544
PARTISAN REVIEW
person of forty is sixty-five, and so on. Thus, when I fell in love with
Elsie I took her to be grown-up. I met her again, when I was
thirteen and she, I think, must have been twenty-three; she now
seemed to me a middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And
the child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which
for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have
passed the age of thirty .are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about
things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the
child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
The schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is
in fact mimicked and laughed at behind his back.
An
adult who does
not seem dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous.
I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own
childhood outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the
chief means we have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only
by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly
distorted is the child's vision of the world. Consider this, for example.
How would Crossgates appear to me now, if I could go back, at my
present age, and see it as it was in 1915? What should I think of
Bingo and Sim, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should
see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly
clambering up
.a
social ladder which any thinking person could see
to be on the point of collapse. I would be no more frightened of
them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those
days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas-though of this I
am not certain-I imagine they must have been somewhat younger
than I am now. And how would Johnny Hall appear, with his
blacksmith's ,arms and his red, jeering face? Merely
.a
scruffy little
boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little
boys. The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because
these happen to be my own memories. But it would be very
difficult for me to see with the eyes of any other child, except by an
effort of the imagination which might lead me completely astray.
The child and the adult live in different worlds.
If
that is so, we
cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not
still for many children as dreadful an experience as
it
used to be.
Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual
taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery ,and the misunderstand-
