On the Mystification of Children

HEN I look back over my childhood I can see that the early years of it were very largely occupied, as are, I am confident, the early years of most children, with trying to understand, see through, fathom, and account for my elders. They lived, apparently, in a very much larger world than my own, and one by no means easy of access or comprehension. They were forever doing things that were outside my ken: going on errands that, so far as I could see, were perfectly without relation to myself; and taking undue, even absorbing, thought of hundreds of things that were not, if I was any judge, of the slightest real import or value. Dolls they only condescended to. At dolls' tea-parties they merely pretended to pleasure, generally so overdoing it that they embarrassed one. Rolls of dock-weed money, that delightful and easily acquired wealth (you had only to go a little beyond the garden gate to find it), they did not care to handle. Yet I have seen them with my own eyes sit without occupation of any kind, by the hour, engaged in inconsiderable conversation that I honestly believe led nowhere except into the blind alley of an agreement that so-and-so (usually some remote or once or twice removed member of the family relationship) was "really very peculiar." I have seen two otherwise very intelligent members of this older clan—people, I mean, who could, if they really set themselves to do so, tell a good, straight, exciting fairytale, and cut out very creditable paper dolls,—I have seen them waste the best honey-bee hours of the day writing what were doubtless unimportant letters; or, while the dew was on the plenteous garden, occupy themselves with adding up what I cannot think were commensurate household accounts.

But a thing that puzzled me more than all this was the often quite unaccountable language they used. They were much given to expressing themselves in irrelevant proverbs.

"It never rains but it pours," a phrase my mother used often, has much to recommend it, no doubt, if mere economy and utility are in question; but to me, and said in all seasons, or when the sky was as blue as June and fine weather could make it, it was a bewilderment. They said "Give him enough rope, and he will hang himself," and knew quite what they were talking about, though neither rope nor hanging were really concerned in the circumstance. But illuminating and satisfactory as their speech seems to have been to themselves, me it left in outer darkness.

Figurative language is, of course, the poet's province. They spoke, if you like, with homely poetry, but that helped me little in the interpretation. It is, I know, often said that every child is a poet; but I think this an exaggerative fiction, and I could give bond that I was none. So far as I know and can recall, there is no person more desirous of exactness, more perfectly downright in his wishes, than a child. He is compounded of amazement and wonder. He lives upon perpetual inquiry and the direct hope of finding an answer to his questions. Roundabout measures are not to his liking. Robin Hood's barn is not of his building. Postponements, circumlocutions, detours, insincerities, and subterfuges are not of his choice. They are foisted on him by a community of grown-ups who have in their turn in early years been forced by another set of indirect elders to compromise with life and their own longings.

The child is rarely in doubt as to what he wants, and does not conceal his longings. Fire pleases him, and he would put his hand on it if he were not intercepted. The moon meets with his approval, and if he had his own way and the direct fulfilment of his desires, the world would go moonless that night to bed. He is, so far as I know, the only absolutely whole-hearted explorer in the world; and those who later follow that profession and rise to eminence in it do so only because they have retained and pursued those old longings.

But though the child maintains this direction, now note carefully the course of his elders; mark how they offer him makeshifts and substitutes, a rattle in place of that thing Prometheus gave his eternal peace and godlike happiness to possess, and an apple in place of the mellow moon, which has been the mother of men's delights for many ages. I have always found a child's tastes sound and in accordance with the gods. It is his elders who persistently pull him away from their company.

I had what is generally known as an old-fashioned bringing-up, and consequently soon learned to curb the outward manifestations of my curiosity. But denied speech, my hearing became only the more acute. Ah, how many hours I must have listened without a word, in the mere dear hope I would be able to pick up by chance the information I so much craved!

But mystification continued, and at what seemed to be an increasing ratio. Here in the world all about me chattering adults spoke glibly of some very present cousin as once or even perhaps twice "removed," of another as looking exactly like "the other side of the house," of "chips" off "old blocks," of "watched pots" that "never boiled," and irrelevantly of the obvious impossibility of making "silk purses" out of "sows' ears." All this was bad enough, but they did, besides, sometimes resort to Latin phrases. My mother had a way of saying at the climax of a story, "Mirabile dictu!" "De gustibus" was frequent, and once an uncle of mine, when some one spoke the most interesting truths about another cousin not twice or three times, but finally, removed, said solemnly, holding up his hand, "Nil nisi bonum," which had the effect of stopping conversation altogether.

