The first thing a baby does is to howl. If that child knew that he had got a joyous, gamesome time before him, he wouldn’t. He would smile. But one of the most endearing characteristics of childhood is its candour, and the baby knows that croup lies waiting round the corner to seize him by the throat, that thrush lurks in the imperfectly-washed feeding-bottle, that wind-spasms and teething convulsions only wait their opportunity to mark him for their prey, and so he howls:
“Ah! (A pant.)
Ah-ha! Ah! (A pause to gather forces.)
Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha!
Ah! Ah! E’EE!”
(Fortissimo, crescendo, and ad libitum.)
The nurse will be likely to say it is a pin, but it is not. It is because the baby guesses what it has got to go through before it grows up. If ever it grows up at all. There is a period between childhood and maturity of which one doesn’t want to write. No man likes to remember that he was once a long-legged, red-wristed hobbledehoy, who drowned his freckles in blushes when girls, who did not happen to be his sisters, looked at him, and shaved surreptitiously with his mother’s scissors. No woman cares about looking back to the days when she had thick ankles, which her skirts were not long enough to cover; when she wore her hair in a pigtail, because she was too old to wear it loose upon her shoulders, and too young to turn it up; when the front hooks and eyes of her frock were always bursting off, and her sister’s sweethearts used to call her “little girl.” A humiliating experience altogether, the period of adolescence. But more humiliating still it is to be a mature, grown-up person, and know how far off you are from being the wonderful creature you intended to be, when you began the world. You did not contemplate being exactly beautiful—it is not for everyone to achieve that—but you meant to be commanding. You were going to do everything well: to succeed gloriously—to be distinguished and brilliant—knock lumps off this poor old globe, in fact. And now—well—you haven’t! The clay you’re made of is the ordinary kind: not the blue earth diamonds grow in. You might make up for your absolute lack of individuality by a brilliant suicide. But you don’t. You’re too commonplace. You’re contented to go on being nobody. This may be a calm state, but it is certainly not a happy one.
But there are exceptions.
And yet there is a childhood which is, maybe, the happiest period of our existence. Not the time of the shining morning face—of the curled top-knot—for to the excoriating action of the soaped towel was due that facial polish, and the twisting of the damped hair around the long-tailed ivory brush was attended with the shedding of bitter tears of rage and pain. But the second edition of the Book of Infancy, bound in shrivelled yellow leather and printed in faded ink. “The world,” say the slippered pantaloon and the mumbling grandame, “was a fine place when we were young.” And what is more, they really believe it. He was strong, fascinating and handsome—she was clever and beautiful. Both may say so as often as they like, and everybody credits them—because they are so old. Comple et amur illam et amemus: plena est voluptatis si illâ scias uti. Come, gentle Dotage! Shade me with thy kindly wing, lend me thy rose-coloured horn-glasses! Let me view the Past, not as it was, but as I would have had it. So shall the children cluster round my knee, and listen, wide-eyed and envying, as I tell them of the golden days of my childhood, and the young people sigh, hearing of the brave and brilliant, beautiful and noble things that never happened in the bygone time when I was young. Only the middle-aged folk look a little doubtful, and Death, leaning over the back of my armchair, laughs outright, and taps me—as a reproving nurse might—on the withered lips with one bony finger-tip. After which I fall asleep, and am carried away to bed.
Alden philosophises.
I have not been a child for several years; it is unnecessary to mention the precise number, but I have a clear recollection of the period. My childhood was certainly happy, so far as I was personally concerned, but I will not go so far as to say that it was a source of unmixed happiness to others. As to whether childhood is the happiest or the most miserable part of our existence, there is so much to be said on both sides that I am almost inclined to answer the question in a judicious and statesmanlike way, by saying that I yield to no one in my profound appreciation of the wide-reaching importance of the question, and that the day will certainly come when the awakened conscience of the nation will demand its settlement in accordance with right and justice. When that time arrives I need hardly say that I shall be found on the side of justice, but I am not yet wholly convinced that the time has fully arrived. In the meantime, however, I do not hesitate to say that in those cases where childhood is happier than mature age there can be but little doubt among thinking men of all shades of belief that maturity is, in some respects, at least less demonstrably happy than childhood. Now that would be eminently judicious, but, on the other hand, it would look like an underhanded attempt to introduce politics into the Idler. It will be better, therefore, to treat the subject in a philosophic way. The question which the Editors of the Idler ask is, after all, a question as to the relative advantages of Idealism and Realism—spelled with the largest kind of capital letters. The small boy is ordinarily an Idealist, unless, of course, he belongs to the unhappy class of small boys who have to earn their own living when they ought to be at play, and who, having no time for dreaming, become Realists of the most hardened and painful type. In the former case the small boy is happy, for he lives in a world of his own creation, and for the purpose of happiness such a world is far better than the actual world. In the latter case he is generally more or less unhappy, for he is compelled to see the world as it really is, and he finds it not all nice. The realistic small boy can have very little true happiness. Fancy M. Zola’s childhood: assuming, of course, that he was then a Realist, which he probably was not, judging from the fact that he is only a Realist professionally at the present day. To the childish Zola, life must have presented itself as a series of human documents. He saw things as they were, not as a small boy should see them. He could have had no genuine longings for a life of piracy, for he saw that the pirate, instead of being a gorgeously-dressed and nobly-chivalrous hero, was only a brutal ruffian travelling on the road to Execution Dock. Tin soldiers could have brought him no happiness, for he knew that they were only lifeless bits of tin, as incapable of fighting as the army of Monaco. It gave him no pleasure to be dressed in a pasteboard helmet and to wear a tin sword, for he knew that grown-up people would not mistake him for a soldier; and that a blue flannel shirt, and a cap with the name of some frigate on a silk ribbon, would not lead foreigners to believe that he was a French admiral at the age of seven. He may have found some little pleasure in playing marbles—not, of course, for the sake of that silly game, but for the reason that marbles are portable property, and that the more marbles a boy wins the richer he is—but for all other boyish diversions he must have felt a profound contempt.