There is a certain year that is winged, as it were, against the flight of
time; it does so move, and yet withstands time's movement. It is full of
pauses that are due to the energy of change, has bounds and rebounds, and
when it is most active then it is longest. It is not long with languor.
It has room for remoteness, and leisure for oblivion. It takes great
excursions against time, and travels so as to enlarge its hours. This
certain year is any one of the early years of fully conscious life, and
therefore it is of all the dates. The child of Tumult has been living
amply and changefully through such a year--his eighth. It is difficult
to believe that his is a year of the self-same date as that of the adult,
the men who do not breast their days.
For them is the inelastic, or but slightly elastic, movement of things.
Month matched with month shows a fairly equal length. Men and women
never travel far from yesterday; nor is their morrow in a distant light.
There is recognition and familiarity between their seasons. But the
Child of Tumult has infinite prospects in his year. Forgetfulness and
surprise set his east and his west at immeasurable distance. His Lethe
runs in the cheerful sun. You look on your own little adult year, and in
imagination enlarge it, because you know it to be the contemporary of
his. Even she who is quite old, if she have a vital fancy, may face a
strange and great extent of a few years of her life still to come--his
years, the years she is to live at his side.
Reason seems to be making good her rule in this little boy's life, not so
much by slow degrees as by sudden and fitful accessions. His speech is
yet so childish that he chooses, for a toy, with blushes of pleasure, "a
little duck what can walk"; but with a beautifully clear accent he greets
his mother with the colloquial question, "Well, darling, do you know the
latest?" "The _what_?" "The latest: do you know the latest?" And then
he tells his news, generally, it must be owned, with some reference to
his own wrongs. On another occasion the unexpected little phrase was
varied; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousand of the
side he favoured had fallen. The child then came to his mother's room
with the question: "Have you heard the saddest?" Moreover the "saddest"
caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized him
during the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection. From
such great causes arise such little things! Some of his grief was for
the nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his brother, whose
sympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps did not spare his
sensibilities.
The tumults of a little child's passions of anger and grief, growing
fewer as he grows older, rather increase than lessen in their
painfulness. There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulation of
all the childish powers to the overwhelming compulsion of anger. This is
not temptation; the word is too weak for the assault of a child's passion
upon his will. That little will is taken captive entirely, and before
the child was seven he knew that it was so. Such a consciousness leaves
all babyhood behind and condemns the child to suffer. For a certain
passage of his life he is neither unconscious of evil, as he was, nor
strong enough to resist it, as he will be. The time of the subsiding of
the tumult is by no means the least pitiable of the phases of human life.
Happily the recovery from each trouble is ready and sure; so that the
child who had been abandoned to naughtiness with all his will in an
entire consent to the gloomy possession of his anger, and who had later
undergone a haggard repentance, has his captivity suddenly turned again,
"like rivers in the south." "Forget it," he had wept, in a kind of
extremity of remorse; "forget it, darling, and don't, don't be sad;" and
it is he, happily, who forgets. The wasted look of his pale face is
effaced by the touch of a single cheerful thought, and five short minutes
can restore the ruin, as though a broken little German town should in the
twinkling of an eye be restored as no architect could restore it--should
be made fresh, strong, and tight again, looking like a full box of toys,
as a town was wont to look in the new days of old.
When his ruthless angers are not in possession the child shows the growth
of this tardy reason that--quickened--is hereafter to do so much for his
peace and dignity, by the sweetest consideration. Denied a second
handful of strawberries, and seeing quite clearly that the denial was
enforced reluctantly, he makes haste to reply, "It doesn't matter,
darling." At any sudden noise in the house his beautiful voice, with all
its little difficulties of pronunciation, is heard with the sedulous
reassurance: "It's all right, mother, nobody hurted ourselves!" He is
not surprised so as to forget this gentle little duty, which was never
required of him, but is of his own devising.
According to the opinion of his dear and admired American friend, he says
all these things, good and evil, with an English accent; and at the
American play his English accent was irrepressible. "It's too comic; no,
it's too comic," he called in his enjoyment; being the only perfectly
fearless child in the world, he will not consent to the conventional
shyness in public, whether he be the member of an audience or of a
congregation, but makes himself perceptible. And even when he has a
desperate thing to say, in the moment of absolute revolt--such a thing as
"I _can't_ like you, mother," which anon he will recant with convulsions
of distress--he has to "speak the thing he will," and when he recants it
is not for fear.
If such a child could be ruled (or approximately ruled, for inquisitorial
government could hardly be so much as attempted) by some small means
adapted to his size and to his physical aspect, it would be well for his
health, but that seems at times impossible. By no effort can his elders
altogether succeed in keeping tragedy out of the life that is so unready
for it. Against great emotions no one can defend him by any forethought.
He is their subject; and to see him thus devoted and thus wrung, thus
wrecked by tempests inwardly, so that you feel grief has him actually by
the heart, recalls the reluctance--the question--wherewith you perceive
the interior grief of poetry or of a devout life. Cannot the Muse,
cannot the Saint, you ask, live with something less than this? If this
is the truer life, it seems hardly supportable. In like manner it should
be possible for a child of seven to come through his childhood with
griefs that should not so closely involve him, but should deal with the
easier sentiments.
Despite all his simplicity, the child has (by way of inheritance, for he
has never heard them) the self-excusing fictions of our race. Accused of
certain acts of violence, and unable to rebut the charge with any effect,
he flies to the old convention: "I didn't know what I was doing," he
avers, using a great deal of gesticulation to express the temporary
distraction of his mind. "Darling, after nurse slapped me as hard as she
could, I didn't know what I was doing, so I suppose I pushed her with my
foot." His mother knows as well as does Tolstoi that men and children
know what they are doing, and are the more intently aware as the stress
of feeling makes the moments more tense; and she will not admit a plea
which her child might have learned from the undramatic authors he has
never read.
Far from repenting of her old system of rewards, and far from taking
fright at the name of a bribe, the mother of the Child of Tumult has only
to wish she had at command rewards ample and varied enough to give the
shock of hope and promise to the heart of the little boy, and change his
passion at its height.