Chapter II: Part 2

As it is, there is sometimes nothing but the fresh and courageous spelling to make his stories go. "He," however, is hardly the pronoun. The girls are the more active authors, and the more prosaic. What they would write had they never read things written for them by the dull, it is not possible to know. What they do write is this--to take a passage: "Poor Mrs. Bald (that was her name) thought she would never get to the wood where her aunt lived, she got down and pulled the donky on by the bridal . . . Alas! her troubles were not over yet, the donky would not go where she wanted it, instead of turning down Rose Lane it went down another, which although Mrs. Bald did not know it led to a very deep and dangerous pond. The donky ran into the pond and Mrs. Bald was dround."

To give a prosperous look to the magazine containing the serial story just quoted, a few pages of mixed advertisements are laboriously written out: "The Imatation of Christ is the best book in all the world." "Read Thompson's poetry and you are in a world of delight." "Barrat's ginger beer is the only ginger beer to drink." "The place for a ice." Under the indefinite heading "A Article," readers are told "that they are liable to read the paper for nothing."

A still younger hand contributes a short story in which the hero returns to his home after a report of his death had been believed by his wife and family. The last sentence is worth quoting: "We will now," says the author, "leave Mrs. White and her two children to enjoy the sudden appearance of Mr. White."

Here is an editorial announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, every week at the end of the paper there will be a little article on the habits of the paper."

On the whole, authorship does not seem to foster the quality of imagination. Convention, during certain early years, may be a very strong motive--not so much with children brought up strictly within its limits, perhaps, as with those who have had an exceptional freedom. Against this, as a kind of childish bohemianism, there is, in one phase of childhood, a strong reaction. To one child, brought up internationally, and with somewhat too much liberty amongst peasant play- mates and their games, in many dialects, eagerness to become like "other people," and even like the other people of quite inferior fiction, grew to be almost a passion. The desire was in time out-grown, but it cost the girl some years of her simplicity. The style is not always the child.

LETTERS

The letter exacted from a child is usually a letter of thanks; somebody has sent him a box of chocolates. The thanks tend to stiffen a child's style; but in any case a letter is the occasion of a sudden self-consciousness, newer to a child than his elders know. They speak prose and know it. But a young child possesses his words by a different tenure; he is not aware of the spelt and written aspect of the things he says every day; he does not dwell upon the sound of them. He is so little taken by the kind and character of any word that he catches the first that comes at random. A little child to whom a peach was first revealed, whispered to his mother, "I like that kind of turnip." Compelled to write a letter, the child finds the word of daily life suddenly a stranger.

The fresher the mind the duller the sentence; and the younger the fingers the older, more wrinkled, and more sidling the handwriting. Dickens, who used his eyes, remarked the contrast. The hand of a child and his face are full of rounds; but his written O is tottering and haggard.

His phrases are ceremonious without the dignity of ceremony. The child chatters because he wants his companion to hear; but there is no inspiration in the act of writing to a distant aunt about whom he probably has some grotesque impression because he cannot think of anyone, however vague and forgotten, without a mental image. As like as not he pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut. No boy wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut. His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under these discouragements, but to write to her in an artless and childlike fashion.

The child is unwieldy of thought, besides. He cannot send the conventional messages but he loses his way among the few pronouns: "I send them their love," "They sent me my love," "I kissed their hand to me." If he is stopped and told to get the words right, he has to make a long effort. His precedent might be cited to excuse every politician who cannot remember whether he began his sentence with "people" in the singular or the plural, and who finishes it otherwise than as he began it. Points of grammar that are purely points of logic baffle a child completely. He is as unready in the thought needed for these as he is in the use of his senses.

It is not true--though it is generally said--that a young child's senses are quick. This is one of the unverified ideas that commend themselves, one knows not why. We have had experiments to compare the relative quickness of perception proved by men and women. The same experiments with children would give curious results, but they can hardly, perhaps, be made, because the children would be not only slow to perceive but slow to announce the perception; so the moment would go by, and the game be lost. Not even amateur conjuring does so baffle the slow turning of a child's mind as does a little intricacy of grammar.

