No More Learning

The greybeard might have surrendered his last
hope of ever again seeing the Holy City and the
blessed hills which encompass it, but he found
a happiness in the thought that his children or
his children's children might one day return to
Zion. So, on the eve of the Passover, when the
departure from Egypt was told once more with
laughter and tears and song and good cheer, a
little fellow in the garb of a pilgrim came in,
staff in hand and bread-wallet on shoulder, and
the master of the house greeted him with the
question, "Whence comest thou, O pilgrim? "
"From. Egypt," was the reply. "Art thou
delivered from bondage? " "Yes, I am free. "
"Whither goest thou? " "To Jerusalem. "
"Nay, tarry with us to read the recital of the
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
Passover. " And thereupon the ancient story,
In exitu Israel de Egypto, was read from some
long-treasured scroll.
Strangely modified by the casuistry of the
Christian theologians, the tradition of the Child
spread throughout Europe. Every now and
then, in the musty old chronicles written in
crabbed Latin, one comes across a beautiful
little passage which looks as if a flower, pressed
between the leaves half a dozen centuries ago,
had been changed into words and made itself a
place in the text.
Think, for instance, of that strange incident
in the history of Augsburg, when all the babes
^of the city were gathered together and laid on
the pavement before the high altar of the church,
so that their cries might move the Lord to save
the people from the sword of the besieging
Huns.
Or picture that fierce fight in 1143, when the
Senna Brook ran red with human blood and
the baby Duke of Brabant hung in a silver
cradle from a willow-tree while his gallant
subjects slaughtered and routed the forces of
the Lords of Grimberghe.
And here is another baby story, which
belongs to the year 1307. Wasted and hard
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pressed by Kaiser Albrecht, the Landgrave
Friedrich was compelled to fly from the Castle
of Wartburg--that famous fortress within
whose walls, two hundred years later, Luther
found his Patmos. Through the valley of the
Neckar, with his wife and their infant daughter
by his side, the huge-limbed Landgrave rode
among his knights and men-at-arms, well
aware that the Kaiser's troops were following
hot-foot on their track.
Through all the first hour of their flight the
child's fretful wail was heard above the clatter
of hoofs and the clank of armour, till the
colossal Landgrave could no longer endure it.
"What ails the poor little mortal ? " he asked
as they hurried onward.
"Alas! she is crying because she is hungry,"
answered the Landgravine, "and I fear she
won't be quiet till she is suckled. "
"Then suckled she shall be," exclaimed the
giant, "if I lose all Thuringia for it. Halt! "
In a green wooded hollow he drew up his
men to be ready to meet any attack, and bade
them be silent, while the child lay nestling at
its mother's breast. Knight and man-at-arms
stood mute but light-hearted, thinking of the
baby and listening for the hoof-beats of their
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
pursuers. But the green boughs hid the
fugitives, and the Kaiser's troops swerved away
from their traces and thundered off into space.
It is sorrowful to reflect that these incidents
are typical of but one aspect of the mediaeval
Child legend. The other was based on the
hideous dogma that until baptism had been
administered the new-born babe was not a
child of divine love, but a child of perdition.
Of such was the kingdom of heaven--in no
wise. In the Vision of Frate Alberico--the
vision of a lad of ten years--one is shown the
"place filled with red-hot burning cinders and
boiling vapour, in which little children were
purged "--poor helpless sinners no more than
twelve months old. Human nature rebelled
against this detestable theology; but even when
at length the souls of the unbaptized innocents
were rescued from the unquenchable fires and
consigned to a " sorrow without torment," their
limbo was still a region on the verge of
"the abysmal valley dolorous. " The Beatific
Vision was denied to them whose angels do
always behold the face of the Father which is
in heaven.
