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.
John Leech used the caricature of a baby for the purposes of a scorn that was not angry, but familiar. It is true that the poor child had first been burlesqued by the unchildish aspect imposed upon him by his dress, which presented him, without the beauties of art or nature, to all the unnatural ironies. Leech did but finish him in the same spirit, with dots for the childish eyes, and a certain form of face which is best described as a fat square containing two circles--the inordinate cheeks of that ignominious baby. That is the child as _Punch_ in Leech's day preserved him, the latest figure of the then prevailing domestic raillery of the domestic.
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.
In one of Dickens's early sketches there is a plot amongst the humorous _dramatis personae_, to avenge themselves on a little boy for the lack of tact whereby his parents have brought him with them to a party on the river. The principal humorist frightens the child into convulsions. The incident is the success of the day, and is obviously intended to have some kind of reflex action in amusing the reader. In Dickens's maturer books the burlesque little girl imitates her mother's illusory fainting- fits.
Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque. A little girl in _Punch_ improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from some hideous terror.
AUTHORSHIP
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 (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