THE STORY OF A CHILD
By Pierre Loti
THE STORY OF A CHILD
BY
PIERRE LOTI
Translated by Caroline F. Smith
PREFACE
There is to-day a widely spread new interest in child life, a desire
to get nearer to children and understand them. To be sure child study
is not new; every wise parent and every sympathetic teacher has ever
been a student of children; but there is now an effort to do more
consciously and systematically what has always been done in some way.
In the few years since this modern movement began much has been
accomplished, yet there is among many thoughtful people a strong
reaction from the hopes awakened by the enthusiastic heralding of the
newer aspects of psychology. It had been supposed that our science
would soon revolutionize education; indeed, taking the wish for the
fact, we began to talk about the new and the old education (both
mythical) and boast of our millennium. I would not underrate the real
progress, the expansion of educational activities, the enormous gains
made in many ways; but the millennium! The same old errors meet us in
new forms, the old problems are yet unsolved, the waste is so vast
that we sometimes feel thankful that we cannot do as much as we would,
and that Nature protects children from our worst mistakes.
What is the source of this disappointment? Is it not that education,
like all other aspects of life, can never be reduced to mere science?
We need science, it must be increasingly the basis of all life; but
exact science develops very slowly, and meantime we must live.
Doubtless the time will come when our study of mind will have advanced
so far that we can lay down certain great principles as tested laws,
and thus clarify many questions. Even then the solution of the problem
will not be in the enunciation of the theoretic principle, but will
lie in its application to practice; and that application must always
depend upon instinct, tact, appreciation, as well as upon the
scientific law. Even the aid that science can contribute is given
slowly; meanwhile we must work with these children and lift them to
the largest life.
It is in relation to this practical work of education that our effort
to study children gets its human value. There are always two points of
view possible with reference to life. From the standpoint of nature
and science, individuals count for little. Nature can waste a thousand
acorns to raise one oak, hundreds of children may be sacrificed that a
truth may be seen. But from the ethical and human point of view the
meaning of all life is in each individual. That one child should be
lost is a kind of ruin to the universe.
It is this second point of view which every parent and every teacher
must take; and the great practical value of our new study of children
is that it brings us into personal relation with the child world, and
so aids in that subtle touch of life upon life which is the very heart
of education.
It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have a
high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly
significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of
childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal
world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood,
and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be
associated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another
child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the
child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which
to read the lesson of the whole.
It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the
absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the
mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as
well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-
study. Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best
bring us into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the
fact because interpretative of the spirit.
It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of
their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of
daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they
may look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of
childhood. The result is not theories of child life but appreciation
of children. How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's
story of her girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for
love I cannot see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than
many theories in showing the deforming effect of an education that is
formal discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's
great study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life
to any one who will appreciatively respond to it.
A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in
developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape
definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could
scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is
hardly a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was
done to him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of
impressions through the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar
and subtle type of personality most necessary to understand. All that
Loti is and has been is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child.
Exquisite sensitiveness to impressions whether of body or soul, the
egotism of a nature much occupied with its own subjective feelings, a
being atune in response to the haunting melody of the sunset, and the
vague mystery of the seas, a subtle melancholy that comes from the
predominance of feeling over masculine power of action, leading one to
drift like Francesca with the winds of emotion, terrible or sweet,
rather than to fix the tide of the universe in the centre of the
forceful deed--all these qualities are in the dreams of the child as
in the life of the man.
And the style?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with
its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days
of wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes
and ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of
his music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the
child he describes.
Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness. Such
a type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it--
the haunting hunger for the permanence of impressions that come and
go, which pulsates through the book till we can scarcely keep back the
tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries--Death and Life (and
which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on--the fate of
a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense
emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of
fancy and speculation with the swift sword-stroke of an heroic deed.
It is fortunate that the translator has caught the subtle charm of
Loti's style, so difficult to render in another speech, in an amazing
degree. This is peculiarly necessary here, for accuracy of translation
means giving the delicate changes of color and elusive chords of music
that voice the moods and impressions of which the book is made.
Let us read the revelation of this book not primarily to condemn or
praise, or even to estimate and define, but to appreciate. If it be
true that no one ever looked into the Kingdom of Heaven except through
the eyes of a little child, if it be true that the eyes of every
unspoiled child are such a window, take the vision and be thankful.
If, perchance, this window should open toward strange abysses that
reach vaguely away, or upon dark meadows that lie ghost-like in the
mingled light, if out of the abyss rises, undefined, the vast, dim
shape of the mystery, and wakens in us the haunting memories of dead
yesterdays and forgotten years, if we seem carried past the day into
the gray vastness that is beyond the sunset and before the dawn, let
us recognize that the mystery or mysteries, the annunciation of the
Infinite is a little child.
EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS.
TO HER MAJESTY ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ROUMANIA.
December, 188-
I am almost too old to undertake this book, for a sort of night is
falling about me; where shall I find the words vital and young
enough for the task?
To-morrow, at sea, I will commence it; at least I will endeavor to
put into it all that was best of myself at a time when as yet
there was nothing very bad.
So that romantic love may find no place in it, except in the
illusory form of a vision, I will end it at an early age.
And to the sovereign lady whose suggestion it was that I write it,
I offer it as a humble token of my respect and admiration.
PIERRE LOTI.
