Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 by Various

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF

LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI.--JANUARY, 1863.--NO. LXIII.

HAPPIEST DAYS.

Long ago, when you were a little boy or a little girl,--perhaps not so
very long ago, either,--were you never interrupted in your play by being
called in to have your face washed, your hair combed, and your soiled
apron exchanged for a clean one, preparatory to an introduction to Mrs.
Smith, or Dr. Jones, or Aunt Judkins, your mother's early friend? And
after being ushered in to that august presence, and made to face a
battery of questions which were either above or below your capacity, and
which you consequently despised as trash or resented as insult, did you
not, as you were gleefully vanishing, hear a soft sigh breathed out upon
the air,--"Dear child, he is seeing his happiest days"? In the concrete,
it was Mrs. Smith or Dr. Jones speaking of you. But going back to
general principles, it was Commonplacedom expressing its opinion of
childhood.

There never was a greater piece of absurdity in the world. I thought so
when I was a child, and now I know it; and I desire here to brand it as
at once a platitude and a falsehood. How ever the idea gained currency
that childhood is the happiest period of life, I cannot conceive. How
ever, once started, it kept afloat is equally incomprehensible. I should
have supposed that the experience of every sane person would have given
the lie to it. I should have supposed that every soul, as it burst into
flower, would have hurled off the vile imputation. I can only account
for it by recurring to Lady Mary Wortley Montague's statistics, and
concluding that the fools _are_ three out of four in every person's
acquaintance.

I for one lift up my voice emphatically against the assertion, and do
affirm that I think childhood is the most mean and miserable portion of
human life, and I am thankful to be well out of it. I look upon it as
no better than a mitigated form of slavery. There is not a child in
the land that can call his soul, or his body, or his jacket his own. A
little soft lump of clay he comes into the world, and is moulded into a
vessel of honor or a vessel of dishonor long before he can put in a word
about the matter. He has no voice as to his education or his training,
what he shall eat, what he shall drink, or wherewithal he shall be
clothed. He has to wait upon the wisdom, the whims, and often the
wickedness of other people. Imagine, my six-foot friend, how you would
feel to be obliged to wear your woollen mittens when you desire to bloom
out in straw-colored kids, or to be buttoned into your black waistcoat
when your taste leads you to select your white, or to be forced under
your Kossuth hat when you had set your heart on your black beaver: yet
this is what children are perpetually called on to undergo. Their wills
are just as strong as ours and their tastes are stronger, yet they have
to bend the one and sacrifice the other; and they do it under pressure
of necessity. Their reason is not convinced; they are forced to yield to
superior power; and of all disagreeable things in the world, the most
disagreeable is not to have your own way. When you are grown up, you
wear a print frock because you cannot afford a silk, or because a silk
would be out of place,--you wear India-rubber overshoes because your
polished patent-leather would be ruined by the mud; and your self-denial
is amply compensated by the reflection of superior fitness or economy.
But a child has no such reflection to console him. He puts on his
battered, gray old shoes because you make him; he hangs up his new
trousers and goes back into his detestable girl's-frock because he will
be punished if he does not, and it is intolerable.

It is of no use to say that this is their discipline and is all
necessary to their welfare. I maintain that that is a horrible condition
of life in which such degrading _surveillance_ is necessary. You may
affirm that an absolute despotism is the only government fit for
Dahomey, and I may not disallow it; but when you go on and say that
Dahomey is the happiest country in the world, why, I refer you to
Dogberry. Now the parents of a child are, from the nature of the case,
absolute despots. They may be wise, and gentle, and doting despots, and
the chain may be satin-smooth and golden-strong; but if it be of rusty
iron, parting every now and then and letting the poor prisoner violently
loose, and again suddenly caught hold of, bringing him up with a jerk,
galling his tender limbs and irretrievably ruining his temper,--it is
all the same; there is no help for it. And really, to look around
the world and see the people that are its fathers and mothers is
appalling,--the narrow-minded, prejudiced, ignorant, ill-tempered,
fretful, peevish, passionate, careworn, harassed men and women. Even we
grown people, independent of them and capable of self-defence, have as
much as we can do to keep the peace. Where is there a city, or a town,
or a village, in which are no bickerings, no jealousies, no angers, no
petty or swollen spites? Then fancy yourself, instead of the neighbor
and occasional visitor of these poor human beings, their children,
subject to their absolute control, with no power of protest against
their folly, no refuge from their injustice, but living on through thick
and thin right under their guns.