THE FIELDS

The pride of rustic life is the child's form of caste-feeling. The country child is the aristocrat; he has _des relations suivies_ with game-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers. He has a perfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or a suburb. No essayist has so much feeling against terraces and villas.

As for imitation country--the further suburb--it is worse than town; it is a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child's mind is hardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his affairs to think about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom of perpetual observation. The child, compelled to walk, is the only unresting observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, and the tedious people. He is bored as he will never be bored when a man.

He is at his best where, under the welcome stress and pressure of abundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neither in mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of his little gains. On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where maize and grapes are carried in the _botte_, so usually are children expected in the field that _bottes_ are made to the shape of a back and arms of five years old. Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold no more than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans. You may meet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score of times in the morning. Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit sense of what is due to that labourer. When the plums are gathered, for instance, she bakes in the general village oven certain round open tarts across which her arm can hardly reach. No plum tarts elsewhere are anything but dull in comparison with these. There is, besides, the first loaf from the new flour, brown from the maize and white from the wheat. Nor can a day of potato-gathering be more appropriately ended than with a little fire built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under the wood ashes. Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even when the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a child's tooth.

Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in a real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothing but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest of the hedges. They have no little hand in the realities of cultivation, but wild growths give them blackberries. Pale are the joys of nutting beside those of haymaking, but at least they are something.

Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories for the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, taking flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring is for children, who look close. They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense of place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees of the personality of a person; to the child the accidents of voice and look are charged with separate and unique character. Such a sense of place as he got in a day within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that a sound or odour can bring it back in after days, with a shock--even such a sense of single personality does a little watchful girl get from the accents, the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence of a woman. Not all places, nor all persons, are so quick with the expression of themselves; the child knows the difference. As for places that are so loaded, and that breathe so, the child discerns them passionately.

A travelled child multiplies these memories and has them in their variety. His heart has room for many places that have the spirit of place. The glacier may be forgotten, but some little tract of pasture that has taken wing to the head of a mountain valley, a field that has soared up a pass unnamed, will become a memory, in time, sixty years old. That is a fortunate child who has tasted country life in places far apart, who has helped, followed the wheat to the threshing-floor of a Swiss village, stumbled after a plough of Virgil's shape in remoter Tuscan hills, and gleaned after a vintage. You cannot suggest pleasanter memories than those of the vintage, for the day when the wine will be old.

THE BARREN SHORE

It may be a disappointment to the children each year at play upon so many beaches--even if they are but dimly aware of their lack--to find their annual plaything to be not a real annual; an annual thing, indeed, to them, for the arbitrary reason that they go down to it once a year, but not annual in the vital and natural sense of the seasons, not waxing and waning, not bearing, not turning that circle of the seasons whereof no one knows which is the highest point and the secret and the ultimate purpose, not recreated, not new, and not yielding to the child anything raw and irregular to eat.

Sand castles are well enough, and they are the very commonplace of the recollections of elders, of their rhetoric, and of what they think appropriate for their young ones. Shingle and sand are good playthings, but absolute play is not necessarily the ideal of a child; he would rather have a frolic of work. Of all the early autumn things to be done in holiday time, that game with the beach and the wave is the least good for holiday-time.

Not that the shore is everywhere so barren. The coast of the Londoners--all round the southern and eastern borders of England--is indeed the dullest of all sea-margins. But away in the gentle bays of Jersey the summer grows a crop of seaweed which the long ocean wave leaves in noble curves upon the beach; for under sunny water the storms have gathered the crops. The Channel Island people go gleaning after the sea, and store the seaweed for their fields. Thus the beaches of Jersey bays are not altogether barren, and have a kind of dead and accessory harvest for the farmer. After a night of storm these crops are stacked and carted and carried, the sea-wind catching away loose shreds from the summits of the loads.

