THE regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much a
man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry; for although we shake
our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse, we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to
enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers.
Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in
the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go to school no
more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for another (which is by
no means sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of
chastisement. And yet a great change has overtaken us; and although we
do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our pleasure differently.
We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our
Friday’s appetite; and I can remember the time when to call it red
venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have made it more
palatable than the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold mutton is
cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever invented by
man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant
reality, of the mutton carries away before it such seductive figments.
But for the child it is still possible to weave an enchantment over
eatables; and if he has but read of a dish in a story-book, it will be
heavenly manna to him for a week.
If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise, if he is
not something positive in his tastes, it means he has a feeble body and
should have some medicine; but children may be pure spirits, if they
will, and take their enjoyment in a world of moon-shine. Sensation does
not count for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the
swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear
through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough
to see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do not use their
eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own; and
the things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beautiful in
themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I thought they
might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of touch
so clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn
over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you remember
will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, general
sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of wellbeing in
bed. And here, of course, you will understand pleasurable sensations;
for overmastering pain—the most deadly and tragical element in life, and
the true commander of man’s soul and body—alas! pain has its own way with
all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden where the
child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon the field of
battle, or sends the immortal war-god whimpering to his father; and
innocence, no more than philosophy, can protect us from this sting. As
for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which
delight a youthful palate, “it is surely no very cynical asperity” to
think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell and hearing are
perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices, and a great
deal of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is capable of vast
improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the world between
gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with which a
man listens to articulate music.
At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the definition
and intensity of what we feel which accompanies our growing age, another
change takes place in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are
transformed and seen through theories and associations as through
coloured windows. We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and
gossip, and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in
which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop windows
with other eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder, not always to
admire, but to make and modify our little incongruous theories about
life. It is no longer the uniform of a soldier that arrests our
attention; but perhaps the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a
countenance that has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an
adventurous story written in its lines. The pleasure of surprise is
passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts seem mighty tame to encounter;
and we walk the streets to make romances and to sociologise. Nor must we
deny that a good many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit
or in the interest of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look back
with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are in a better
case; they know more than when they were children, they understand
better, their desires and sympathies answer more nimbly to the
provocation of the senses, and their minds are brimming with interest as
they go about the world.
According to my contention, this is a flight to which children cannot
rise. They are wheeled in perambulators or dragged about by nurses in a
pleasing stupor. A vague, faint, abiding, wonderment possesses them.
Here and there some specially remarkable circumstance, such as a
water-cart or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought and
calls them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may see them,
still towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort of
destiny, but still staring at the bright object in their wake. It may be
some minutes before another such moving spectacle reawakens them to the
world in which they dwell. For other children, they almost invariably
show some intelligent sympathy. “There is a fine fellow making mud
pies,” they seem to say; “that I can understand, there is some sense in
mud pies.” But the doings of their elders, unless where they are
speakingly picturesque or recommend themselves by the quality of being
easily imitable, they let them go over their heads (as we say) without
the least regard. If it were not for this perpetual imitation, we should
be tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in
the light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among whom
they condescended to dwell in obedience like a philosopher at a barbarous
court. At times, indeed, they display an arrogance of disregard that is
truly staggering. Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a
young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I had
seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which he
accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the
inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a wise young gentleman, he
would waste no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little
for rational enjoyment, and are even the enemies of rational enjoyment
for others, he had accepted without understanding and without complaint,
as the rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.
We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until
the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the while
sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what
a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find anything
else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When his
story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a
sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of
breath. When he comes to ride with the king’s pardon, he must bestride a
chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and on which he will so
furiously demean himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody
with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance involves an
accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the chest of
drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination is
satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same
category and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child’s faith;
he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring
incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or
valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the
accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed; he can
skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the
enchanted pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener
soberly digging potatoes for the day’s dinner. He can make abstraction
of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes into his
pocket, just as we hold our noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is,
that although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in a
hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as
lie in the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the line
of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and a bagman visit the
same country, and yet move in different worlds.
People struck with these spectacles cry aloud about the power of
imagination in the young. Indeed there may be two words to that. It is,
in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the
grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is
jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons why _Robinson
Crusoe_ should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in
this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts and had, in so
many words, to _play_ at a great variety of professions; and then the
book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so
much. Hammers and saws belong to a province of life that positively
calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most
ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively
simulated to the running burthen “On a cold and frosty morning,” gives a
good instance of the artistic taste in children. And this need for overt
action and lay figures testifies to a defect in the child’s imagination
which prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of his own
heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His experience
is incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we call the
memory is so ill provided, that he can overtake few combinations and body
out few stories, to his own content, without some external aid. He is at
the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain
circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means
permit. And so here is young heroism with a wooden sword, and mothers
practice their kind vocation over a bit of jointed stick. It may be
laughable enough just now; but it is these same people and these same
thoughts, that not long hence, when they are on the theatre of life, will
make you weep and tremble. For children think very much the same
thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and marriageable
women. No one is more romantic. Fame and honour, the love of young men
and the love of mothers, the business man’s pleasure in method, all these
and others they anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us,
who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of destiny,
they only glance from time to time to glean a hint for their own mimetic
reproduction. Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting
to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom both are busy
imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of all. “Art for art” is
their motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as the raw
material for play. Not Théophile Gautier, not Flaubert, can look more
callously upon life, or rate the reproduction more highly over the
reality; and they will parody an execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of
the young man of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the world.
