you become reserved. perhaps not exceptionally so, but as all children become reserved. already you understand that your heart is very preciously your own. you keep it from me and everyone, so much so, so justifiably so, that when by virtue of our kindred and all that we have in common i get sudden glimpses right into your depths, there mixes with the swift spasm of love i feel, a dread—lest you should catch me, as it were, spying into you and that one of us, i know not which, should feel ashamed.
every child passes into this secret stage; it closes in from its first frankness; it carries off the growing jewel of its consciousness to hide from all mankind.... i think i can see why this should be so, but i cannot tell why in so many cases no jewel is given back again at last, alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. i think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen now with true poets and true artists. someday i think it will be the life of all normal human souls. but usually it does not seem to happen at all. children pass out of a stage—open, beautiful, exquisitely simple—into silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. and they are lost. out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and limited man or woman, no child emerges again....
i remember very distinctly how i myself came by imperceptible increments of reservation to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those original and personal standards and appreciations, from sight and expression. i can recall specific moments when i perceive now that my little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and with a sense of novelty in a doorway denying the self within.
it was partly, i think, a simple instinct that drew that curtain of silences and concealments, it was much more a realization that i had no power of lucidity to save the words and deeds i sought to make expressive from complete misunderstanding. but most of all it was the perception that i was under training and compulsion for ends that were all askew and irrelevant to the trend of my imaginations, the quality of my dreams. there was around me something unfriendly to this inner world—something very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute hostility; and if, indeed, i succeeded in giving anything of my inner self to others, it was only, as people put it, to give myself away.
my nurses, my governess, my tutor, my father, the servants about me, seemed all bent upon imposing an artificial personality upon me. only in a very limited sense did they want me. what they wanted was something that could be made out of me by extensive suppressions and additions. they ignored the fact that i had been born with a shape of my own; they were resolved i should be pressed into a mould and cast.
it was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain needs and standards—that, i think, would be a reasonable thing enough to demand—but they wanted me to subdue my most private thoughts to their ideals. my nurses and my governesses would rate me for my very feelings, would clamor for gratitude and reproach me bitterly for betraying that i did not at some particular moment—love.
(only yesterday i heard mademoiselle potin doing that very same thing to you. "it is that you do not care, master steve. it is that you do not care. you do not want to care.")
they went too far in that invasion of my personal life, but i perceive quite clearly the present need for most of the process of moulding and subjugation that children must undergo. human society is a new thing upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. man is a creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the wider social life his crowding interactions force upon him. he still learns speech and computation and civility and all the devices of this artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an extreme reluctance. he has to be shaped in the interests of the species, i admit, to the newer conditions; the growing social order must be protected from the keen edge of his still savage individuality, and he must be trained in his own interests to save himself from the destruction of impossible revolts. but how clumsily is the thing done! how we are caught and jammed and pressed and crippled into citizenship! how excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate!
every child feels that, even if every child does not clearly know it. every child presently begins to hide itself from the confused tyrannies of the social process, from the searching inspections and injunctions and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.
"i have got to be so," we all say deep down in ourselves and more or less distinctly according to the lucidities of our minds; "but in my heart i am this."
and in the outcome we all try to seem at least to be so, while an ineffectual rebel struggles passionately, like a beast caught in a trap, for ends altogether more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star and the wildfire,—for beauty and beautiful things. these, we all know in our darkly vital recesses, are the real needs of life, the obediences imposed upon us by our crude necessities and jostling proximities, mere incidentals on our way to those profounder purposes....
and when i write thus of our selves i mean our bodies quite as much as our imaginations; the two sides of us are covered up alike and put alike into disguises and unnatural shapes, we are taught and forced to hide them for the same reasons, from a fear of ourselves and a fear of the people about us. the sense of beauty, the sense of one's body, the freedom of thought and of desire and the wonder of life, are all interwoven strands. i remember that in the park of burnmore one great craving i had was to take off my clothes there altogether, and bathe in a clear place among loosestrife and meadowsweet, and afterwards lie wet and naked upon the soft green turf with the sun shining upon me. but i thought also that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have, and i never dared give way to it.