Further south, if the growth of the sea is not so put to use, the shore has yet its seasons. You could hardly tell, if you did not know the month, whether a space of sea or a series of waves, at Aldborough, say, or at Dover, were summer or winter water; but in those fortunate regions which are southern, yet not too southern for winter, and have thus the strongest swing of change and the fullest pulse of the year, there are a winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and the vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can rest; and where you float, there float also by you opalescent jelly-fish, half transparent in the perfectly transparent water. An hour in the warm sea is not enough. Rock-bathing is done on lonely shores. A city may be but a mile away, and the cultivated vineyards may be close above the seaside pine-trees, but the place is perfectly remote. You pitch your tent on any little hollow of beach. A charming Englishwoman who used to bathe with her children under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villa in the motionless white evenings of summer put white roses in her hair, and liked to sit out on a rock at sea where the first rays of the moon would touch her.

You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing in the world is more uninteresting than eleven o'clock. It is the hour of mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o'clock on a shingly beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing. Twelve has a dignity always, and everywhere its name is great. The noon of every day that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly. One o'clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hour of the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening and lingering life. To bathe at eleven in the sun, in the wind, to bathe from a machine, in a narrow sea that is certainly not clear and is only by courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience to a tyrannical tide and in water that is always much colder than yourself, to bathe in a hurry and in public--this is to know nothing rightly of one of the greatest of all the pleasures that humanity takes with nature.

By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea than of mere straits. These temperate islands would be better called the Ocean Islands. When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, he composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter of some thought. The final decision was to direct it, "A Victor Hugo, Ocean." It reached him. It even received a reply: "I am the Past, you are the Future; I am, etc." If an English boy had had the same idea the name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it. "A Victor Hugo, La Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but "the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last is suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland--formless grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by a perpetual wind.

As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea, machine-bathing at eleven o'clock will hardly furnish them with a magical early memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It was vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of all ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and superfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of water had they," poor infants.

None the less is the barren shore the children's; and St. Augustine, Isaac Newton, and Wordsworth had not a vision of sea-beaches without a child there.

THE BOY

After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood of few explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phase which the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note as an impression.

Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described but by negatives. Above all, he is not demonstrative. The days are long gone by when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and a pipe. One or two of these things he has, and he takes them without the least swagger. He avoids expression of any kind. Any satisfaction he may feel with things as they are is rather to be surprised in his manner than perceived in his action. Mr. Jaggers, when it befell him to be astonished, showed it by a stop of manner, for an indivisible moment--not by a pause in the thing he chanced to be about. In like manner the boy cannot prevent his most innocent pleasures from arresting him.

He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told to do anything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home. His elders probably give him as few orders as possible. He will almost ingeniously evade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted upon him, but if he does but succeed in only postponing his obedience, he has, visibly, done something for his own relief. It is less convenient that he should hold mere questions, addressed to him in all good faith, as in some sort an attempt upon his liberty.

Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage. But it is against impersonal and indifferent questions also that the boy sets his face like a rock. He has no ambition to give information on any point. Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and there are even those who bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for the pleasure of answering them with animation. This, the boy perhaps thinks, is "fuss," and, if he has any passions, he has a passionate dislike of fuss.

When a younger child tears the boy's scrapbook (which is conjectured, though not known, to be the dearest thing he has) he betrays no emotion; that was to be expected. But when the stolen pages are rescued and put by for him, he abstains from taking an interest in the retrieval; he will do nothing to restore them. To do so would mar the integrity of his reserve. If he would do much rather than answer questions, he would suffer something rather than ask them.

He loves his father and a friend of his father's, and he pushes them, in order to show it without compromising his temperament.

He is a partisan in silence. It may be guessed that he is often occupied in comparing other people with his admired men. Of this too he says little, except some brief word of allusion to what other men do _not_ do.

