STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD.
I.
INTRODUCTORY.
Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap the hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at managing a certain mighty baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished for his rashness.[[1]]
Yet there is good reason to suppose that it is only within comparatively recent times that the more subtle charm and the deeper significance of infancy have been discerned. We have come to appreciate babyhood as we have come to appreciate the finer lineaments of nature as a whole. This applies, of course, more especially to the ruder sex. The man has in him much of the boy’s contempt for small things, and he needed ages of education at the hands of the better-informed woman before he could perceive the charm of infantile ways.
One of the first males to do justice to this attractive subject was Rousseau. He made short work with the theological dogma that the child is born morally depraved, and can only be made good by miraculous appliances. His watchword, return to nature, included a reversion to the infant as coming virginal and unspoilt by man’s tinkering from the hands of its Maker. To gain a glimpse of this primordial beauty before it was marred by man’s awkward touch was something, and so Rousseau set men in the way of sitting reverently at the feet of infancy, watching and learning.
For us of to-day, who have learned to go to the pure springs of nature for much of our spiritual refreshment, the child has acquired a high place among the things of beauty. Indeed, the grace of childhood may almost be said to have been discovered by the modern poet. Wordsworth has stooped over his cradle intent on catching, ere they passed, the ‘visionary gleams’ of ‘the glories he hath known’. Blake, R. L. Stevenson, and others, have tried to put into language his day-dreamings, his quaint fancyings. Dickens and Victor Hugo have shown us something of his delicate quivering heart-strings; Swinburne has summed up the divine charm of “children’s ways and wiles”. The page of modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child-love and our child-admiration.
Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back admiringly to childhood. The æsthetic charm of the infant which draws us so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions is, like everything else which moves the modern mind, highly complex. Among other sources of this charm we may discern the perfect serenity, the happy ‘insouciance’ of the childish mind. The note of world-complaint in modern life has penetrated into most domains, yet it has not, one would hope, penetrated into the charmed circle of childish experience. Childhood has, no doubt, its sad aspect:—
Poor stumbler on the rocky coast of woe,
Tutored by pain each source of pain to know:
neglect and cruelty may bring much misery into the first bright years. Yet the very instinct of childhood to be glad in its self-created world, an instinct which with consummate art Victor Hugo keeps warm and quick in the breast of the half-starved ill-used child Cosette, secures for it a peculiar blessedness. The true nature-child, who has not become blasé, is happy, untroubled with the future, knowing nothing of the misery of disillusion. As, with hearts chastened by many experiences, we take a peep over the wall of his fancy-built pleasance, we seem to be taken back to a real golden age. With Amiel, we say: “Le peu de paradis que nous aperçevons encore sur la terre est du à sa présence”. Yet the thought, which the same moment brings, of the flitting of the nursery visions, of the coming storm and stress, adds a pathos to the spectacle, and we feel as Heine felt when he wrote:—