The Child of Fiction.

I know the sort of Child the weeper over Children’s wrongs has in his mind.  It has deep, soulful, yearning eyes.  It moves about the house softly, shedding an atmosphere of patient resignation.  It says: “Yes, dear papa.”  “No, dear mamma.”  It has but one ambition—to be good and useful.  It has beautiful thoughts about the stars.  You don’t know whether it is in the house or isn’t: you find it with its little face pressed close against the window-pane watching the golden sunset.  Nobody understands it.  It blesses the old people and dies.  One of these days the young gentleman from Cambridge will, one hopes, have a Baby of his own—a real Child: and serve him darn-well right.

At present he is labouring under a wrong conception of the article.  He says we over-educate it.  We clog its wonderful brain with a mass of uninteresting facts and foolish formulas that we call knowledge.  He does not know that all this time the Child is alive and kicking.  He is under the delusion that the Child is taking all this lying down.  We tell the Child it has got to be quiet, or else we will wring its neck.  The gentleman from Cambridge pictures the Child as from that moment a silent spirit moving voiceless towards the grave.

We catch the Child in the morning, and clean it up, and put a little satchel on its back, and pack it off to school; and the maiden lady Understander pictures that Child wasting the all too brief period of youth crowding itself up with knowledge.

My dear Madam, you take it from me that your tears are being wasted.  You wipe your eyes and cheer up.  The dear Child is not going to be overworked: he is seeing to that.

As a matter of the fact, the Child of the present day is having, if anything, too good a time.  I shall be considered a brute for saying this, but I am thinking of its future, and my opinion is that we are giving it swelled head.  The argument just now in the air is that the parent exists merely for the Children.  The parent doesn’t count.  It is as if a gardener were to say,

“Bother the flowers, let them rot.  The sooner they are out of the way the better.  The seed is the only thing that interests me.”

You can’t produce respectable seed but from carefully cultivated flowers.  The philosopher, clamouring for improved Children, will later grasp the fact that the parent is of importance.  Then he will change his tactics, and address the Children, and we shall have our time.  He will impress on them how necessary it is for their own sakes that they should be careful of us.  We shall have books written about misunderstood fathers who were worried into early graves.