MODERN SACRIFICES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 104, 4 May 1937, Page 20

MODERN SACRIFICES

CULT OF INFANTILISM

DICKENS AND BARRIE

All great civilisations of the past "Hvere based upon the principle that the interests of adults come before those of children, writes Aldous Huxley in the "New Statesman." Socrates and Lucretius, Dante and Chaucer, Voltaire and Goethe, all the great representatives of creative historical epochs, were mature men who produced mature works. The great change began with the nineteenth century. In the realm of concrete facts as well as in that of fiction, children in the best years and grey-bearded infants made their appearance among the adults. The moribid cult of the infantile had. started.

An early symptom of this change may be found in Wordsworth's "The child is father of the man," an assertion which tended to enhance the value of the immature at the expense of the .mature. To all writers of former times the man had been father of - the child. In other words, they had the interests and values of the mature age more at heart than those of childhood. These symptoms: became more pronounced With the emergence of Charles Dickens in the field of literature. To him undoubtedly goes the merit of having invented an entirely new type of hero. For Dickens the highest type of man was not the heroic adult, but the middle-aged infant Pickwick and the like of him, the typical Dickensian saints. Considered objectively and without the halo of amusing* ludicrousness with which Dickens surrounded them, these baldheaded old infants are most repulsive deformities.

Almost ■ simultaneously with Pick--wick was born that other awful product of the nineteenth century imagination, defined by Baudelaire as La Jeune Fille Assassin de l'Art—the artkilling young girl. For more than two generations the creature ruled European, particularly Anglo-Saxon^ culture, imposing a literature girlishly reserved, and daring authors to write anything not fit for a girl of twelve to read. To this day this killer, of arts and adult values wields some power. Did she not quite recently inspire the American senator who declared that he preferred his child to become a dope fiend rather than read one v line of D. H. Lawrence, and that the virtue of one girl of sixteen was worth more than all the books ever brought to the United States?

In the twentieth century the Pantheon of Infantilism was enriche ( d by an important new addition: the ctiaracter of Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up. Thanks to Barrie, its spiritual father, infantilism became a goal towards which people aspired consciously, and it became so droll and coquettish that it made one's blood freeze in the veins.

The alarming thing about it is that Peter Pan undoubtedly satisfied an existing need. Men were revelling in infantilism. The universal admiration for its values became so great that the Catholic Church, an essentially mature institution, deemed it advisable to canonise Saint Theresa of Lisieux, a striking example of modern: infantilism. We have but to compare the modern Saint Theresa with her great Spanish namesake from the sixteenth century (one of the greatest characters in the history of womanhood) to realise that peculiar and ominous things must have happened to the western spirit in recent times.

In America particularly, but to a great extent also in our country, the glorification of infantile values has assumed such proportions that the life of the grown-ups is mostly sacrificed to the children. It is they who set the fashion in the family circle and their elders obediently dance to their tune. Each generation is expected to sacrifice its adult state on the altar of the coming generation.

A simple arithmetical calculation proves how absurd this is. We are children during twenty years but mature during forty or fifty years. The glorification of infantilism prevents us, at least during two-thirds of our existence, from leading a life befitting adult people.

No doubt childhood has its rights, but so has the adult state, whose values are no less worthy of respect than those of childhood.