MRS. MEYNELL ON CHILDREN.*

IN one of the best of her graceful little essays on children Mrs. Meynell observes how very modern is the present interest taken for its own sake in childhood and child-life. It is only within the last fifteen years, to push the period to quite its farthest limit, that writers of varying degrees of merit have felt it a theme worthy of their powers. It would be interesting to discover when the change as to the great importance of childhood began to steal over our modern minds. To be sure, Wordsworth declared that the child is father of the man, but it was not until after his day that the rush of child—not childish—literature came into vogue. For as a rule it is written for the grown-up minds, and even that which is written ostensibly for children is often much too subtle for them. They demand breadth and clearness of treatment ; details, even minute, and to us wearisome details, so long as they relate to actual facts they enjoy ; but the careful and analytical study of character bores them, and if they do not actually skip it, they mentally pronounce it "bosh." It might very naturally be con- cluded that the rise of this literature about children was contemporaneous with the rise of feminine writers, for deep in the hearts of most women is implanted the love of children, but this has not, we think, proved to be the case. Miss Austen, only in the briefest manner, admits them into one or two of her books. Miss Bronte's children are too often priggish and somewhat unnatural replicas of her men and women ; while even Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot,. though both wrote with sympathy and understanding of childhood, did so only to lay the foundations on which to raise the structure of their adult characters. There is little loving study in any of these women's books, of childhood for its own sake. That seems to have originated with a man. So far as the present writer knows, it was Dickens who first made definitely clear the charm and possibilities that lay in such a study for the adult mind. Sentimental, at times even painfully sentimental, as are his pictures of "Little Nell," Paul Dombey, and "Tiny Tim," it is yet evident that the portraiture of children's life and character interests him apart from the necessities of his story, and that he dwells and lingers over it for love of the subject in itself.

And even at the present time when we have had what might very well be called "a boom" in books about children which do not profess to be written for the young people themselves, the writers are chiefly men. Among some of the best of these are Mr. Crockett's Sweet. heart Travellers, Mr. Canton's beautiful and pathetic little story called The Invisible Playmate, and Mr. Kenneth Grahame's amusing Golden Age. Such books would have been impossible even a generation ago, for, as Mrs. Meynell remarks, our forefathers seem to have looked upon child- hood as a necessary evil to be got through as quickly as possible:— " Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very wor& child as soon as might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight years old they called him a youth. The diarist • The Childrah By Alice MeynelL London g John Lana

himself had no cause to be proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in illness by an 'honoured grandmother' that he was not initiated into any rudiments' till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth of eight before Latin was seriously begun ; but this fact he is evidently, in after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of, and

hardly acknowledges Evelyn has nothing to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it. Twice are children, not his own, mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to the wedding of a maid of five years old,—a curious thing, but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility. Another time he stands by, in a French hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a frightful surgical operation with extraordinary patience' The use I made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been subject to this deplorable infirmit ie.' " Mrs. Meynell points out that there were no little girls in early art like the boy angels of the painters, any more than

there were any little girls in literature. Addison's heroines of fourteen years old were worldly young women sagely weighing the advantages and disadvantages of their many offers of marriage. "As for the little girl saints, even when they were so young that their hands, like those of Saint Agnes, slipped through their fetters, they were always re- corded as refusing importunate suitors, which seemed neces- sary to make them interesting to the media3val mind, but mars them for ours."

This difference between our feeling for childhood and that of an earlier day lies in the fact, Mrs. Meynell thinks, that in the preceding generations it was merely looked upon as a necessary means to the desired end of manhood, a period to be hurried over as quickly as possible, while the present age has learnt unconsciously, from a backwater, left, as it were, by the stream of thought on evolution, "to find the use and the value of process." May it not rather be due to the fact that much of the old-world lightheartedness and pleasure in man- hood has for the time faded from the minds of most modern men and women; that the conditions of life are no longer so simple and straightforward as they were ; and that in- creasingly feeling the strain and stress of life, people do their best to keep their children as long as possible free from the burdens of adult life, and contemplate with a sense of refresh- nient, not unmixed with regret, the paradise undimmed by anxiety they have so carefully fostered amongst them ? The following wistful little lyric of Mr. Palgrave's, called Utopia," exactly expresses this feeling of most grown-up minds with regard to their childhood :— " There is a garden where lilies And roses are side by side ;

And all day between them in silence The silken butterflies glide.