The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious
art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract,
impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond
the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and
personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to
the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit
this personal element into our divagations we are apt to stir up
uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of old
wounds. Our day-dreams can no longer lie all in the air like a story in
the _Arabian Nights_; they read to us rather like the history of a period
in which we ourselves had taken part, where we come across many
unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly reprimanded. And
then the child, mind you, acts his parts. He does not merely repeat them
to himself; he leaps, he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his body.
And so his play breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than he
gives it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to our intellectual form
of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed, we rouse many
hot feelings for which we can find no outlet. Substitutes are not
acceptable to the mature mind, which desires the thing itself; and even
to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one’s enemy, although it is
perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still left within our reach,
is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to a visit and an
interview which may be the reverse of triumphant after all.
In the child’s world of dim sensation, play is all in all. “Making
believe” is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a
walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some
suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business man in an office
before I could sit down to my book. Will you kindly question your
memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith
and soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some
invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of
spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of
mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are
even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow
to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together,
they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because
they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how even
the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led by
the nose with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper than this:
when children are together even a meal is felt as an interruption in the
business of life; and they must find some imaginative sanction, and tell
themselves some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to render
entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking. What
wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon
tea-cups!—from which there followed a code of rules and a whole world of
excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a game. When my
cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven
the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a
country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and
explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can
imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still
unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions
were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and travelled on
stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious,
as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew
smaller every moment; and how in fine, the food was of altogether
secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we
seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I
ever had over a meal, were in the case of calves’ feet jelly. It was
hardly possible not to believe—and you may be sure, so far from trying, I
did all I could to favour the illusion—that some part of it was hollow,
and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of
the golden rock. There, might some miniature _Red Beard_ await his hour;
there, might one find the treasures of the _Forty Thieves_, and
bewildered Cassim beating about the walls. And so I quarried on slowly,
with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little
palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste when I took
cream with it, I used often to go without, because the cream dimmed the
transparent fractures.
Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-minded children.
It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-eminent a sovereignty, for it is
the wellspring of romance, and the actions and the excitement to which it
gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort of fable. And thus
cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about nothing and
for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving. It is a game, if
you like, but not a game of play. You cannot tell yourself a story about
cricket; and the activity it calls forth can be justified on no rational
theory. Even football, although it admirably simulates the tug and the
ebb and flow of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young
sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little boy who
was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, and had to spirit
himself up, whenever he came to play, with an elaborate story of
enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in
conflict between two Arabian nations.
To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted about the
bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and
are not the contemporaries of their parents. What can they think of
them? what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look
down upon their games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown
designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest
solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of
their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes
the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever
such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know
what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child’s unvarnished feeling. A
sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very
feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for the untried
residue of mankind go to make up the attraction that he feels. No
wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world in front of him,
if he clings to the hand he knows! The dread irrationality of the whole
affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. “O, why,” I remember passionately wondering, “why can we not all
be happy and devote ourselves to play?” And when children do
philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.
One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these considerations; that
whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not be any
peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain show, and
among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and
unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly
learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach
them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is
inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we charge
him with incompetence and not with dishonesty. And why not extend the
same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid
about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we excuse
them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human
entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified town
and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes three-fourths
of his time in a dream and the rest in open self-deception, and we expect
him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing
evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less than decent. You do not
consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to weave what he
has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he cares no more for what you
call truth, than you for a gingerbread dragoon.
I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very inquiring as to the
precise truth of stories. But indeed this is a very different matter,
and one bound up with the subject of play, and the precise amount of
playfulness, or playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such
burning questions must arise in the course of nursery education. Among
the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the pretty soldier and
the terrifying Irish beggarman, is, or is not, the child to expect a
Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out for magicians,
kindly and potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast
away upon a desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that
he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in his
own toy schooner? Surely all these are practical questions to a neophyte
entering upon life with a view to play. Precision upon such a point, the
child can understand. But if you merely ask him of his past behaviour,
as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such and such a
match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone by a forbidden
path,—why, he can see no moment in the inquiry, and it is ten to one, he
has already half forgotten and half bemused himself with subsequent
imaginings.
It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where they
figure so prettily—pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs. They will
come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into offices and
the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let
them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a
rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?