Happily, we have in a great measure emerged
from the shadow of that belief, though some
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
traces of it still survive in the minds of good
men and good women, who continue to think that
children are "born bad. " But for how many
centuries it must have darkened the lives of
parents and children of Christendom. Indeed,
it seems to me to be ultimately the real ex-,
planation of the blindness and perversity which
characterised, even within living memory, the
conception of a child's education. How other-
wise can we account for the fact that in the
early years of this century men and women
seem to have lost all recollection that they too
were once children; that it never occurred to
them to regard a child as a small human being
living in a half real, half imaginary world of
its own; that they never discovered that love
and beauty are a child's Guardian Angels, and
that the golden bridge between the world of
childhood and the world of maturity is a sym-
pathetic imagination; that it never suggested
itself to fathers and mothers that nine-tenths
of a child's fractiousness and naughtiness spring
from physical conditions, and that a merry
laugh, a cheery word, a quarter of an hour of
fresh air, are surer and saner remedies than
* slap or strap?
Any one who reads of the unhappy child-
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
hood so frequently recorded of those evil days,
when babes and sucklings were doomed and
unregenerate creatures, the wicked days when
"tempers were broken," and poor shivering little
souls, with the bloom of Paradise still rosy on
their faces, were scourged into obedience and
rectitude, and contrasts the stupidity of that time
with the humane temper of our own, cannot
well avoid conjecturing as to the cause of the
change. It is not to be supposed that any
living father or mother loves a child more
devotedly to-day than our grand-parents and
great-grand-parents loved their boys and girls;
nor can it be doubted that they were as good
and as well-meaning as any of their descendants.
Yet how one's heart quickens and one's blood
boils as one reads of the "discipline" which
. l. even religious people considered it their duty
to inflict on the children of their love. No
doubt the growth of education and the broaden-
ing of intellectual sympathies have enabled us
to regard childhood and the problem of child-
training from a wiser point of view; and it
may be that art, poetry, and fiction have aided
our too accustomed eyes to recognise the
sweetness and beauty of child-life and to ponder
over its mysteries; but more than to any other
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
single influence we must ascribe our change of
views regarding the Baba log and our own
dealings with them to the greater stress
which has been laid in our own generation on
the fatherhood of God and the sonship of man.
The wise teaching of Richter and the tender
humanity of Froebel have come to us at a
moment when we are best fitted to understand
and appreciate them.
Thrice happy child of to-day! Thy star
glitters over the roof, and thou art born into a
believing generation. We cherish the old'
legends which tell how the brute stones and
wild waters and the winds of heaven are in
league with thee; and how all woodland things,
from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on
the wall, from the bees that gave thee honey to
the grey wolf that gave thee milk, are pledged
to guard thee from wrong. We sing again
the old cradle-songs of many lands, to bribe
thee to sleep with promises of golden cradles
and foreign towns and churches, and we guide
thy little feet through the movements of the
quaint singing-games of a time gone by. The
poets have made thee the theme of their inspi-
ration; the novelists are exploiting thee and
thy sweetness and grave benignity; the educa-
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
tional statisticians are weighing and measuring
thee, and recording thy ways and thy words in
learned books.
To any one who has made acquaintance with
the Baba log, unless indeed he be a curmud-
geon, none of these things seem strange.
Even as the merest babes they are imposing
creatures. "There is something gigantic
about them," wrote Tennyson with true obser-
vation. "The wide-eyed wonder of a babe
has a grandeur in it which as children they
Jose. They seem to me to be prophets of a
mightier race. "
One of the strangest things in life, a mother
will tell you, is what she calls the transparent
veil that interposes between her and her babe,
and renders the small immortal as inaccessible ,
as Sirius. Occasionally there is a look of grave
omniscience in its great tranquil eyes, which
thrills her with an eerie apprehension of invi-
sible witnesses. The tender and playful touch
of its soft hands restores the comfortable
feeling of its simple humanity. Then sud-
denly she becomes conscious that it is almost
as much animal as human--that it is-beyond
human appeal, human reasoning, human com-
prehension. How she waits and watches for
I
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
that veil to be drawn aside! But it is never
drawn aside. It breaks slowly thread by
thread, dissolves as it were in an unaccount-
able way, and some day the last film disap-
pears, and she finds with joy that the babe is
neither angel, changeling, nor elemental crea-
ture, but a responsive child of sweet and whole-
some flesh and blood.
