During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one
significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an
interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This
is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of
process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of
progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than
resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their
transitoriness.
What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world,
for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for
the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold, perhaps,
that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should
acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.
But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a
patient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred years
ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full stature
of body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future hunting. If her
song is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results of
time, and has submitted her heart to experience. Childhood is a time of
danger; "Would it were done." But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put
it to sleep and guard its slumbers. It will pass. She sings prophecies
to the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she
spins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn. She bids good speed.
John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child--"that
pretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was chiefly
precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man he
never lived to be. The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead,
says of him: "At two and a half years of age he pronounced English,
Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three
languages." As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at
that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the
entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make
congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and _vice versa_, construe
and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives,
verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a
considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' and had a strong passion for
Greek."
Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not
to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is the
very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty
times. All being favourable, the child of Evelyn's studious home would
have done all these things in the course of nature within a few years. It
was the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, to
Evelyn, so exquisite. The course of nature had not any beauty in his
eyes. It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was not
admired for the majesty of its unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mourns
with him "the strangely hopeful child," who--without Comenius's "Janua"
and without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known it, an
appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and
closing a separate expectation every day of his five years.
Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering
to the estate of man. They thought their little boy strangely hopeful
because he was so quick on his way to be something else. They lost the
timely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes. And
yet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!
It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, must
rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not slighting
it, or bidding it hasten its work, not yet hailing it, with Faust, "Stay,
thou art so fair!" Childhood is but change made gay and visible, and the
world has lately been converted to change.
Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the
act. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal,
and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but some of them wear
apparent wings.
_Tout passe_. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the
fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and
contain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this question
most arbitrarily as to the life of man.
All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, this
suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time of
fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they had
the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this unpausing
life.
Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as
might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight years
old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to be
proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by
an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments"
till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth of
eight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in
after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of,
and hardly acknowledges. It is difficult to imagine what childhood must
have been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything
that was proper to five years old was defect. A strange good conceit of
themselves and of their own ages had those fathers.
They took their children seriously, without relief. Evelyn has nothing
to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it. Twice are
children not his own mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to the wedding
of a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently, an
occasion of sensibility. Another time he stands by, in a French
hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a
frightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience." "The use I
made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been
subject to this deplorable infirmitie." This is what he says.
See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
literature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there were
in all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon being
children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, for
example, had no little girls. There was always Cupid, and there were the
prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his
little brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might be
called Tommy. But there were no "little radiant girls." Now and then an
"Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always a
matter of sewing and reading. As for the little girl saints, even when
they were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slipped
through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate
suitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval
mind, but mars them for ours.
So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat
hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most
admirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in the
Court of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "who
passed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the least
stain or tincture in her christall." She held her state with men and
maids for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as that
of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instruction
to the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might give
the least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there did
usually assume," refused the addresses of the "greatest persons," and was
as famous for her beauty as for her wit. One would like to forget the
age at which she did these things. When she began her service she was
eleven. When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she was
not thirteen.
Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and
heroines, therefore, were of those ages. The poets turned April into
May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if they
shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs. The particular
year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say a
fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and
ellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as Keats a poet would not
have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimely
flowers. The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as he
has it.
The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear of
losing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper with the
bloom of their childhood. The young heiress of seventeen in the
"Spectator" has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last six
years." The famous letter describing the figure, the dance, the wit, the
stockings of the charming Mr. Shapely is supposed to be written by a girl
of thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can." She
adds, "I have a good portion which they cannot hinder me of." This
correspondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they have
bought their wedding clothes." There was no sense of childhood in an age
that could think this an opportune pleasantry.
But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later
century--an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and all
things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its
appointed end. It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than a
sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children to seem,
at last, something else than a defect.