(To be continued.)
[A RAMBLE ABOUT CHILDHOOD.]
By Mrs. MOLESWORTH.
No true child-lover would maintain that all children are equally lovable, or indeed, in some—though, I think, rare instances—lovable at all.
But in this, speaking for myself, I detect no inconsistency, no falsity to one’s colours. For the qualities or deficiencies which make a child unlovable may be summed up in one word; they are such as make it unchildlike. And this, not necessarily, if at all, as regards a child’s mental qualities. It is the moral side of child-nature that attracts—the heart, the spirit. For painful as it is to meet with precocity of mind in some instances, especially the precocity of the kind forced upon the children of the poor not unfrequently, this, unchildlike as it is, is by no means incompatible with great sweetness and beauty of the moral character, great power of affection, delightful candour, even that most exquisite of childlike possessions—trustfulness.
Yes, the root of a child’s nature, the essential groundwork of it, to be lovely and lovable, must be childlike. But a literal meaning must be given to the pretty adjective. I would not even altogether eliminate from it certain qualities which might, strictly speaking, be perhaps more correctly described as childish, seeing that if we limited the word too narrowly, we should lose others of the great charms of children, their queer, delightful inconsistencies and exaggerations, their quaint originality, their grotesque imaginings, all of which, in more or less degree, a real child, even a dull or stupid one, possesses.
Take, for example, the unconscious egoism, almost amounting, logically speaking, to “arrogance,” of most children. The world, nay, the universe, is their own little life and surroundings; their house and family are the rules, the proper thing, all others exceptions. It is not, in most instances, till childhood is growing into a phase of the past, that the sense of comparison is really developed, or that the young creatures take in that other circumstances or conditions besides their own may be what should be, that they themselves do not hold a monopoly of the model existence.
There is something pretty as well as absurd in this—to my mind, at least, in certain directions, something almost sacred, which it would be desecration to touch with hasty or careless fingers; which, one almost grieves to know, must pass, like all illusions, however sweet and innocent, when its day is over.