Meanwhile the pigmy has been philo-
sophically taking stock of the colossal world
which is still a part of himself; drinking in light
and colour and sound; making the acquaint-
ance of that startling phenomenon, his own
l foot; discovering with surprise, not free from
apprehension, that a certain podgy fist which
bangs him occasionally is in reality an erratic
prolongation--or possibly a colony--of his
own personality. Out of his experiences he
rapidly constructs a provisional standard of
comparison and a scheme of the universe.
One wonders whether the physiologist will
some day discover that there is a physical
something in the unworn freshness and
purity of a child's senses to account for the
. "dream-like vividness and splendour," which,
as Wordsworth noted, invests the objects of
vision in our early years, to explain that
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
curious hearing "in colours" referred to by
Professor Sully, and to assist us in under-
standing the child's remarkable faculty for
vitalising and personifying all that strikes on his
perception. It has perplexed me exceedingly
to reconcile, in the case of a little fellow of
three and a half, his slowness to perceive
something I point out to him with my stick,
and the wonderful acuteness with which he has
observed a thousand details about trains and
engines--things which are his delight by day
and his dream by night, but which scare him
beyond words if he chances to come within
fifty yards of them.
The little pilgrim of the dawn has now the
freedom of what Professor Sully calls "the
realm of fancy. " In his active brain he has a
magic wand which makes him master of
creation. He fills the blank spaces between
the zenith and the nadir with his imaginings;
makes the woods fearful with wolves, discovers
the haunts of fairies and tree-folk in holes
under the tree roots, and associates the church,
the barn, the lane, the brook, the gate, with
the people and places of his story-books.
This realm is not only the land of fancy, but
that of fetich. To one little fellow, born in
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
Siberia, the great god Pan was a reality. At
night he would say, "Bye-bye, Poo-ah I"--
"Good night, Out-of-doors! " Another went
in mortal dread of a feather from the eider-
down, or a fluff of the wool in which a banana
had been packed, and he would flee with a yell
when it moved towards him on a breath of air.
Boy Beloved had an unspeakable horror of an
indiarubber hot-water bottle, but if he had to
pass near it, he would propitiate it with "Nice
water-bottle! " and, watching it carefully, sidle
out of danger.
In this realm of fancy a child's quaint and
pretty sayings, his flashes of natural poetry,
appear almost inevitable. He is continually
checking off likenesses; he understands through
similitudes. Spectacles could hardly fail to
become "little windows"; a quivering compass-
needle "a bird "; a butterfly a "flying pansy. '1
"Oh, making mud-pies! " cried a little maid
gleefully, when she saw some nursery gardeners
hard at work; and "Want a drink of meolk! "
when a waggoner drew up at the horse-trough.
Boy Beloved had seen his mother's thread
ravel, and when he could not pull open the
cupboard door, stamped his foot and roared,
"In a knot, in a knot! "
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
Imitation is one of the ways of checking
likenesses. Sometimes one is apt to punish
for disobedience--and all because one did not
understand that some little man was a horse,
and not a responsible human boy. One morn-
ing from my window I saw Boy Beloved
standing on one leg, with the other doubled up
close to his body and his arms half extended
in a curve. The attitude was a puzzle till I
noticed the fowl in front of him, and then it
was evident that he was "playing at poultry. "
More curious still was his explanation of a
long howl of his, which brought us to see what
had happened. He laughed a droll little laugh
and said, " I thought I was a puff-puff"--and
the whoop was his notion of a steam-whistle.
One of the most interesting things in watch-
ing a child's play is the knowledge one acquires
of the sharpness and detailed accuracy of its
observation. A small" shop-lady " will consult
the (invisible) ticket before she quotes you the
price of her goods, and if by some negligence
it has not been pinned on, she will refer the
matter to the gentleman called "Sign. " If
you ride in an imaginary tram-car with Boy
Beloved as conductor, he will say "Pling! "
the sound of the bell-punch) before he gives
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
you an imaginary ticket and takes an imaginary
fare.