Once "Cousin Anne" conveyed most interestingly that "Cousin Matilda" did not approve of Mrs. Bartholomew's private school, preferring to send her own children for public instruction; and just when I was expecting to hear some good reason given, she broke off sensible speech abruptly and remarked to my mother, "Those look to me, Mary my dear, very much like sour grapes."

What effect but of whimsical trickery could that have, I ask you, upon a downright mind like my own?

Once, too, in the very midst of one of the most enthralling tales I ever listened to, and for which I had renounced dolls and all other delights to stand in the background of the story, my eyes wide, my Cousin Louise seemed suddenly to lose her mind, leaned forward, and broke off the recital, and with the utter incoherency of the mentally unsound remarked, "Mary, have you forgotten that little pitchers have long ears?"

They did nothing more than stop talking about this fascinating subject, which had so completely thrown her off her balance, and, without further reference to it, turned their attention to me and became solicitous about my preferences, dolls and other matters of my usually negligible world.

There are children, I know, who soon capitulate, who early accept the ruling of their elders that the world is a place of utter unlikelihoods, that uncertainty characteristic; they simply accept the fact that life reflects itself on the retina not in the dignity of uprightness, but rather stands consistently and perpetually on its head. But I was not one of these. I maintained for a long while the balance of my true relation to the universe. Though my wings were clipped to the extent that I stood silent and quiet while other people talked, yet my heart was forever flying forth in wonderment and longing to know.

will be seen, then, what new disappointments were inevitable when, as I myself began to grow in reason and perspicacity, my elders, to offset this dangerous tendency, no longer mystified me only by mere habitual and thoughtless opaqueness, but with intent and forethought as well.

When I came to an age and understanding that enabled me to ask really leading questions whose answers would have been extremely useful for my purposes, there developed those age-old replies, devices thought of Heaven knows how many eons ago, for the express purpose of befogging the dawning intellect. If I demanded, for instance, with growing assurance and desire, what a certain thing might be or for what it was intended, the good-natured, but occult, reply was too often, I blush to state, "Whimwhams to make gooses' bridles"; or it might be, "Lay-overs for meddlers to make little girls ask questions"; or, worst of all, and employed, I think, only by the vulgar, "Curiosity killed a cat."

This was the age, too, of absurdities in riddles. One of them I recall vividly: "Why is a bat when it flies?"

Ah, why, indeed! The sincere effort and gray matter I have given to that sphinx-like problem! Why? Why? How I pondered! How I looked out of clear eyes hopefully for possible enlightenment! How I brought my very best powers to solve the unsolvable with all the sincerity in the world and more! "Why is a bat when it flies?" Pause, ponderation. "Why is a bat when it flies?" "Why is a bat when it flies?" "Why is a bat—when it flies?" I tried it in every light and at every speed and accent, I took a new run at it from this angle and that; I put my head in my hands, and did more positive, independent, desperate essential thinking than I have probably even in my best moments done since. I fixed my eyes on the floor among footstools and humble things, and demanded of myself bitterly, "Why—is a bat when it flies?" I cast my eyes to high heaven and invoked high powers; "Why is a bat when it flies!" Oh, why? Baffled, bewildered, I still held fast to my desire to know, as Jacob to the angel, and would not let it go. "Why is a bat when it flies?"

But I only beat upon closed doors; I only grew more bewildered and confounded. Finally, outdone, convinced of my inabilities, I went and confessed them. What was the answer to the unanswerable? And with great gravity, which I took to be sincere, they said, "Because the higher [pause], the fewer."

Then if you look bewildered (and you do), they offer it again gently, persuasively, "Because the higher, the fewer." And if you love truth to the point of saying you do not "see," they look surprised. "Why, don't you see?" They pause to give you one more chance to stand with the intelligent, then slowly, as though to make mistake impossible, "The higher—the fewer."

And it is at that moment, unless you happen to be a future Sappho or Cæsar, Napoleon, Lincoln, or Confucius, that you yield to the larger force. You abandon honesty and you pretend that you see. You fall innocently into the new trick and trap that they have laid for you. And they laugh anew at your pretense, these grown-ups of a certain type, and think it a joke; and no one but the recording angel is in all probability aware that there is a terrible dent in your shining armor; and the devil has had a tasty sauce added to one of his banqueting dishes.

