THE CHILDREN(孩子们)

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THE CHILDREN

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A

BIRD, I.

To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour,

disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the pre-

occupations. You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by

year, do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not

the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenated ways of a child

you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you

where you tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault.

You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of

time to your footing.

No man's fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four

years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and

unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving

dolls." A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from

the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there

was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, "Mother, do be a

lady frog." None ever said their good things before these indeliberate

authors. Even their own kind--children--have not preceded them. No

child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose

father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse,

and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a

mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. "Do

you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things for

you." "Do you work," she asked, "to buy the lovely puddin's?" Yes,

even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth

pursuing. "And do you work to buy the fat? I don't like fat."

The sympathies, nevertheless, are there. The same child was to be

soothed at night after a weeping dream that a skater had been drowned in

the Kensington Round Pond. It was suggested to her that she should

forget it by thinking about the one unfailing and gay subject--her wishes.

THE CHILDREN

"Do you know," she said, without loss of time, "what I should like best in

all the world? A thundred dolls and a whistle!" Her mother was so

overcome by this tremendous numeral, that she could make no offer as to

the dolls. But the whistle seemed practicable. "It is for me to whistle

for cabs," said the child, with a sudden moderation, "when I go to parties."

Another morning she came down radiant, "Did you hear a great noise in

the miggle of the night? That was me crying. I cried because I dreamt

that Cuckoo [a brother] had swallowed a bead into his nose."

The mere errors of children are unforeseen as nothing is--no, nothing

feminine--in this adult world. "I've got a lotter than you," is the word of

a very young egotist. An older child says, "I'd better go, bettern't I,

mother?" He calls a little space at the back of a London house, "the

backy-garden." A little creature proffers almost daily the reminder at

luncheon--at tart-time: "Father, I hope you will remember that I am the

favourite of the crust." Moreover, if an author set himself to invent the

naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he

would hardly light upon the device of the little troupe who, having no

footlights, arranged upon the floor a long row of--candle-shades!

"It's JOLLY dull without you, mother," says a little girl who-- gentlest

of the gentle--has a dramatic sense of slang, of which she makes no secret.

But she drops her voice somewhat to disguise her feats of metathesis,

about which she has doubts and which are involuntary: the "stand-

wash," the "sweeping-crosser," the "sewing chamine." Genoese peasants

have the same prank when they try to speak Italian.

Children forget last year so well that if they are Londoners they should

by any means have an impression of the country or the sea annually. A

London little girl watches a fly upon the wing, follows it with her pointing

finger, and names it "bird." Her brother, who wants to play with a bronze

Japanese lobster, ask "Will you please let me have that tiger?"

At times children give to a word that slight variety which is the most

touching kind of newness. Thus, a child of three asks you to save him.

How moving a word, and how freshly said! He had heard of the "saving"

of other things of interest--especially chocolate creams taken for safe-

keeping--and he asks, "Who is going to save me to-day? Nurse is going

THE CHILDREN

out, will you save me, mother?" The same little variant upon common

use is in another child's courteous reply to a summons to help in the

arrangement of some flowers, "I am quite at your ease."

A child, unconscious little author of things told in this record, was

taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from her

own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. As he

dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she noted

with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they might

be those of the fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop, and

that is his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally, with even

heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming parterre of confectionery

hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose, is where he buys

his sugar pigs."

In all her excursions into streets new to her, this same child is intent

upon a certain quest--the quest of a genuine collector. We have all heard

of collecting butterflies, of collecting china-dogs, of collecting cocked hats,

and so forth; but her pursuit gives her a joy that costs her nothing except a

sharp look-out upon the proper names over all shop-windows. No hoard

was ever lighter than hers. "I began three weeks ago next Monday,

mother," she says with precision, "and I have got thirty-nine." "Thirty-

nine what?" "Smiths."

THE CHILDREN

FELLOW TRAVELLERS WITH A

BIRD. II.

The mere gathering of children's language would be much like

collecting together a handful of flowers that should be all unique, single of

their kind. In one thing, however, do children agree, and that is the

rejection of most of the conventions of the authors who have reported

them. They do not, for example, say "me is;" their natural reply to "are

you?" is "I are." One child, pronouncing sweetly and neatly, will have

nothing but the nominative pronoun. "Lift I up and let I see it raining," she

bids; and told that it does not rain, resumes, "Lift I up and let I see it not

raining."

