During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts.
This is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of progress.With this is a resignation to change, and something more than resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their transitoriness.
What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world, for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood.We do not now hold, perhaps, that promise so high.Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.
But it was not so once.As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a patient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred years ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full stature of body and mind.The Indian woman sings of the future hunting.If her song is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results of time, and has submitted her heart to experience.
Childhood is a time of danger; "Would it were done." But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put it to sleep and guard its slumbers.It will pass.She sings prophecies to the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she spins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn.She bids good speed.
John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive.His child--"that pretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was chiefly precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man he never lived to be.The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead, says of him: "At two and a half years of age he pronounced English, Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three languages." As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' and had a strong passion for Greek."Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty times.All being favorable, the child of Evelyn's studious home would have done all these things in the course of nature within a few years.It was the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, to Evelyn, so exquisite.
The course of nature had not any beauty in his eyes.It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was not admired for the majesty of its unhasting process.Jeremy Taylor mourns with him "the strangely hopeful child," who--without Comenius's "Janua" and without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known it, an appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and closing a separate expectation every day of his five years.
Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering to the estate of man.They thought their little boy strangely hopeful because he was so quick on his way to be something else.They lost the timely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes.And yet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!
It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn, must rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not slighting it, or bidding it hasten its work, nor yet hailing it, with Faust, "Stay, thou art so fair!" Childhood is but change made gay and visible, and the world has lately been converted to change.
Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal, and every goal a passage.The hours are equal;but some of them wear apparent wings.
Tout passe.Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and contain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this question most arbitrarily as to the 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.
