Making Believe

‘Is all the world grown up? Is childhood dead? ’ It lacks less than a decade of being a hundred years since Elia protested thus against the removal of the ‘four little winged marble boys’ who used to spout ‘ever fresh streams from their wanton innocent lips, in the square of Lincoln’s Inn.’ Those little winged marble boys were loved of the children, but for the adults they were childish, and therefore were removed. If childhood was dead or even moribund then, what of it now?

Some people are hardy enough to hold that childhood flourishes wherever there are children, —a traditional generalization that may once have been true, but is only seldom true to-day. Watching the children on the city streets, — they are all on the streets, for want of gardens to play in, — I ask myself continually, Have they all grown learned, worldly-wise, circumspect? do they play with a jaded air? has their talk a touch of sophistication? Something is the matter, but is the trouble in them or in me? Can it be that the children of the present generation are forgetting how to play? Can it be that they are losing the faculty of‘make believe?’ Sol queried to-day, for instance, when I overheard a bright little fellow of seven conversing about sal ammoniac batteries, carbon, and zinc. Shades of Jack the Giant-Killer and Jack of the Bean-Stalk! Sal ammoniac, carbon, and zinc! How long is it since this has been the language of childhood? Have chemical elements and salts supplanted the fairies, and is infancy hereafter to prattle the jargon of the electrician? I knew that the realms of fantasy had long been almost depopulated of adults, but I had foolishly clung to the illusion that the children were still there in large numbers.

More than simplicity, more than innocence, more than vernal freshness, I had thought that fantasy was the special concomitant of childhood. It was the romantic quality, the air of makebelieve, which surrounded Lamb’s little marble boys, naked in all weathers in a London square, spouting endless streams, that made the children love them. Yes, and it was that, too, I suppose, that made the adults remove them. And if there is any falling off among children in the talent of making believe, unless we lay the blame upon that long-suffering phantom, The Spirit of the Age, — who is said to be scientific, rationalistic, positivistic, — there is no one to blame but ourselves. We have let ourselves grow up.

Childhood flourishes to-day, as it has always flourished, where there are grown-up people who are children. This is a complicated and paradoxical saying, but it is worthy of acceptation. There are such people. I see one now and then, and I always try to watch him when he is not looking, and drink in some of his effulgence. I remember coming upon one once, a long time ago, when I was fishing. Now, the chief value of trout-fishing is that it makes one be still for a season. One moves along like a guiltless conspirator, even the footsteps drowned in the babble of the brook, and comes upon all manner of shy people in fur, feathers, and clothes, before they have time to assume their company manners, — a cow drinking, an otter fishing, a musk-rat lining his burrow, a blue dragon-fly poised on a calamus leaf, a king-fisher nesting, or, as in the present instance, a portly gentleman, past middle age, engrossed, in defiance of apoplexy, in building a dam. He had chosen the down-stream edge of a deep pool, thrown off coat and vest, pulled off shoes and stockings, and gone at it. He was perfectly happy. Out of the depths of the pool he heaved the fine flat slates, made by Nature for dam-building. Handfuls of dark loam scooped from the nearer shore served for plaster. In the middle he had left an outlet to be walled up last. No man ever did so neat a job without long practice. When, at last, he saw me, he blushed slightly, but offered no apologies.

‘There, sir,’ said he, straightening up, with hands pressed on an aching back, ‘how’s that for an old fellow? I haven’t done that for, — let me see, it must be — Oh, Lord, it can’t be as long as that! Why,’ — and he turned a pair of laughing incredulous eyes upon me, — ‘what fools we old fellows be, not to do it every summer!’

He had shed his years with his coat. I am sure that his grandchildren — he had six — were blest in him. We joined forces, and for two hours ‘we twa paidlet in the burn and pu’d the gowans fine’ of happy reminiscence. The dam was a great success: the pool filled superbly, and poured over the top in a cascade fully a foot and a half high. That was something; but more, infinitely more, was the picture the old gentleman presented, standing barefoot on a precarious stone, grinning delightedly, absently wiping his grimy hands on his black trousers, and whooping until the hills echoed again.

I have said that this infant of sixtyfive’s grandchildren were blest in him. What grandchildren could have been anything but childlike with such a grandfather? Where he was, the world had to be young. You may say that the influence of the six grandchildren kept him young, but I maintain that if he had been a bachelor, sole inhabitant of a desert island, any chance Man Friday who had come upon him would have found him building dams with the same happy assiduity; indeed, there are no more childlike persons in the world than childlike bachelors, — witness Charles Lamb and Lewis Carroll. If those six grandchildren had any more of spring’s perennial charm than most children; if they were more redolent of the air of fairyland; if they lived more persistently in the sunny realms of make believe, they owed it, both by inheritance and by imitation, partly at least to their grandfather.

