Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

by Alice Meynell

It is, by the way, a curious sign of indignity of race—or, if not indignity, provincialism—in the more extremely Oriental people, that a Japanese woman carries her child on her back and not upon her arm. It is a charming infant, and the mother looks no more than a gentle child; with the little creature bound to her back she carries a soft lantern in a mild blue night. She is not of a classic race, and she shuffles on her subordinate way, an irresponsible creature, who must not proffer opinions except by way of quotation, and is scarcely of the inches that measure the landscape or of the aspect that fronts the sky.

But whence is this now prevalent desire to slip the nobler and bear the ignobler burden? It is not long since an American woman wrote a book, Women and Economics, urging equal labour upon women, by the analogy of animals that know no distinction between a strong sex and a weak, nor between a free sex and one confined to the pen, or the lair, or the cover, by the care of little ones. The reply seems too obvious that the children of men are more helpless, and are helpless for a longer time, even in proportion to their longer life, than the off-spring of other living creatures. The children of men have to be carried. This author complains that women are economically dependent upon men; and she finds that the world has “misty ideas upon the subject.” If those misty ideas are to the effect that a woman who keeps house for the service of herself, her husband, and the other inmates, gives her work in return for maintenance, and is not a dependent but a colleague, I must wish that ideas “mistily” held were often so just, and ideas vaguely believed were often so well founded. Those who charge the husband with “employing” his wife choose to neglect the fact that she is mistress and hostess, as well as “servant” or “housekeeper,” ministering to herself and to the guests in whose company she has pleasure, and to whose respect she has a right. Our economic author proceeds: “We are the only animal species in which the sex relation is also an economic factor. . . We have not been accustomed to face this fact beyond our loose generalization that it was ‘natural,’ and that other animals did so too.” Has anyone really been so rash as to aver “that other animals did so too”? The obvious truth is that other animals do otherwise, but that, whatever they do, they make no rule or example for man. Again: “Whatever the economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do the most work get the least money.” And yet but now they were charged with “getting it” too dependently, or rather, with having it “got” for them by man! Is this writer indeed misled by that mere word “money,” which she here lets slip?

“He nearly persuades me to go on all fours,” sighs Voltaire rising—rising erect reluctantly, one may almost say—from the reading of Rousseau.

THE UNREADY

It is rashly said that the senses of children are quick. They are, on the contrary, unwieldy in turning, unready in reporting, until advancing age teaches them agility. This is not lack of sensitiveness, but mere length of process. For instance, a child nearly newly born is cruelly startled by a sudden crash in the room—a child who has never learnt to fear, and is merely overcome by the shock of sound; nevertheless, that shock of sound does not reach the conscious hearing or the nerves but after some moments, nor before some moments more is the sense of the shock expressed. The sound travels to the remoteness and seclusion of the child’s consciousness, as the roar of a gun travels to listeners half a mile away.

So it is, too, with pain, which has learnt to be so instant and eager with us of later age that no point of time is lost in its touches—direct as the unintercepted message of great and candid eyes, unhampered by trivialities; even so immediate is the communication of pain. But you could count five between the prick of a surgeon’s instrument upon a baby’s arm and the little whimper that answers it. The child is then too young, also, to refer the feeling of pain to the arm that suffers it. Even when pain has groped its way to his mind it hardly seems to bring local tidings thither. The baby does not turn his eyes in any degree towards his arm or towards the side that is so vexed with vaccination. He looks in any other direction at haphazard, and cries at random.

See, too, how slowly the unpractised apprehension of an older child trudges after the nimbleness of a conjurer. It is the greatest failure to take these little gobe-mouches to a good conjurer. His successes leave them cold, for they had not yet understood what it was the good man meant to surprise them withal. The amateur it is who really astonishes them. They cannot come up even with your amateur beginner, performing at close quarters; whereas the master of his craft on a platform runs quite away at the outset from the lagging senses of his honest audience.

You may rob a child of his dearest plate at table, almost from under his ingenuous eyes, send him off in chase of it, and have it in its place and off again ten times before the little breathless boy has begun to perceive in what direction his sweets have been snatched.

Teachers of young children should therefore teach themselves a habit of awaiting, should surround themselves with pauses of patience. The simple little processes of logic that arrange the grammar of a common sentence are too quick for these young blunderers, who cannot use two pronouns but they must confuse them. I never found that a young child—one of something under nine years—was able to say, “I send them my love” at the first attempt. It will be “I send me my love,” “I send them their love,” “They send me my love”; not, of course, through any confusion of understanding, but because of the tardy setting of words in order with the thoughts. The child visibly grapples with the difficulty, and is beaten.

It is no doubt this unreadiness that causes little children to like twice-told tales and foregone conclusions in their games. They are not eager, for a year or two yet to come, for surprises. If you hide and they cannot see you hiding, their joy in finding you is comparatively small; but let them know perfectly well what cupboard you are in, and they will find you with shouts of discovery. The better the hiding-place is understood between you the more lively the drama. They make a convention of art for their play. The younger the children the more dramatic; and when the house is filled with outcries of laughter from the breathless breast of a child, it is that he is pretending to be surprised at finding his mother where he bade her pretend to hide. This is the comedy that never tires. Let the elder who cannot understand its charm beware how he tries to put a more intelligible form of delight in the place of it; for, if not, he will find that children also have a manner of substitution, and that they will put half-hearted laughter in the place of their natural impetuous clamours. It is certain that very young children like to play upon their own imaginations, and enjoy their own short game.