Phillpotts temporises.
I fail to see how you can assert or deny upon this question. There are thousands of happy children in the world, and thousands as miserable as any grown-up person. It depends entirely upon those responsible for the individual infant; and a babe’s environment is really unimportant, because, before intelligence sets in, a child wants little more than warmth and good food, and general looking after. At that early period the human young are on much the same level as cats and dogs. My dog is just as happy as the Prince of Wales’s Pomeranian, because I satisfy him; social distinction has no charm for him; bones and literary society are sufficient for a creature devoid of conscious intelligence. In the same way an infant may be happy at a workhouse, perhaps even more so than in a Park Lane nursery—if there are such things as Park Lane nurseries. But it is when intellect dawns, and a child is able himself to say whether he is happy or unhappy, that he becomes interesting. Then, as before, his measure of joy or sorrow must depend upon those fellow-creatures who form his society. Probably the rule that obtains of men and women holds good of children also: the less brain power the more happiness. Intellect—especially a growing intellect—will give a child lightning flashes of joy denied to his more thick-headed brother; but much sorrow must also result from his extra intelligence. If he rises higher, he will sink far lower, too. The placid, ordinary youth thinks less, and digests his food better, and has a pleasanter time, on the whole. A sensitive child feels with a keen freshness that only years can blunt. To see some fool of a man crushing a clever child is heart-rending. By curious, misguided instincts, children always look up to their full-grown companions; and the result is, that any adult ass can nip in the bud precious childish fancies, or make fatuous and crushing replies to childish inquiries, which show in themselves the trembling dawn of an intellect far superior to his own.
And says that clever men loathe childhood.
As a rule, you will find that clever men look back at their childhood with lively loathing, while the average Briton, if Heaven has given him enough memory to recall his earliest youth at all, says that it was all right as far as he can remember. In my own small case (and, after all, personal experience is never uninteresting—to the person), I can say that until I went to a day-school at the age of seven, or it may have been less, I had a fairly good time. Open air has a great deal to do with happiness in a child—open air and plenty of wholesome food, and satisfactory parents. Not that the victim cares overmuch for rice-puddings or a good mother; but these things leave their mark. As to mothers, I should say they have got more men and women into Heaven than any bishop, priest, deacon, or professional Churchman whatsoever. Personally, I am still here, and should be the last to make sure of anything, or count my own chickens before they are hatched, but I have the privilege of knowing men and women, to the number of at least five, who are undoubtedly bound for Golden Shores; and it was their mothers’ doing in every case. Fathers, too, have their significance, but it is purely temporal, and never much concerns an infant until the child reaches that advanced platform of intelligence whereon questions concerning pocket-money arise.
Mrs. Panton thinks it ought to be the happiest.
There would be no difficulty whatever in replying to the question, if it runs, “Should childhood be the happiest or most miserable period of our existence?” because, I am sure, we should one and all agree that it most certainly should: for we have no cares then, no responsibilities; our clean pinafores are worn without the least notice of what they cost to wash; our dinners, if unappetising, are regular, and, if they are not paid for, do not weigh upon either our minds or our bodies; while we neither look forward nor backward, and enjoy our existence from day to day with all the freedom from care and anxiety which, we suppose, characterises the life of a puppy or a kitten. But all this presupposes that we are not in the group of tyrants, either in the nursery, schoolroom, or dining-room, and that those who have charge of us remember their own days of childhood: recollect all the dreams, threats, and fancies which can turn them into a period of absolute torture; and, above all, consider that a child is not a sheet of plain blank paper, but that it is a composite arrangement of all the ancestors that one can remember, and of many that one cannot: for unless this is so, no words of mine can describe the misery that can be inflicted on a sensitive, dreamy child, who, to a certain extent, is heavily handicapped in the race of life by the feeble vitality which, as a rule, accompanies such a disposition, and who all too often is made a liar by harsh dealing, and an invalid in life by the hardening process, so dear to the hearts of so many fathers, mothers, and governesses. If, on the contrary, a child is carefully studied—if it be regarded as one by itself and not a sample of a batch, which must be just as are its brothers and sisters—I maintain that childhood must be the very happiest time that we can have: the dreams and happenings, which fill our nights and days, make both equally delightful, while if we are tired to death by lessons and the daily walk, we soon grow out of this, because we can build our own castles in the air out of the driest possible task, and make long and elaborate romances for ourselves out of the—most likely very commonplace—people we meet on our morning scamper. Then, too, was there not the never-to-be-forgotten joy of the yearly visit to the sea, and an equally well-loved return to our usual routine in London, to say nothing of the fascinations of making up one’s mind on the subject of what one was going to be, and how one was to benefit and astonish a world that up to the present time has not seemed quite to come up to our expectations on the subject? Undoubtedly then I say, if the child is in proper hands, that childhood is the happiest time we can possibly have.