Wings and the Child; Or, The Building of Magic Cities Part 3

Besides, it needs a solid substructure to support it, and if you make your building solid, every brick in your box will be used up, and all you will have to show for it will be a partially built wing of a peculiarly undesirable villa residence, replete with every modern inconvenience. Nor must it be supposed that the difficulty can be met by adding more and more boxes of bricks. Add them, by all means; and the result will be a larger and probably an uglier factory, or a completed, and therefore more completely hideous, villa. Unless you are a millionaire, and have a toy cupboard as big as a pantechnicon, you will never have enough bricks to build up the solid ma.s.ses which rest the eye, and give solidity and dignity to architecture. Among such solid ma.s.ses _steps_ are not the least important. Every child knows that a really good flight of steps will take half the bricks in his box and leave insufficient material for the edifice to which the steps were intended to lead up. The tall broad smooth wall, its quiet surface disturbed only by one or two windows, a flight of steps and a doorway, is for ever out of reach of the child who has only bricks wherewith to build.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sh.e.l.l ARCHES]

The arches supplied with boxes of bricks are usually few and badly proportioned. There is seldom any provision for setting them up in a colonnade.

The pillars which will support the ends of two arches are too wide for the _end_ arch, which is single. This difficulty is dealt with in stone bricks, but not in wooden ones; at any rate so far as my experience goes.

There never was a time, one supposes, when so much money was spent on children and their toys. It is impossible to believe that, should some toy maker design and put on the market really desirable bricks for children, there would not be a ready sale for them. I suggest, then, that bricks are too large, and too small--and that what is needed is much smaller bricks, and much larger ones. The bricks in the old chest in our nursery started with 2-in. cubes, and went on in gradations of 2-in. to the largest brick--12 by 2 by 2 in. The chest itself must have been at least 4 by 2 by 1 ft. Another detestable quality in our modern bricks is their inexactness--a sixteenth or even a quarter of an inch, more or less, is no more to the maker of bricks nowadays than it is to a bad dressmaker. Our bricks were well and truly cut: they were of seasoned oak, smooth and pleasant to touch--none of the rough-sawn edges which vex the hand and render the building unstable; they were heavy--a very important quality in bricks. They "stayed put." I suggest that such bricks as these, supplemented by arches of varied curves, but unvarying thicknesses, and slabs of board varying in breadth but not in length, would not be a toy beyond the purse of kind uncles and aunts, and certainly not beyond the means of our Council schools. The slabs of boards are to build steps with and to make roofs with. Every child who has ever built with bricks feels the reckless wastefulness of using for steps the bricks so much needed for walls and towers. And who has not experienced the aggravation of finding when his tower is built that he has used up all the long bricks near its foundation and has now none left which are long enough to lay across its summit and form its roof?

The slabs of board should be, like the bricks, of seasoned oak, and should be an inch thick. There should be plenty of arches--so as to render possible some sort of resemblance to Norman and cla.s.sical architecture.

But bricks alone, however beautiful and varied, cannot as building material have the value which material freely chosen would have.

Children love to make mud pies, and to build sand castles, because the material is plastic and responds with more or less of docility to their demands upon it. Also there is always enough of it, which there never is of bricks, or for the matter of that, of plasticine. I can imagine a splendid happiness for a child in a bushel of plasticine--but the sticks of plasticine are too small to be made into anything architecturally satisfying; and much too expensive for ordinary children to have in any but such quant.i.ties as encourage niggling. You will notice that children never tire of building sand castles on the sea-sh.o.r.e--but they would soon tire of building with a quart of damp sand on a table. It is true that the sea washes away your sand castle, usually before it is finished, but its end is finely catastrophic and full of damp delightful incident. Also the climax has the great essential of drama--it is inevitable. How different the demolition of the brick-built house by mamma, who wants s.p.a.ce for cutting out, or by Mary, who desires to lay the table. The most promising of palaces, the most beautiful of bridges, are, at the urgence of these grown-up needs, swept away, and so, never being able to finish anything, the builder becomes discouraged. Perhaps he takes to the floor as an eligible building site, only to find his buildings exposed to the tempestuous petticoat of Mary, or the carelessly stepping high-heeled shoes of mamma. The same thing happens with a dolls' school, or a dolls' dinner-party, or any game requiring pageantry of any sort--so that little girls who would like their dolls to be actors in some scene of magnificence find no safe place for the actors save in their arms--and nurse with enforced premature maternal fussings the doll who, in happier circ.u.mstances, might be a Druid or a martyr, or Francis the First at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is better to the child's mind that the cherished doll should safely be baby for ever, than that it should be Francis the First and get walked on.

