CHILDREN'S PHANTASY.

I)R. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT, in the interesting paper which he read at York last week on " The Insanity of Children," appears to have treated the fancies of children as if they were in some sense the roots of subsequent disturbances of reason. At least, if we may trust the report in the York Herald of yesterday week, Dr. Allbutt said :—" When very young, a child seemed to live in phantasy ; even its own self was to itself a ghost. It would address its own solid body by another name as something other than itself, as a companion or confidant of its inner being. Pretty were the fancies of a child, yet its healthy growth consisted in their evaporation. If the growth of the mind were something less or something other than healthy, then these fancies kept their empire." If that be correctly reported, we suppose Dr. Allbutt to mean that childish fancy stands in the way of true mental concep- tions much as a weed prevents the growth of a flower, and that unless the weed is pulled up to make room for the flower, the flower will not grow ; in other words, unless the imaginative side of a child's life fades away, the perceptive and rational side will not flourish. Now, if that were really Dr. Clifford Allbutt's meaning, we totally differ with him. He was thinking, we con- clude, of such cases as that of little Hartley Coleridge, who, when told something about himself, is said to have replied,— "Yes, but which Hartley ? There is the real Hartley, and the picture Hartley, and the shadow Hartley, and the catch-me-fast Hartley," a remark which he accompanied by catching hold of one hand with the other, and then looking up bewildered at the problem whether he should identify himself with the catcher or with the caught. Now, if that were the sort of " phantasy " which Dr. Allbutt thinks in need of " evapora- tion " under the influence of the growth of the child's appre- hension for what is called sensible experience, we entirely differ from him. It was not by the " evaporation " of Hartley Coleridge's insight into the mystery of our ideal associations and of the power of the mind to become its own object, that he grew into the subtle poet and thinker and delightful converser he became ; nor was it to the " persistence " of such fancies that he owed the inadequate grasp he obtained of moral laws and of the duty of temperance and self- restraint. A child of feeble fancy, or of no fanciful power at all, is, we think, far more likely to grow up with that inability to apprehend adequately the world of experience to which Dr. Allbutt attributes children's insanity, than a child of fertile fancy. In proportion to the strength of the fancy or imagination is the strength of that power of appre- hending the irresistible authority of fact which fits a man for actual life. Does any one suppose, for instance, that the delicate and aerial character of Shakespeare's childish fancy lessened his capacity for understanding the difference between fancy and fact, instead of indefinitely increasing it ? If be does, he appears to us not to have grasped one of the most obvious characteristics of genius,—namely, that it is the man's power of conceiving a multitude of variations on the actual conditions of existence which renders his apprehension of these actual conditions of existence truly vivid and effectual. Could Bacon have had the haunting conviction which has won such a fame for his " Novum Organum," that the laws of things are totally distinct from the laws of thought, if he had not had a great imagination, and constantly experienced the shock of finding that there is no short-cut to the knowledge of external realities except that which is carried through by the hard work of minute observa- tion P Consider the life of such original children as the Brontes, and observe what a world of fancy they actually lived in. And then note how they learned to grasp with an iron grasp the great, rude facts of Yorkshire nature and Yorkshire life. To maintain that it was not precisely the strength of the imagination with which they had dwelt upon their own childish ideas of what life might be, which gave them their strong subsequent grasp of what life actually was, seems to us a blunder as serious, and one leading us as far astray, as to sup, pose that a faint and feeble sense of external realities is likely to go along with a vigorous and masterful ideal life. Compare Sir Walter Scott's account of the visions and fancies of his own infancy and childhood, with the strong grasp which he fastened later upon the real world and upon rough men's characters, and believe if you can that it was not the hardy fancy of his infancy which, by its steady growth and expansion, tended directly to confirm the masculine sagacity of his later life. Now in cases like these there is no " evaporation " of childish fancies ; on the contrary, childish fancies blossom into rich and strong imaginations, and yet rich and strong imaginations which, so far from weaning their owners from a love of reality, stimu- late that sense of reality, and make it vastly stronger than, without such a fancy or imagination, it ever could have been. So far from its being an excessive development of fancy which leads to childish insanity, we believe that it is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a deficiency of faculty much more likely to be connected with want of fancy than with exuberance of fancy, and especially a deficiency in self-control, —a capricious self-will such as runs to far greater excess in dull children who have neither a fancy nor an imagination, than in those who

can see themselves as others see them, and enter into the monstrous irrationality of violent caprice.

