But all things have an end. The long training is passed, and you are seated in the boat. The race gets finished, one way or the other, and you are seated at the festive board. The dinner vanishes from the table, and you wake up next morning feeling very glad when you remember you can stop an hour longer in bed. And the vision of an editor is at hand to hint that these reminiscences must not prove an exception to the general rule, but must also come to a conclusion.
Is Childhood the Happiest or the most Miserable
Period of One’s Existence?
G. R. Sims says it depends upon the child.
It depends so much upon the child. As a child, my greatest delight was to give swagger dinner parties to my brothers and sisters in the nursery on winter afternoons, when we could not go out. The principal delicacy in these entertainments was an orange sorbet specially prepared by my own hands. Here is the recipe. Squeeze into a small cup the juice of half an orange, fill up with snow, scraped from the outside window sill, and serve cold. Now, although the preparation of this delightful delicacy gave me an immense amount of happiness, I could rarely induce any grown-up people to partake of it. Then there was a wine which always graced the table at our nursery feasts. We called it currant wine, and made it by putting a handful of grocer’s currants into a wineglass, filling up with cold water, and stirring the mixture up with a piece of firewood until the liquid was a rich brown. I have often, in later life, paid fifteen shillings for a bottle of champagne, and not felt half so happy over it as I used to be over a teaspoonful of our own home-made currant wine. In these matters childhood was the happiest period of my life. With regard to the enjoyment of “games,” I never played many as a child, but as a man I have derived the greatest possible pleasure from them. I never learned to skip till I was thirty, and at thirty-five my greatest delight was a game of battledore and shuttlecock. Now that I am turned forty I have given up violent exercise, and taken to playing with boxes of bricks and tin soldiers. I am sure that I am far happier with them, now, than I was as a child. In my old nursery days I always quarrelled with my brothers and sisters about our toys, and we generally finished up by throwing them at each other. Now I can sit on the floor in the long winter evenings and perform the most wonderful architectural feats with my box of bricks, and nobody thinks of interfering with me. With my soldiers, too, I am much happier. I can place the French and German armies in battle array, and devote my mind entirely to complex strategical operations without having to keep one eye on the armies and the other on the baby. Our baby was always putting my soldiers in his mouth; and, on one occasion, he completely crippled the Russian forces by swallowing their only general at a critical moment. So far as toys are concerned I am sure that childhood was not the happiest period of my life. The real charm of childhood, however, is its lack of the sense of responsibility. It is the sense of responsibility which comes with manhood that destroys the charm of life, and makes us think of our irresponsible childhood with regret. A child hasn’t to trouble about the rent, or the butcher’s bill, or of what the world will think of it, or of the duties it owes to society, to the family, or to itself. At the cost of a few tears or a sustained shriek it can get almost anything it wants, and it is waited on hand and foot at somebody else’s expense. It has absolutely no responsibility beyond being occasionally left alone in the nursery with a little brother or sister, with instructions to see that baby doesn’t fall into the fire. This, bar the bother of having to grab the baby violently by the hair to keep it from mischief, is ideal happiness; and I have known some children to whom the hair grabbing was a pleasure rather than a duty. It is the “responsibility” which comes with age which always causes us to compare it unfavourably with childhood. In another matter, manhood compares favourably with childhood. A man can be as naughty as he likes, and there is nobody to whip him unless he is a garrotter. Childhood is not the happiest period for those who like to be naughty, and naughtiness is the general idea of happiness. If it were not so everybody would try to be good. Up to the time of going to press no really popular movement in that direction has been discovered by Reuter or Dalziel, or “our own correspondent.”
Miss Clo Graves thinks it an unpleasant period.