CHILDHOOD AND BEAUTY

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21255, 29 August 1934, Page 18

CHILDHOOD AND BEAUTY

[By H. C. D. SOMERSET.] (Under the auspices of the Sunlight League). (5) "Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief." With poetic insight Francis Thompson expressed this quintessence of childhood in his famous essay on Shelley in 1889. Since that time we have learned a great deal about what it is to be a child. Perhaps through the realisation forced on us of the failure of our stiff-necked adulthood — perhaps through a dim memory of a kingdom not yet realised and promised only to those who become -is little children, we have now placed ourselves on the side of the child. The associations of people meeting for his welfare are legion: there are books about him without end. Out of the mass of data now available there are a few basic facts that ought to be kept with determination before all those who associate with children. And-the greatest of these is the fact that to be a child is to be different from an adult, but it is not to be less than an adult. For consider a moment. The child is a fourdimensional being with an unconscious mind reaching back through time to the very beginnings of life. In the light of that long time-vista who will say that the most Methuselah-like adult is appreciably older? To be a child is to be a long, long way on the road. He comes with life to the full, with the instincts of his race ready to awaken at the right moment: and the road humanity has travelled carries the power lines for his mental energy. Childhood is not Incomplete It is sheer folly, then, to look upon childhood as incomplete at any stageas merely a preparation for adulthood. The keen observer will admit that the tragedy of growing up is that we lose in the process: we lose in intuition what we gain in intellect. And as we grow older we look back to our childhood as the happiest time of our lives, spoiled though it may have been by an inimical environment. The imagination is fired by the vision of a world in which children are given the chance that is theirs by right. The sciences'Of child psychology and physiology are happily available, and already they are making for childhealth. After all it is so little that the growing life needs —the right food, pure air, water and sunshine, and liberty to grow. But with all this attention to the various facets of child welfare, there is the danger in this age of specialists of ov*er-looking the essential unity that is the child. He is a great deal move than the sum of his parts, more than a bundle of instincts wedded to some animated graphs of this and that. He is a delicately co-ordinated whole, neither spirit nor matter but compounded of both—in short, a life which is continually seeking for self-expression. This self-expression may be marred by ■wrong feeding, poor housing, misunderstanding parents, cramping schools; but when all these wrongs art' righted, as they will be, the mystery cl' the child's adventure is as great as ever. The Search for Beauty T believe that his quest is a great Ei-arch for beauty and his passion is to express it in himself through his creative ability. I am ii«t now concerned with any iic'ult conception of what beauty is. With the child it is "to believe in loveliness" as Francis Thompson saw. Poets and children have always known This. And loveliness is be-ing. It is self-expression raised to its best. There i,: no other definition of beauty that will stand. Plant the primrose by the river's brim where there is the right moisture and the right shade, and the primrose will emerge as a thing of beauty just by the power of its own being. We find this law running all through nature: ugliness is repression, beauty is liberty. From this law the child is not exempt: he is in it all, along with rocks and stones and trees. His contact with nature, therefore, should be simple and direct —a living contact with pure sunshine, fresh air, and the reality of plants and animals in conditions where each can express its being in its own way. This is the only school where beauty dwells. The Value of Childhood I am now at the point where I should be reminded that I am advocating something far too idealistic and unreal: that the world of men is not like that at all. Unfortunately it is not: but why do we keep on giving the sacred name of reality to anything so very unreal and perverted as the modern world? Why should we want to plunge the child so prematurely into it? Out of the great mass of psychological research done in the last few years, one fact of great importance is emerging: it is that the whole currency of life is coined in childhood. In later life we may change it for shares in this and that or dissipate it entirely, but it is doubtful whether we can ever add to it. Today the funds of idealism and beauty have run very low with us and I often wonder whether the trouble did not begin 60 years ago with the "free," compulsory, and secular childhood of Victorian England. What we do know is that the only safe-deposit bank for the future is the childhood of the present. A very potent fact about beauty is the way all children and unspoiled adults respond to it. There comes a quickening of the pulse in the presence of it—a feeling of joy that a flower, a bird, a song, a thought has succeeded in being. This is the emotion of beauty and from much pondering I have come to believe that so universal A response must be the one true instinct of our lives. Dare we do anything to wall in our children from it!