ROUND THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XXV, 21 December 1895, Page 770

ROUND THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

| WITH APOLOGIES TO the autocrat of the breakfast table. l WE hear much nowadays of the New Woman,’ said the Professor. ‘ She is served up to us, more or less spiced, in “bloomers,” in ballroom simplicity, in the aesthetic emotional garb of the “new” novel, in every attire abnormal enough to suggest a market value to the literary aspirant and timesserving publishers. We meet her in gaiters and rational dress on rugged mountain tops, in irrational address on social reform committees, where she takes up the reform and drops the sociability, on bicycles, on School Boards, and I ask you to decide which of these four eminences is attended with most breeze. She frequents the club, the office, the studio, the lecture-hall, the laboratory, the dis-secting-room, and sometimes even her own home. Yet a more interesting problem than the New Woman has began to present itself, and that is the New Child. The New Child, whether from too much evolution or too little spanking, is as advanced at ten as its mothers and fathers were at twenty, its grandmothers and grandfathers at fifty. It recites Homer in the original in place of “ Mary Had a kittle Lamb.” It demands dainties, where bread and jam was formerly a luxury. It conducts the correspondence columns of newspapers and magazines. Here is a bona fide communication which reveals the money-making faculties of six and a-half: Dear Dot.—l have two pet lambs: their names are Queenie and Prince. I sold my last year’s lambs to father for 15s. Dear Dot, tlo yon think Iyot enough for them t Yours truly. Ethel.

The New Child invades the operatic and music hall stage not only as a professional, but in the more tiresome rble of amateur infant prodigy. Time was when infant fairies and elves and dragons and acrobats and tight-rope walkers and skirt-dancers of circus or pantomime won the pity of all right-thinking people. Behind the paint and the glitter they saw washed-out little faces, wrecked constitutions, and vanity, self-love, and coarse-minded tendencies fostered by the vulgar publicity of their lives. They rejoiced in the knowledge of their own little ones, secured from the taint of evil associations by a quiet home-life and discipline. But the old order of parent changeth. The New Child revels in publicity. Fancy dress balls where the public pay for the privilege of watching children from five to fifteen, rouged, powdered, and patched, aping the fashions of their great-grandparents with none of their greatgrandparents’ grace ; subscription dances where grown-ups and young mingle, and the little ones imitate the affectations and flirtations of their elders, without their elders’ powers of discrimination and sense of fitness ; theatricals in public halls, where a drawing-room recitation was of old a fearful and tearful ordeal ; masquerades, with all the hollow masquerading of real life to come—these are some of the dissipations of the new child. The ‘ * long long thoughts ’ ’ of modern youth stretch no further than the importance and “ aims ” and “ missions ” of their own small selves. Men with missions are objectionable, women with missions an affliction, but when children have missions —Heaven defend them ! Their case is desperate enough to be treated with Gregory’s mixture and salts and senna three times a day. The golden fiction-realms of adventure and romance are never sought by this precocious little traveller, world-worn ere the first turning in the road. Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, Deerfoot, the flower of Shawanoes, the more modern and equally brave Umslopogaas are no friends of the present day youngsters ; the blood in their veins has never tingled to the sound of Robin Hood’s bugle horn, or the songs of mad Meg Merrilees, or the trumpet challenge of Ivanhoe’s gallant passage of arms at Ashby. Their breath has never quickened over the adventures of Amyas Leigh and Good Old Salvation Yeo or throbbed at the fate of the poor White Rose of Devon. Jack Shepherd, Dick Turpin, Captain Kidd, Brian de Bois Gilbert, Quilp, Tecumseh, and other engaging criminals have no interest for them. Indeed, I doubt whether the wealth of” Treasure Island ” holds much fascination for the New Child. A boy in a good secondary school lately declared to me his literary penchant for “penny dreadfuls.” “They’re exciting, you know, and all a fellow has time for nowadays.” Thus a big gate in the child's paradise swings to, which nothing on earth can re-open, for though we may meet our early book friends again in later life, it is only to find the trail of the serpent over them all. The change is not in them, but in us. They are neither exalted heroes nor desperate villains, but mere ordinary mortals like ourselves with the average virtues and weaknesses of humanity. The glory and freshness surrounding them, the childish adoration enthroning them, are departed. The naughty boy of the Sunday book, and ‘ Hymns for

the Young,’ generally longed to be an angel when his mother’s gooseberries and his little brother’s cake made him feel ill. The good boy was always an angel unawares, and there is no more effectual disguise for an angel than a small boy. The New Child longs to be an angel of another description, the tableaux vivant angel with more limelight halo and bigger wings than the rest, the said wings to be detachable when it descends to the ordinary ch’ld-level again, and Tommy Brown’s head needs ‘ punching.' The worst of it is that this poor little product—or shall we say victim—of modern enlightenment, seldom regains the child-level from which parental vanity, or thoughtlessness, or frivolity, removes it. Saddest of all, the simple natural joys of childhood lose their flavour to the satiated little palate, and the childish capacity for enjoyment—the first fine careless rapture of youth—is lost, and can never be caught again. Early years are a fast narrowing margin by the sea. The deeps of trouble and perplexity and care roll in so quickly, and though no happy castles are built, nor any childlike pleasures enjoyed, they roll in just the same. Too soon, alas! the playground and the playtime are submerged, and when the tide turns again children’s castles have long ceased to enchant. * The Liliputia of Gulliver’s travels has become a reality,’ said the Practical Man. ‘The present age is governed by little people. Yet the children are not to blame for their love of excitement and prominence. Rather the parents who, to gorify their own weakness for display or because the blind follow the blind, allow late hours and endless gaieties, and then complain of the frivolity of the rising generation. Home pleasures, happy home-life and training, will do more for children than the Bible in schools or anything else. The Floral Fete was a sensible pleasure, its object being the encouragement of a healthy childish recreation, but there are other excitements much less beneficial, such as public dances and unlimited outing of one sort and another. As Burns concludes his picture of simple domestic felicity—

" From scenes like these old Scotia’s Harden springs Which makes her loved at home, revered abroad.” So, if future poets are to sing New Zealand’s grandeur, it must spring from the same solid foundation of virtues implanted early in the homes of her people and rulers to be. ’ The Practical Man intended a longer peroration, but discovered that the lodgers (including the cat) had forgotten they were not in church, arid gone to sleep.