My impression is, however, that five of these grandchildren rather bored him. At ages ranging from one to ten, they were all too mature. I noticed that he dwelt with particular relish upon the sixth, a boy of nine, who belonged to another family. This youngster, it appeared, was a quiet little chap, given to lying on his stomach on floor and ground, reading, or playing with a set of chessmen, with which and a boxful of dominoes he fought over again the battles of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. With a wooden sword and a barrel-head shield, he fought and slew great numbers of dragons, galloping grandly meanwhile and champing at the bit. He had a curious habit of personifying the most unlikely objects, such as a clothes-post or a mulleinstalk or a servant-girl. He haunted tree-tops and fence-tops and shedroofs; and the higher he climbed, the louder he sang. His parents, I understood, were visited by vague fears that he was a little queer. Not so his grandad. That gentleman gloried in these vagaries and, I believe, abetted him in them. I remember that Grandad himself that very day expressed a longing to climb an eligible oak tree near by, glancing ruefully down at a frontal rotundity which put it out of the question. One observation of his sticks in my mind. ‘Why, sir,’ said he, ‘that boy is living six lives while the others are living one!’

We can picture the others, — stolid little urchins who could no more invent a game than transform the fireside rug into a magic carpet; to whom a thicket was merely an assemblage of underbrush, not a robber’s cave; and a garden only an assortment of flower-beds, not a witch-haunted and fairy-denizened wilderness; who were, in short, what people are fond of calling normal healthy boys and girls. They pestered their disgusted grandparent, we may be sure, for suggestions as to what to play, what to make, what to do; multitudes of complicated and expensive toys they played with for an hour and then incontinently smashed; they had no higher conception of fun than blowing a tin horn and sliding down bannisters. Is it any wonder that, however normal and healthy they were, their grandfather had no patience with them? He never had to ask a policeman what to do next, or write to the inquiry editor of the newspaper for suggestions for passing his time. A touch of bitterness in his references to them gave me the impression that they had pronounced him silly.

Perhaps he was too hard on them. Perhaps, if he had been willing to spend a little more time over them, they might have learned to make believe, though I doubt it. They did not begin right. They were born into the wrong kind of family. There was a want in father and mother that no grandfather could wholly supply, especially a grandfather who was ‘squeamish in his children.’ Lacking imagination by inheritance, and confronted by none of the daily little innocent play which is the infallible mark of parents not hopelessly grown-up, how could they learn how to make believe? A litter of puppies or kittens fare better, for their mother teaches them at least so much.

It may be argued that the five unromantic children were just as happy as the sixth. But that ‘remains to be proved.’ There is no reliable machine on the market for measuring happiness. To me, such happiness as theirs runs thin. There is a difference between ‘table claret’ and Chambertin, yet they are both wine. The dambuilding old gentleman hit on a truth when he said that the romantic child was living six lives to the others’ one.

I watched two little girls on the street to-day. They had two strips of red and pink ribbon which they held aloft in the wind and let flutter. They were well-dressed little girls, too, and seemed quite normal and healthy. They screamed and chirruped and danced over this poor amusement during the entire period of ten minutes while I waited for a car. Evidently they thought it fun. It was, but it rang hollow in my ears. They were having such a hard time amusing themselves. In time a little boy came riding furiously on a velocipede, whistling shrilly. He was a steam engine and whole train of cars making up time. He snatched the ribbons very impolitely from the little girls’ hands, shouting, ‘Give me the mail-bags,’ and disappeared around a corner, bound for Buffalo, leaving the little girls bereft, forlorn as two lonely freight-agents in two way-stations in a desert. There seemed to me a fulness of joy about the boy’s pastime which theirs lacked. I imagine that it took them all the rest of the day to decide what to do next. He had the advantage of a velocipede, to be sure, yet he could have impersonated the Empire State Limited almost as well on foot. His intuitions were good, even if his makebelieve was not particularly original.

I have greater hopes for another little hoy to whom I was introduced recently at dinner-table. He suggested cutting off all the legs of the table except the one in the middle, so that when he desired potatoes which were on the opposite side, all he would have to do would be to turn the table half-way round and help himself. I protested, pointing out that, as the table would be continuously on the move, I should have to spear my dinner as it whizzed past; and that, moreover, if I wished potatoes at the same moment that he did, the table could not possibly go in two directions at once. He considered the objections gravely, but with twinkling eyes,and then evolved an improvement. Our individual dishes were now to be placed on an immovable rim, while the middle of the table revolved. This original conception he embroidered mentally for some time, as I could tell by his gestures. He was silent for the rest of the meal, but ate with great satisfaction off a whirling table, in a union of actuality and fantasy enviable to contemplate. It is easy to see that such a child has been encouraged in ihese flights of fancy; that his father is not so mundane, his mother so seriously minded, as not occasionally to indulge his innocent inventions.

There was probably never a child so unimaginative that he never made believe, any more than there was ever a positivist so positive, or a scientist so scientific, t hat he never romantically embraced an hypothesis or romantically did to death an illusion. Realism and romance are inextricably blended in life, and the difference between the rationalist and the romanticist is seldom more than nominal. The scientist, under the guise of seeking the truth or adding his mite to the world’s knowledge, is really trying to have a good time within his temperamental limitations. Is it to be supposed that a man ever spent a life counting molecules, comparing fabliaux, studying enclitics, or fingering a ticker-tape, unless he enjoyed it? Why need he drag Truth into the question any more than the romanticist does? Why, above all, need we talk of the martyrdom of scientist or scholar? Does the foxhound demand commiseration if he incurs a few cuts and scratches on the trail?

