MISS FRY ON CHILDHOOD
ONE of the most entertaining and in some sense instruc- tive books we have met with for some time back, consists of considerably less than two hundred very short pages of a study of childhood by Miss Isabel Fry, called "Uninitiated," 4 by which she means to suggest that children take at least a good deal longer to spell out the real drift and meaning of the habits and expressions and feelings of their . grown-up friends and attendants, than they do to master the language in which those feelings are conveyed. " Uninitiated " shows, as vividly as the lively memory of a girl concerning the difficulties of her childhood in an unusually happy and sympathetic home could show it, bow a not altogether flexible mind has to fit itself to the ill-fitting clothes supplied by the speech and manners of those around it, before it can wear and use them with any kind of comfort and success. The notion that clothes are carefully fitted both to the body and the mind of those who wear them is more or less untrue. To a great extent at least, both the body and the mind have to be adapted in part to the clothes, as well as the clothes to the body and mind of the wearers, who have to find out by a great variety of discomforts and failures that they must manage to suit their attitudes and gestures to the very imperfectly fitting vesture which the conventions of generations have arranged for them. The ordinary idea is that fathers and mothers and teachers and servants are culpably wanting in sympathy for children. Miss Fry does not give much countenance to that view. But she shows how intrin- sically impossible it often is for a child, even in the tenderest and most sympathetic society, to give those who are around it any sort of hint as to what is really passing in the interior of its own mind. In the first place, it does not itself understand its own feelings, and therefore cannot express them ; in the next place, it often has no language in which to convey these feelings to others, except the language of the woe-begone,— a language which merely tells of its misery in finding itself so inarticulate, but does not give the least clue to the true nature of that misery. A sensitive child will suffer under a vast number of the sights and sounds to which it is exposed without itself knowing why it suffers, and often indeed it will suffer when another child not so sensitive in precisely the same surroundings, will be full of curiosity and interest in relation to the very sights and sounds which plunge the former into misery. And this somewhat capricious and inexplicable suffering is often at least as bard on the grown-up people who have to guess at the char- acter of the child's inner world, as their bungling attempts at communicating with it can be on the sensitive nature of the child itself. And it is obvious that while Miss Fry thinks that dogmatic nurses with cut-and-dried notions of their own about the way to teach children, and the moral theology with which they should indoctrinate them, are far from the best kind of attendants, she nevertheless recognises that they are
at least as much to be pitied for being set to disentangle so involved a skein of feeling as a child's vague impressions of the world around it, as the child is to be pitied for having to accommodate itself to instructions so stiff and clumsy. " Uninitiated " is at least as remarkable as a testimony to the fact that children learn a. great deal from the almost necessary ignorance of their elders as to what is passing in their groping minds, which they would never learn so
well from more sympathetic and nimble-mine,.-1 teachers,
as it is a testimony to the hardship which senb.iie children suffer from their elders' want of adroitness and insight.
Indeed, it is through these hardships that they often derive their most valuable experiences. It is a hardship, no doubt, to be so misunderstood, but it is a most advan-
• Loudon: Osgood, McIlvaine. and Co.
tageons discipline as well. To be too tenderly initiated into the easiest way of living, is to lose more in the moral dis- cipline of life, than can be gained in the form of a happier abildhood. Of course, no one would advocate intentional roughness with children. That does more to harden than to strengthen. Bat to protect children too carefully from all the incidental rubs of a world that must fret them sooner or later, is shortsighted tenderness. The language, the dialect, the conventions of the world, constitute a costumewhich no one, even when fully matured, can regard as a good fit for individual thought and feeling. And in learning to understand its various misfits and its clumsy falsifications of individual experience, even the least sensitive mind must encounter many troubles. No )ne can teach as better than Miss Fry in her charming little book how severe these troubles are to the minds of children, specially of imaginative children, who are always attempting to represent to themselves more or less unsuccessfully what
their elders mean by the conventional language of the world around them. For example, the child has been convicted of an unintentional act of disobedience, and punished for it by lonely imprisonment in the night-nursery, and this is the train of reflection in which she indulges :—
