Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random.
There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in
sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. Summer dusk,
especially, is the frolic moment for children, baffle them how you may.
They may have been in a pottering mood all day, intent upon all kinds of
close industries, breathing hard over choppings and poundings. But when
late twilight comes, there comes also the punctual wildness. The
children will run and pursue, and laugh for the mere movement--it does so
jolt their spirits.
What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatory
dark? The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths and
crickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all fours. The
children lie in ambush and fall upon one another in the mimicry of
hunting.
The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and a
rebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and the children are to go
home. But, with more or less of life and fire, the children strike some
blow for liberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual
child, or the stroke of the conqueror; but something, something is done
for freedom under the early stars.
This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict with
the weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy of men
should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at some
time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of the
poor.
Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved by
children. Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to beguile the
time. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another to
play. "Oh come," she said, "and play with me at new maid."
The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable hour.
It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits. The habit of
prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity of
some customs in mankind. But if the inquirers who appeal to that
beginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek no
further. See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in their
thralldom. Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction of
their high antiquity weakens your hand.
Childhood is antiquity, and with the sense of time and the sense of
mystery is connected for ever the hearing of a lullaby. The French sleep-
song is the most romantic. There is in it such a sound of history as
must inspire any imaginative child, falling to sleep, with a sense of the
incalculable; and the songs themselves are old. "Le Bon Roi Dagobert"
has been sung over French cradles since the legend was fresh. The nurse
knows nothing more sleepy than the tune and the verse that she herself
slept to when a child. The gaiety of the thirteenth century, in "Le Pont
d'Avignon," is put mysteriously to sleep, away in the _tete a tete_
of child and nurse, in a thousand little sequestered rooms at night.
"Malbrook" would be comparatively modern, were not all things that are
sung to a drowsing child as distant as the day of Abraham.
If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some of
them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate races
that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the white
child. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropical
night. His closing eyes are filled with alien images.