"Oh!" but you say, "this is a very one-sided view. You leave out
entirely the natural tenderness that comes in to temper the matter.
Without that, a child's situation would of course be intolerable; but
the love that is born with him makes all things smooth."

No, it does not make all things smooth. It does wonders, to be sure, but
it does not make cross people pleasant, nor violent people calm, nor
fretful people easy, nor obstinate people reasonable, nor foolish people
wise,--that is, it may do so spasmodically, but it does not hold them to
it and keep them at it. A great deal of beautiful moonshine is written
about the sanctities of home and the sacraments of marriage and birth. I
do not mean to say that there is no sanctity and no sacrament. Moonshine
is not nothing. It is light,--real, honest light,--just as truly as
the sunshine. It is sunshine at second-hand. It illuminates, but
indistinctly. It beautifies, but it does not vivify or fructify. It
comes indeed from the sun, but in too roundabout a way to do the sun's
work. So, if a woman is pretty nearly sanctified before she is married,
wifehood and motherhood may finish the business; but there is not one
man in ten thousand of the writers aforesaid who would marry a vixen,
trusting to the sanctifying influences of marriage to tone her down to
sweetness. A thoughtful, gentle, pure, and elevated woman, who has been
accustomed to stand face to face with the eternities, will see in her
child a soul. If the circumstances of her life leave her leisure and
adequate repose, that soul will be to her a solemn trust, a sacred
charge, for which she will give her own soul's life in pledge. But, dear
me! how many such women do you suppose there are in your village? Heaven
forbid that I should even appear to be depreciating woman! Do I not know
too well their strength, and their virtue which is their strength? But
stepping out of idyls and novels, and stepping into American kitchens,
is it not true that the larger part of the mothers see in their babies,
or act as if they saw, only babies? And if there are three or four or
half a dozen of them, as there generally are, so much the more do they
see babies whose bodies monopolize the mother's time to the disadvantage
of their souls. She loves them, and she works for them day and night;
but when they are ranting and ramping and quarrelling, and torturing
her over-tense nerves, she forgets the infinite, and applies herself
energetically to the finite, by sending Harry with a round scolding into
one corner and Susy into another, with no light thrown upon the point
in dispute, no principle settled as a guide in future difficulties, and
little discrimination as to the relative guilt of the offenders. But
there is no court of appeal before which Harry and Susy can lay their
case in these charming "happiest days."

Then there are parents who love their children like wild beasts. It is
a passionate, blind, instinctive, unreasoning love. They have no more
intelligent discernment, when an outside difficulty arises with respect
to their children, than a she-bear. They wax furious over the most
richly deserved punishment, if inflicted by a teacher's hand; they take
the part of their child against legal authority; but, observe, this does
not prevent them from laying their own hands heavily on their children.
The same obstinate ignorance and narrowness that are exhibited without
exist within also. Folly is folly, abroad or at home. A man does not
play the fool out-doors and act the sage in the house. When the poor
child becomes obnoxious, the same unreasoning rage falls upon him. The
object of a ferocious love is the object of an equally ferocious anger.
It is only he who loves wisely that loves well.

The manner in which children's tastes are disregarded, their feelings
ignored, and their instincts violated is enough to disaffect one with
childhood. They are expected to kiss all flesh that asks them to do so.
They are jerked up into the laps of people whom they abhor. They say,
"Yes, Ma'am," under pain of bread and water for a week, when their
unerring nature prompts them to hurl out, "I won't, you hideous old
fright!" They are sent out of the room whenever a fascinating bit of
scandal is to be rehearsed, packed off to bed just as everybody is
settled down for a charming evening, bothered about their lessons when
their play is but fairly under way, and hedged and hampered on every
side. It is true that all this may be for their good, but, my dear dolt,
what of that? So everything is for the good of grownup people; but does
that make us contented? It is doubtless for our good in the long run
that we lose our pocketbooks, and break our arms, and catch a fever, and
have our brothers defraud a bank, and our houses burn down, and people
steal our umbrellas, and borrow our books and never return them. In
fact, we know that upon certain conditions all things work together for
our good, but, notwithstanding, we find some things a great bore; and we
may talk to our children of discipline and health by the hour together,
and it will never be anything but an intolerable nuisance to them to be
swooped off to bed by a dingy old nurse just as the people are beginning
to come, and shining silk, and floating lace, and odorous, faint flowers
are taking their ecstatic young souls back into the golden days of the
good Haroun al Raschid.