In any house where s.p.a.ce makes such a thing possible, a table might be set aside for children, to be their very own--a table on which neither food nor millinery should ever trespa.s.s. Of course it is needful that toys and pseudo-toys should be "put away" daily, but it is not necessary that they should all be put away. Those which are being used in some splendid half-developed scheme might surely be allowed to stay where they are, so that it may be possible to go on with the game next day. A truce might be called of that ruthless tidying up which, every day, destroys the new idea, and compels the child each day to produce a new scheme instead of allowing it to work on yesterday's and bring it to something a little nearer the perfection which it touched when the child's mind first conceived it. But, it may be urged, children leave everything half-finished, and go off to something else. Of course they do--but clear away the half-finished thing, and you will find when they come back from the b.u.t.terfly flight after some other interest, that they will not be pleased with you.

"I've put all your bricks nicely away," you say proudly; and Tommy will say "Bother!" in his heart, even if his lips are sufficiently trained to avoid that expletive and to subst.i.tute: "I do wish you hadn't: I wanted to finish building my tower."

You see one thing leads to another. It isn't that children are any more bird-witted than we are: it is that they have not yet learned to restrain the thousand curiosities, desires, and creative impulses proper to their age. You, of course, if you desired to set up a tableau of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, would sit down with a bit of pencil and the back of an envelope and jot down all the properties required for staging the scene. But the child who has "had" the Field "in History," and whose imagination has been stirred by the name of it--a thing that will happen under the stupidest of teachers--sets up Henry and Francis in paper crowns and only then begins to see that tents and banners and cloth of gold are lacking. Perhaps he goes off to the village shop to get flags, perhaps to your handkerchief case for tent-cloth, perhaps to the meadow beyond the orchard to gather b.u.t.tercups. While on any of these quests some supremely important event may strike across his plans, and overshadow them--a new kitten, a gift from the gardener of plants for his little garden, or the fact that some one is going fis.h.i.+ng. Then Francis and Henry are forgotten, the b.u.t.tercups left dying on the doorstep, and the tent-cloth crammed into the pockets among string, stamps, acid drops, and pieces of the watch he took to pieces last holidays and never put together again, and he will follow the new trail.

But he will come back to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and if you have "tidied up" the kings and put their crowns in the wastepaper basket the child will be disappointed and worried, his imagination checked and his scheme baffled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HANDKERCHIEF TENTS.]

His annexation of your handkerchiefs will not occur if you have accustomed him to come to you or to his nurse for the means to his small ends; but if there is no one to whom he can apply for help, you will find that he will not stick at the sacred threshold of your handkerchief case. The tents of the Field of the Cloth of Gold will be far more important to him than the inviolability of that scented treasure-house--unless, of course, you happen to have explained to him exactly how much you dislike that your handkerchiefs should keep the sort of company they meet with in his pockets. Then, if he loves you, and has found you reasonable, he will refrain, while wondering at your prejudices. But he will--or ought to--find some other material for tents--letter paper perhaps. Letter paper makes quite good tents, though not nearly so good, of course, as handkerchiefs folded diagonally--supported by a central pole, say a penholder, and fastened down at the tucked-in corners with pins or rose thorns. You can explain to him that rose-thorns hurt handkerchiefs, but you will not punish him if this has not occurred to him. And this brings one to the question of crime and punishment, of which perhaps I had better say what I have to say before I go on talking about bricks and how to supplement them. As I was saying, one thing leads to another.