An elder child had a rooted dislike to a brown corduroy suit ordered

for her by maternal authority. She wore the garments under protest, and

with some resentment. At the same time it was evident that she took no

pleasure in hearing her praises sweetly sung by a poet, her friend. He

had imagined the making of this child in the counsels of Heaven, and the

decreeing of her soft skin, of her brilliant eyes, and of her hair--"a brown

tress." She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and she

silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of

Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy.

The unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a

phrase for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. "That," she

said more or less after Sterne, "is a cotton-wool story."

The learning of words is, needless to say, continued long after the

years of mere learning to speak. The young child now takes a current

word into use, a little at random, and now makes a new one, so as to save

the interruption of a pause for search. I have certainly detected, in

children old enough to show their motives, a conviction that a word of

their own making is as good a communication as another, and as

intelligible. There is even a general implicit conviction among them that

the grown-up people, too, make words by the wayside as occasion befalls.

THE CHILDREN

How otherwise should words be so numerous that every day brings

forward some hitherto unheard? The child would be surprised to know

how irritably poets are refused the faculty and authority which he thinks to

belong to the common world.

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting-out of

a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much

confidence in the chances of the hedge. He goes free, a simple

adventurer. Nor does he make any officious effort to invent anything

strange or particularly expressive or descriptive. The child trusts genially

to his hearer. A very young boy, excited by his first sight of sunflowers,

was eager to describe them, and called them, without allowing himself to

be checked for the trifle of a name, "summersets." This was simple and

unexpected; so was the comment of a sister a very little older. "Why

does he call those flowers summersets?" their mother said; and the girl,

with a darkly brilliant look of humour and penetration, answered, "because

they are so big." There seemed to be no further question possible after an

explanation that was presented thus charged with meaning.

To a later phase of life, when a little girl's vocabulary was, somewhat

at random, growing larger, belong a few brave phrases hazarded to express

a meaning well realized--a personal matter. Questioned as to the eating of

an uncertain number of buns just before lunch, the child averred, "I took

them just to appetize my hunger." As she betrayed a familiar knowledge

of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked whether she and

her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on their way from

school. "I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed; "but I generally

speculate outside."

Children sometimes attempt to cap something perfectly funny with

something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Dryden

does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But

sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders. Take

the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her

family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something of her

own writing. The child has a full and gay sense of the sweetest kinds of

irony. There was no need for her to write, she and her mother being both at

THE CHILDREN

home, but the words must have seemed to her worthy of a pen: --"My dear

mother, I really wonder how you can be proud of that article, if it is

worthy to be called a article, which I doubt. Such a unletterary article.

I cannot call it letterature. I hope you will not write any more such

unconventionan trash."

This is the saying of a little boy who admired his much younger sister,

and thought her forward for her age: "I wish people knew just how old

she is, mother, then they would know she is onward. They can see she is

pretty, but they can't know she is such a onward baby."

Thus speak the naturally unreluctant; but there are other children who

in time betray a little consciousness and a slight mefiance as to where the

adult sense of humour may be lurking in wait for them, obscure. These

children may not be shy enough to suffer any self- checking in their talk,

but they are now and then to be heard slurring a word of which they do not

feel too sure. A little girl whose sensitiveness was barely enough to

cause her to stop to choose between two words, was wont to bring a cup of

tea to the writing- table of her mother, who had often feigned indignation

at the weakness of what her Irish maid always called "the infusion." "I'm

afraid it's bosh again, mother," said the child; and then, in a half-whisper,

"Is bosh right, or wash, mother?" She was not told, and decided for

herself, with doubts, for bosh. The afternoon cup left the kitchen an

infusion, and reached the library "bosh" thenceforward.

THE CHILDREN

CHILDREN IN MIDWINTER

Children are so flowerlike that it is always a little fresh surprise to see

them blooming in winter. Their tenderness, their down, their colour, their

fulness--which is like that of a thick rose or of a tight grape--look out of

season. Children in the withering wind are like the soft golden-pink

roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathing a southern calm on

the north wind. The child has something better than warmth in the cold,

something more subtly out of place and more delicately contrary; and that

is coolness. To be cool in the cold is the sign of a vitality quite

exquisitely alien from the common conditions of the world. It is to have

a naturally, and not an artificially, different and separate climate.