Even in this very point lies one of the miseries of childhood, that
no philosophy comes to temper their sorrow. We do not know why we are
troubled, but we know that there _is_ some good, grand reason for it.
The poor little children do not know even that. They find trouble
utterly inconsequent and unreasonable. The problem of evil is to them
absolutely incapable of solution. We know that beyond our horizon
stretches the infinite universe. We grasp only one link of a chain
whose beginning and end is eternity. So we readily adjust ourselves to
mystery, and are content. We apply to everything inexplicable the test
of partial view, and maintain our tranquillity. We fall into the ranks,
and march on, acquiescent, if not jubilant. We hear the roar of cannon
and the rattle of musketry. Stalwart forms fall by our side, and brawny
arms are stricken. Our own hopes bite the dust, our own hearts bury
their dead; but we know that law is inexorable. Effect must follow
cause, and there is no happening without causation. So, knowing
ourselves to be only one small brigade of the army of the Lord, we
defile through the passes of this narrow world, bearing aloft on our
banner, and writing ever on our hearts, the divine consolation, "What
thou knowest not now thou shalt know hereafter." This is an unspeakable
tranquillizer and comforter, of which, woe is me! the little ones know
nothing. They have no underlying generalities on which to stand. Law and
logic and eternity are nothing to them. They only know that it rains,
and they will have to wait another week before they go a-fishing; and
why couldn't it have rained Friday just as well as Saturday? and it
always does rain or something when I want to go anywhere,--so, there!
And the frantic flood of tears comes up from outraged justice as well as
from disappointed hope. It is the flimsiest of all possible arguments to
say that their sorrows are trifling, to talk about their little cares
and trials. These little things are great to little men and women. A
pine bucket full is just as full as a hogshead. The ant has to tug just
as hard to carry a grain of corn as the Irishman does to carry a hod of
bricks. You can see the bran running out of Fanny's doll's arm, or
the cat putting her foot through Tom's new kite, without losing your
equanimity; but their hearts feel the pang of hopeless sorrow, or foiled
ambition, or bitter disappointment,--and the emotion is the thing in
question, not the event that caused it.

It is an additional disadvantage to children in their troubles that they
can never estimate the relations of things. They have no perspective.
All things are at equal distances from the point of sight. Life presents
to them neither foreground nor background, principal figure nor
subordinates, but only a plain spread of canvas on which one thing
stands out just as big and just as black as another. You classify your
_desagrements_. This is a mere temporary annoyance, and receives but a
passing thought. This is a life-long sorrow, but it is superficial; it
will drop off from you at the grave, be folded away with your cerements,
and leave no scar on your spirit. This thrusts its lancet into the
secret place where your soul abideth, but you know that it tortures only
to heal; it is recuperative, not destructive, and you will rise from it
to newness of life. But when little ones see a ripple in the current of
their joy, they do not know, they cannot tell, that it is only a pebble
breaking softly in upon the summer flow to toss a cool spray up into
the white bosom of the lilies, or to bathe the bending violets upon the
green and grateful bank. It seems to them as if the whole strong tide
is thrust fiercely and violently back, and hurled into a new channel,
chasmed in the rough, rent granite. It is impossible to calculate the
waste of grief and pathos which this incapacity causes. Fanny's doll
aforesaid is left too near the fire, and waxy tears roll down her ruddy
cheeks, to the utter ruin of her pretty face and her gay frock; and
anon poor Fanny breaks her little heart in moans and sobs and sore
lamentation. It is Rachel weeping for her children. I went on a tramp
one May morning to buy a tissue-paper wreath of flowers for a little
girl to wear to a May-party, where all the other little girls were
expected to appear similarly crowned. After a long and weary search, I
was forced to return without it. Scarcely had I pulled the bell, when I
heard the quick pattering of little feet in the entry. Never in all my
life shall I lose the memory of those wistful eyes that did not so much
as look up to my face, but levelled themselves to my hand, and filmed
with bitter disappointment to find it empty. _I_ could see that the
wreath was a very insignificant matter. I knew that every little beggar
in the street had garlanded herself with sixpenny roses, and I should
have preferred that my darling should be content with her own silky
brown hair; but my taste availed her nothing, and the iron entered into
her soul. Once a little boy, who could just stretch himself up as high
as his papa's knee, climbed surreptitiously into the store-closet and
upset the milk-pitcher. Terrified, he crept behind the flour-barrel, and
there Nemesis found him, and he looked so charming and so guilty that
two or three others were called to come and enjoy the sight. But he,
unhappy midget, did not know that he looked charming; he did not know
that his guilty consciousness only made him the more interesting; he did
not know that he seemed an epitome of humanity, a Liliputian miniature
of the great world; and his large, blue, solemn eyes were filled with
remorse. As he stood there, silent, with his grave, utterly mournful
face, he had robbed a bank, he had forged a note, he had committed a
murder, he was guilty of treason. All the horror of conscience, all the
shame of discovery, all the unavailing regret of a detected, atrocious,
but not utterly hardened pirate tore his poor little innocent heart. Yet
children are seeing their happiest days!