CHAPTER VIII

The Moral Code

IN attempting to explain and enforce a moral code, the first and most essential need is to formulate definitely to oneself the code which one proposes to enforce and to explain. There is nothing from which children, and subject human beings generally, suffer so much as the incoherence of the thought of those in authority over them. Before you can begin to lay down the law you must know what that law is, and your heart, soul, and spirit must not only know it, but approve it, before you can gain a willing obedience to it from those on whom you wish to impose it. By this I do not mean only that we ought to make up our minds whether this, that, or the other isolated act is right or wrong, as it occurs, but that we ought to have a clear perception and knowledge of the things that are right and the things that are wrong, and have a standard which we can apply to any new action brought under our notice, so that, measuring the new act by our old standard, we shall be able to say, with some sort of rough accuracy, "This is wrong," or "This is right."

And the standard of expediency is not a good one for this purpose, nor is the standard of custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or the standard of success in life. Children are not good judges of expediency.

The law of mere custom will not be strong enough to bind them when desire calls with enchanting voice to forbidden things. Gentility and the gospel of getting on will leave them cold. You may at first deal merely with a succession of unrelated particulars, saying, "This is right," "This is wrong," beating down the children's questionings by your mere _Ipse dixit_; but a time will come when it will not be enough, in answer to their "Why is it wrong?" "Why is it right?" to answer "Because I say so." The child will want some other standard which he himself can apply. The standard of what you say may be a s.h.i.+fting one, and anyhow, he cannot be at all sure what you will say unless he knows what is your standard, the standard by which you will decide whether to say, in any given case, that a thing is wrong or right. And in order that you may clearly set before the child your own moral standard you must first have set it very clearly before yourself. It is not enough to say, "Stealing is wrong," "Lying is wrong," "Greediness is wrong." If you feel that these things are wrong because they are contrary to the will of G.o.d, you will not find that that explanation is sufficient for a child unless he knows very much more about G.o.d than His name and certain miraculous and incomprehensible attributes of His. He will want to know what is the will of G.o.d, to which these wrong things are contrary. And he will want very much to know the definite right as well as the definite wrong. You will have to give the child a standard that can be applied to positives as well as negatives.

There is a very simple standard by which to measure the actions of children--and, much more severely, our own actions. It is set up in the words of Christ: "Do unto others as you would they should do unto you"--a standard so simple that quite little children can understand and apply it, a standard so severe that were it understood and applied by us who are no longer children, the warped, tangled, rotten web we call civilisation could not endure for a day. There is no other standard by which a child can judge its own actions, and yours, and judge them justly.

Having fixed your standard it will be necessary to try your own actions by it as well as the child's. And this standard will give you the only vital code of morality, because it compels the continual exercise of imagination, the continual preening and flight of the wings of the soul.

You cannot order your life by that Divine precept without a hundred times a day asking yourself, "How should _I_ like that, if I were not myself?" without continually putting yourself, imaginatively, in some one else's place. And when the child asks, "Why is it wrong to steal?"

you can lead him to see how little he would like to have his own possessions stolen. When he asks, "Why is it wrong to lie?" you may teach him to imagine his own bitterness if others should deceive him. It is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong because I say so," or even "because G.o.d says so"; but if you want to mark it right or wrong, to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on the tables of the heart and the soul, teach the child to see for himself _how_ things are right and wrong--and to judge of them by that one Divine and unfailing rule.

Of course even when the child knows what is right he will not always do it, any more than you do: and one of the questions to be considered is how you shall deal with those lapses from moral rect.i.tude of which he, no less than you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the old savage punishments, were revenge, and nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay out" the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment is curative--that the fear of punishment will deter people from doing wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his opinion only the other day that punishment, no matter how severe, will not act as a deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of the criminal's escaping it. What would deter would be the _certainty_ of punishment, however slight. Now since you are not omniscient you cannot pretend to your child that if he does wrong you are certain to know and to punish him: if you are silly enough to pretend it, he will find you out immediately, and estimate your lie at its true blackness. You can, however, without any pretence, a.s.sure him that if he does wrong he himself will know it, that it will make him feel unclean and nasty, and miserable till he is able to wash himself in the waters of repentance and forgiveness. That if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel dirty and mean, and if he acts bravely and cleanly he will feel clean and brave. And he will find that what you say is true. But not unless you shall have succeeded in convincing him that your standard is a true standard, and that the things which that standard shows to be wrong are wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.

