I dreamt that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into his
nose."
The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no, nothing
feminine--in this adult world. "I've got a lotter than you," is the word
of a very young egotist. An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern't
I, mother?" He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "the
backy-garden." A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder at
luncheon--at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am the
favourite of the crust." Moreover, if an author set himself to invent
the naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home,
he would hardly light upon the device of the little _troupe_ who, having
no footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of candle-shades.
"It's _jolly_ dull without you, mother," says a little girl who--gentlest
of the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes no
secret. But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats of
metathesis, about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the
"stand-wash," the "sweeping-crosser," the "sewing chamine." Genoese
peasants have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.
Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they should
by any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually. A
London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her
pointing finger, and names it "bird." Her brother, who wants to play
with a bronze Japanese lobster, asks "Will you please let me have that
tiger?"
At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the most
touching kind of newness. Thus, a child of three asks you to save him.
How moving a word, and how freshly said! He had heard of the "saving" of
other things of interest--especially chocolate creams taken for
safe-keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me to-day? Nurse is
going out, will you save me, mother?" The same little variant upon
common use is in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help in
the arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at your ease."
A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, was
taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from
her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. As
he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she
noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they
might be those of the _fournisseurs_ of her friend. "That is his bread
shop, and that is his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally,
with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming _parterre_ of
confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose,
is where he buys his sugar pigs."
In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intent
upon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector. We have all
heard of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collecting
cocked hats, and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs her
nothing except a sharp look-out upon the proper names over all
shop-windows. No hoard was ever lighter than hers. "I began three weeks
ago next Monday, mother," she says with precision, "and I have got thirty-
nine." "Thirty-nine what?" "Smiths."
The mere gathering of children's language would be much like collecting
together a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of their
kind. In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the
rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported
them. They do not, for example, say "me is"; their natural reply to "are
you?" is "I are." One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have
nothing but the nominative pronoun. "Lift I up and let I see it
raining," she bids; and told that it does not rain resumes, "Lift I up
and let I see it not raining."
An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered for
her by maternal authority. She wore the garments under protest, and with
some resentment. At the same time it was evident that she took no
pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend. He
had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and the
decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"a
brown tress." She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and
she silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of
Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy. The
unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrase
for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. "That," she said,
more or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."
The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the years
of mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a current word into
use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save the
interruption of a pause for search. I have certainly detected, in
children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of
their own making is as good a communication as another, and as
intelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction among them
that the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion
befalls. How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings
forward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know how
irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to
belong to the common world.
There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of a
child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much
confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple
adventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything
strange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trusts
genially to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight of
sunflowers, was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing
himself to be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets." This was
simple and unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little
older. "Why does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said;
and the girl, with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration,
answered, "because they are so big." There seemed to be no further
question possible after an explanation that was presented thus charged
with meaning.
To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat
at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express
a meaning well realized--a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating
of an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I
took them just to appetize my hunger." As she betrayed a familiar
knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked
whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on
their way from school. "I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed;
"but I generally speculate outside."
Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with
something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Dryden
does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But
sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders.
Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems,
allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with
something of her own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the
sweetest kinds of irony. There was no need for her to write, she and her
mother being both at home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy
of a pen:--"My dear mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that
article, if it is worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such a
unletterary article. I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will not
write any more such unconventionan trash."
This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister,
and thought her forward for her age: "I wish people knew just how old she
is, mother, then they would know she is onward. They can see she is
pretty, but they can't know she is such a onward baby."
Thus speak the naturally unreluclant; but there are other children who in
time betray a little consciousness and a slight _mefiance_ as to where
the adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure. These
children may not be shy enough to suffer any self-checking in their talk,
but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word of which they do
not feel too sure. A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enough
to cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cup
of tea to the writing-table of her mother, who had often feigned
indignation at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the
infusion." "I'm afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and
then, in a half-whisper, "Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was not
told, and decided for herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon cup
left the kitchen an infusion, and reached the library "bosh"
thenceforward.