The Children | Page 9

life of man.
All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, this
suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time of
fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they
had the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this
unpausing life.
Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word 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 himself had no cause to be

proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness 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. It is difficult to imagine what
childhood must have been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it;
when everything that was proper to five years old was defect. A strange
good conceit of themselves and of their own ages had those fathers.
They took their children seriously, without relief. 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 infirmitie." This is what he says.
See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in
literature, and how it abolished little girls. It may be that there were in
all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon being children;
whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal. Art, for example, had
no little girls. There was always Cupid, and there were the prosperous
urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his little
brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St. Jerome" might be
called Tommy. But there were no "little radiant girls." Now and then an
"Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always a
matter of sewing and reading. As for the little girl saints, even when
they were so young that their hands, like those of St. Agnes, slipped
through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate
suitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the
mediaeval mind, but mars them for ours.
So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat
hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most

admirable Mrs. Godolphin. She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in
the Court of Charles II. She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "who
passed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the least
stain or tincture in her christall." She held her state with men and maids
for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as that of
never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instruction
to the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might give
the least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there did usually
assume," refused the addresses of the "greatest persons," and was as
famous for her beauty as for her wit. One would like to forget the age at
which she did these things. When she began her service she was eleven.
When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she was not
thirteen.
Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and
heroines, therefore, were of those ages. The poets turned April into
May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if they
shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs. The particular
year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say a
fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and
ellipses, figures, and tropes. Even as late as Keats a poet would not
have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimely
flowers. The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as he
has it.
The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old. His fear of
losing the idea of the bloom of