Childlike

“ There is another kind of relationship by which little children interpret their environment. It is the early manifestation of the associational process which in our adult life so largely crowds out the sensory and motor appreciation of the world. It runs way back to the baby’s pleasure in recognizing things, certainly long before the period of articulate questions. We all retain vestiges of this childlike pleasure in our joyful greeting of a foreign word that is understood or in any new application of an old thought or design. ”

“ The children of the sun, the children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find some remote, faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! ”

“ To develop a man's intellectual powers is not always the best way to make him "humble himself as a little child." Increase of knowledge may make a Newton feel like a child picking up pebbles on the shore of truth, but it is apt to make "the natural man" less childlike. But for no one, whether catechumen, or convert, or mature Christian, can the cultivation of his intellect be as pressing a duty as the cultivation of his heart. "To speak with the tongues of men and of angels," and to "know all mysteries and all knowledge," is as nothing in comparison with love. ”

“ Would such an unchildlike child as we see sometimes, now in a great house, clothed in purple and lace, now in a squalid close, clothed in dirt and rags, have been fit for our Lord's purpose, when he had to say that his listeners must become like this child? ”

“ But in this, speaking for myself, I detect no inconsistency, no falsity to one’s colours. For the qualities or deficiencies which make a child unlovable may be summed up in one word; they are such as make it unchildlike. ”

“ At the same time it is comparatively rare for the ordinary child, that “Æ” says he was, to develop childlikeness in later life. Usually a return occurs to a state unconsciously experienced in early youth. But there appear to be strata of characteristics in every mind, and life is their successive revelation. ”

“ But take them civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow. And yet, incredible as it seems, that very quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes found in the boy and, with it, strange to say, the boy's proper mind and spirit. ”

“ Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who have never known what childhood is: who have never been taught to love and court a parent’s smile, or to dread a parent’s frown. The thousand nameless endearments of childhood, its gaiety and its innocence, are alike unknown to them. ”

“ We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise our children, analyse our children, think we are endowed with a special capacity to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we play at being children. And the result is that we are not more child-like, but our children are less child-like. It is so tiring to stoop to the child, so much easier to lift the child up to you. Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. ”

“ It is strange that all children, coming from whatever place or condition, have these natural gestures alike when they enter the school. The quick motions of the little fingers, as they tell a long story in this way, remind one of humming-birds.
The children are as different from one another as hearing children are. Some are so pretty that artists might covet them, little ones who have not yet learned to speak, but who look up at you silently, statues in which the soul is to awake; others, dwarfed and distorted in figure, have a look of dull despair, too old for childhood. ”

“ Well, girl or child, it's the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
Glick. Or I. Is it tame, or will it fly away like a bird, when it wakes up? Flick. I've heard that children are quite tame;—and they can talk! ”

“ This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to! He was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of fastidious taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue eyes, his commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every change of thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not improbably claim that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter had spoken,—the strange, divine, dread gift of genius. ”

“ To train a child’s will we feel we must crucify it upon the cross of our desires. A child must obey us, we say, follow our caprices and chisel himself into a likeness to us, because we wish him to be like us. Why should children be little men and women? ”

“ In the variety, affinities develop themselves very prettily, and the rough points of rampant individualities wear off. We have seen a highly-gifted child, who, at home, was—to use a vulgar, but expressive word—pesky and odious, with the exacting demands of a powerful, but untrained mind and heart, become "sweet as roses" spontaneously, amidst the rebound of a large, well-ordered, and carefully watched child-society. ”

“ Let the father or the mother think long before they send away their boy—before they break the home-ties that make a web of infinite fineness and soft silken meshes around his heart, and toss him aloof into the boy-world, where he must struggle up amid bickerings and quarrels, into his age of youth! There are boys, indeed, with little fineness in the texture of their hearts, and with little delicacy of soul ”

“ They go further; they mistake the common signs of growth for marks of exceptional talent. Liveliness, sharp sayings, romping, amusing simplicity, these are the characteristic marks of this age, and show that the child is a child indeed. Is it strange that a child who is encouraged to chatter and allowed to say anything, who is restrained neither by consideration nor convention, should chance to say something clever? ”

“ As we have had pointed out to us, the child is not best pleased by mere portraits of himself; he prefers idealised children, whether naughtier and more adventurous, or absolute heroes of romance. And here a strange fact appears, that as a rule what pleases the boy pleases the girl also ”

“ LET THE CHILD BE NATURAL
After all, the greatest charm of childhood is natural, spontaneous simplicity. Stilted, party-mannered children are bores. They are unnatural. And that which is not natural, cannot be well-bred. ”

“ In the delicate face clever, expressive eyes are captivating, which, with pondering, take on at first a curiously serious, concentrated expression. In the whole, he does not at all make an impression of an unhealthy, jaded child, but rather of a boy with a completely fresh and merry view of the world. ”