" I was thinking dreamily about heaven, and how wonderful it was that God could always see me. Could He see, for instance, and did He notice, that I had a button off my boot, or did He overlook some things and only trouble about what was actually either good or naughty ? I did not know. And then Nurse said that He was always taking care of me, every minute. Didn't He ever leave me alone at all? I supposed not. But surely if he saw that I was sitting on this chair, and knew that Nurse had made up her mind not to come in for say twenty minutes, Ile might leave me at any rate for a little while. But no; I hardly thought He would. Then I went on to try to imagine what would happen supposing for any reason he did leave me. I should probably fall down through some sort of vast open space and die. No, not exactly die, because then God would have to decide whether I was to go to heaven or hell, and then I should be once more in His keeping, and in that case I should be just sitting here in the night-nursery again, for all the world as I was doing at this moment. I could not make up my mind what would happen, and I felt it would be almost worth while to try the ex- periment. What time could be better than now when I had nothing else to do or think about ? I would ask God to leave off taking care of me,—but then, perhaps I should 'go' so fast that I shouldn't be able to pray to Him to take care of me again. In view of this danger, I composed a prayer: 'Oh! please God, leave off taking care of me just for one single second, and then take care of me again: I did not pray this at once ; I only said it to myself to make sure that it would be quite safe. I had an un- comfortable feeling that it was very naughty, but I couldn't see why it should be so, and if it was, as Nurse said, only because -God was so kind that He took care of me always, I did not see why I might not ask Him to stop doing it for a moment. So at last, with the excitement of trying a risky experiment, I prayed, even then half-incredulous of success, and waited to see whether I felt any difference. No, breathless and motionless as I sat, with eyes staring and ears strained, I could perceive no change whatever in myself or in my surroundings. The sewing-machine in the nursery still purred on; little Samuel still knelt in the picture on the wall opposite me, with the yellow light still firmly streaming upon him, and the blue.bottle who bad been keeping up a continual fizzle' was still fighting at the window-pane. I set myself rigidly, and tried again to feel the sort of falling or collapse which I had imagined. Still I felt nothing, and I had at last to give up the effort, and believe that for some reason which perhaps I was not quite old enough to understand, God would not let go of my still-sobbing body." (pp. 26-30.) How could a child with such a mind for verifying by actual experiment what it had been taught concerning God, and yet penetrated by a profound belief that grown-up people could not understand her even as well as she understood herself, be expected to accept conventional precepts in the conventional sense, as mere roundabout and pretentious ways of warning -her off mysterious subjects, and enjoining upon her a deep reverence for forms of words to which she attached no meaning P In another instance in which she endeavoured to test the real effectiveness of prayer, she says, "I don't mean that when I prayed this, I had much faith that it would work. On the contrary, I hardly expected it at all ; but as it was my only chance of comfort, I would not give it up without a trial. Grown-up people surer understood things, so that to ask questions of them was all but useless," and that, we suspect, is very much the 'opinion of a vast number of children much less imagina- tive than our author was in her childhood. They find grown- up people using a language so conventional, so carefully con- structed as it were for the very purpose of evading their diffieulties and smothering them in vague words of no particular meaning, that they cease to bring their little
problems before their elders when they find themselves treated as speaking a strange language and answered in a language which to them is stranger still. They ask to be told why it is naughty to tell convenient fibs when they find their brothers making up all sorts of monstrous fibs, and getting admired for their high spirits in so doing ; they are full of mysterious dreads which they cannot articulate and of which they see no trace in their elders; they find in themselves a deep horror of institutions and all the mechanism of philanthropy, —for example, the "homes of rest" for "weary pilgrims," with the texts above the doors suggesting " painful ideas of Sundays, heaven, angels, hymn-singing, good people, and death," their horror of which they do not dare to confide to their friends' disapproving ears; they have a fancy that after they themselves are in bed, some new sort of night-regime may begin, and per- haps one so uncanny and alarming that they would do better to avoid any chance of getting even an accidental glimpse of it; and so they look upon the condition of a grown-up person as a sort of world of disagreeable duties and responsibilities from the strange and unintelligible hard-and-fast rules of which they recoil, in a sort of perplexity not unmingled with that depression which any lively apprehension of the thoroughly uncongenial atmosphere of business excites in all true children. And, no doubt, their initiation into this world of duties and punctualities and regulated habits is a difficult matter,—the more difficult, the more imaginative and freedom-loving the child is. To learn to dress themselves properly, not only as regards clothing, but as regards manner and expression,— to learn to use with ease a costume which no more fits them than Saul's armour fitted David, to learn the meaning as well as the no-meaning of conventions, to learn the value as well as the hollowness of speech; to learn to appreciate the dreary mechanism of institutions and the immense importance of grooves in which it wearies the lively mind of childhood to see their fellow creatures moving, as a train moves along the endless line of railway,—this is one of the greatest achievements of what we call educa- tion, and the kind of achievement which makes education so repulsive to the fitful and elastic imagination of the young. Miss Fry has rendered no slight service in helping us to recall, what most of us had all but forgotten, the tortures which we passed through when we learned to put our minds into harness, and to subdue all those airy curvettings and fanciful gambols of heart in which the adven- turousness and the gaiety of childhood spent themselves before society imposed its heavy yoke upon our habits.
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