🥀 I have asked a man who evidently enjoyed his mature years what was his principal remembrance of childhood, and he has answered, without stopping to find something unexpected—as the man of the moment is too apt to stop—“I was bored.” Too much time is what wearies childhood. Although we are all surprised by the speed with which, in after years, “time flies,” as we all say, not many of us understand that there is no flying nor creeping on the part of Time; that his space is merely relative, and that he seems to fly now because in childhood he went on a halting foot; or rather because he too was small and went a little way at his great pace. But there is no other manner of measuring the passage of time than such an act of comparison, and those who do not make it consciously must make it unconsciously. The childish measure of time, moreover, it is that makes ancient history ancient. If we heard for the first time, at forty, of Cheops, of Abraham, of the Argonautic Expedition, of Romulus, of Charlemagne, their respective antiquity in our imagination would be wonderfully lessened. Not childhood only but infancy itself—infancy sung to sleep—conceives great mysteries of time. But measure the centuries by the ten-years’ measuring rod of later life, and see what little things they are, and to what small purpose even four or five of them are added together. Our race’s sense of time, and sense of history, and sense of mystery is formed of the impressions of its successive childhoods.

🥀 To return to the contemporary but differing times of ourselves and our children: they are not, as we are accustomed to life, but more influential still is our habit of memory and their practice of oblivion. They do not make a custom of remembering; and a morning not thought upon becomes a distant thing in the afternoon; last year, not voluntarily thought upon, grows dim; whereas ripe age pauses to remember, and old age does more than pause. “There is always retrospect,” said an old paper-seller to me one day; he had stood at the same corner for fifteen short though weary years.

🥀 Children, then, find the time long. Wordsworth, who so freshly, so observantly, remembered childhood, and whose childhood, was so influential in our literature, characteristically remembered the length of childish time as a length of happiness—the length of a lovely day in the summer-country; it had the length of twenty days of summer-country in older age—albeit older age that in him loved the summer as passionately as, in him, childhood had loved it, older age that reluctantly saw it fly, and whispered a “Stay—thou art so fair,” to a thousand thousand moments. They would not stay, though they seemed to have lingered at long-drawn play over the head of the boy he remembered. But other men, who are not Wordsworths, or anything like Wordsworths, have connected the slow time of childhood with other things than summer loveliness and light. “I was bored,” said the cheerful and active man of middle-age; and we may have to deal, in the persons of our younglings, with the childhood of persons who are not Wordsworths—hard as this saying may be in the parent’s ear.

🥀 We should not let our children be bored; they may, they must, be weary of their education; but that is a different thing. It is an occupied fatigue, an active distaste. What is to be avoided is _ennui_ and the vacant hours. Our fathers guarded them against this austerely, by means of duty and occupation, whether a child’s duty or a schoolboy’s; we—lessons apart—are attempting that guard by means of amusement—whether a child’s “fun” or a schoolboy’s. Now, it is with no sour discountenance that we may question this amusement. The world has tardily decided that if anyone ought to be happy it is a child, the sinless one; the decision is made with a side-glance at the more completely sinless animal, and a wish that this creature too might have the justice of happiness. And this is a modern resolution, and a modern wistfulness; it does not imply, as it would seem to imply, a “conviction of sin” in the adult heart; it is therefore not solemn, but it is very kind and just. Not in condemnation of that temper of mind is the inevitable warning to be urged. No, the evil to be feared is not that of making the child too happy; it is that of using up the capital estate of pleasure. If a child is to continue happy, to continue amused and gay, he must be entertained upon the usufruct and not upon the capital of pleasures. Nay, even elders, considerate enough to hold that children should not have “fun” too unmixed, lest it should lose its charm, hardly know that it is the very fact of “fun” that is in danger. The child over-amused is in peril of losing amusement itself within his own heart, and not merely the pleasure in pantomime, or the pleasure in roller-skating, in other words the need of a change of gaieties. Alas, it is gaiety itself that is at stake. The man who confessed that his chief remembrance of his childhood was that he had been bored, had kept his gaiety unimpaired in spite of that uncheerful beginning. It would have been better for him, and more just to his innocence, if he had not been bored, but it was better for him to have been bored during the inconsiderate occupations of his elders and by their dullness, than by his own amusements. That is, better of two evils. Children should not be bored at all, or not more than is human.

🥀 Not too often, not too long, should justly be the “fun.” As to its length, the variations of contemporary time should teach us that one hour of pantomime is to the average young child as long as an hour of sunny summer was to Wordsworth—that is twenty times one hour—well, Wordsworth liked round numbers, and I hope poets will continue to like them; let us suppose he exaggerated somewhat. At any rate the amused child lives quickly through a long hour, as the bored child lives minutely through a long hour. Assuredly what we owe them both is our judgment of their different, their childish, conditions; and a little imagination that shall take their measure into our life-accustomed hands, and with it rule the measure of cyclic, of weekly, of daily, and of hourly time.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.