It should not be supposed that I took life too seriously and had no sense of humor. Children are capable of fine and sound distinctions. The question concerning Zebedee's children I accepted as legitimate fun and asked for more. "Miss Netticoat in a white petticoat, and a red nose" was a delight; so, also, though he was so troublesome, was the polygamous gentleman traveling to—no, it was from—St. Ives; but these were never by me classed with the irrational bat. I could tell a further story of a bird and the chance for which I waited, with pathetic patience and utmost faith, to deposit salt on its tail, were not these experiences, however amusing, too painful. Suffice it to say I was a downright healthy and happily sincere child. I was good natured, and I had perhaps even more than the average child's trust in my elders.

My very own were, indeed, for the most part to be depended on; but let me but step even a little way out of the family circle, and I came into a province where "gooses" wore bridles, where curiosity was at times fatal to felines, and where bats flew without likelihood or syntax.

if with proverbial phrases I was mystified, and if in many a particular instance I was with purpose aforethought ed and perplexed by wholly evasive persons with a low estimate of wit, a still greater bewilderment awaited me in my initiation into those forms and customs whereby the average God-fearing community practises its religion. Here, it seemed, one came under the influence of a larger conspiracy, where an entire body and congregation of people united to give themselves over, horse, foot, deacons, and dragoons, to such mysteries as were utterly beyond the province of one's experience or best imagination. I pass over doctrinal matters and arguments. I refer rather only to the common religious parlance, the customary figures, similes, and to those general and varied contradictions in terms on which all religious bodies, it appears, are severally agreed.

If I limit myself solely to my Sunday-school experience, I find an amazing abundance of this material. The hymns, not to speak of the invocations and instruction, did so abound in the extraordinary and unlikely that from the opening one to the last, one's feet, so to speak, never once touched solid ground; mine, I mean, never once did, unless perhaps at that moment when I received, for no meritorious conduct that I could discover, one of the little gaily colored Sunday-school cards, the one really bright spot in an otherwise windy and overcast experience.

We stood indoors, I mean, for instance, little children without umbrellas, and with the sincere hope that it would not rain, singing in enthusiastic chorus:

We united in mysteries as to "lower lights" that were to be "kept burning" along some shore that never was or could be, and as to "sheaves" that were to be brought in, rejoicing, from I do not know whose fields; certainly not ours, as we owned none. To the accompaniment of a piano, little though we were and inexperienced in despair and desperation, we voiced that unthinkable longing, contrary, I believe, to every instinct of child nature, "Oh, to be nothing, nothing!"

I may confess that the rhythms I always enjoyed; the more and the more pronounced the merrier. "Whi-i-iter than the sno-o-ow," gave me positive pleasure, but was soon spoiled by the condition that was to be imposed before that rhythmic promised whiteness could be obtained. On this rock my floating, now derelict reason split utterly. I could not see how such a thing could possibly be accomplished, as was promised, yet I sang it in full voice and with great downrightness,

No one seemed either to remark or object to any of these extraordinary discrepancies. The grown-ups in charge of the matter neither explained nor reasoned with you. They simply began with a few chords on the Sunday-school piano, and then struck straight into all inconsistency and contradiction. After having carefully and at some pains taught you that a lie was one of the very worst sins, the leader of the Sunday-school, baton in hand, then indicated that the moment had come for you to join in asserting stoutly to music (he even insisted on the stoutness) that "Once you were blind, but now you could see," or he called on you to declare, "I am weary, so weary of sin," which had not the slightest foundation either in fact or probability.

Or, with neither sea nor boat anywhere sight, we urged in loud rhythm an invisible sailor in danger of drowning to "pull for the shore." We bade him not mind the rolling waves (though none rolled), but "bend to the oar," though there was not the slightest semblance of oar to bend to. We urged him to leave the "poor old stranded wreck," though none was in sight, advised him not to "cling to self," whatever "self" might be, but rather to give all his efforts wholly and singly, as he loved life and valued safety, to pulling just as hard as he was able for dry land.

As to later experiences,—as to catechism and creed, I mean,—why should I dwell upon these, save that here was new and additional bewilderment?

