LIFE’S GOLDEN AGE.
All the world has shrunk since the Golden Age of our childhood. Time was longer, and people were taller then. A wet day was the depth of despair and the end of all things; the hours also were longer, and a year from January to December lapsed slowly by, like the prehistoric ages. The future seemed to be bringing a measureless succession of such years until the gigantic height of grown-up people would be reached; but life was so long, it was hardly worth while to think about the mystery of growing to their height at last. Our old home has shrunk since those days; the rooms are smaller and darker; the streets, once familiar, would be narrower if we could see them now; the garden has shrunk too; the trees have been growing down; and the church spire is stumpy, as if Time had pushed its top lower, like a shutting telescope. Beyond the home circle who were part of our existence, the grown-up people of the Golden Age were a mysterious race. They cared no more for games or playthings; though we refused to believe that any length of years would make us cease to care for hide-and-seek among the gorse and the billows of fern, and for the mustering of tin armies or the acquisition of new toys. Not only were the grown-up people in a dried-up state of indifference to games and plays, but they actually laughed at things that were not in the least funny. They never cried; they never ran; they did not ask for pudding twice, though they might have it; they had learned all possible lessons long ago, and had managed to remember them for the rest of their lives, and they knew all about everything always.
But oh, the green world of those days! Have the green lanes since wound on through golden light and moving leaf-shadows? Have the cornfields been so broad beyond the hedges, such a sea of warm and breeze-swept yellow ripeness, flecked all along near the hedge-path with sparkling blue, and with blazing red poppies? Have the skies been so far away since, where the lark sang out of sight, and where, with our head on the grass, we made upward voyages among the towering white clouds in the clearness of breezy summer days? Have the summers burned the dusty roads so white? And has the milk been so sweet within sight of the sheds at a doorway under thatched eaves? Is the noontide stillness of the hot country, the siesta of the birds, as deep as it was then? Is the scent of the honeysuckle as strong, and the smell of the hay? Are there bright beetles in the hayfield yet, and are butterflies becoming extinct, compared with their old numbers? Is it possible to have hay-battles, now that there seem to be so many painful stubble-fields to traverse in this world of ours? Who will give us back the heart-thrill of our first sight of the mountains? Who will remind us of the actual refreshment of wading in the shallow sunny brook, or swinging over it from ropes tied to white-blossomed trees? Who will send us another song like our first hearing of the noise of the great unresting sea, or another sight like the first vision of its foam-fringed, sky-bounded, sun-dazzled waters? When the moon shone on the water then, one longed to look all night; when the winter stars were out, there was no pageant like the heaven of heavens. In that Golden Age the world might have been created and called good but yesterday, so new a world it was. We saw
The earth and every common sight
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
But the glory and the freshness were in ourselves. Wordsworth calls it the hour ‘of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.’ Not all the splendour has departed; the sun of those days and the light of our first love are still lingering in the sunlight of to-day. George Eliot tells us how a forest of young golden-brown oak branches with the light gleaming through, and with ground-ivy and blue speedwell and white star-flowers below, is more beautiful to the heart than all the grandeur of tropical forests, because it holds ‘the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood had left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine or the deep-bladed grass might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.’
A yearning for that Golden Age of life has come in earnest moments to half the world; the poets have sighed for it; and one of the sweetest songs that tell of saddest thought became a favourite long ago because it told how, in gathering shells on the beach,
A dream came o’er me like a spell—
I thought I was again a child.
How, why is childhood called the happiest time of life? And if it be life’s Golden Age, why cannot we keep the gold?
The reasons why that period is envied seem to be these: First, and most subtly underlying all envy of childhood, is the knowledge that it is the time when we have our whole life before us. Often it is not the return of the state itself that is desired, but its anticipation of a life which we feel to be swift and short, and of a past which is irrevocable. Not to be children again, but to have our chance again, is the wish underlying most of the yearning. Apart from this, there are many other reasons. We may place as the second, the freedom of childhood from responsibility and care; and next, its freshness and its habitual joy; and last, but very far from least, the atmosphere of loving service, kindness, and tenderness which surrounds that helpless period. Of course, we are speaking of childhood under favourable circumstances; no one, except, perhaps, a dying man, would envy the beginning of life in extreme poverty or in loveless hardship.
Other reasons there are for looking back tenderly to that Golden Age: it was the time when we possessed unconsciously all the spiritual beauty that we recognise now as the inner charm of little children. They walk in the paradise of an unfallen world; their simplicity is their greatest attraction; their faith and trust in those that care for and provide for them is absolutely perfect; without any words, they know that the home-love will last; without taking thought, they expect to-morrow to be cared for like to-day. Lastly, they love much, and from the first love they receive, their life takes vigour and colour. They are like young plants straining to the light, and enriched according to their share of warmth and sunshine.
But there is to the Golden Age another side. It is not perfection; it is not entirely happy. How imperfect it is, all of us know, and the flaws on the surface are not the saddest; in fact, without some of these, we should hardly recognise our human fellow-mortals, or we should doubt that we knew them well. A great educator in his day was wont to say that he dreaded receiving a boy whom the parents presented with pride as faultless; he dreaded that the faults were within, ready to break out as childhood disappeared. But all lovers of children will acknowledge the manifold imperfection that is a part of their being; and perhaps we should not love them so well if it was not craving our sympathetic care. Again, this Golden Age is not an entirely happy time. It is true that the outbursts of sobbing are forgotten sooner than we can forget our sorrows; but the sobs were real while they lasted. As George Eliot says, this anguish appears very trivial to weather-worn mortals, who have to think about Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it may be not less bitter, perhaps it is even more bitter, than later troubles. ‘We can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sorrows of five or ten years ago. Surely, if we could recall that early bitterness and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of children.’