No one desires, of course, that a child should be always feeling his own moral pulse: if he has learned that there is a right and a wrong way he will not be always bothering about which way he may be living--it will be only when something goes amiss that he will stop and consider. Just as one does not stop to think whether one is breathing properly, only when one chokes one knows that one isn't.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ONE HALF OF THE CITY.

72]]

Punishment, however, should not be confused with the consequences of action, and while children are yet too small to understand all that G.o.d may be to them, it is possible to show them the _consequences_ of their misdeeds, magnifying these beyond the consequences of the act to be reprobated and thus pointing the general moral. I mean that one may honourably apply, to the small wrong-doings of childhood, the _sort_ of consequences--proportioned, of course, to the wrong-doing--which would result from such wrong-doing on a larger scale by a grown-up person. It will be exceedingly troublesome and painful for you, but perhaps its painfulness to you may be the measure of its value to the child. For instance, Tommy steals a penny, knowing that to steal pennies is wrong. He is very little, and a penny is very little, and your impulse, if not to slap him, might be to tell him that he is a very naughty boy and have done with it. It will go to your heart to bring home to him the consequences of theft, especially as you cannot do it at once; but if, next time you are about to send him to the shop for something, you say, "No: I can't send you because you might steal my pennies as you did the other day"--this will be hateful for you to do--but it will show him more plainly than anything else what happens to people who steal. They are not trusted. And the same with lies. Show him that those who tell lies are not believed.

But, remembering how it felt to be a child, have pity, and do not teach him these lessons when any one else is there. Let the humiliation of them be a secret between you two alone. Only when a wrong has been done which demands a rest.i.tution or an amend should the soul of the child, shamed with wrong-doing, be exposed to alien eyes.

When we sit in judgment on the aggressions and on the shortcomings of others the first need is neither justice nor mercy, but imagination with self-knowledge. The judge should be able to put himself in the place of the accused, to perceive, by sympathetic vision, the point of view of the one who stands before the judgment-seat. The judge is an adult human being, and therefore has some knowledge of the mental and moral processes of human beings. He should use this knowledge; and when it comes to a grown-up judging a child, it is no less necessary for the judge to place himself imaginatively in the place of the small offender.

And this cannot be done by imagination and self-consideration alone.

Memory is needed. Let me say it again: there is only one way of understanding children; they cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory.

Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children. When you were a child you suffered intensely from injustice, from want of understanding, in your grown-up censors. You were punished when you had not meant to do wrong: you escaped punishment when you had not meant to do right. The whole scheme of grown-up law seemed to you, and very likely was, arbitrary and incomprehensible. And you suffered from it desperately. So much that, even if you have now forgotten all that you suffered, the mark of that suffering none the less remains on your soul to this day.

It would seem that the humiliations, the mortifications endured in childhood leave an ineffaceable brand on the spirit. How then can we not remember, and, remembering, refrain from hurting other children as we were hurt?

The spirit of the child is sensitive to the slightest change in the atmosphere about him. You can convey disapproval quite easily--and approval also. But while most parents and guardians are constantly alive to the necessity for expressing disapproval and inflicting punishment, the other side of the medal seems to be hidden from them.

The most prevalent idea of training children is the idea of prohibition and punishment. "You are not to do it! You will? Then take that!" the blow or punishment following, expresses simply and exactly the whole theory of moral education held by the ma.s.s of modern mothers. The vast mistake, both in the education of children and government of nations, is the heavy stress laid on the negative virtues. Also the fact that punishment follows on the failure _not_ to do certain things--whereas no commensurate reward is offered even for success in _not_ doing, let alone for success in active and honourable well-doing. The reward of negative virtue is negative also, and consists simply in non-punishment.

The rewards of active virtue are, in the world of men, money and praise.

But there are deeds for which money cannot pay, and sometimes these are rewarded by medals and paragraphs in the newspapers--not at all the same thing as being rewarded by the praise of your fellow-men. Now children, like all sane human beings, love praise. They love it more keenly perhaps than other human beings because their natural craving for it has not been overlaid with false modesties and shames. They have not learned that

Praise to the face Is open disgrace.