These people--the aforesaid three-fourths of our acquaintance--lay great
stress on the fact that children are free from care, as if freedom from
care were one of the beatitudes of Paradise; but I should like to know
if freedom from care is any blessing to beings who don't know what care
is. You who are careful and troubled about many things may dwell on it
with great satisfaction, but children don't find it delightful by any
means. On the contrary, they are never so happy as when they can get a
little care, or cheat themselves into the belief that they have it.
You can make them proud for a day by sending them on some responsible
errand. If you will not place care upon them, they will make it for
themselves. You shall see a whole family of dolls stricken down
simultaneously with malignant measles, or a restive horse evoked from a
passive parlor-chair. They are a great deal more eager to assume care
than you are to throw it off. To be sure, they may be quite as eager to
be rid of it after a while; but while this does not prove that care is
delightful, it certainly does prove that freedom from care is not.

Now I should like, Herr Narr, to have you look at the other side for a
moment: for there is a positive and a negative pole. Children not only
have their full share of misery, but they do not have their full share
of happiness; at least, they miss many sources of happiness to which we
have access. They have no consciousness. They have sensations, but no
perceptions. We look longingly upon them, because they are so graceful,
and simple, and natural, and frank, and artless; but though this may
make us happy, it does not make them happy, because they don't know
anything about it. It never occurs to them that they are graceful. No
child is ever artless to himself. The only difference he sees between
you and himself is that you are grown-up and he is little. Sometimes I
think he does have a dim perception that when he is sick it is because
he has eaten too much, and he must take medicine, and feed on heartless
dry toast, while, when you are sick, you have the dyspepsia, and go to
Europe. But the beauty and sweetness of children are entirely wasted on
themselves, and their frankness is a source of infinite annoyance to
each other. A man enjoys _himself_. If he is handsome, or wise, or
witty, he generally knows it, and takes great satisfaction in it; but
a child does not. He loses half his happiness because he does not know
that he is happy. If he ever has any consciousness, it is an isolated,
momentary thing, with no relation to anything antecedent or subsequent.
It lays hold on nothing. Not only have they no perception of themselves,
but they have no perception of anything. They never recognize an
exigency. They do not salute greatness. Has not the Autocrat told us of
some lady who remembered a certain momentous event in our Revolutionary
War, and remembered it only by and because of the regret she experienced
at leaving her doll behind, when her family was forced to fly from home?
What humiliation is this! What an utter failure to appreciate the issues
of life! For her there was no revolution, no upheaval of world-old
theories, no struggle for freedom, no great combat of the heroisms.
All the passion and pain, the mortal throes of error, the glory of
sacrifice, the victory of an idea, the triumph of right, the dawn of a
new era,--all, all were hidden from her behind a lump of wax. And what
was true of her is true of all her class. Having eyes, they see not;
with their ears they do not hear. The din of arms, the waving of
banners, the gleam of swords, fearful sights and great signs in the
heavens, or the still, small voice that thrills when wind and fire and
earthquake have swept by, may proclaim the coming of the Lord, and they
stumble along, munching bread-and-butter. Out in the solitudes Nature
speaks with her many-toned voices, and they are deaf. They have a blind
sensational enjoyment, such as a squirrel or a chicken may have, but
they can in no wise interpret the Mighty Mother, nor even hear her
words. The ocean moans his secret to unheeding ears. The agony of the
underworld finds no speech in the mountain-peaks, bare and grand. The
old oaks stretch out their arms in vain. Grove whispers to grove, and
the robin stops to listen, but the child plays on. He bruises the happy
buttercups, he crushes the quivering anemone, and his cruel fingers are
stained with the harebell's purple blood. Rippling waterfall and rolling
river, the majesty of sombre woods, the wild waste of wilderness, the
fairy spirits of sunshine, the sparkling wine of June, and the golden
languor of October, the child passes by, and a dipper of blackberries,
or a pocketful of chestnuts, fills and satisfies his horrible little
soul. And in face of all this people say--there are people who _dare_ to
say--that childhood's are the "happiest days."