“ In reality the connection between the two is somewhat like that of parent and child; the smaller body, though lacking in power, has closely imitated the larger mass of writing in form and kind, and has reflected, sometimes clearly, sometimes dimly, the good or bad fashions that have shared the successive periods of literary history, like a child who unconsciously reproduces a parent’s foibles or excellences. ”

“ She has never been content to reproduce merely the physical plasticity and delicacy of infancy, but has shown in her joyous babies and dreamy little girls at least the potentiality of strong wills and clear minds. Great diversity of character and temperament are displayed in the expressive curves of the plump young faces, and the eyes, in particular, questioning, exultant, wondering, reflective or merry, betray a penetrating and subtle insight into the dawning personality under observation. ”

“ We stood to each other from boyhood upwards in every possible relation, whether of an educational, warlike, delicate, or social character, which the warm and fitful feelings peculiar to boyhood and youth can produce. ”

“ The stage of generalization belonging to the infantile cycle is comparatively short because the romantic material of infancy is so scanty. The initial knowledge of the world in any developed sense of the word “knowledge” really commences after the achievement of the first cycle, and thus issues in the tremendous age of romance. Ideas, facts, relationships, stories, histories, possibilities, artistry in words, in sounds, in form and in colour, crowd into the child’s life, stir his feelings, excite his appreciation, and incite his impulses to kindred activities. ”

“ This yea-saying to anything and everything, which surges up with the conviction of an explosion at every moment, everywhere, is far more important, far more profound, far more solid, as a characteristic of childhood, than that mythical innocence and sweet merriness which is the only characteristic of healthy childhood that superficial child-lovers will either grant or recognize. ”

“ In return for the gift of our love, our own lives are rejuvenated by association with the light, joy, and laughter of youth.
But the arrival of puberty marks a change in our attitude toward our children of which we are not wholly conscious. At this age the boy is neither man nor child, but part of both, and we become impatient with the idiosyncrasies of his nature and conduct which constantly assert themselves at this period of life. ”

“ What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. ”

“ Studies of children, in the warm and tender colouring of personal reminiscence, are the chief matter of the book; children do not appreciate the love and insight that makes it poetry; they will not stand still to trace, in these portraits of brothers and sisters, a likeness to the gentle authors. Grown-up persons, acquainted with the family history, understand the little girl’s patience over her broken doll and her studied kindness to “dear little craving selfish John”. ”

“ That is, the child-rearing has come to be with us a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to trust that process to unskilled hands—even our own. ”

“ This is not an exclusive list; the attempt has been made to have it a practical, workable list, for parents and teachers and librarians to consult, bringing to it their own personal judgment as to individual taste and development of the child under consideration. Such a term as “the child” has been used reluctantly, since there is no other term, more human, less mechanical, to take its place. Because of this dislike for a stereotyped grading of childhood, the reader will here find no indication as to age demands. ”

“ A commonplace infant will tire of the choicest toys; they are to such minds but effigies and delusion, which last, the delight of imaginative infancy, to the cut and dried, dull, childish understanding is impossible.
I once overheard one little girl at a theatre—a splendid spectacle, calculated to dazzle and delight imaginative childhood—say to another: "It is nothing but make-believe! ”

“ The tendency of young children to become what they see those around them whom they love are, seems to be altogether the most universally acting and the most powerful of the influences on which the formation of the character depends ”

“ It is just these first instinctive impulses of the girl-child, combined with her imitativeness and wonderful precocity, which make her so fascinating. But do they think? They do, but this first early thinking does not make them self-conscious as does their later thinking, to the spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed begins remarkably early. I remember one child, a little five-year-old and one of my favourites, climbing to my knee one day and exhibiting a strangely grave face. ”

“ When one knows their origin and something of their social and literary history, they take on new dignity and importance. One ceases to look upon them as mere nonsense to be rattled off for the amusement of the baby, and learns to see them as little treasures of primitive art, miraculously preserved and passed down from baby to baby through these many generations: bits of old song and ballad, games and charms, riddles and incantations, tales of charming incidents and episodes—a gallery of unmatchable portraits, sallies of wit just witty enough for the four-year-old, mild but adequate nonsense ”

“ The child that at first merely played like a cat, being amused with color, form, and movement, has become a causative being. Herewith the development of the "I"-feeling enters upon a new phase; but it is not yet perfected. Vanity and ambition come in for the further development of it. Above all, it is attention to the parts of his own body and the articles of his dress, the nearest of all objects to the child's eye, that helps along the separation in thought of the child's body from all other objects. ”

“ You will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character and temperament of one child are not the character and temperament of another, yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of the child as though the needs of all children were the same. ”

“ As the boys and girls grow up, the stories fade gradually from their minds. But a time comes when they have children of their own. And then, to amuse the children, they can find no tales more thrilling than those which fascinated them in their own childhood. ”