LIVING POEMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 213, 8 September 1923, Page 28

LIVING POEMS.

THEN AND NOW. (By 149.1 It is uncommon in New Zealand to find an unhappy child. Each of US knows that there are poverty and sorrow an proportion to tbo people we have, ■but in a very special sense the happiest country has the happiest children. What eeems most curious is that New Zealand children love to go to school. Every man in the sere and yellow leaf or pven in the leaf just turning brown remembers that ho did not like school. If he lived in the reign of pood Queen Victoria ho went—but he had to be sfiit. It was the reign not only-of the best queen, but of tie best antimacassars—and everybody who knows what Macassar hair "oil did to tho backs of chairs, sofaa, and wallpapers will unterstand tho need of "ami."' It was tho age of horsehair chairs from which the unfortunate child slipped. He wus brushed aside by crinolints '(his female relatives did not really see him, his visibility was so low), and he was frequently attired in Holland clothes with a red military braiding down the leg. Hβ also rejoiced in the possession of long hair done into a kind of pneumatic sausage on his infantile head—and, as in Auckland in this rear of he. was not allowed to play on Sundays. The "better class" child waa reared by a wetnurse_ (evidonce of which may be found in repeated advertisements in the -'Times")The other kind of child began to work at the age of nine yeara. either scaring crows -with a rattle, tending bobbins in a mill, or tvide Dickens) living with hearty Mr. Fezziwig and having a bed of brown paper under the counter. Xot because of these things, 'but despite of them, these children became our fathers and mothers, bo that through much tribulation they achieved in perfection what must have appeared to them almost impoa.-ible. The Victorian age was remarkable for its mathematical piety, its excesses and its stuffiness. With tho utmost kindness relatives poisoned their consumptives with carbonic acid gas, being told by the doctors, who desired to bleed everybody to death, tihat adr was very good for calves but very poisonous for people. The unfortunate infant who ended in prunella boots and who did not curtesy at the exact moment to her "betters," was given an hour of backboard or macrame work or some of those diabolical cotton devices ending in the atrocities which were own brothers to waxen oranges under glass, waggling grapes and the trembling beade upon granny's bonnet. The British infant gave no cheery "Hello" to the passing neighbour. It the infant was a he, he solemnly doffed. If the infant was a she, she gravely bobbed. The child who would liave the temerity to invade the precincts sacred to its parents was almost unknown. "Punch," which sets down the soul of society in black and white, ■has shown it so. In good Victoria's royal reign infantile solemnity and white cotton stockings were necessary, anil the infant waa expected to remember most of all that he ' was but a stranger here, heaven being his home. The literature of the time was on all fours with the solid mahogany chairs, 1 have recently been perusing some school poetry intended to remind children that if they did not "behave" something most sulphurous would happen to them. Very likely that excellent person Robert Raikes had something to do with the invariable Victorian suggestion that if children were not born to be hanged they were born - to be burned. Among the favourite school poems over which maiden governesses exulted while trembling children sought sanctuary under hard mahogany chairs were "The Idiot Boy." "The Blind Boy," , the beautiful Etory of the child whose lodging waa the cold, cold ground, and who ate the bread of charity because his father had been a soldier and was killed in action. Note if you will that it was the correct Victorian thing for children whose fathers had been killed in action to lodge on the cold, cold ground. In the same childish book is a touching group of verses about a -mad mother, and there is not in sixty-eight pages any hope for the children who became our -.fathers and mothers. Necessarily in such an age these condemned infante wrought in mines and in mills for sixpence per week of fourteen-hc-ur days and you know that even the grown-uj? child, 6am Weller, believed his fortune made when the immortal Pickwick gave him five pounds per annum. These controlled and rather distressed children! once a year (and even sometimes twice) were taken to a Town Hall or a Corn Exchange to hear the Very Reverend Aminadab Sleek lecture on the Immortality of the SouL Nobody blames the rev. gentleman. He belonged to the age in which it was very wrong for anyone to be a child and in which it was excessively careless for a child to lau-h on Sunday or in the presence of adults. You have noticed that the great novelists of the mid-Victorian period never gave us a childish child All Dickens' children are solemn little men and women, as also are all Thackeray's. If a celebrated artist drew or painted children, all of them were email crinolined women or small well-behaved men whom one seema to see bowing Bolemnly to their parents and never darine to say, as the little boy in the train disaster at Ongarue said, "Buck up, mumIm jalce!" Well, whafa the difference between 1823 and 1923? Children do not look like sawed-off little mothers and fathers and their mothers don't Bhnek and faint six tim e 9 an hour There is a dreadful dearth of hysterics, pneumatic curls for little boys and macrame work for little girls. What*is different about the child of to-day ,s that it is regarded as the equal and the friend of its parent To the early Victorian person in tiehtBtrapped troueora and a stiff eto ck, t£ o _ hello of a strange child would be an insult to be wiped out only in cane. To the modern man or woman it is one of aU frlendUeSt - Some of us worry about the rudeness of children, but some of us, feeline if not knowing a little more, think more of the natural graces, the infinite wonders and the emancipation of the little ones. It is not known whether those Victorian people loved their children less, but it is certain they treated them worse, imagined that the correct pose for a child was the pose of a worldwise adult. Nowhere on the good earth are the bulk of the children so free as in New Zealand, the gem country settled by children who sat on horsehair chairs and were spanked for rubbing their little heads against auntie's anti-macassars. They are better than all the poems that ever were sung or said, For they are living poems, and all the rest are dead.