When he speaks it is with a carefully shortened vocabulary. As an author shuns monotony, so does the boy shun change. He does not generally talk slang; his habitual words are the most usual of daily words made useful and appropriate by certain varieties of voice. These express for him all that he will consent to communicate. He reserves more by speaking dull words with zeal than by using zealous words that might betray him. But his brevity is the chief thing; he has almost made an art of it.

He is not "merry." Merry boys have pretty manners, and it must be owned that this boy's manners are not pretty. But if not merry, he is happy; there never was a more untroubled soul. If he has an almost grotesque reticence, he has no secrets. Nothing that he thinks is very much hidden. Even if he did not push his father, it would be evident that the boy loves him; even if he never laid his hand (and this little thing he does rarely) on his friend's shoulder, it would be plain that he loves his friend. His happiness appears in his moody and charming face, his ambition in his dumbness, and the hopes of his life to come in ungainly bearing. How does so much heart, how does so much sweetness, all unexpressed, appear? For it is not only those who know him well that know the child's heart; strangers are aware of it. This, which he would not reveal, is the only thing that is quite unmistakable and quite conspicuous.

What he thinks that he turns visibly to the world is a sense of humour, with a measure of criticism and of indifference. What he thinks the world may divine in him is courage and an intelligence. But carry himself how he will, he is manifestly a tender, gentle, and even spiritual creature, masculine and innocent--"a nice boy." There is no other way of describing him than that of his own brief language.

ILLNESS

The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some little books, but none the less a fresh fact. In spite of the sentimental, children in illness remain the full sources of perpetual surprises. Their self-control in real suffering is a wonder. A little turbulent girl, brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might be thought, to deal in any way with her own impulses--a child whose way was to cry out, laugh, complain, and triumph without bating anything of her own temperament, and without the hesitation of a moment, struck her face, on a run, against a wall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed with pain and covered with blood. "Tell mother it's nothing! Tell mother, quick, it's nothing!" cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.

The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to lie for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken little body might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure, painful; and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded by twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that had carried her through all her years--impulse. A condition of acute consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of life had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of a child's days and nights at eight years old.

Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient, not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never used before. "You are exquisite to me, mother," she said, at receiving some common service.

Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous child assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience. Not that illness is to be trusted to work so. There is another child who in his brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally. The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but an impossibility; but in any case it would be a failure. You can bring the spoon to the child, but three nurses cannot make him drink. This, then, is the occasion of the ultimate resistance. He raises the standard of revolution, and casts every tradition and every precept to the wind on which it flies. He has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursue him with a grotesque spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment, still more grotesque. He is committed to the wild novelty of absolute refusal. He not only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throws everything over. Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilist laughs.

Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy. "Am I unwell to-day, mother?" asks a child with all his faith and confidence at the highest point.

THE YOUNG CHILD

The infant of literature "wails" and wails feebly, with the invariability of a thing unproved and taken for granted. Nothing, nevertheless, could be more unlike a wail than the most distinctive cry whereon the child of man catches his first breath. It is a hasty, huddled outcry, sharp and brief, rather deep than shrill in tone. With all deference to old moralities, man does not weep at beginning this world; he simply lifts up his new voice much as do the birds in the Zoological Gardens, and with much the same tone as some of the duck kind there. He does not weep for some months to come. His outcry soon becomes the human cry that is better known than loved, but tears belong to later infancy. And if the infant of days neither wails nor weeps, the infant of months is still too young to be gay. A child's mirth, when at last it begins, is his first secret; you understand little of it. The first smile (for the convulsive movement in sleep that is popularly adorned by that name is not a smile) is an uncertain sketch of a smile, unpractised but unmistakable. It is accompanied by a single sound--a sound that would be a monosyllable if it were articulate--which is the utterance, though hardly the communication, of a private jollity. That and that alone is the real beginning of human laughter.