What Dr. Allbutt seems to have had in his mind,—namely, that it is easy for children to believe in fairy-tales, and in what men know to be impossible and inconsistent with natural laws,—is, of course, very true ; but what we dispute is that the process by which children grow into the conviction that there

are no fairy-godmothers or Fortunatus's purses, or flying horses, or wishing-caps, can be properly described as the

evaporation of childish fancies. On the contrary, we believe that the more vivid those childish fancies are, and the more vivid the idealising faculty which grows out of them is in the man, the deeper is the impression which the inexorability of natural and moral law makes upon the mind, and the deeper, instead of the lighter, is the furrow made by the world of experience. It is not the man who has never entered into the imaginary joy of having everything as he wished, who is most deeply persuaded that the course of the world is not amenable to human wishes. On the contrary, the child who has revelled in the Arabian or German legends of obedient genii and enchanted princesses, and who grows up to accept a spiritual idealism in which there is a yet higher principle of transfiguration and transubstantiation of base into heavenly elements, realises far more powerfully the unmanageable forces of nature and life, than the man who has never kicked against the sharp pricks of a system of things in which the tenderest nerves are most deeply wounded and the most generous love is most bitterly tried. Our position is that there is a double education in the child as in the man, an education of the ideal susceptibilities and an education of the patient will, neither of which is

complete without the other, and which cannot, in reality, grow healthily apart. The dull realist cannot half learn the lesson of realism, because he has never suffered the martyrdom of ruined hope ; and as for the vague and empty idealist who lives in a fool's paradise of optimistic dreams, it is the want of depth and vividness in his aspirations, not their ardour, which enables him to blind himself to the sickliness and self- deceptions of his visionary life.

Childish insanity, like the insanity of later years, comes no doubt, as Dr. Allbutt intimates, chiefly from inherited physical faults of organisation. All we care to insist on is

that it is not the vividness of childish phantasy which can be regarded as the trustworthy symptom of such faults of

organisation. On the contrary, the vividness of childish phantasy, like the vividness of mature imagination, is a

sign of health, not a sign of weakness, an omen of capacity to assimilate the stern teaching of experience, not of incapacity to assimilate it. It is weakness of will, arbitrari-

ness of temper, helplessness in temptation, prodigal self- indulgence, which betoken, so far as there are any mental symptoms which do betoken, the failure of the higher sanity ; but these tokens, far from necessarily accompanying exuberant fancy, are much more likely to accompany its inert- ness. Wordsworth had his presages of evil for Hartley Coleridge when he was but six years old, but the presages were not such as were fulfilled, nor had there at that early age been time for the child to display that weakness of will which led to the disappointment of hopes so brilliant. Wordsworth addressed the fanciful child as one too likely to be the prey of suffering, if there were the stamina in him to bear much suffering :—

" 0 thou whose fancies from afar are brought,

Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel And fittest to unutterable thought The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol ; Thou faery voyager, that dost float In such clear water, that thy boat May rather seem To brood on air, than on an earthly stream; Suspended in a stream as clear as sky Where earth and heaven do make one imagery ; 0 blessed vision ! happy child, Thou art so exquisitely wild, I think of thee with many fears For what may be thy lot in future years.

I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,

Lord of thy house and hospitality, And Grief, uneasy lover, never rest But when she sate within the touch of thee."

And Wordsworth goes on to reproach himself with the folly of these sad presages, and to encourage the hope that Nature would either end this airy being quite, or lengthen out his season of delight, and keep for him by individual right " the young lamb's heart amongst the full-grown flocks." And so far as the omens of the future were visible in the child's joyful, graceful, and exuberant fancies, these omens were fulfilled. Nature did guard for him "the young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks," and it was the well-spring of fancy blossoming into mature imagination which preserved for Hartley Coleridge that blessing. As he himself said of him- self in after-years, in one of the most beautiful sonnets in the language,—

"And yet I am a child though I am old,

Time is my debtor for the years untold."

It was not the sweet and graceful fancies of his childhood which wrecked him. They were never " evaporated ;" they budded and blossomed into the most exquisite sense of ideal truth ; and it was the developed fancy of the child which constituted the charm and inspiration of the man. It was the weakness of Hartley Coleridge's will,—also in great measure an in- heritance,—which brought upon him the great misfortune of his maturity ; but that weakness of will was not only no result of the exuberance of his fancy, but was, so far as we have any means of judging, rather restrained and controlled by the ideal life he led, than exaggerated by it. If caprice and wilful- ness could be " evaporated," while fancy grows into imagination and learns to measure the might of the great natural laws in the grasp of which we live, and the great ideal ends at which, nevertheless, we can safely aim, there would be no need at all to dread the growth of that visionary faculty, the prodigality of which not only gives to childhood its golden hours, but secures to manhood half its power to deal effectually with the realities of life.