He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious of
something more than a change in his sense of the present and in his
apprehension of the future. He must be aware of no less a thing than the
destruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did,
and the mere relation of time is as it was. But that which has fallen
together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is
the past itself--time--the fact of antiquity.
He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are no
more extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit of
measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of
paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He had
thought them to be wide.
For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states,
the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure which
he holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten years
had given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It was
then that he conceived Antiquity. But now! Is it to a decade of ten
such little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--that
men give the dignity of a century? They call it an age; but what if life
shows now so small that the word age has lost its gravity?
In fact, when a child begins to know that there is a past, he has a most
noble rod to measure it by--he has his own ten years. He attributes an
overwhelming majesty to all recorded time. He confers distance. He, and
he alone, bestows mystery. Remoteness is his. He creates more than
mortal centuries. He sends armies fighting into the extremities of the
past. He assigns the Parthenon to a hill of ages, and the temples of
Upper Egypt to sidereal time.
If there were no child, there would be nothing old. He, having conceived
old time, communicates a remembrance at least of the mystery to the mind
of the man. The man perceives at last all the illusion, but he cannot
forget what was his conviction when he was a child. He had once a
persuasion of Antiquity. And this is not for nothing. The enormous
undeception that comes upon him still leaves spaces in his mind.
But the undeception is rude work. The man receives successive shocks. It
is as though one strained level eyes towards the horizon, and then were
bidden to shorten his sight and to close his search within a poor half
acre before his face. Now, it is that he suddenly perceives the hitherto
remote, remote youth of his own parents to have been something familiarly
near, so measured by his new standard; again, it is the coming of Attila
that is displaced. Those ten last years of his have corrected the world.
There needs no other rod than that ten years' rod to chastise all the
imaginations of the spirit of man. It makes history skip.
To have lived through any appreciable part of any century is to hold
thenceforth a mere century cheap enough. But, it may be said, the
mystery of change remains. Nay, it does not. Change that trudges
through our own world--our contemporary world--is not very mysterious. We
perceive its pace; it is a jog-trot. Even so, we now consider, jolted
the changes of the past, with the same hurry.
The man, therefore, who has intelligently ceased to be a child scans
through a shortened avenue the reaches of the past. He marvels that he
was so deceived. For it was a very deception. If the Argonauts, for
instance, had been children, it would have been well enough for the child
to measure their remoteness and their acts with his own magnificent
measure. But they were only men and demi-gods. Thus they belong to him
as he is now--a man; and not to him as he was once--a child. It was
quite wrong to lay the child's enormous ten years' rule along the path
from our time to theirs; that path must be skipped by the nimble yard in
the man's present possession. Decidedly the Argonauts are no subject for
the boy.
What, then? Is the record of the race nothing but a bundle of such
little times? Nay, it seems that childhood, which created the illusion
of ages, does actually prove it true. Childhood is itself Antiquity--to
every man his only Antiquity. The recollection of childhood cannot make
Abraham old again in the mind of a man of thirty-five; but the beginning
of every life is older than Abraham. _There_ is the abyss of time. Let
a man turn to his own childhood--no further--if he would renew his sense
of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
For in childhood change does not go at that mere hasty amble; it rushes;
but it has enormous space for its flight. The child has an apprehension
not only of things far off, but of things far apart; an illusive
apprehension when he is learning "ancient" history--a real apprehension
when he is conning his own immeasurable infancy. If there is no
historical Antiquity worth speaking of, this is the renewed and
unnumbered Antiquity for all mankind.
And it is of this--merely of this--that "ancient" history seems to
partake. Rome was founded when we began Roman history, and that is why
it seems long ago. Suppose the man of thirty-five heard, at that present
age, for the first time of Romulus. Why, Romulus would be nowhere. But
he built his wall, as a matter of fact, when every one was seven years
old. It is by good fortune that "ancient" history is taught in the only
ancient days. So, for a time, the world is magical.
Modern history does well enough for learning later. But by learning
something of antiquity in the first ten years, the child enlarges the
sense of time for all mankind. For even after the great illusion is over
and history is re-measured, and all fancy and flight caught back and
chastised, the enlarged sense remains enlarged. The man remains capable
of great spaces of time. He will not find them in Egypt, it is true, but
he finds them within, he contains them, he is aware of them. History has
fallen together, but childhood surrounds and encompasses history,
stretches beyond and passes on the road to eternity.
He has not passed in vain through the long ten years, the ten years that
are the treasury of preceptions--the first. The great disillusion shall
never shorten those years, nor set nearer together the days that made
them. "Far apart," I have said, and that "far apart" is wonderful. The
past of childhood is not single, is not motionless, nor fixed in one
point; it has summits a world away one from the other. Year from year
differs as the antiquity of Mexico from the antiquity of Chaldea. And
the man of thirty-five knows for ever afterwards what is flight, even
though he finds no great historic distances to prove his wings by.
There is a long and mysterious moment in long and mysterious childhood,
which is the extremest distance known to any human fancy. Many other
moments, many other hours, are long in the first ten years. Hours of
weariness are long--not with a mysterious length, but with a mere length
of protraction, so that the things called minutes and half-hours by the
elderly may be something else to their apparent contemporaries, the
children. The ancient moment is not merely one of these--it is a space
not of long, but of immeasurable, time. It is the moment of going to
sleep. The man knows that borderland, and has a contempt for it: he has
long ceased to find antiquity there. It has become a common enough
margin of dreams to him; and he does not attend to its phantasies. He
knows that he has a frolic spirit in his head which has its way at those
hours, but he is not interested in it. It is the inexperienced child who
passes with simplicity through the marginal country; and the thing he
meets there is principally the yet further conception of illimitable
time.
His nurse's lullaby is translated into the mysteries of time. She sings
absolutely immemorial words. It matters little what they may mean to
waking ears; to the ears of a child going to sleep they tell of the
beginning of the world. He has fallen asleep to the sound of them all
his life; and "all his life" means more than older speech can well
express.
Ancient custom is formed in a single spacious year. A child is beset
with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere
adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further
back--it is already so far. That is, it looks as remote to the memory of
a man of thirty as to that of a man of seventy. What are a mere forty
years of added later life in the contemplation of such a distance? Pshaw!
Footnotes:
{1} It is worth noting that long after the writing of this paper, and
the ascription of a Stevenson-like character to the quoted phrase, a
letter of Stevenson's was published, and proved that he had read Lucy
Hutchinson's writings, and that he did not love her. "I have possessed
myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, whom, of course, I admire, etc. . . I
sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the
bitterness of my spirit. . . The way in which she talks of herself makes
one's blood run cold." He was young at that time of writing, and perhaps
hardly aware of the lesson in English he had taken from her. We know
that he never wasted the opportunity for such a lesson; and the fact that
he did allow her to administer one to him in right seventeenth-century
diction is established--it is not too bold to say so--by my recognition
of his style in her own. I had surely caught the retrospective reflex
note, heard first in his voice, recognized in hers.
{2} I found it afterwards: it was Rebecca.