From the end of the first fortnight in life, when it appears for the first time, and as it were flickeringly, the child's smile begins to grow definite and, gradually, more frequent. By very slow degrees the secrecy passes away, and the dryness becomes more genial. The child now smiles more openly, but he is still very unlike the laughing creature of so much prose and verse. His laughter takes a long time to form. The monosyllable grows louder, and then comes to be repeated with little catches of the breath. The humour upon which he learns to laugh is that of something which approaches him quickly and then withdraws. This is the first intelligible jest of jesting man.

An infant never meets your eyes; he evidently does not remark the features of faces near him. Whether because of the greater conspicuousness of dark hair or dark hat, or for some like reason, he addresses his looks, his laughs, and apparently his criticism, to the heads, not the faces, of his friends. These are the ways of all infants, various in character, parentage, race, and colour; they do the same things. There are turns in a kitten's play--arched leapings and sidelong jumps, graceful rearings and grotesque dances--which the sacred kittens of Egypt used in their time. But not more alike are these repetitions than the impulses of all young children learning to laugh.

In regard to the child of a somewhat later growth, we are told much of his effect upon the world; not much of the effect of the world upon him. Yet he is compelled to endure the reflex results, at least, of all that pleases, distresses, or oppresses the world. That he should be obliged to suffer the moods of men is a more important thing than that men should be amused by his moods. If he is saddened, that is certainly much more than that his elders should be gladdened. It is doubtless hardly possible that children should go altogether free of human affairs. They might, in mere justice, be spared the burden they bear ignorantly and simply when it is laid upon them, of such events and ill fortunes as may trouble our peace; but they cannot easily be spared the hearing of a disturbed voice or the sight of an altered face. Alas! they are made to feel money-matters, and even this is not the worst. There are unconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries, of which they do not know the names, but which change the faces where they look for smiles. To such alterations children are sensitive even when they seem least accessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels of elders. Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droop when their defied tyrants are dejected.

For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is a mere impulse and is easily disconcerted. They are gay without knowing any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were, proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they are helpless and find no stay. For this reason the merriest of all children are those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in a family nor in a public home by paid guardians, but in a place of charity, rightly named, where impartial, unalterable, and impersonal devotion has them in hand. They endure an immeasurable loss, and are orphans, but they gain in perpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature. The separate nest is nature's, and the best; but it might be wished that the separate nest were less subject to moods. The nurse has her private business, and when it does not prosper, and when the remote affairs of the governess go wrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration of the mishap.

The uniformity of infancy passes away long before the age when children have this indefinite suffering inflicted upon them; and they have become infinitely various, and feel the consequences of the cares of their elders in unnumbered degrees. The most charming children feel them the most sensibly, and not with resentment but with sympathy. It is assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists the virtue of childhood. What other thing are we to learn of them? Not simplicity, for they are intricate enough. Not gratitude; for their usual sincere thanklessness makes half the pleasure of doing them good. Not obedience; for the child is born with the love of liberty. And as for humility, the boast of a child is the frankest thing in the world. A child's natural vanity is not merely the delight in his own possessions, but the triumph over others less fortunate. If this emotion were not so young it would be exceedingly unamiable. But the truth must be confessed that having very quickly learnt the value of comparison and relation, a child rejoices in the perception that what he has is better than what his brother has; this comparison is a means of judging his fortune, after all. It is true that if his brother showed distress, he might make haste to offer an exchange. But the impulse of joy is candidly egotistic.

It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask pity for their sorrows from those who have caused them, who do not perceive that they are wronged, who never dream that they are forgiving, and who make no bargain for apologies--it is this that men and women are urged to learn of a child. Graces more confessedly childlike they make shift to teach themselves.

FAIR AND BROWN

George Eliot, in one of her novels, has a good-natured mother, who confesses that when she administers justice she is obliged to spare the offenders who have fair hair, because they look so much more innocent than the rest. And if this is the state of maternal feelings where all are more or less fair, what must be the miscarriage of justice in countries where a _blond_ angel makes his infrequent visit within the family circle?