So we have decided that the Golden Age is not perfect—anything but it! And it is far from being entirely happy. There is another consideration to be taken into account—what happiness we possessed in childhood we did not understand or value. We had that ‘strangely perspectiveless view of life’ which prevented us from enjoying our happiness as we enjoy it now, when we know its value better, through experience and through a wider view of the world. The want of a perspective to their world gives to children’s grief its intensity; they cannot look beyond; they cannot understand its passing away. But it also gives to joys their shallowness; and there are manifold meanings in the saying, that unless we have suffered we cannot rejoice. Therefore, in sighing for life’s Golden Age again, the sigh means a wish, not for childhood as childhood is, but for childhood with the added consciousness and experience of after-years. To have freedom from care, and to know what a burden care can be; to have freshness, and to know what ennui means; to have habitual joyousness, after learning how anxiety can wear the spirit out of life; to have love and wisdom watching over one, as if one was what a child is to a mother’s heart, ‘the unconscious centre and poise of the universe;’ and at the same time to know the worth of such wisdom and love; to have our life all before us, conscious of what life is and how short are the years; to find again the Eden garden, innocent of evil, after having seen how evil fills the world with misery; to be simple, after having found out the charm and the wisdom of simplicity; to have—in a word—not childhood as it is, but as it would be, if we with our present knowledge could begin again:—this is what is wished for. This, too, is the secret of the sympathetic touch in Gray’s well-known welcome of the breeze from the school of his boyhood, that breeze that came from the happy hills, the fields beloved in vain:
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
That second spring would be boyhood with manhood’s knowledge—an impossible existence, a Golden Age that never was. It was because of the grim troop of passions and diseases waiting ‘in the vale below,’ that Gray envied the boyhood that had not yet advanced to meet the strife and miseries of the world. We call that Golden Age ‘the happiest time,’ merely by contrast; we forget its small capacity for happiness, its shallow understanding of the worth of those good things that we envy; and we apostrophise it in poetry and prose, because we are condemning the after-time as unhappy, without remembering our increased capacity for happiness.
But if it be impossible to carry back to a new start in life the experience life has given us, while we are thinking with a sad fascination of that Golden Age, and feeling the ‘momentary bliss’ of recollection, we shall not find it impossible to reverse our aspirations, and to combine with later life some part, and perhaps the best part, of our young life’s treasures. We yearn for those two things together—the happiness of the beginning, and the light upon it from the experience of the end. We cannot go back; but why should we not gather again and bring forward with us all that can be brought from the Golden Age? Then, to some extent, our aspirations will be satisfied.
Out of that Golden Age all the best things can be picked up and carried along with us still. Surely this is some comfort to us wayfarers who must ‘move on!’ We cannot have life over again; but it can be made to lengthen in worth by intensity of purpose, and of working, of loving. These, and not time, are the true measure of life. We envy freedom from responsibility; the child has his tasks as we have ours; his lesson may be as hard as our duty, and harder; he is happily resigned to tasks in obedience to the will of others; our buckling down to duty will bring us our playtime too. Freshness comes next. Wordsworth, after mourning that the glory and the dream were gone, acknowledged that he could receive from the meanest flower thoughts too deep for tears; so we strongly suspect that the glory and the dream were remaining, and that he saw till the last the earth ‘apparelled in celestial light.’ The love of the open-air world of beauty is a great key to lifelong freshness of soul. Another key to freshness is the custom of being easily pleased. The smallest gift pleases a child; in later life, we look more at the love of the giver than at the gift; but why should not the manifold growth of small kindnesses refresh us? And how shall we get habitual joy? It is a precious treasure; the home is rich where there is one member of the household brimful of sunshine. A merry word at home is magic for brightening life; and it is some encouragement to know that of all social virtues, the habit of joyousness is the one that grows fastest by patient effort. It fosters another childlike treasure—the sense of delight in a home atmosphere of love. Let us not fear to express our tenderness in word and deed for those who share life’s burdens with us, and the glow of the Golden Age will be round the hearth again. As for simplicity, it is already the lifelong dower of many of the most gifted minds; it is almost a characteristic of the intellectual men of noblest life. Why should we use long words when short ones are kinder; why go roundabout ways when we only need openly do our best? Wonderful as it may seem, simplicity is the most imitable part of childhood. The absence of self-consciousness is the grand key to it. If we cease thinking about the effect produced upon others, who are supposed to have concentrated their attention upon our puny selves, we shall escape much heart-burning, and gradually begin to brighten our path with something of childhood’s brightness. As for faith and trust, if they look higher than the roof of home, why should they not be as the child’s huge trust? We should have fewer careworn looks, and the habit of joy would be easier.
There is another quality that must crown this development of the childlike character—it is sympathy—that wide and warm sympathy which knows no growing old, and which is the fruition of our childhood’s eager freshness. Best of all, in picking up those old treasures that we carelessly dropped by the way when the Golden Age was ending, we may yet be, all unconsciously, very near the paradise-garden where once we walked, not knowing our good-fortune, and but half able to enjoy it.