VOL. XV.

No. 3.

ALL dividing lines in nature may

be, like the axis of the earth, imaginary lines. Perhaps there is no real wall of partition between the animal and the vegetable, between a symphony in color and one in sound. Yet the imaginary line is real enough in such cases to prevent our confusing the one thing with the other. We do not mistake the stones for the bread, although the bread contains mineral matter.

Perhaps, too, there is no real line separating in us that which we get at first hand from nature and that which we get at second hand by the conventionalities of social man. Yet there is such a line, however imaginary, however difficult of discovery, be tween the genuine and the artificial, the spontaneous and the prescribed, the direct and the roundabout; be tween the rational, logical, unconscious, natural, and the adjusted, compromised, self-conscious and conventional.

In proportion as we become conventionalized, personality or individuality becomes obscured, weakened, impotent, lost. Convention, like death, is a great leveler. The more subservient we become to it, the less is it possible to express the individual self, and the more do we become puppets worked by a common wire. "The history of Christianity is the development of personality," said Mr. Horace E. Scudder. Our Lord's plea for the children was a plea for free personality, and therefore for self-expression. The disciples' way, and our way, is to assume that the adult state which is chiefly a conglomerate of adjustments to the strength and weakness of men, and hence in large degree conventional, is the only state worth anybody's being in. Says Rousseau, "They are always seeking the man in the child without reflecting what he is before he can become a man." As they do not see much "man" in the child, they either dis

miss him or insist upon forcing adulthood on him by snuffing out the divine light of his nature with the crush of conventionalities.

* * *

And again Rousseau: "Nature requires children to be children before they are men. Childhood hath its manner of seeing, perceiving, and thinking, peculiar to itself; nor is there anything more absurd than our being anxious to substitute our own in its stead." How little do we consider that the very zenith and glory of certain human powers and possibilities, the sense of justice, logical sequence, directness, spirit of inquiry, quickness of perception, sharpness of memory, vividness of fantasy, faith absolute, are the peculiar possession of childhood, never to be regained in their original fullness of when once the heel of convenpower tion begins to level and stamp them out! "Experience," in the world as it is, is an essential to getting on in the world; but it is no substitute for those original elementary powers which are likely to deteriorate under conventional acquirement. We think we get along pretty well, but this satisfaction is itself a process or a product of our convention-born paresis. The truth is, we get along badly. On our own ground the children can, in some ways, distance us. Shall we not labor for the preservation rather than the extinction of those powers in the child? To do so, we must keep sight of the Line of Convention.

of life which comes out of our dealings with our fellows; our necessity of understanding them, and of being understood by them; out of selfconsciousness, circumvention, adjustment, compromise, concession, order, arising from a knowledge of men's stupidity, falsity, contradictions, uncertainties, concealments, bickerings, self-seeking, schemings, sacrifices, diplomacies, polite barbarities, insincerities, trained self-seeking, and what not. You may call it education; call it manners, fashion, climate, government, custom, regulation, self-preservation, economy, or what you please. I am calling it Convention. It is the artificial, the prearranged, adjusted, and acquired side of life. It is adapted to times and seasons, to conditions, to circum

stances.

Facts and truths most patent are sometimes most difficult to define; yet they may be described, their relations shown, their conditions and offices illustrated. Let us illustrate.

Exquisitely subtle are the encroachments of Convention upon the natural soul. natural soul. See how we are entangled in it. Does any bit of verse seem simpler and more appropriate

to the child than

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,

Like a diamond in the sky"?

More than a dozen years ago, when, with three years of records in the life of my child behind me, I was getting deeper and deeper into the study of child-nature, I was startled by a vis

ion of the unintelligibility of this simple verse to the child. True, my boy gave the necessary signs of enjoyment, which most parents and teachers regard as proof enough that a child is being fed with digestible mental food. Upon inquiry, I found that he did not know what a diamond was, however enjoyable the verse may have been. So I showed him a diamond, thus supposing the simile now to be clear to him. If he now knew what a diamond was, he certainly did not know what a star was! Why, then, "like a diamond in the sky"? Step over the Line of Convention on to the child's nature-territory, and look back at your conventionalized self. How you have been hoodwinked by that verse as a child's verse! What reason has the child of four or five years to see any force or meaning more than skin deep in the simile? He has no such reason as you have for saying that the star is like a diamond in the sky. You are conscious of the infinite difference between the two. On this very difference the point of the simile turns. The bead of light in the sky is a sign of awful immensity; but so common has this thought of it become that you find pleasure in ignoring it and making that gigantic sphere no more than it appears to be,—a flashing stone small enough for a lady's ring. All this is entirely outside of the child's range, for he has no conception of great distance, either in time or space. You have little enough; he none. star to him need not be like a diamond, for, if you say so, it is a diamond, and that is all there is to it.

The

Yet more. Why should the child wonder what the star is, any more than he should wonder what the diamond is? Genuine wonder is also out of his range. It is because we have learned so many things that we wonder at that which seems beyond us. There is nothing especially astonishing or wonderful in the tricks of a magician to a very young child. The infant begins with all things of sense equally inexplicable. If all is wonder, nothing is wonder. So the awe-struck parent, overpowered with the contemplation of the infinitude of space made obvious to the mature mind by the reduction of a blazing sun to a diamond point, is upon a wholly different plane from the child when they recite together, "How I wonder what you are." But he deludes himself with the thought that the child is en rapport with him, supposing that the child's interests go into the common pool of conventionally accepted mysteries.

In truth, the child is an alien here. And yet observe that he is in the zenith of powers which, in large degree, we have lost. Accepting things as he finds them, he takes them for what they seem to be, and does not therefore wonder much about them. When he discovers the discrepancy between seeming and being, doubt and wonder begin.

Suppose a case of another sort. A little boy is required to speak a piece in school. He begins:

"See the morning-glory blossom, and the pansy, and the rose;

Shy mignonette just peeping from the ground!"