In England he is the rule, and supreme as a matter of course. He is "English," and best, as is the early asparagus and the young potato, according to the happy conviction of the shops. To say "child" in England is to say "fair-haired child," even as in Tuscany to say "young man" is to say "tenor." "I have a little party to-night, eight or ten tenors, from neighbouring palazzi, to meet my English friends."

But France is a greater enthusiast than our now country. The fairness and the golden hair are here so much a matter of orthodoxy, that they are not always mentioned; they are frequently taken for granted. Not so in France; the French go out of their way to make the exceptional fairness of their children the rule of their literature. No French child dare show his face in a book--prose or poetry--without blue eyes and fair hair. It is a thing about which the French child of real life can hardly escape a certain sensitiveness. What, he may ask, is the use of being a dark-haired child of fact, when all the emotion, all the innocence, all the romance, are absorbed by the flaxen-haired child of fiction? How deplorable that our mothers, the French infants may say, should have their unattained ideals in the nurseries of the imagination; how dismal that they should be perpetually disillusioned in the nurseries of fact! Is there then no sentiment for us? they may ask. Will not convention, which has been forced to restore the advantage to truth on so many other points, be compelled to yield on this point also, and reconcile our aunts to the family colouring?

All the schools of literature are in a tale. The classic masters, needless to say, do not stoop to the colouring of boys and girls; but as soon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair ever in it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue, and no cheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses. Victor Hugo, who discovered the child of modern poetry, never omits the touch of description; the word _blond_ is as inevitable as any epithet marshalled to attend its noun in a last-century poet's dictionary. One would not have it away; one can hear the caress with which the master pronounces it, "making his mouth," as Swift did for his "little language." Nor does the customary adjective fail in later literature. It was dear to the Realist, and it is dear to the Symbolist. The only difference is that in the French of the Symbolist it precedes the noun.

And yet it is time that the sweetness of the dark child should have its day. He is really no less childlike than the other. There is a pretty antithesis between the strong effect of his colouring and the softness of his years and of his months. The blond human being--man, woman or child--has the beauty of harmony; the hair plays off from the tones of the flesh, only a few degrees brighter or a few degrees darker. Contrast of colour there is, in the blue of the eyes, and in the red of cheek and lip, but there is no contrast of tone. The whole effect is that of much various colour and of equal tone. In the dark face there is hardly any colour and an almost complete opposition of tone. The complete opposition, of course, would be black and white; and a beautiful dark child comes near to this, but for the lovely modifications, the warmth of his white, and of his black alike, so that the one tone, as well as the other, is softened towards brown. It is the beauty of contrast, with a suggestion of harmony--as it were a beginning of harmony--which is infinitely lovely.

Nor is the dark child lacking in variety. His radiant eyes range from a brown so bright that it looks golden in the light, to a brown so dark that it barely defines the pupil. So is his hair various, answering the sun with unsuspected touches, not of gold but of bronze. And his cheek is not invariably pale. A dusky rose sometimes lurks there with such an effect of vitality as you will hardly get from the shallower pink of the flaxened haired. And the suggestion is that of late summer, the colour of wheat almost ready for the harvest, and darker, redder flowers--poppies and others--than come in Spring.

The dark eyes, besides, are generally brighter--they shelter a more liquid light than the blue or grey. Southern eyes have generally most beautiful whites. And as to the charm of the childish figure, there is usually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener that is at least as young and sweet as the round form of the blond child. And yet the painters of Italy would have none of it. They rejected the dusky brilliant pale little Italians all about them; they would have none but flaxen-haired children, and they would have nothing that was slim, nothing that was thin, nothing that was shadowy. They rejoiced in much fair flesh, and in all possible freshness. So it was in fair Flanders as well as in dark Italy. But so it was not in Spain. The Pyrenees seemed to interrupt the tradition. And as Murillo saw the charm of dark heads, and the innocence of dark eyes, so did one English painter. Reynolds painted young dark hair as tenderly as the youngest gold.