The rationalist gets far more consideration than he deserves, the romanticist far less. From his childhood the latter finds the world persistently bent upon robbing him of his dreams. The fairies go first, with the giants, ogres, witches, and ghosts, in their train. Santa follows. Swans prove geese. Women do not all prove to be angels. Miracles arc explained. Revelation becomes evolution. If he is a stiffnecked and incorrigible romanticist, like William Blake and Emmanuel Swedenborg, lie persists in what the world calls delusion. But his race is at a sad disadvantage in argument. In a. world of things-as-they-are-not, it is hard to be dogmatic; in a world of things-as-they-are, nothing is easier. And so the rationalist promulgates his inglorious successes almost unopposed. If he would confine his operations to the grown-ups, it would be bad enough; but when he militates against childhood, it is time for somebody to protest. The triumph (and tragedy) of his system is shown incarnate in the urchin who jumps from infancy into the university, leaving the whole glorious domain of boyhood untrodden. In the equation of such a life, the value of x, the factor of romance, ‘approaches zero.’

In addition to our dereliction in permitting ourselves to grow up, we have upon our souls the other responsibility of devising various so-called ‘conveniences of modern life,’ as killing to the romance of childhood ‘as the canker to the rose, or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, or frost to flowers.’ Among these are numbered the apartment-house and the nursemaid. I protest against the apartmenthouse because there the materials of make believe are well-nigh wanting. The dumb-waiter and the fire-escape have possibilities, and the janitor might serve at a pinch for an ogre; but these are poor substitutes for attics and cellars and gardens. I abominate nursemaids and governesses and resident tutors, because these are usually unromantic persons. There is a tincture of bravado in any make believe carried on in the presence of an unsympathetic and pedagogically-minded guardian, be he nurse-maid, tutor, governess, or teacher. The bubbles of romance are easily punctured; the sprouts of fancy languish in a chilling atmosphere. From this arraignment, however, I must except the old-fashioned Irish servantgirl, or maid-of-all-work, if she is still in existence. The Swedes and Poles and. Finns are said to have supplanted her. When they came in, and when children began to grow rationalistic, she departed, singing, like Matthew Arnold’s cuckoo, ‘The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!’

I must dedicate a line or two here to one of her species. Her name was Mary Flannagan. I remember her vividly: blue-eyed, pretty-faced, sweet-hearted, down-at-the-heel, with a soft burr on her tongue, and an illogical twist, in her idiom, and a tousled brown head crammed with snatches of song and scraps of story. I should like to be once more, just for a night, a little tale-hungry boy, to nestle, as once, in her lap while the potatoes burned and the steak scorched, and listen to her famous story of the Walking Coffin, with the delectable icy trickle down my back, and the ghostly stirring in my hair; or to roar with laughter with her over her rhyme of the doughty Robbity Bobbit, who ate a cow and a calf, a bullock and a half, the church and the steeple, the priest and the people, and then asked for more!

Unimaginative grown-ups thought they were paying her wages to do the sweeping and cooking and washing; but all the gold in Tir-nan-og, where happiness can be bought for a penny, would never have paid for those hours I spent with her. She might forget the cake in the oven, but she had always time to play customer at my apothecary’s shop, conducted outside the kitchen window, with decoctions of violet-root and effusions of geraniumleaf for stock-in-trade. She had in her enough of the spirit of childhood to have made passable playmates of Auguste Comte and Adam Smith, and I can go no further than that.

There were soft summer twilights when she was supposed to be washing the supper dishes or sprinkling the clothes, but was really tremulously exploring the garden hand-in-hand with me, transmuting its prosaic soil into the beloved sod of which she so often sang under gentle endearing mystical names — Kathleen Ny-Houlahan and Silk of the Kine and Ros geal dhu. There was a great clump of lilacs, haunted, she was sure, by the Pooka and the Horned Women. And one night, — I shall never forget it, — there came along the gravel path an ominous rumbling and crunching and grinding. How wre scampered for the kitchen and bolted the door! x4nd how we crept to the window and peeped through the blinds to see — not the terrible Costa Bower, the death-coach with headless horses, and the Dallahan, the headless coachman, horribly outlined against the moon, but Jim, the hired man, rolling an ash-barrel! Ah! those were nights! but how short,—short-lived as the gay motes that people the sunbeam.

Many a good mother will protest against such pastimes, as mine did. I shall not try to defend them; doubtless the same hours spent in the society of a tutor would have been more profitable; doubtless Mary Flannagan ought to have been ashamed of herself for filling my immature head with the terrors that fright us from our sleeps; yet it was a sad day for me when she received her dismissal, and I cannot find it in my heart to condemn her. She breathed the air of fairyland; in her Irish blue eyes I caught gleams of the sunshine of Hy Brasail; and she paid me back a thousandfold for a few wakeful nights, a few tremors in the dark, in coin that, unlike the fairy gold, has never turned to dust and leaves.

No, I would not swap Mary Flannagan for some years of schooling.