I may have been peculiarly unfortunate in my surroundings, but the
children of poetry and novels were very infrequent in my day. The
innocent cherubs never studied in my school-house, nor played
puss-in-the-corner in our back-yard. Childhood, when I was young, had
rosy cheeks and bright eyes, as I remember, but it was also extremely
given to quarrelling. It used frequently to "get mad." It made nothing
of twitching away books and balls. It often pouted. Sometimes it would
bite. If it wore a fine frock, it would strut. It told lies,--"whoppers"
at that. It took the biggest half of the apple. It was not, as a general
thing, magnanimous, but "aggravating." It may have been fun to you who
looked on, but it was death to us who were in the midst.

This whole way of viewing childhood, this regretful retrospect of
its vanished joys, this infatuated apotheosis of doughiness and rank
unfinish, this fearful looking-for of dread old age, is low, gross,
material, utterly unworthy of a sublime manhood, utterly false to
Christian truth. Childhood is preeminently the animal stage of
existence. The baby is a beast,--a very soft, tender, caressive
beast,--a beast full of promise,--a beast with the germ of an
angel,--but a beast still. A week-old baby gives no more sign of
intelligence, of love, or ambition, or hope, or fear, or passion, or
purpose, than a week-old monkey, and is not half so frisky and funny.
In fact, it is a puling, scowling, wretched, dismal, desperate-looking
animal. It is only as it grows old that the beast gives way and the
angel-wings bud, and all along through infancy and childhood the beast
gives way and gives way and the angel-wings bud and bud; and yet we
entertain our angel so unawares that we look back regretfully to the
time when the angel was in abeyance and the beast raved regnant.

The only advantage which childhood has over manhood is the absence of
foreboding, and this indeed is much. A large part of our suffering is
anticipatory, much of which children are spared. The present happiness
is clouded for them by no shadowy possibility; but for this small
indemnity shall we offset the glory of our manly years? Because their
narrowness cannot take in the contingencies that threaten peace, are
they blessed above all others? Does not the same narrowness cut them
off from the bright certainty that underlies all doubts and fears? If
ignorance is bliss, man stands at the summit of mortal misery, and
the scale of happiness is a descending one. We must go down into the
ocean-depths, where, for the scintillant soul, a dim, twilight instinct
lights up gelatinous lives. If childhood is indeed the happiest period,
then the mysterious God-breathed breath was no boon and the Deity is
cruel. Immortality were well exchanged for the blank of annihilation.

There is infinite talk of the dissipated illusions of youth, the paling
of bright, young dreams. Life, it is said, turns out to be different
from what was pictured. The rosy-hued morning fades away into the gray
and livid evening, the black and ghastly night. In especial cases it may
be so, but I do not believe it is the general experience. It surely need
not be. It should not be. I have found things a great deal better than I
expected. I am but one; but with all my oneness, with all that there is
of me, I protest against such shallow generalities. I think they are
slanderous of Him who ordained life, its processes and its vicissitudes.
He never made our dreams to outstrip our realizations. Every conception,
brain-born, has its execution, hand-wrought. Life is not a paltry
tin cup which the child drains dry, leaving the man to go weary and
hopeless, quaffing at it in vain with black, parched lips. It is a
fountain ever springing. It is a great deep, which the wisest has never
bounded, the grandest never fathomed.

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