Chapter V: Part 5

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.

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[Sidenote: 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.

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[Sidenote: Barry Pain says childish happiness is a delusion.]

I have never understood the feelings of those who are sorry that they are full-grown. To different children there is, of course, a different childhood; but, as a rule, the happiness of childhood is a delusion, and the peace of the perambulator a myth. I believe that any brave and intelligent man can count on the fingers of one hand the things that would really hurt him seriously; the longer you live, the more you realise how few things are really important. But the troubles of childhood are numberless. The agony of terror is alone enough to make childhood the most miserable part of one's existence. The dead came out of their graves and walked into my nursery by night; I dared not open my eyes lest I should see them. There was a waiting figure behind every curtain in dim-lit passages. There were pictures in books that haunted me; I knew two or three of them well--I knew the page on which they came. I opened the book and turned almost up to the dreaded page, and then waited; but I had to go on always. I had to see the eyes staring into mine, and the lips writhing. Then I shut the book quickly, and went away to do something or other that would take my mind away from the picture. I am glad that I am grown-up; I should not care to endure such maddening terrors again. I was far too much ashamed of them then to speak of them; that made them worse. I think that no one who, as a child, was afraid of the dark, would look back upon childhood as the pleasantest period of his life. And, if a child has more troubles than a man, he undoubtedly has fewer pleasures. A child's pleasures are mostly due to its love of acquisition, its vanity, or its appetite being temporarily satisfied. From its natural affection for its parents or friends--if that affection is very strong--it gets far more suffering than pleasure. Any man of average intelligence can do better than that; he has work that interests him, books, or music, or pictures that mean far more to him than any child's pleasure means to the child. It is easy to love children; one of the chief reasons is that pity is akin to love. And on this question of the unhappiness of childhood, I would sooner trust a man's memory than a child's direct statement.

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[Sidenote: Barr is sorry for the small boy.]

The small boy, poor little chap, lives under the most galling despotism that exists on the face of the earth. There is no court of appeal for him. His father is at once his judge, his opposing counsel, his public prosecutor, as it were, his jailer, and his executioner. Every man is a natural tyrant. It has taken centuries of bloodshed and martyrdom on the part of the oppressed to obtain even the poor semblance of liberty that we flatter ourselves we possess. Kings have been beheaded, thrones have been overturned, cities have been given to the flames, and countries have suffered pillage and rapine, all to knock it into the head of that tyrannical brute, man, that, on the whole, it is better not to force his despotism on his fellow-creatures. Yet, human nature has not changed in the least, and where man has full sway, he is as much a tyrant to-day as he was five hundred years ago. Nations have been emancipated, but the kingdom of which the small boy is a subject remains what it always was. Nature, who is a well-meaning blunderer, has tried to set things right, first by planting some natural affection for his small boy into the stony heart of the parent, and, second, by making the small boy himself an optimist. Happily, there is always a silver lining to the cloud that hovers over the small boy, even when the cane is descending upon him. Trifles please the poor little fellow and help him to forget the gloom which surrounds him. Coventry Patmore, in that most touching poem, "The Toys," tells of a father who struck his motherless son, and sent him weeping to bed, and, being tardily remorseful, the father looked at the sleeping boy, whose undried tears were still on his cheek, and found that before going to sleep the stricken lad had arranged his trivial toys, all the cherished possessions of his pocket, so that his eyes might rest on them "to comfort his sad heart."

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[Sidenote: But the future small boy will have still more trouble.]

The small boy does not gain much when he exchanges the tyranny of the home for the tyranny of the school. The schoolmaster is naturally a despot, but he is a despot, limited. To make up for any advantages accruing from the master's limitations, the urchin has to put up with the bullying of the big boy. Possibly there are teachers who have human feelings, as far as the small boy is concerned. We read of such persons in books like "Tom Brown's Schooldays," but it must not be forgotten that these books are works of fiction. The lad who wrote that his master was a beast, but a just beast, may not have been exceptionally lucky, but it is sad to think that the small boy often comes under the dominion of beasts who are not just. But even if masters were all that could be desired, think of the amount of perfectly useless knowledge that a small boy is expected to acquire. How happy was the small boy of 1065 compared with the small boy of 1893. When William the Conqueror, with a man's usual heedlessness of the comfort of small boys, came over in 1066 and popularised that date, he inaugurated a long succession of useless dates that the small boy is compelled to learn. Every monarch has had four figures attached to him, like a picture in an exhibition. Yet was there ever a man stopped in the streets of London, and suddenly confronted with the question, "What year did Henry VIII. come to the throne?" Certainly not. A man would be considered insane who expected any rational being to burden his mind with such trivialities. Yet the small boy is caned if he doesn't know. The only consolation I can offer the unfortunate small boy of to-day is that it will be ever so much worse for the small boy born 3000 years from now. Every day, objectionable and thoughtless men are discovering new things. Then dates will keep accumulating just as they have always been in the habit of doing. Possibly a new specimen of that detestable type of humanity, Euclid, will arise, and perhaps some conscienceless villain may invent a more complicated system of mathematics than algebra. You never can tell what may happen in 3000 years. So the small boy of 1893 may congratulate himself that he is not the small boy of 4893.

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[Sidenote: Mrs. Fenwick Miller thinks it depends upon the parents.]

Childhood ought to be the happiest period of humanity's course; for children are free from the two great sources of grief and wretchedness--the struggle for money and the consciousness of sex. The children of the poor know a want of many comforts, but this is not a source of unhappiness. Absolute necessities of life, the only true wants of childhood, are so few, and all that is really needed by anybody apart from custom or imagination is so cheap, that I do not think that more than a small minority of children are unhappy from actual want. But we, their elders, painfully and acutely want a thousand things because we have tasted them, or because we have imaginations developed to fancy effectively how we should enjoy them; and then we must needs try to get them, and make ourselves wretched in the furious effort after satisfying our desires, and more wretched still because we don't fully succeed. If we could take life as children in this respect, actively wanting only absolute necessaries, and not having to ourselves strive for even the money by which that minimum of wants is to be supplied, would not most of our troubles of this actual moment vanish? Those that remained, would they not nearly all (given health) hang on the tragic fact of sex? Oh, that garden of Gethsemane of humanity, with its blighted seedlings and its blasted blossoms! How keen are its sorrows of desires ungratified and desires satiated--its cruel losses and its yet more cruel relics that _will_ remain. Oh, that dreadful fact of sex, with its emotional agonies, its moral problems, its intellectual interruptions, its social burdens, and only too often its physical pangs--if we were rid, as children are, of all that, and of the struggle for means to meet the daily material wants, should we not be fairly happy? Then childhood, free of all this, must needs be the happiest time of life!