We can all be more or less warm--with fur, with skating, with tea, with

fire, and with sleep--in the winter. But the child is fresh in the wind, and

wakes cool from his dreams, dewy when there is hoar- frost everywhere

else; he is "more lovely and more temperate" than the summer day and

than the winter day alike. He overcomes both heat and cold by another

climate, which is the climate of life; but that victory of life is more

delicate and more surprising in the tyranny of January. By the sight and

the touch of children, we are, as it were, indulged with something finer

than a fruit or a flower in untimely bloom. The childish bloom is always

untimely. The fruit and flower will be common later on; the strawberries

will be a matter of course anon, and the asparagus dull in its day. But a

child is a perpetual primeur.

Or rather he is not in truth always untimely. Some few days in the

year are his own season--unnoticed days of March or April, soft, fresh and

equal, when the child sleeps and rises with the sun. Then he looks as

though he had his brief season, and ceases for a while to seem strange.

It is no wonder that we should try to attribute the times of the year to

children; their likeness is so rife among annuals. For man and woman we

are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously

their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel,

without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a

THE CHILDREN

quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children--for a waxing that

shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall not be final,

shall not be fatal. But every winter shows us how human they are, and

how they are little pilgrims and visitants among the things that look like

their kin. For every winter shows them free from the east wind; more

perfectly than their elders, they enclose the climate of life. And, moreover,

with them the climate of life is the climate of the spring of life; the climate

of a human March that is sure to make a constant progress, and of a human

April that never hesitates. The child "breathes April and May"--an inner

April and his own May.

The winter child looks so much the more beautiful for the season as

his most brilliant uncles and aunts look less well. He is tender and gay in

the east wind. Now more than ever must the lover beware of making a

comparison between the beauty of the admired woman and the beauty of a

child. He is indeed too wary ever to make it. So is the poet. As

comparisons are necessary to him, he will pay a frankly impossible

homage, and compare a woman's face to something too fine, to something

it never could emulate. The Elizabethan lyrist is safe among lilies and

cherries, roses, pearls, and snow. He undertakes the beautiful office of

flattery, and flatters with courage. There is no hidden reproach in the

praise. Pearls and snow suffer, in a sham fight, a mimic defeat that does

them no harm, and no harm comes to the lady's beauty from a competition

so impossible. She never wore a lily or a coral in the colours of her face,

and their beauty is not hers. But here is the secret: she is compared

with a flower because she could not endure to be compared with a child.

That would touch her too nearly. There would be the human texture and

the life like hers, but immeasurably more lovely. No colour, no surface, no

eyes of woman have ever been comparable with the colour, the surface,

and the eyes of childhood. And no poet has ever run the risk of such a

defeat. Why, it is defeat enough for a woman to have her face, however

well-favoured, close to a child's, even if there is no one by who should be

rash enough to approach them still nearer by a comparison.

This, needless to say, is true of no other kind of beauty than that

beauty of light, colour, and surface to which the Elizabethans referred, and

THE CHILDREN

which suggested their flatteries in disfavour of the lily. There are, indeed,

other adult beauties, but those are such as make no allusions to the garden.

What is here affirmed is that the beautiful woman who is widely and

wisely likened to the flowers, which are inaccessibly more beautiful, must

not, for her own sake, be likened to the always accessible child.

Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is

much beyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition, this

completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their beauty of

finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as years are

added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection. A bloom

disappears, for instance. In some little children the whole face, and

especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and the

growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft as

bloom. Look then at the eyebrows themselves. Their line is as definite

as in later life, but there is in the child the flush given by the exceeding

fineness of the delicate hairs. Moreover, what becomes, afterwards, of

the length and the curl of the eyelash? What is there in growing up that

is destructive of a finish so charming as this?

Queen Elizabeth forbade any light to visit her face "from the right or

from the left" when her portrait was a-painting. She was an observant

woman, and liked to be lighted from the front. It is a light from the right

or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows. And

you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing and

parting caress that infancy has given to his face. The down will then be

found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red of his cheek.

His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not much harder than

petals.

To return to the child in January. It is his month for the laying up of

dreams. No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even with a

majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs now

and then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a charm and

glory mingled with uncertain dreams. Never forgotten, and yet never

certainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening. When

many and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there never was

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THECHILDREN1THECHILDRENTHECHILDREN2FELLOWTRAVELLERSWITHABIRD,I.Toattendtoalivingchildistobebaffledinyourhumour,disappointedofyourpathos,andsetfreshlyfreefromallthepre-occupations.Youcannotanticipatehim.Blackbirds,overheardyearbyyear,donotcomposethesamephrases;nevertwoleitmotifsalike.Notthetone,butth...

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