Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the
act. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal,
and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but some of them wear
apparent wings.
_Tout passe_. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the
fruit, or the fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and
contain? It seems as though our forefathers had answered this question
most arbitrarily as to the life of man.
All their literature dealing with children is bent upon this haste, this
suppression of the approach to what seemed then the only time of
fulfilment. The way was without rest to them. And this because they had
the illusion of a rest to be gained at some later point of this unpausing
life.
Evelyn and his contemporaries dropped the very word child as soon as
might be, if not sooner. When a poor little boy came to be eight years
old they called him a youth. The diarist himself had no cause to be
proud of his own early years, for he was so far indulged in idleness by
an "honoured grandmother" that he was "not initiated into any rudiments"
till he was four years of age. He seems even to have been a youth of
eight before Latin was seriously begun; but this fact he is evidently, in
after years, with a total lack of a sense of humour, rather ashamed of,
and hardly acknowledges.
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