And with what ease and dramatic vraisem-
blance the mimics throw themselves into a
situation! Promenading round the garden, in
old days, with her doll, W. V. exclaimed,
"Look, baby; there's pappa! "--then, in a
hurried aside, "Wave your hand, father! "
"Ta-ta! " I said to nurse once, as she took
Boy Beloved downstairs; "write when you get
there! " "Wouldn't it be funny," cried W. V. ,
"if nurse wrote a letter for him:
'Dear Pappa,
Dot dere,
Baby'"
Wonderful are the ways of a girl with her
doll. "I am an anxious-minded doll-mother,"
observed a true make-believer, as on a windy
night she gave up her eider-down to her
favourite and "tucked her in" with tender
solicitude.
The doll is one of the best teachers of a
child, and it is one of the happy chances of
language that the very name "dolly" carries
us back to St.
Dorothea (God's gift) and her
beautiful rose-legend. "Dorothy," writes Miss
Yonge, in her "History of Christian Names,"
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
"was once one of the most usual of English
names, and 'Dolly' was so constantly heard
in every household that it finally became the
generic term for the wooden children that at
least as late as the infancy of Elizabeth Stuart
were called babies or puppets. " And this God's
gift to girlhood -has many things to teach
mothers if they will but watch and try to
understand what they see.
Professor Sully is of opinion that the perfect
child's faith in dolldom passes away early; in
most cases, it would appear, about the age of
thirteen or fourteen. It is then that the young
people begin to realise the shocking fact that
dolls have no "inner life. " I should have
imagined that the sincerity of simple faith
died out long before the age of fourteen.
Judging from a conversation with W. V. when
she was a serious matron of seven and dolly
lay listening in her arms, the perfect faith
sometimes does not outlast half that age.
"Does your little girl talk? "
"Oh no. "
"How is that? "
"Why, she's only a little baby--three
months. "
"I see. And when will she talk? "
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
"I should think when she's five years old;
perhaps when she's four. "
"Are you fond of her? "
She cuddles the doll and smiles radiantly.
"Do you think she is fond of you? Is
she as fond of you as Guy-boy is of his
mother? "
"Guy is a real baby--a live doll," with
a laugh; "this one isn't--I pretend she is.
She will never be able to really talk, you
know. "
"What is the good of pretending? "
"You have to pretend--unless you have
one of those dolls that speak when you pull
a string. "
"But what pleasure have you in pretending? "
"It is nearly as nice to pretend--when you
can't have a real live baby. "
And the art of pretending cuts Gordian
knots with such a deft facility. "These spoons
are too big for the toy tea-set," says Olive.
"Oh, let's pretend they are little," rejoins
Giggi--and that mountain is cast into the sea;
to have made it a mountain at all was "perferly
'idickerlus! " But if you think that a make-
believer cannot be strictly accurate and un-
compromising when he likes, you are mistaken.
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Giggi's mamma was telling sympathetically
how he had slipped, and " sat down suddenly,"
and hurt his back. "That isn't my back,
v mamma," interposed Giggi; "that's where my
legs live! " And if you suppose that an
anxious-minded doll-mother is not keenly alive
to the difference between the credible and the
incredible, you will find that your figures come
out wrong. "Of course Bunyan says, 'And
I dreamed a dream '; but it would take three
or four dreams to make a whole book. He
must have made up some of it, father, when he
was awake! "
Yet it is in this same region of make-believe,
I suppose, that we must place that bewildering
habit of so many children, of playing with
imaginary companions. An instance is given
in the Sayings which follow, but, from a con-
siderable number of letters which I have
received on the subject, I am forced to believe
that it is an experience by no means uncommon
in child life. But this is a topic which I must
treat as the Highland divine treated "a great
speeritooal diffeeculty "--look it boldly in the
face and pass on.