I partook by inheritance from my mother's and father's people of two denominations. When from stark Presbyterianism I went at times to a more mitigated Episcopalianism; when I confessed strangely, but sonorously, that I was a miserable sinner and had no health in me; when I begged to be spared if I confessed my faults, and restored if I were penitent; the language was certainly far more pleasing, but I cannot see, considering my age and tastes and good health, that there was much improvement as to consistency.

But meanwhile all these things had their inevitable effect. They broke down, as they were well designed to do, your faith in your own reason and in your own reasonable judgment and observations. They overspread life with such dazzling contradictions that, just as in war-days it was often impossible to say whether a war-ship was more like a zebra or a zebra more like a warship, so now by turns you could not have told whether you were the rather stolid little girl you had innocently believed yourself to be, or a broken and empty vessel, a stranded sailor, a Christian soldier, a lost sheep, a jewel to be set in a crown, or a miserable sinner, without health in you.

The confusion at last grew so great that you were obliged to resort to headquarters (as it may be you were expected and intended to do) to find out the real state of your soul and identity from one supposed to be expert in these matters. Day by day you lost self-confidence; your complacency leaked away unsuspected, drop by drop. Less and less you thought for yourself, more and more you depended on your spiritual advisers. Uncertainty possessed you, doubt assailed you, fear beset you; you took to getting down on your knees in dark chambers and making passionate confession of the utter blackness of your really quite normal-colored heart; of the miserable unworthiness of your really very reasonably good little soul.

These things are mystifying. Indeed, were it some other little child, not myself, I could weep concerning those paroxysms of penitence that I remember over such innocent, innocent trifles. Children, it seems to me, are generous beyond all computation. The patience and good-natured endurance of them appear to me enormous. Ah, what might not be done with souls so willing, so biddable, I ask, if instead of giving them mystery, we were bent—we ourselves more clarified—on giving them truth!

But mystery continued to have its way with me. If I asked direct questions of the religious about the unknowable, I was told it was a mystery, a fact I already knew all too well. Directness, simplicity, sincerity, were losing ground. By no wish of my own I was being bound over to the majority of these people who it must be, by every assumption of their own and others, were my betters. They did not choose to use plain language. They spoke for the most part in riddles worse even than the bewildering bat. They made it approximately clear that mystery was a virtue.

Naturally enough, I tried to establish some balance between these teachings and my own insatiable desire to know, but the best result I obtained was a sense of shame at asking for explanations.

I wanted to be of this chosen company. Indeed, I believe that was the strongest desire of the whole experience; nor do I believe this desire was less, at bottom, than the instinctive age-old human yearning toward brotherhood. It cannot be, I feel sure, that the mysteriously worded prayer meant so much to my six- or seven-year-old heart; I feel fairly certain it was the fellowship, so flattering to my years. I can give you no idea how it stirred me and lent me stature to bend my head on a plane of equality with all these grown-ups and to chant with them, after, a sonorously read command that prohibited me from committing murder, "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law." It was the part of the service I loved best, and if children of six kept note-books, I believe I should find many of them agreeing with me.

Conversely, almost the most painful moment of the morning was to me that one just following the tenth commandment, when the well-practised response changed suddenly after the petition for mercy. I could never make out that last wording about the writing of "all these thy laws in our hearts, we beseech thee." I kept my head on my hands like the rest, but was obliged to drop out miserably from the unison.

But if this experience in one church brought me such a sense of exile, what shall I say of that feeling of intolerable alienation produced by the doxology of the other?

Here was the very best moment of those palely stained-glass hours, the solemn united moment that bound you, and yet freed you to go into the living green pastures of the real world once more. It shrived you of weariness. You forgave whatever dull or doctrinary minister had detained you. How I joined with all my heart in the performance, and how other people joined also—all the people, all those even who had hitherto had neither voice nor confidence to join in the more particular hymns, with their tricky omitted stanzas and often unsingable tunes! How the organ, like a chained creature freed at last, rolled and surged and went with a roar into the opening thunder! How every one rose at its great bidding, and drew their lungs solemnly full of air! Some stood a little on one foot, some leaned a trifle on the other, most of them placed both hands carefully on the back of the pew ahead. I recall that the chief deacon and wealthiest citizen always stretched his neck a bit and felt of his collar, as though to make sure it was in order and there was room enough for the voice he was about to employ.

