the little fellow writes, in the verses he makes for his grandmothers birthday; and then, when the verses come to be read, ah! the humiliation of soul he goes through, and how surely he expects father and grandmother to find him out for a hypocrite. “Why did I write it? She’s not here, and it was not necessary to mention her; I love grandma, it’s true; I reverence her, but still she is not the same. Why did I write it? Why have I lied?” This is the sort of thing there is in children. We recognise it as we read, and remember the dim, childish days when we, too, had an ‘organ of truth’ just so exquisitely delicate; and the recollection should quicken our reverence for the tender consciences of children.
“The Story of a Child.”—I should like while speaking of this subject to mention another book which contains the self-revelation of a child,—a child that once was summoned, to give evidence, out of the dark abysm of time. This is the sort of study of a child that is really precious, because it is to be had on no other terms than by harking back to our own childhood, vivifying it, reproducing it, by mere force of imaginative power. This is absolutely the only way to get into sympathy with a child, for children, with all their frank confidences and ready chatter, are quite inscrutable little persons, who never tell anyone the sort of things that we read in this ‘Story.’ There is no need to tell each other, for other children know, and, as for telling the grown-ups, children are fully persuaded that no grown-up, not even mother, could understand; Ponto might, perhaps, and confidences will be poured into the ear of a dog which the loving mother lays herself out for in vain.
“Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe
Our hermit spirits dwell, and range apart,
Our eyes see all around in gloom or glow—
Hues of their own, fresh borrow’d from the heart.”
And this is even more notably the case with children than with ourselves. It is a law of our nature with which it is absolutely useless to contend, and our only means of true intimacy with a child is the power of recovering our own childhood—a power which we are apt to let slip as of no vital importance. This, Miss Margaret Deland helps us to do: we recognise our old selves, with a difference, in Ellen. Just so irrational, inconsequent, loving and heroic, and generally tiresome to the grown-up world were our own impulses in that long ago, on which we look back with tenderness, but seldom with complacency. If we rise, after reading The Story of a Child,[10] a little more humble, a little more diffident, ready to believe more than we see, why, it will do us no harm, and should bless and help the children. From one word of the author’s we should like to differ. Miss Deland thinks that it may be wholesome for the elders to understand children better, but for the children, why, she thinks that most of us grow up wonderfully well in spite of this and all other difficulties. In a sense this is true, but, in another sense, one of the saddest things in life is the issue of splendid child-material into commonplace, uninteresting maturity, of a kind that the world seems to be neither the better nor the worse for.
Tolstoi’s childhood and that of Miss Deland’s little heroine would appear to be a far cry from ‘the Kindergarten’; but as a matter of fact these two revelations of what children are bring our contention to a point.
We are told that, “but yesterday, in the University of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the Faculty was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloroform. The other day his successor and nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the librarian of the University to go to the library and pick out the books on his subject that were no longer needed. And his reply to the librarian was this: ‘Take every text-book that is more than ten years old, and put it down in the cellar.’” So far as education is a science, the truth of even ten—much more, a hundred—years ago is not the whole truth of to-day.
“Thoughts beyond their thought to those high seers were given”;