When does the first flash of self-conscious-
ness occur in a child's experience--the first
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
clear realisation that he is he, something quite
distinct from the rest of creation?
As might be expected, it is not easy to
collect information on this obscure but singularly
interesting subject. So far I have only come
across two instances. In his Letters James
Smetham writes: "My first awakening to
consciousness, as far as I can remember, was
in a valley in Yorkshire, outside the garden-
gate of my father's house, when at the age of
two. I have a distinct remembrance of the
ecstasy with which I regarded the distant blue-
ness of the hills, and saw the laurels shake in
the wind and felt it lift my hair. " Mary Howitt,
in her Autobiography, makes a similar state-
ment, but unfortunately she leaves the reader
to conjecture her age as between three and
four years: "Then I recollect a curious little
epoch in my life, as we were returning one
evening from a forest ramble with my father.
It was the first evidence to my mind that I
could think. I remember very well the new
light, the gladness, the wealth of which I
seemed suddenly possessed. It has curiously
connected itself in my mind with passing a
pinfold. That particular spot seemed like the
line between rational and irrational existence;
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
and so childish was I in intellectual life, that
it seemed to me as if before I passed the
pinfold I could only say and think ' Bungam '--
such was the expression in my mind--but that
after passing it I had the full use of all
intelligible speech. "
Very few persons seem to recollect that
first flash of revelation, and indeed the habit
of humanising everything he sees is so in-
veterate in a child that it is easy to conceive
that, in spite of the revelation, the original
vague dream-life with its magical illusions may
continue for years. There is more than make-
believe in what I may call the anthropo-
morphism of childhood; there is an unreasoning
but very positive belief that everything is
alive, and in precisely the same way as the
observer. One day Boy Beloved knocked his
head against the bannister. After crying and
receiving the usual remedial kissing, he went
and laid his head against the bannister, so
that it too might "kiss the place better. "
Naturally enough, for when any of us had
hurt him, had not we kissed the spot? And
surely this was an improvement on the ancient
tradition of retaliation--the mistaken beating of
the bannister.
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
So, too, one morning, sitting up in bed with
his bricks and toys, he called to the gas:
"Ower here, gas! Come, build for Guy; play
cricket for Guy, gas! " It was not till his
mother had made the gas say No in a far-
away tone that he reconciled himself to a
solitary game. On another occasion, after
"picnicking" quietly for a long while in the
shadowy woods under the dining-room table
with his horse and engine, he brought out the
latter with the request, " Kiss this old train,
pappa," for he is the most affectionate of little
mortals, and will in the most unaccountable
way climb a couple of flights of stairs to
"kiss your nice hand," or even your sleeve or
dress. If the humour takes him to play at
buying something in the woods, he will
convert an oak or a birch into a shopkeeper,
and you can see his lips moving as he describes
what he wants and makes his purchase.
One of the most interesting incidents, how-
ever, occurred when his wooden engine fell
down. He picked it up, kissed it, and said
cheerily, "All better now; don't cry, puff-
puff! Be a brick! "--and added in a low
voice to himself, "He's going to be a brick. "
And the other evening, on going to bed, his
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
attention was caught by the brightness of the
sunset. "The daylight has forgotten to go
away. Tell him to go, pappa! " After a while:
"Has he gone? " "Not yet, dear; he is just
waiting to see his sister before he goes. "
"His sister! Has he a sister? " "Yes; she
is called Starlight: when he sees her, he will
say good-bye and go away! " "Oh! " That
seemed new, but quite natural and reasonable;
so he lay down quietly, with that ready
acquiescence which is a child's predisposition
to obedience.
Curiously related to this dream-life, and to
the sudden awakening from it, is the way in
which a child's occasional consciousness of the
unreality of its dreams affects its confidence in
the reality of its perceptions while awake.
Professor Sully, who has recorded so many
delightful and significant observations of child
life, mentions a boy of five who asked his
teacher, "Wouldn't it be funny if we were
dreaming? Supposing every one in the whole
world were dreaming, wouldn't that be funny?