Then the organ settled gorgeously at last, with a final great crash, into the melody. You glanced at your mother to make sure she was beginning (ah, how across the years I can hear my mother's fine, sympathetic alto!) then just a fraction behind her first note you joined in, too. How strong and full of praise the first line always was! So was the second; but, oh, the third! Midway of the third!—

"Praise Him above, ye Hea—"

That was as far as my knowledge went. From there on I could not make out the words that were being sung. I was obliged either to drop out entirely or sing shamedly, miserably, without words, until the fourth line restored me and united me to the rest once more.

But, oh, that hiatus! Unless you have loved the singing of the doxology, as I did, and have, like me, in your sixth or seventh year, been without the knowledge of the latter half of that third line, how would it be possible to make you understand what its lack meant to me! How make you know the vanishings and fallings from me; the shame and longing, troubled pride, doubt, and uncertainty! It may seem to you I exaggerate, but I can still feel the trouble and hurt and loss and alienation of the unknown latter part of that third line.

Then, too, either I must have deceived my family, or they must have thought me too inconsiderable to have my doxology corrected, and either reading was hard to bear.

It ended at last, when I was about ten, by my coming across the verse printed somewhere, and, without a word to anybody, appropriating greedily the lacking half of the third line, and incorporating it into the body of my future religious singing; but that was a late remedy of a long-endured mortification.

No, looking back, I think I cannot remember anything that more disconcerted and troubled me in all those early years than my incompetency and befogment as to the praise of God, and the obligation either to deceive or to drop out of the singing. I who so loved directness! I who so delighted in participation! There are many ways of humiliating childhood, but few indeed so searching as either to shame it before the world or to deny it its fellowship.

Indeed, I find the conditions offered childhood hard. It can hardly be said we leave children any choice. It is true, they may, so to speak, take us or leave us. Ah, yes, but leave us for what? We offer them praise, approval, affection, all that they hold dearest in the world—in a word, fellowship in its fullest sense; but we offer it in the name of obscurity, on the condition of mystification and opacity. Let them renounce their love of exactness, eschew their early devotion to exploration, throw over and abandon the soul's persistent, godlike, ingrained, primordial desire to know, and accept in place of all these the humble willingness to be taught of those who have usurped by ancient apostolic or unapostolic claim the rights and copyrights of wisdom. Let them put off those proud childhood guesses and suspicions of a royal inheritance, and know they are "nothing, nothing!" Let them have done trailing those clouds of glory; put on sackcloth, touch their forehead with ashes, in token of humility and abasement, and learn from their elders how to behave themselves soberly of a Sunday. Let them believe as we do, and they will be welcomed into our communion; and, if that communion happens to be of a certain denomination, a hymn will even be sung by every one, standing, concerning a sheep that was miserably lost and at last safely brought back to the fold; or it may be one whose leading refrain is "Sinner, oh, sinner, come home!"

Yes, if they will believe as we do, and as we recommend, they may break bread with us. If they will give over questioning and capitulate, they shall have our approval. It is trying to settle matters for themselves that will put a ban upon them; it is the repeated effort to think for themselves and independent of us that will ostracize them and bring down on their heads the condemnation of society; it is the persistent desire to deal without ambassadors with divinity, direct, that will, so the legend we have fashioned goes, blast and utterly destroy them. Let them veil themselves thankfully in the mystery that affords us and them protection! Let them give over hoping to find out questionable truth and, unquestioning, accept instead abstruse, undiscoverable, impenetrable doctrines, and be saved!

Yet alarming as all this must seem to those whose hopes are bound up with the eventual triumph of truth, perhaps we need not take too much thought for the morrow. It would not surprise me to find that nature, when too dangerously threatened, sets up, whether it be in so tiny a creature as the bee or in one of such unlimited powers as the human soul, some desire for self-protection; and if we were sufficiently informed, it is not improbable we should find her always providing against a danger over-long endured. While the specially downright and logical young of our species undoubtedly suffer much at the hands of our habit of mystification, and the spirits most sensitively endowed with a love of truth, and therefore the most fit for high adventure, are, as a rule, the very ones most utterly lost to the world through this process of opacity, yet there are, to offset these, the better poised, the more normal, the more commonplace, if you like, the happy-go-lucky as well as the downright merry, who manage somehow to elude fairly well the atrophying effects of mystification; who preserve their good nature unspoiled, their interest in life unaffrighted, who manage to keep their balance, maintain their love of their kind, yes, and occasionally, and as a mere easy tour de force, coin such generally useful terms as "I should worry!"