I may not enter the garden, Though I know the road thereto, And morn by morn to the gateway I see the children go.

They bring back light on their faces; But they cannot bring back to me What the lilies say to the roses,

Or the songs of the butterflies be."

Mrs. lifeynell's delicate little essays are thoroughly imbued with the modern feeling for the charm and importance of childhood, and she writes of it with tender grace, and with much real insight into, and sympathy with, many aspects of a child's mind. This, for instance, will come home to most people who can recall their childish impressions :—

"Your hours when you were six were the enormous hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and Trick for- getfulness. Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gabble 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."

And yet for all that, these essays leave upon the mind a feeling that the writer as a whole does but skim lightly and pleasantly over the more superficial ways and characteristics of the child, and leaves the deeper things of his spirit untouched upon.

She makes no comment on his passionate loyalty and intense and idealising hero-worship that may turn the most common- place friend into something little short of a hero of old. The child can be thrilled like a lover by the mere unconscious touch of his ideal, and made gloriously happy for the day by a brief word of thanks, or a, kindly gesture of acknowledg- ment in return for some service gladly and proudly rendered by the loyal little worshipper. And all this glowing love and admiration will, as a rule, be kept closely guarded, especially in the case of boys, in the small heart, from a shy and delicate feeling of reticence and reserve, for at a very early age the child learns to dread the tarnishing breath of grown-up criticism and comment on the burnished mirror of his ideal. The severe, unbending sense of justice that dwells in the minds of most children finds no place in Mrs. Meynell's essays that stern justice that knows nothing of extenuating circum- stances, of palliatives, of expediency, and before whose merciless tribunal are brought up for judgment, silently and for the most part without comment, the sayings and, doings of their elders.

Of that little child whose "exterior semblance doth belie its soul's immensity," Mrs. Meynell apparently knows nothing. Yet few who have had any experience of children can fail to have been struck by their susceptibility to religious truth, as well as by the humble, transparent, and guileless quality of their religions feeling, facts recognised and made for ever the symbol of the trusting filial heart by our Lord himself, when he took the little child and set him, as an unconscious rebuke and example, among the questioning, and perhaps just then self-seeking, disciples, and declared that of such was the kingdom of heaven. But that Mrs. Meynell, among the many important characteristics of childhood which she has left without notice, should equally have passed over its keen and vivid imaginative power is remarkable, for it is exactly the quality that would, we should have thought, have had the greatest attraction and fascination for her. Was it not Hans Christian Andersen who thought so highly of it that he used to declare you must either be a child or a genius to write a real fairy-story ? He was him- self perhaps both. It is this gift that may be either the bane or the boon of its possessor,—may either people the dark and solitude with vague and undefinable terrors, or, like the philosopher's stone, transmute the common, and it may be even sordid, conditions of life into a golden glory.

To the vivid imagination of the child the rubbish-heap in the back-garden really does become for the time being the desert- island he has determined it shall be, full of thrilling adven- tures and hair-breadth escapes, and the land around it becomes an impassable sea, peopled with terrible sea-monsters, repre- sented by decaying cabbage-stalks ; while the gardener, stolidly wheeling his barrow at the farther end of the garden, is a ship, sighted by the castaways, but keeping straight on her course oblivious of their frantic and despairing signals of distress. To many a little girl an old disfigured apology for a doll is the object of as much tender care and solicitude as her small motherly heart will bestow on her real baby in the years to come. It is this vivid power of imagination that made Mr. Canton's little "W. V.," peeping about in the garden in the early summer morning, bent on new discoveries, exclaim :—

"Look, Father, sweet Mrs. Pea

Has two little babies in bud."

It is because Mrs. Meynell has found no room in her book on children, for such salient features of childhood as these, that, in spite of its sympathetic treatment and the grace of its style, we lay it down with something akin to a feeling of disappointment