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Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. Summer dusk, especially, is the frolic moment for children, baffle them how you may. They may have been in a pottering mood all day, intent upon all kinds of close industries, breathing hard over choppings and poundings. But when late twilight comes, there comes also the punctual wildness. The children will run and pursue, and laugh for the mere movement--it does so jog their spirits.

What remembrances does this imply of the hunt, what of the predatory dark? The kitten grows alert at the same hour, and hunts for moths and crickets in the grass. It comes like an imp, leaping on all fours. The children lie in ambush and fall upon one another in the mimicry of hunting.

The sudden outbreak of action is complained of as a defiance and a rebellion. Their entertainers are tired, and the children are to go home. But, with more or less of life and fire, they strike some blow for liberty. It may be the impotent revolt of the ineffectual child, or the stroke of the conqueror; but something, something is done for freedom under the early stars.

This is not the only time when the energy of children is in conflict with the weariness of men. But it is less tolerable that the energy of men should be at odds with the weariness of children, which happens at some time of their jaunts together, especially, alas! in the jaunts of the poor.

Of games for the summer dusk when it rains, cards are most beloved by children. Three tiny girls were to be taught "old maid" to beguile the time. One of them, a nut-brown child of five, was persuading another to play. "Oh come," she said, "and play with me at new maid."

The time of falling asleep is a child's immemorial and incalculable hour. It is full of traditions, and beset by antique habits. The habit of prehistoric races has been cited as the only explanation of the fixity of some customs in mankind. But if the enquirers who appeal to that beginning remembered better their own infancy, they would seek no further. See the habits in falling to sleep which have children in their thralldom. Try to overcome them in any child, and his own conviction of their high antiquity weakens your hand.

If English children are not rocked to many such aged lullabies, some of them are put to sleep to strange cradle-songs. The affectionate races that are brought into subjection sing the primitive lullaby to the white child. Asiatic voices and African persuade him to sleep in the tropical night. His closing eyes are filled with alien images.

THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS

It is generally understood in the family that the nurse who menaces a child, whether with the supernatural or with simple sweeps, lions, or tigers--goes. The rule is a right one, for the appeal to fear may possibly hurt a child; nevertheless, it oftener fails to hurt him. If he is prone to fears, he will be helpless under their grasp, without the help of human tales. The night will threaten him, the shadow will pursue, the dream will catch him; terror itself have him by the heart. And terror, having made his pulses leap, knows how to use any thought, any shape, any image, to account to the child's mind for the flight and tempest of his blood. "The child shall not be frightened," decrees ineffectual love; but though no man make him afraid, he is frightened. Fear knows him well and finds him alone.

Such a child is hardly at the mercy of any human rashness and impatience; nor is the child whose pulses go steadily, and whose brows are fresh and cool, at their mercy. This is one of the points upon which a healthy child resembles the Japanese. Whatever that extreme Oriental may be in war and diplomacy, whatever he may be at London University, or whatever his plans of Empire, in relation to the unseen world he is a child at play. He hides himself, he hides his eyes and pretends to believe that he is hiding, he runs from the supernatural and laughs for the fun of running.

So did a child, threatened for his unruliness with the revelation of the man with two heads. The nurse must have had recourse to this man under acute provocation. The boy, who had profited well by every one of his four long years, and was radiant with the light and colour of health, refused to be left to compose himself to sleep. That act is an adult act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life, when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of setting forth. But the child is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to sleep, than he takes a "constitutional" with his hoop and hoopstick. The child amuses himself up to the last of his waking moments. Happily, in the search for amusement, he is apt to learn some habit or to cherish some toy, either of which may betray him and deliver him up to sleep, the enemy. What wonder, then, if a child who knows that everyone in the world desires his peace and pleasure, should clamour for companionship in the first reluctant minutes of bed? This child, being happy, did not weep for what he wanted; he shouted for it in the rousing tones of his strength. After many evenings of this he was told that this was precisely the vociferous kind of wakefulness that might cause the man with two heads to show himself.

Unable to explain that no child ever goes to sleep, but that sleep, on the contrary, "goes" for a child, the little boy yet accepted the penalty, believed in the man, and kept quiet for a time.

There was indignation in the mother's heart when the child instructed her as to what might be looked for at his bedside; she used all her emphasis in assuring him that no man with two heads would ever trouble those innocent eyes, for there was no such portent anywhere on earth. There is no such heart-oppressing task as the making of these assurances to a child, for whom who knows what portents are actually in wait! She found him, however, cowering with laughter, not with dread, lest the man with two heads should see or overhear. The man with two heads had become his play, and so was perhaps bringing about his sleep by gentler means than the nurse had intended. The man was employing the vacant minutes of the little creature's flight from sleep, called "going to sleep" in the inexact language of the old.

Nor would the boy give up his faith with its tremor and private laughter. Because a child has a place for everything, this boy had placed the monstrous man in the ceiling, in a corner of the room that might be kept out of sight by the bed curtain. If that corner were left uncovered, the fear would grow stronger than the fun; "the man would see me," said the little boy. But let the curtain be in position, and the child lay alone, hugging the dear belief that the monster was near.

He was earnest in controversy with his mother as to the existence of his man. The man was there, for he had been told so, and he was there to wait for "naughty boys," said the child, with cheerful self-condemnation. The little boy's voice was somewhat hushed, because of the four ears of the listener, but it did not falter, except when his mother's arguments against the existence of the man seemed to him cogent and likely to gain the day. Then for the first time the boy was a little downcast, and the light of mystery became dimmer in his gay eyes.

CHILDREN IN BURLESQUE

Derision, which is so great a part of human comedy, has not spared the humours of children. Yet they are fitter subjects for any other kind of jesting. In the first place they are quite defenceless, but besides and before this, it might have been supposed that nothing in a child could provoke the equal passion of scorn. Between confessed unequals scorn is not even suggested. Its derisive proclamation of inequality has no sting and no meaning where inequality is natural and manifest.

Children rouse the laughter of men and women; but in all that laughter the tone of derision is more strange a discord than the tone of anger would be, or the tone of theological anger and menace. These, little children have had to bear in their day, but in the grim and serious moods--not in the play--of their elders. The wonder is that children should ever have been burlesqued, or held to be fit subjects for irony.

Whether the thing has been done anywhere out of England, in any form, might be a point for enquiry. It would seem, at a glance, that English art and literature are quite alone in this incredible manner of sport.

And even here, too, the thing that is laughed at in a child is probably always a mere reflection of the parents' vulgarity. None the less it is an unintelligible thing that even the rankest vulgarity of father or mother should be resented, in the child, with the implacable resentment of derision.

In like manner did Thackeray and Dickens, despite all their sentiment. Children were made to serve both the sentiment and the irony between which those two writers, alike in this, stood double-minded. Thackeray, writing of his snobs, wreaks himself upon a child; there is no worse snob than his snob-child. There are snob-children not only in the book dedicated to their parents, but in nearly all his novels. There is a female snob-child in "Lovel the Widower," who may be taken as a type, and there are snob-children at frequent intervals in "Philip." It is not certain that Thackeray intended the children of Pendennis himself to be innocent and exempt.

Authorship prevails in nurseries--at least in some nurseries. In many it is probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has not been a large family without its magazine. The weak point of all this literature is its commonplace. The child's effort is to write something as much like as possible to the tedious books that are read to him; he is apt to be fluent and foolish. If a child simple enough to imitate were also simple enough not to imitate he might write nursery magazines that would not bore us.

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 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

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.

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.

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 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.

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