Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as might be, if not sooner.When a poor little boy came to be eight years old they called him a youth.The diarist himself had no cause to be proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments" till he was four years of age.He seems even to have been a youth of eight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of, and hardly acknowledges.It is difficult to imagine what childhood must have been when nobody, looking on, saw any fun in it; when everything that was proper to five years old was defect.A strange good conceit of themselves and of their own ages had those fathers.
They took their children seriously, without relief.Evelyn has nothing to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it.Twice are children, not his own, mentioned in his diary.Once he goes to the wedding of a maid of five years old--a curious thing, but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility.Another time he stands by, in a French hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a frightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience." "The use I made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been subject to this deplorable infirmitie." This is what he says.
See, moreover, how the fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in literature, and how it abolished little girls.It may be that there were in all ages--even those--certain few boys who insisted upon being children; whereas the girls were docile to the adult ideal.
Art, for example, had no little girls.There was always Cupid, and there were the prosperous urchin-angels of the painters; the one who is hauling up his little brother by the hand in the "Last Communion of St.Jerome" might be called Tommy.But there were no "little radiant girls." Now and then an "Education of the Virgin" is the exception, and then it is always a matter of sewing and reading.As for the little girl saints, even when they were so young that their hands, like those of St.Agnes, slipped through their fetters, they are always recorded as refusing importunate suitors, which seems necessary to make them interesting to the mediaeval mind, but mars them for ours.
So does the hurrying and ignoring of little-girl-childhood somewhat hamper the delight with which readers of John Evelyn admire his most admirable Mrs.Godolphin.She was Maid of Honour to the Queen in the Court of Charles II.She was, as he prettily says, an Arethusa "who passed through all those turbulent waters without so much as the least stain or tincture in her christall." She held her state with men and maids for her servants, guided herself by most exact rules, such as that of never speaking to the King, gave an excellent example and instruction to the other maids of honour, was "severely careful how she might give the least countenance to that liberty which the gallants there did usually assume," refused the addresses of the "greatest persons," and was as famous for her beauty as for her wit.One would like to forget the age at which she did these things.When she began her service she was eleven.When she was making her rule never to speak to the King she was not thirteen.
Marriage was the business of daughters of fourteen and fifteen, and heroines, therefore, were of those ages.The poets turned April into May, and seemed to think that they lent a grace to the year if they shortened and abridged the spring of their many songs.The particular year they sang of was to be a particularly fine year, as who should say a fine child and forward, with congruous syntax at two years old, and ellipses, figures, and tropes.Even as late as Keats a poet would not have patience with the process of the seasons, but boasted of untimely flowers.The "musk-rose" is never in fact the child of mid-May, as he has it.
The young women of Addison are nearly fourteen years old.His fear of losing the idea of the bloom of their youth makes him so tamper with the bloom of their childhood.The young heiress of seventeen in the Spectator has looked upon herself as marriageable "for the last six years." The famous letter describing the figure, the dance, the wit, the stockings of the charming Mr.Shapely is supposed to be written by a girl of thirteen, "willing to settle in the world as soon as she can." She adds, "I have a good portion which they cannot hinder me of." This correspondent is one of "the women who seldom ask advice before they have bought their wedding clothes." There was no sense of childhood in an age that could think this an opportune pleasantry.
But impatience of the way and the wayfaring was to disappear from a later century--an age that has found all things to be on a journey, and all things complete in their day because it is their day, and has its appointed end.It is the tardy conviction of this, rather than a sentiment ready made, that has caused the childhood of children to seem, at last, something else than a defect.
