To recall some recollections of my own childish beliefs—if the egotism may be pardoned, on the ground that one’s own experiences of this nature cannot but be the most trustworthy. I often smile to myself, with the smile “akin to tears,” when I look back to some of the faiths, the first principles, of my earliest years.
Foremost among these was the belief in the absolute perfection of my father and mother. I thought that they could not do wrong, that they knew everything. I remember feeling extremely surprised and perplexed on some occasions when, having involuntarily—for I, like most children, but seldom expressed or alluded to my deepest convictions—allowed this creed of mine to escape me, the subjects of it—though not without a smile—endeavoured tenderly to correct my estimate of them.
“There are many, many things I do not know about, my little girl,” my father would say, adding once, I remember—for this remark impressed me greatly—“I only know enough to begin to see that I am exceedingly ignorant.” And my mother was even more emphatic in her deprecation of our nursery fiat that “mamma was quite, quite good.”
Not that these protestations shook our faith. In my own case I know that the unconscious arrogance with regard to family conditions extended to ludicrous details. I thought that the Christian names of my parents were the only correct ones for papas and mammas; I believed that the order in which we children stood—there were six of us, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl—was the appointed order of nature, that all deviation from these and other particulars of the kind was abnormal and incorrect, and I viewed with condescending pity the playmates whose brothers and sisters were wrongly arranged, or whose parents suffered under “not right” names.
Gradually, of course, these queer, childish “articles of belief” faded—melted away in the clearer vision of experience and developing intellect. But they left a something behind them which I should be sorry to be without; and they left too, I think, a certain faculty of penetration into infant inner life, which circumstances have shown themselves kindly in preserving and deepening. I have learnt to feel since that nearly all children have their own odd and original theories of things, though many forget, as life advances, to remember about their own childhood’s beliefs and imaginings. And this is not unnatural, when we take into account the rarity and difficulty of obtaining a child’s full confidence, for uncommunicated, unexpressed thoughts are apt to die away from want of word-clothing. One really learns more about children from the revelations of grown-up men and women who “remember,” and have cherished their remembrances, than from the children of the moment themselves.
Still, queer ideas crop out to others sometimes. Not often—if it happened oftener we should be less struck by their oddity, by their grotesque originality. A few which, in some instances, not without difficulty and the exertion of some amount of diplomacy, I have succeeded in extracting—no, that is not the right word for a matter of such fairylike delicacy—in drawing out, as the bee draws the honey from the tiny flowers—occur to me as I write, and may be worth mention.
A small boy of my acquaintance, after a fit of extreme penitence for some little offence against his grandmother, whom he was very fond of, added to his “so very sorry,” “never do it again, never, never,” the unintelligible assurance, “I will be always good to you, dear little granny, always; and when you have to go round all the houses, I’ll see that our cook gives you lots and lots of scraps—very nice ones—and nice old boots and shoes, and everything you want. I’ll even”—with a burst of enthusiastic devotion—“I’ll even go round with you my own self.”
Grandmother expressed her sense of the intended good offices, but gingerly, with my assistance, set to work to find out what the little fellow meant—what in the world he had got into his head; and it was no easy task, I can assure you. But at last we succeeded. It appeared that the confusion in the boy’s mind arose from the, in a sense, double meaning of the word “old.” He associated it, naturally enough, with the idea of poverty, material worthlessness, in conjunction with that of age and long-livedness. Every human being, he believed, had to descend, “when you gets very old,” to a state of beggardom; his dear granny, like everybody else, would have to wander from door to door with a piteous tale of want; but from his door she should never be repulsed; nay indeed, he himself would take her by the hand and lead her on the painful round. Nor did he murmur at this strange order of things; to him it was a “has-to-be,” accepted like the darkness that follows the day; like the gradual out-at-toe condition of his own little worn-out shoes; and I greatly doubt if our carefully-worded explanation of his mistake carried real conviction with it. I strongly suspect that he remained on the look-out for granny in her new rôle for a good many months, or even years, to come.
Some other curious childish beliefs recur to my memory. I knew a little girl who cherished as an undoubted article of faith a legend—how originated who can say?—perhaps suggested by some half poetical talk of her elders about the aging year, the year about to bid us farewell and so on, perhaps entirely evolved out of her own fantastic little brain—that on the 31st of December the “old year” took material human form and strolled about the world in the guise of an aged man, though unrecognised by the uninitiated crowd. She had the habit on this day of taking up her quarters in a corner of the deep, old-fashioned window-sill of her nursery, and there, in patient silence, gazing down into the street till Mr. Old-year should have passed by. Nor were her hopes disappointed. She always caught sight of him and nodded her own farewell, unexpectful of any response.
“He couldn’t say good-bye to everybody; he wouldn’t have time,” was her explanation to the little sister to whom she at last confided her odd fancy, and through whose indiscretion it leaked out to the rest of the nursery group.