REAL CHILDHOOD

The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods and of their impressions. Your hours when you were six were the enormous hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick forgetfulness. Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up, he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right value, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile, were infinitely tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.

Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit fully to confess it.

You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly that you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a dreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain of it to the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of the world in their hands--your seniors. You remembered the duration of some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.

As to the length of Beethoven, experienced by you on duty in the drawing room, it would be curious to know whether it was really something greater than Beethoven had any idea of. You sat and listened, and tried to fix a passage in your mind as a kind of half-way mark, with the deliberate provident intention of helping yourself through the time during a future hearing; for you knew too well that you would have to bear it all again. You could not do the same with sermons, because, though even more fatiguing, they were more or less different each time.

While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--and a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every house you lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence of mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it. As to the length of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words do not measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleep in childhood. Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from the duration of time--the names of streets, the names of tradesmen, especially the _fournisseurs_ of the household, who lived in them.

You were bored by people. It did not occur to you to be tired of those of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially. Nor were you bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless they held you, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible voices and so look at their mannered faces that they released you an older child than they took you prisoner. But--it is a reluctant confession--you were tired of your relations; you were weary of their bonnets. Measured by adult time, those bonnets were, it is to be presumed, of no more than reasonable duration; they had no more than the average or common life. You have no reason, looking back, to believe that your great-aunts wore bonnets for great and indefinite spaces of time. But, to your sense as a child, long and changing and developing days saw the same harassing artificial flowers hoisted up with the same black lace. You would have had a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but you deliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet. So with dresses, especially such as had any little misfit about them. For you it had always existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing. You seemed to have been aware of it for years. By the way, there would be less cheap reproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knew how immensely old their old clothes are to them.

The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary ugliness of things, and that--apart from the effects of _ennui_--they reject that ugliness actively. You have stood and listened to your mother's compliments on her friend's hat, and have made your mental protest in very definite words. You thought it hideous, and hideous things offended you then more than they have ever offended you since. At nine years old you made people, alas! responsible for their faces, as you do still in a measure, though you think you do not. You severely made them answer for their clothes, in a manner which you have seen good reason, in later life, to mitigate. Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, you had no mercy. To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they were friskiness of manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with rather bygone or frumpish fashions. Too much childish dislike was wasted so.

But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learnt later. At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the contrast of a white kid glove and a bright red wrist. Well, this is not the received arrangement, but red and white do go well together, and their distribution has to be taught with time. Whose were the wrist and glove? Certainly some one's who must have been distressed at the _bouquet_ of colour that you admired. This, however, was but a local admiration. You did not admire the girl as a whole. She whom you adored was always a married woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but always divinely elegant. She alone was worthy to stand at the side of your mother. You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for a chance of holding her bracelet when she played. You composed prose in honour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown to yourself) a "catalogue." She took singularly little notice of you.

Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature. The light of summer morning before sunrise was to you a spiritual splendour for which you wanted no name. The Mediterranean under the first perceptible touch of the moon, the calm southern sea in the full blossom of summer, the early spring everywhere, in the showery streets, in the fields, or at sea, left old childish memories with you which you try to evoke now when you see them again. But the cloudy dusk behind poplars on the plains of France, the flying landscape from the train, willows, and the last of the light, were more mournful to you then than you care to remember now. So were the black crosses on the graves of the French village; so were cypresses, though greatly beloved.

If you were happy enough to be an internationally educated child, you had much at heart the heart of every country you knew. You disliked the English accent of your compatriots abroad with a scorn to which, needless to say, you are not tempted now. You had shocks of delight from Swiss woods full of lilies of the valley, and from English fields full of cowslips. You had disquieting dreams of landscape and sun, and of many of these you cannot now tell which were visions of travel and which visions of slumber. Your strong sense of place made you love some places too keenly for peace.