“In age to wish for youth is full as vain,
As for a youth to turn a child again.”
_Denham_.
IT is to be supposed that there are few men and women who do not
occasionally look back on the days of their childhood with regret. The
responsibilities of age are sometimes so pressing, its duties so irksome,
that the most contented mind must travel back with envy to a period when
responsibilities were not, and duties were merely the simple rules of a
pleasing game, the due keeping of which was sure to entail proportionate
reward.
And this being so, and the delights of the Golden Age always being kept
in the back of our mind, as a favourable contrast to the present state of
things, it is hardly surprising that in course of time, the memory of the
earlier days of our life is apt to become gilded and resplendent, and
very unlike the simple, up and down April existence that was really ours.
The dull wet days, the lessons and the tears are all forgotten; it is the
sunshine and the laughter and the play that remain. But it by no means
follows that such hoarding up of pleasant memories tends to make a man
discontented with his lot; it would rather seem that they impart
something of their good humour to the mind in which they are stored, so
that the sunshine of former jolly days returns to yield an aftermath of
more sober joy, and to help to light out our later years with a becoming
glow of cheerfulness. And on the other hand you will find that an
habitually discontented man will be quite unwilling to own that the days
of his youth, at all events, were happy.
There is no doubt that the most natural result of this glorification of
our own childhood is a liking for children. Seeing them naughty or good,
at work or at play, our minds straightway step back through the span of
years to greet a little one who behaved in just such a way; and the
sympathetic understanding thus engendered, shows us the surest way, both
to manage children of our own, and to make friends with those of others.
It is impossible to conceive a man, bearing his own childhood in mind,
behaving unjustly or unkindly to a child. For seeing that we perceive in
every child a more or less distinct reflection of our own child nature,
such conduct would be something suicidal. How much of the child is still
contained within our mature mind is difficult to judge—some people have
much more than others. And it is these people who can peel off their
experience and knowledge like an athlete stripping for a race, and who
can step out to play not only with the same spirit and excitement, but
even with the same mental processes as a child; these are they who can
readily obtain admission into the sacred circle of child games, and who
can fancy, for just as long as the game lasts, that they are once more
wandering in that fairy garden from whose easy paths of laughter and
innocence our aching feet are banished for ever.
Here, then, is the cure for this nostalgia of childhood, which seizes the
best of us from time to time, and causes us to batter vainly at
fast-locked nursery doors, or to look sadly at the gaudy toyshops, robbed
by the cynical years of their fit halo. When this melancholy falls on
us, and we who are respectable forty feel like senile eighty, let us
forthwith seek the company of little children, and so elude the fatal
black dog. “Sophocles did not blush to play with children.” Why should
we? And for those who are not fortunate enough to number in their
acquaintance children of the right age and humour, here, as the cookery
books say, is a tried receipt.
Take a copy of Mr. Barrie’s “Little White Bird,” together with a large
bag of sweets, and sally to the park. The rest depends on your address,
but for a shy man a puppy will prove an invaluable aid to the making of
acquaintances. And if, as has happened to ourselves, at the end of a
delightful afternoon a little lady of some seven years should, abjuring
words, fling her arms round your neck and press an uncommonly sticky pair
of lips on a cheek which, till that moment we will suppose better
acquainted with the razor, why then, if not sooner, you will have learnt
that the whole philosophy of growing old is the increasing pleasure you
can take in the society of the young; this, once determined, a vista of
most charming days lies before you, and sorrow for a nursery cupboard
that has gone into the Ewigkeit will be forgotten in helping some
diminutive neighbour to explore hers.
Southey was really stating this idea when he wrote in “The Doctor” that
“A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a
child in it rising three years or a kitten rising six weeks,” though to
our mind the presence of both would be the ideal arrangement, since the
kitten would take the place of the puppy previously mentioned, for the
child to play with.
If we wish to support age kindly, it is only to be done by surrounding
ourselves with youth. And the laughter of children, surely the purest
and sweetest of all music, will strike a responsive chord in our breasts,
and will enable us to live through the years that wither, in all harmony
and contentment.