Wings and the Child

MP3 Audio CD. Wings and the Child

CHAPTER I

Of Understanding


IT is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I
set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special
means of knowing anything: I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be
known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.
And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the
recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from
observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may
observe the actions of children and chronicle their sayings, and produce
from these, perhaps, a lifelike sketch of a child, as it appears to the
grown-up observer; but observation is no key to the inner mysteries of a
child's soul. The only key to those mysteries is in knowledge, the
knowledge of what you yourself felt when you were good and little and a
child. You can remember how things looked to you, and how things looked
to the other children who were your intimates. Our own childhood,
besides furnishing us with an exhaustless store of enlightening
memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity of our lives for the
observation of children--other children. There is a freemasonry between
children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take which is and must
be for ever impossible between children and grown-ups, no matter how
sympathetic the grown-up, how confiding the child. Between the child and
the grown-up there is a great gulf fixed--and this gulf, the gulf
between one generation and another, can never be really bridged. You may
learn to see across it, a little, or sometimes in rare cases to lean
very far across it so that you can just touch the tips of the little
fingers held out from the other side. But if your dealings with those on