On the contrary, praise to the face seems to them natural, right, and altogether desirable. See that they get it.

Do you remember when you were little how you struggled to exercise some tiresome negative virtue, such as not biting your nails, not teasing the cat, not executing, with your school-boots, that heavy shuffling movement, so simply relieving to you, so mysteriously annoying to the grown-ups? Can you have forgotten how for ages and ages--three or four days, even--you refrained from drinking water with your mouth full of food, from leaving your handkerchief about in obvious spots natural and convenient, how you sternly denied yourself the pleasure of drawing your hoop stick along the front railings--because, though you enjoyed this musical exercise, others did not? And how, all through the interminable period of self-denial, you heartened yourself to these dismal refrainings by the warm comfortable thought, "_Won't_ they be pleased?"--and how they never were. They took it all as a matter of course. To them, because they had forgotten how it felt to be a child, all your heroic sacrifices and renunciations counted as nothing. To them it was natural that a child should keep his fingers out of his mouth, and off the tail of Puss, should keep his feet still and his handkerchief in his pocket, should do the suitable things with meat, drink, and hoop-sticks. They never noticed, and so they never praised.

But when, worn out by long abstinence from natural joys, natural relaxations, you broke one of those rules which seemed to you so useless and so arbitrary, then they noticed fast enough.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TAIL OF PUSS.]

"Can you _never_ remember," they said, "just a simple thing like not biting your nails?" Bitter aloes following, no doubt. Or, "I really should have thought," they would say, "that considering the number of times I've spoken about it you would remember not to make that frightful noise," with boots or hoop sticks or a blade of wet gra.s.s or what not.

They did not pause to think, in their earnest grown-up business of "bringing the boy up," how many, how very many, and how seemingly silly, were the "don'ts" which you had to remember. But you will not be like that: you will notice and approve, and most needful of all, reward with praise the earnest, difficult refrainings of the child who is trying to please you: who is trying to learn the long table of your commandments all beginning with "Thou shalt not," and to practise them, not because these commandments appeal to him as reasonable or just or useful, but just because he loves you, wants to please you, and, deepest need of love, wants you to be pleased with him.

A hasty yet determined effort at putting yourself in his place is the thing needed every time you have to sit in judgment on the actions of another human being--most of all when that human being is a little child. If we cultivated this habit we should not hurt other people as we do. I have seen cruel things.

A little girl, suffering from a slight affection of the eye, was given by a sympathetic aunt the run of a box of that aunt's old ball-dresses.

She spent a whole hour in arranging a costume which seemed to her to be of royal beauty. A crushed pink tulle dress, a many-coloured striped Roman sash, white satin slippers, put on over the black strapped shoes, and turning up very much at the toes. White gloves, very dirty and wrinkled like a tortoise's legs over the plump dimpled arms. Hair dressed high on the head over a pad of folded stockings, secured by hairpins borrowed from the housemaid. A wreath, of crushed red calico roses from somebody's last summer's hat, some pearl beads, the property of cook, and a blue heart out of a cracker--saved since Christmas.

"I am a beautiful Princess," said the child, and the housemaid responded heartily: "That you are, ducky, and no mistake. Go and show mother."

But mother, when she was told that this stumbling, long-tailed bundle of crushed finery was a beautiful Princess, laughed and said, "Princess Rag-Bag, I should say."

"It's only pretending, you know," the child explained, wondering why explanations should be needed by mother and not by Eliza.

The mother laughed again. "I shouldn't pretend to be a Princess with that great stye in my eye," she said, and thought no more about it.

But the child remembers to this day how she slunk away and tore off the beautiful Princess-clothes, and cried and cried and cried, and wished that she was dead. Children really do wish that, sometimes.

Another form of cruelty is mere carelessness. A child spends hours in preparing some surprise for you--decorates your room with flowers, not in the best taste perhaps, and fading maybe before your impatiently awaited arrival--or ties scarves and handkerchiefs to the banisters to represent flags at your home-coming.

"Very pretty, dear," you say carelessly, hardly looking--and the child sees that you hardly look, "and now clear it all away, there's a dear!"