How, why is childhood called the happiest time of life? And if it be life’s Golden Age, why cannot we keep the gold?
The reasons why that period is envied seem to be these: First, and most subtly underlying all envy of childhood, is the knowledge that it is the time when we have our whole life before us. Often it is not the return of the state itself that is desired, but its anticipation of a life which we feel to be swift and short, and of a past which is irrevocable. Not to be children again, but to have our chance again, is the wish underlying most of the yearning. Apart from this, there are many other reasons. We may place as the second, the freedom of childhood from responsibility and care; and next, its freshness and its habitual joy; and last, but very far from least, the atmosphere of loving service, kindness, and tenderness which surrounds that helpless period. Of course, we are speaking of childhood under favourable circumstances; no one, except, perhaps, a dying man, would envy the beginning of life in extreme poverty or in loveless hardship.
Other reasons there are for looking back tenderly to that Golden Age: it was the time when we possessed unconsciously all the spiritual beauty that we recognise now as the inner charm of little children. They walk in the paradise of an unfallen world; their simplicity is their greatest attraction; their faith and trust in those that care for and provide for them is absolutely perfect; without any words, they know that the home-love will last; without taking thought, they expect to-morrow to be cared for like to-day. Lastly, they love much, and from the first love they receive, their life takes vigour and colour. They are like young plants straining to the light, and enriched according to their share of warmth and sunshine.
But there is to the Golden Age another side. It is not perfection; it is not entirely happy. How imperfect it is, all of us know, and the flaws on the surface are not the saddest; in fact, without some of these, we should hardly recognise our human fellow-mortals, or we should doubt that we knew them well. A great educator in his day was wont to say that he dreaded receiving a boy whom the parents presented with pride as faultless; he dreaded that the faults were within, ready to break out as childhood disappeared. But all lovers of children will acknowledge the manifold imperfection that is a part of their being; and perhaps we should not love them so well if it was not craving our sympathetic care. Again, this Golden Age is not an entirely happy time. It is true that the outbursts of sobbing are forgotten sooner than we can forget our sorrows; but the sobs were real while they lasted. As George Eliot says, this anguish appears very trivial to weather-worn mortals, who have to think about Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it may be not less bitter, perhaps it is even more bitter, than later troubles. ‘We can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sorrows of five or ten years ago. Surely, if we could recall that early bitterness and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of children.’
So we have decided that the Golden Age is not perfect—anything but it! And it is far from being entirely happy. There is another consideration to be taken into account—what happiness we possessed in childhood we did not understand or value. We had that ‘strangely perspectiveless view of life’ which prevented us from enjoying our happiness as we enjoy it now, when we know its value better, through experience and through a wider view of the world. The want of a perspective to their world gives to children’s grief its intensity; they cannot look beyond; they cannot understand its passing away. But it also gives to joys their shallowness; and there are manifold meanings in the saying, that unless we have suffered we cannot rejoice. Therefore, in sighing for life’s Golden Age again, the sigh means a wish, not for childhood as childhood is, but for childhood with the added consciousness and experience of after-years. To have freedom from care, and to know what a burden care can be; to have freshness, and to know what ennui means; to have habitual joyousness, after learning how anxiety can wear the spirit out of life; to have love and wisdom watching over one, as if one was what a child is to a mother’s heart, ‘the unconscious centre and poise of the universe;’ and at the same time to know the worth of such wisdom and love; to have our life all before us, conscious of what life is and how short are the years; to find again the Eden garden, innocent of evil, after having seen how evil fills the world with misery; to be simple, after having found out the charm and the wisdom of simplicity; to have—in a word—not childhood as it is, but as it would be, if we with our present knowledge could begin again:—this is what is wished for. This, too, is the secret of the sympathetic touch in Gray’s well-known welcome of the breeze from the school of his boyhood, that breeze that came from the happy hills, the fields beloved in vain:
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,