Sunday, December fifteenth.
This is another day that is hardly worth recording, one that would not be missed from a life.
It’s time something were again said about young Rockwell who is the real, live, crowning beauty of the community. Weeks have passed since I last recorded his fresh delight in everything here. It is the same to-day. For hours he plays alone out-of-doors. Now he’s an animal crawling on all fours along the trunk of a tree that I have felled, going out upon its horizontal branches as the porcupines do, hiding himself in the foliage and growling fiercely—hours long it seems—while the foolish goats flee in terror and the foxes race wildly up and down the extent of their corral. Again he’s a browsing creature eating the spruce needles with decided relish,—doing it so seriously. Truly he lives the part he plays when it is one of his beloved wild creatures. Then he tears up and down the beach mounted like a four-year-old kid on a stick horse, yelling as loud as he can, going to the water’s edge, and racing the swell as it mounts the slope. And presently I capture him for his end of the saw. At that he no longer knows fatigue,—he’s as good as a man. He really never tires and the work goes on with a fine, jolly good-will that makes of the hardest chore one of the day’s pleasures. Rockwell is lonely at times; but if he tells me he’d like somebody to play with he’s sure to add in the same breath, “Ah well, never mind.”
I don’t know how such a haphazard education if continued would fit him for participation in the “practical” affairs of life. But I am convinced that if all the little beauties of spirit that can now be seen budding could be allowed free, clean growth, quite away from the brutal hand of mass influences, we’d have nothing less than the full and perfect flowering of a human soul;—and in our reachings toward supermanhood none can do more.
Here, as an example, is an achievement of his imagination that it is hard to picture as surviving long in the atmosphere of a large school. Rockwell for two or three years has called himself the “mother of all things.” It is not a figure of speech with him but an attitude towards life. If it were the creed of a great poet—and it could be—the discerning critic might discover it to be of the profoundest significance in modern thought. In little Rockwell it is of one piece with his whole spirit which expresses itself in his love for all animals, the fiercest to the mildest, and for all growing things. The least manifestation of that which is thought to be typical cruelty of boys outrages his whole nature.
I am far from believing Rockwell to be a unique example of childhood. I think that while cruelty appears uppermost where boys herd together, the love of animals is no less characteristic of many sensitive children. But of this I am certain,—that nothing will make a child more ridiculous in the eyes of the mob child than this most perfect and most beautiful attitude of some children toward life. In considering the education of a child and weighing what is to be gained or lost by one system or another I am inclined to think that no gain can outweigh the loss to a child of its loving, non-predatory impulses.