But while we applaud this pretty confident attribution of divine wisdom to children, we are much too cautious to translate it into practice. "It is far too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth prudently, "to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of immortality;" and he might have added that, while the Child may be Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege of spanking. Even so I observe that, while able to agree cordially with Christ on the necessity of becoming as little children as a condition of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious as to act upon any such belief; nay, we find ourselves obliged to revise and re-interpret the wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, forbids oaths of all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be serious, or we should have to upset a settled practice of the courts. And as for resisting no evil and forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens! what would become of our splendid armaments! The suggestion, put so down rightly, is quite too wild. In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. (I forget the Bishop's exact words, but they amounted to a complete and thoroughly common-sense repudiation of Gospel Christianity.)
No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine teaching touches on conduct, we must as practical men correct it, and with a special look-out for its indulgent misunderstanding of children. Children, as a matter of experience, have no sense of the rights of property. They steal apples.
And yet—there must be something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent men of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit of shadows. 'Shadows we are and shadows we pursue' sounded an exquisitely solemn note in an election speech; but after all, we must take the world as we find it, and the world as we find it has its own recognised rewards. No success attended the poet who wrote that—
"Those little new-invented things—
Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys,
So ribbands are and rings,
Which all our happiness destroys.
Nor God
In His abode,
Nor saints, nor little boys,
Nor Angels made them; only foolish men,
Grown mad with custom, on those toys
Which more increase their wants to date.…"
"Those little new-invented things—
Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys,
So ribbands are and rings,
Which all our happiness destroys.
Nor God
In His abode,
Nor saints, nor little boys,
Nor Angels made them; only foolish men,
Grown mad with custom, on those toys
Which more increase their wants to date.…"
He found no publisher, and they have been rescued by accident after two hundred years of oblivion. (It appears, nevertheless, that he was a happy man.)
And yet—I repeat—since we respond to it so readily, whether in welcome or in irritation, there must be something in this claim set up for childish simplicity; and I cannot help thinking it fortunate and salutary for us that the Celtic poets have taken to sounding its note so boldly. Whatever else they do, on the conventional ideals of this generation they speak out with an uncompromising and highly disconcerting directness. As I said just now, they are held, if at all, by a long and loose chain to the graven images to which we stand bound arm-to-arm and foot-to-foot. They fly far enough aloof to take a bird's-eye view. What they see they declare with a boldness which is the more impressive for being unconscious. And they declare that they see us tied to stupid material gods, and wholly blind to ideas.
P.S.—I made bold enough to say in the course of these remarks that Euclid's Elements could hardly be improved by writing them out in ballad metre. A friend, to whom I happened to repeat this assertion, cast doubt on it and challenged me to prove it. I do so with pleasure in the following—