They might be, mightn't they? " The strange
thing is that this sense of the illusiveness
of the world is not confined to childhood.
Wordsworth told Professor Bonamy Price that
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
there was a time in his life when he had to
push against something that resisted, to be
sure that there was anything outside of him.
"I was sure of my own mind; everything else
fell away and vanished into thought. " And
these strange "fallings from us" and "vanish-
ings" come within the experience of Tenny-
son, just as Wordsworth "used to brood over
the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to
persuade himself that, whatever might become
of others, he would be translated, in something
of the same way, to heaven," so Tennyson
had moments in which, at one time, "he felt he
could not die," and at another
seem'd to move among a world of ghosts,
And feel himself the shadow of a dream.
And a yet more striking coincidence may be
found in Newman's "Apologia": "I thought
life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all
this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a
playful device concealing themselves from me,
and deceiving me with the semblance of a
material world. "
Every now and again one is startled by
some preternaturally wise or beautiful saying
from the lips of a child, which seems to justify
the poet's thought that
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
What could be more like a sweet and clear
echo from the "Fioretti" than the words of
the little boy who, as Professor Sully tells us,
remarked to his mother that if he could say
what he liked to God, it would be, "Love me
when I am naughty " ; or the lovely saying of
a little girl to her mother, who was weeping
for a beloved one: "Why do you cry? It is
only that he has woken up and we are still
asleep. "
"Such sayings are not unwholesome or pre-
cocious," observes the writer of a notable
article in The Pilot* from which I have quoted
the last incident: the priggish, mawkish,
unwholesome sayings are of a very different
character, and have a deplorably sancti-
monious ring about them. "We are having
quite a thetfllojun for our son ! " remarked a
little girl of her four-year-old brother when he
hazarded some comment on the divine inten-
tion in the making of trees. And indeed in
children the theologian is often born a twin
* "Some Reflections on Childhood. " The Pilot, Sept. 8,
1900.
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
brother of the poet. How can the busy brains
help speculating on the God who is the Father
they pray to, the heaven which is His
dwelling-place, the angels who watch unseen
around their cribs? It would be unnatural
indeed if they did not try to find convenient
places for these invisible spirits in their small
world, just as certain tropical birds contrive
means for lighting their nests with fireflies.
The childish speculator is logical, free-
spoken, and bold to audacity, but he is never
irreverent. He listens greedily, and his reten-
tive memory stores away unintelligible talk for
future deliberation. He is prone to put awk-
ward questions, and in our stupidity and
impatience, or, it may be, in our dread of
indulging a spirit of curious levity, we are apt
to impose silence somewhat brusquely on the
eager inquirer. This is a miserable mistake,
especially if we insist at the same time on
giving religious instruction regarding truths
which it would frequently be much wiser to
leave for maturer years. If we teach, we must
be prepared to listen to many theological
difficulties, to the oddest conjectures, and the
most amazing assimilations of ideas only half
understood. "What do they do in heaven?
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
That puzzles me sometimes," said one little
girl. "Why does Jesus take little babies up
into heaven again? Does He send them
down to any one else? " "Does God like us
to show our moons" (the white crescents at
the root of the nails, from which a child should
always press back the skin when drying her
hands)? But most surprising of all was the
account of how God once went to Hades--to
visit there, and she might perhaps have gone
with Him. (She might have been eight years
old, in heaven, before she came here; but she
did not know. ) He went because He wanted
to know what it was like. Of course, He made
Hades, but He didn't know what it was like;
He had workmen to make it for Him, no doubt.
He took all those in heaven down with Him--
babies and all. Alongside of her unhesitating
speculativeness ran a grave sense of decorum:
"Of course it isn't proper to laugh when you
are saying your prayers. You would behave
if you went to see the Queen; and God is
greater ; " and a perfectly clear sense of right
and wrong: "Don't you feel reckless some-
times, mother ? --as if you wanted to disobey
the laws of God! " and a truer conception of
the divine compassion, I trust, than is to be
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