I was speaking of some old childhood experiences lightly one night not long ago with a cousin of mine, from whom I had been separated since early years, but whose childhood I well remember as one of the most good-natured, frank, amusing, and lovable of my recollection.

"What did you do, Mary my dear, as to the doxology?"

"What did you do?" She laughed.

"Oh, I just dropped out, and hummed miserably and tried and tried to catch the words of the third line. But I never could. I remember feeling so intolerably lonely and ashamed."

"Oh, I did n't," she said, with much the old happy, good nature; "I just sang it in full voice straight through."

"But what did you do about the 'heavenly host'?"

"Oh, my dear," she managed to speak without the slightest irreverence, "the heavenly host did n't bother me a bit. I just sang as much as I could catch. 'Praise Him above, ye Hea—ye Ho—' I had n't the slightest idea what it meant. But that did n't matter. It was singing together that I liked. I 've always liked it, in or out of church."

Ah, that I understood. I found myself suddenly admiring and even reverencing that not too earnest spirit that so easily and in early years, without the egotism of embarrassment, chose the better part. "Ye Hea—ye Ho—"served well enough; the chief part of praise of divinity being still, no doubt, whether in or out of church, the brotherhood.

Yet there is more than the brotherhood that stays in my philosophy. I hope I have not seemed to be too critical of my elders. Though the greater number of their doctrines would seem to me like wilful befogment or worse, nevertheless I have come to years when I must admit that I hold these elders oftenest more pitiful than to blame. Moreover, so many of them, despite their behaviors in unfrankness, have nevertheless successfully and without much effort managed to command my affections and contrived to retain my devotion. Indeed, to speak truth, I have even come to believe that their mystification of children is not an altogether voluntary affair. I cannot get rid of the impression, as I look into the faces of those I know and do not know, of a tired evening, that they themselves are not entirely clear. A bewilderment is often evident in their eyes also. To me so many of them have the air of people who still hopefully await an explanation. I have strongly the impression, too, that some of them have, not in childhood only, desired, yes, and still desire with ineradicable longing, the moon, and have been offered an inadequate substitute through all the later years; have hoped not only once in early, unspoiled days, but persistently, with unconquerable hope, to solve the unsolvable; are indeed still trying, and have not yet been brought to "give up" the riddle of life, though it, like that of the bat, seems to them equally without solution or syntax. I have the impression that though they, too, have been persistently desirous of knowing, hopeful of finding out, yet they also are much mystified. I have seen not infrequently the same questioning and almost bewildered look in the eyes of the old that I have seen in those of little children, and I am sometimes inclined to think the dear long-held questions of their hearts have hardly received better answers.

As to the religious-minded, though it seems to me they have for the most part been rather more practical, fashioning what they take to be shining virtues out of sometimes dark necessity, trading in mysteries, trying thriftily to exchange new ones for old, and economically assuming a wisdom even when they have it not; yet, as I have watched them, it has seemed to me at times that they do but duplicate in another sphere my old experience of the doxology. I seem to see them, too, like my diminutive self of other years, bent on acknowledging and lauding in concert some truths they cannot iterate and do as little understand; resolved on praising what they take to be some guiding Omnipotence, yet knowing very little accurately what they mean thereby. Sometimes I could swear I hear them all singing bravely, resolvedly, in full voice and together, only in another larger key, "Praise Him above, ye Hea—ye Ho—"

But, above all, among all these bewilderments, absurdities, riddles, contradictions, and incertitudes, I cannot be blind to a certain inviolable honor that abides; something in human nature which yet commands, though it cannot always deserve, our reverence. For it is by no means little children only, though they most obviously, who preserve in perpetuity the dignity of the race. Let be our follies and mistakes; the gentle and memorable fact remains that some dignity incorruptible resides sovereign in man's spirit, and, it would seem, must triumph at last inviolate in his destiny; that, despite the sphinxlike riddle of the gods, the soul itself, at its best, has no desire of its own to deceive, but, rather, stands generally hopeful and still desirous of finding truth.