Prunes and Prisms

‘PRUNES are so wholesome! What nourishment in a Prism?’

It is a question of Fact or Fancy as pabulum for the young.

There is little danger that the modern child will be too imaginative or romantic. His peers, if not his elders, the conditions of his practical education, life itself will see to that. There is much greater danger that in learning ‘common sense and efficiency,’ — magic phrase! the Open Sesame to success,— he will lose imagination, — Open Sesame to that other realm of things unprovable and delightsome,—and grow a terrible, unhappy little materialist.

The prune has an indigestible stone. Children unwarned of this have been known to choke with fatal result. Obviously, neither are prisms good to swallow. But it needs a mere ray of sunshine to teach a child the true use of a prism. And long after the prune is digested and forgotten the prism will keep him happy and wondering, while his fancy grows.

More fancy, more poetry, more food for imagination: that is what children need. Every day the need becomes more apparent. Magazines, movingpictures, the average juvenile book, the talk of all about them,— everything tends to tether children’s thoughts to the world of Here-and-now and Hasto-be, the world we know with our five senses. But shall they therefore lose their rightful inheritance in that other realm of loveliness, — the world of Yesterday-and-To-morrow, of Faraway, of May-be? This realm is intended to be loaned them indefinitely, prefigured in the ‘glory and the gleam’ of the rainbow-prism.

It is not dangerous to encourage fancy; it is not disingenuous to create illusion. Such has ever been the function of art and imagination, which need and make no apology for themselves.

It is far easier to lose the blessed faculty for ‘believing three impossible things before breakfast,’ than that other faculty which enables one to see through a spiritless imitation of Santa Claus or find out what makes the wheels go round. But elders are almost universally elate when children begin to show precocious gleams of the latter instinct, while they are inclined to be dubious about the former. It is so easy to form habits of exaggeration, don’t you know! And children must be taught to distinguish truthfully between fact and all the other sort of thing. Good heavens! What so awful as untruth?

And yet in these days of super-revelation, who can dogmatize as to what ‘facts’ are, or disprove the thing which he has never happened to experience?

There is no tome requiring so frequent new, corrected, amended, appended editions in order to keep up to date as that standard reference book, ‘Who’s Who in Fact.’ Already the new edition of 1915 is in process of revision.

A molecule, which most scientists agree to be a fact, is much more hypothetic and fantastical than Robin Goodfellow, whom more will claim to be a mere fancy. A great many incontrovertible facts have been disproved in the course of time: but I never yet heard any one disprove the existence of the old-fashioned, orthodox fairy. A hard thing to do, and if done, — how terrible!

Nowadays, who dare say of almost any proposition, ‘ There can be no such thing ’; or of almost any theory, ‘It cannot be true’? Unexpected allies of Imagination, Science and Philosophy themselves are teaching us the value of those long-despised phrases, ‘May be,’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Who knows?’

The conscientious answer to many childish questionings, allowing space again for the whole blessed lost world of surmise and surprise and mystery, need be — in fact can be — no more positive than this.

‘Is there a Santa Claus?’ Maybe.

‘Did it really happen? ’ Who knows?

‘Do you believe in fairies?’ Why not?

Happy phrase, — ‘The benefit of the doubt’! About a positive fact there can be no doubt — except indeed that its benefit may be doubtful. But as to doubts, — fancies, dreams, precious, insoluble mysteries, — there the benefits are facts, if you please.

When we come to the world of the imagination, let us give the children the benefit of the doubt. Prunes by themselves are extraordinarily uninteresting. Having a prism to play with, one can forget even prunes.

To any one who would most sanely interpret life for a little child, I would say: be not yourself overmuch concerned with your dessert of wholesome, uninspiring prunes. But hang a prism in the window of your soul, then look into the rainbow which it makes and tell what you see.

Though beautiful it will be true.