Great Mysteries and Little Plagues

by John Neal

What would be our feelings to see a fair child start up before us a maniac or a murderer, armed to the teeth? to find a nest of serpents on our pillow? a destroyer, or a traitor, a Harry the Eighth, or a Benedict Arnold asleep in our bosom? A Catherine or a Peter, a Bacon, a Galileo, or a Bentham, a Napoleon or a Voltaire, clambering up our knees after sugar-plums? Cuvier laboring to distinguish a horse-fly from a blue-bottle, or dissecting a spider with a rusty nail? La Place trying to multiply his own apples, or to subtract his playfellow's gingerbread? What should we say to find ourselves romping with Messalina, Swedenborg, and Madame de Stael? or playing bo-peep with Murat, Robespierre, and Charlotte Corday? or puss-puss in the corner with George Washington, Jonathan Wild, Shakspeare, Sappho, Jeremy Taylor, Mrs. Clark, Alfieri, and Harriet Wilson? Yet stranger things have happened. These were all children but the other day, and clambered about the knees, and rummaged in the pockets, and nestled in the laps of people no better than we are. But if they had appeared in their true shape for a single moment, while playing together! What a scampering there would have been among the grown folks! How their fingers would have tingled!

Now to me there is no study half so delightful as that of these little creatures, with hearts fresh from the gardens of the sky, in their first and fairest and most unintentional disclosures, while they are indeed a mystery, a fragrant, luminous, and beautiful mystery. And I have an idea that if we only had a name for the study, it might be found as attractive and as popular, and perhaps—though I would not go too far—perhaps about as advantageous in the long run to the future fathers and mothers of mankind, as the study of shrubs and flowers, or that of birds and fishes. And why not? They are the cryptogamia of another world,—the infusoria of the skies.

Then why not pursue the study for yourself? The subjects are always before you. No books are needed, no costly drawings, no lectures, neither transparencies nor illustrations. Your specimens are all about you. They come and go at your bidding. They are not to be hunted for, along the edge of a precipice, on the borders of the wilderness, in the desert, nor by the sea-shore. They abound, not in the uninhabited or unvisited place, but in your very dwelling-houses, about the steps of your doors, in every street of every village, in every green field, and every crowded thoroughfare. They flourish bravely in snow-storms, in the dust of the trampled highway, where drums are beating and colors flying—in the roar of cities. They love the sounding sea-breeze and the open air, and may always be found about the wharves, and rejoicing before the windows of toy-shops. They love the blaze of fireworks and the smell of gunpowder; and where that is, they are, to a dead certainty.

You have but to go abroad for half an hour in pleasant weather, or to throw open your doors or windows on a Saturday afternoon, if you live anywhere in the neighborhood of a school-house, or a vacant lot, with here and there a patch of green, or a dry place in it, and steal behind the curtains, or draw the blinds, and let the fresh wind blow through and through the chambers of your heart for a few minutes, winnowing the dust and scattering the cobwebs that have gathered there while you were asleep, and lo! you will find it ringing with the voices of children at play, and all alive with the glimmering phantasmagoria of leap-frog, prison-base, or knock-up-and-catch.

Let us try the experiment. There! I have opened the windows, I have drawn the blinds, and hark! already there is the sound of little voices afar off, like "sweet bells jangling." Nearer and nearer come they, and now we catch a glimpse of bright faces peeping round the corners, and there, by that empty inclosure, you see a general mustering and swarming, as of bees about a newly-discovered flower-garden. But the voices we now hear proceed from two little fellows who have withdrawn from the rest. One carries a large basket, and his eyes are directed to my window; he doesn't half like the blinds being drawn. The other follows him, with a tattered book under his arm, rapping the posts, one after the other, as he goes along. He is clearly on bad terms with himself. And now we can see their faces. Both are grave, and one rather pale, and trying to look ferocious. And hark! now we are able to distinguish their words. "Well, I ain't skeered o' you," says the foremost and the larger boy. "Nor I ain't skeered o' you," retorts the other; "but you needn't say you meant to lick me." And so I thought. Another, less acquainted with children, might not be able to see the connection; but I could,—it was worthy of Aristotle himself, or John Locke. "I didn't say I meant to lick ye," rejoined the first, "I said I could lick ye, and so I can." To which the other replies, glancing first at my window and then all up and down street, "I should like to see you try." Whereupon the larger boy begins to move away, half backwards, half sideways, muttering just loud enough to be heard, "Ah, you want to fight now, jest 'cause you're close by your own house." And here the dialogue finished, and the babies moved on, shaking their little heads at each other, and muttering all the way up street. Men are but children of a larger growth! Children but Empires in miniature.

How beautiful and how strange are the first combinations of thought in a wayward or peevish child! And then, how alike we all are in our waywardness and peevishness! It is but a change of name, and one trifle is about as good as another to breed a quarrel, or to throw the wisest and the best of our grown babies off their balance. A bit of writing, the loss of a paper with pictures on it, a handful of glittering dust, or somebody making mouths at us, a word or a look, and we are stamping with rage, or miserable for half a day. A cloud coming up when the horses are at the door, a little bad weather, a spot upon our new clothes, or a lump of sugar not quite so large as another's; and what children we are! How perfectly wretched!

I once knew a little boy, who, after sitting awhile as if lost in thought, turned to his mother, and said: "Mother! what did you marry my father for? Why didn't you wait till I grew up, and then marry me?" Rather a strange question, to be sure, and the little fellow was but just old enough to put his words together. But compare it with many a question put by the sages of earth. Consider it side by side with the ponderings and the misgivings, the inquisitiveness and the apprehensions of a great Philosopher, when he interrogates the Builder of the Universe, and sets himself in array, face to face, with Jehovah.

Nay, I have heard a very intelligent person of mature age betray a confusion of thought altogether as laughable as that of the poor boy. She had been to see a captious old lady whom her father, in his youth, had once intended to marry. "And how did you like her?" said I. "Not at all," she replied; "oh, you don't know how glad I am that father did not marry her; I never should have liked her, I am sure." As if, marry whom he might, she must have been born, she herself, with precisely the same preferences, prejudices and opinions!

"Oh, mother!" said little Mary, aged two years and a half at the time, looking up as she heard a noise, and blushing from head to foot, "I hear a bad smell,—'taint me nor brother. It was an old man in the next house;" hemming loudly and suddenly, with a cough. Modesty is one thing,—squeamishness about children another; and this is really too good to be lost.

I remember a little boy who was a lexicographer from his birth, a language-master and a philosopher. From the hour he was able to ask for a piece of bread and butter, he never hesitated for a word, not he! If one wouldn't serve, another would, with a little twisting and turning. He assured me one day, when I was holding him by the hand rather tighter than he wished (he was but just able to speak at the time), that I should choke his hand; at another, he came to me all out of breath, to announce that a man was below shaving the wall. Upon due inquiry, it turned out that he was only whitewashing. But how should he know the difference between whitewash and lather, a big brush and a little one? Show me, if you can, a prettier example of synthesis or generalization, or a more beautiful adaptation of old words to new purposes. I have heard another complain of a school-fellow for winking at him with his lip; and he took the affront very much to heart, I assure you, and would not be pacified till the matter was cleared up.