OF the many questions that Mr. Boswell, at one time and another, asked his friend, Dr. Johnson, I can hardly recall another more searching than one that he himself describes as whimsical.

“I know not how so whimsical a thought came into my head,” says Boswell, “but I asked, ‘If, sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with you, what would you do?’

“Johnson: Why, sir, I should not much like my company.

“Boswell: But would you take the trouble of rearing it?

“He seemed, as may be supposed, unwilling to pursue the subject: but, upon my persevering in my question, replied, ‘Why, yes, sir, I would; but I must have all conveniences. If I had no garden, I would make a shed on the roof, and take it there for fresh air. I should feed it, and wash it much, and with warm water, to please it, not with cold water, to give it pain.’

“Boswell: But, sir, does not heat relax?

“Johnson: Sir, you are not to imagine the water is to be very hot. I would not coddle the child.”

It appears, too, that the Doctor had given some thought to the subject, although never expecting to be a mother himself: his immediate insistence upon fresh air promises well for the infant, and the frequency with which he proposes to wash his little companion indicates that, so long as the water-supply of the castle lasted, he would have done his part. A cow in the castle seems to have been taken for granted; but, in 1769, even Dr. Johnson would have known little or nothing about formulas, nor would it have occurred to him to make a pasteurizing apparatus, as so many parents do nowadays, out of a large tin pail and a pie-plate. Here the baby would have had to take his eighteenth-century chance. And I wish, too, that he might have had a copy of “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” that modern compendium of twenty-four exercises, by which a reasonably strongarmed mother may strengthen and develop the infant’s tiny muscles; for I like to think of Dr. Johnson exercising his innocent companion in his shed on the roof. “Sir,” he says, “I do not much like my employment; but here we are, and we’ll have to make the best of it.”

Such an experience, no doubt, would have been good for Dr. Johnson, and good for the baby (if it survived). “That into which his little mind is to develop,” says “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” “is plastic—like a wax record, ready to retain such impressions as are made upon it”; and on this wax some, at least, of the impressions left by Dr. Johnson must have been valuable. But on the real mystery of babyhood—the insoluble enigma that the “Guide” can only in small measure dispose of by comparing the rearing of an infant with the home-manufacture of a record for the gramaphone—the experience would have thrown no light.

The Doctor, I dare say, would have written a paper on the feeding and washing of infants, and later dictionaries of familiar quotation might perhaps have been enriched by the phrase,“‘The baby is grandfather to the man.’—Johnson.” But of this grandfather the man has no memory. His babyhood is a past concerning which he is perforce silent, a time when it is only by the report of others that he knows he was living. His little mind seems to have been more than a little blank; and although gifted novelists have set themselves the imaginative task of thinking and writing like babies, none, in my reading, has ever plausibly succeeded. The best they can do is to think and write like little adults. I recall, for example, the honest effort of Miss May Sinclair, whom I greatly respect as an adult, to see Mr. Olivier through the eyes of his baby daughter Mary. “Papa sat up, broad and tall above the table, all by himself. He was dressed in black. One long brown beard hung down in front of him and one short beard covered his mouth. You knew he was smiling because his cheeks swelled high up in his face, so that his eyes were squeezed into narrow, shining slits. When they came out again, you saw scarlet specks and smears in their corners.” A fearsome Papa!—and, although I have no way of knowing that fathers do not present themselves in this futurist aspect to their helpless offspring, I am glad to think otherwise. At all events a baby is, and must be, well used to living in Brobdingnag.

It would be a surprising thing, if it were not so common, that a man shows so little curiosity about this forgotten period of his life. But such curiosity would be impossible to satisfy. Existing photographs of him at that time are a disappointment: he seldom admits seeing any resemblance, and, if he does, the likeness rarely, if ever, gives him any visible satisfaction. Nor can anything of real and personal interest be found out by interviewing those who then knew him. Of a hundred, nay, of a thousand or a million babies,—and though I cannot speak as a woman, it seems to me (except, perhaps, for a livelier interest and pleasure among them in their infant appearance) that everything I am saying applies equally to babies of that fascinating sex,—the trivial details observed by those who are nearest them are practically identical. They thump their heads. They chew their fingers. They try to feed their toes; and, sillier yet, they try to feed them with things that are obviously inedible. And so forth. And so forth. If Dr. Johnson, actually shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with him, had kept a record, the result would have been very much like the records that mothers now keep in what, unless I am mistaken, are called “Baby Books.” If you’ve seen one Baby Book, as the cynical old man said about circuses, you’ve seen all of ‘em.

Nor does any man take pleasure in preserving and reading over his own Baby Book. Hercules, to be sure, might have been interested to read in his mother’s handwriting,--“Tuesday. An eventful day. Two big, horrid Snakes came in from the garden, and got in Darling’s cradle, frightening Nurse into hysterics; but Darling only cooed and strangled them both with his dear, strong little hands. He gets stronger and cunninger every day. When the horrid Snakes were taken away from him, he cried and said, ‘Atta! Atta!’”

But Hercules was an exceptionally interesting baby; and the average Baby Book records nothing that a grown man can regard with pride, and much, if he has any sensitiveness at all, that must make him blush. Nothing but respect for his mother, it is almost safe to say, would withhold him from hurrying the incriminating document to the cellar, and cremating it in the furnace.

For in the beginning Captain William Kidd, George Washington, Dr. Johnson, the writer of this essay, and even the editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” looked and behaved very much alike. And so, for that matter, did little Moll Cutpurse and little Susan B. Anthony. So far as anybody could then have said, Captain Kidd might have become a thoughtful, law-abiding essayist, and I a pirate, handicapped, indeed, by changed conditions of maritime traffic, but unconscientiously doing my wicked best.

As the twig is bent, says the proverb, so is the tree inclined; but these little twigs are bent already, and I humbly submit, with all respect to my scientific friends, and their white mice and their guinea pigs, that where and how it happened remains an insoluble mystery. Little as I know about myself, I know that I am neither a white mouse nor a guinea pig. And this, mark you, is no mere conceit. Scientists themselves have decided that when babies, in that remote past when they first began really to interest their parents, and the human mother, the most pathetic figure of that primitive world, first began the personal and affectionate observation that was to develop slowly, over millions of years, until it found expression in the first Baby Book—scientists, themselves, I say, have decided that, then and there, you and I, intelligent reader, began to differ essentially from every other known kind of mammal. There appeared—oh, wonder!—something psychical as well as physical about us; but where it came from, they cannot tell us. “Natural selection,” so John Fiske once summed up this opinion, “began to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes.” Little enough there seems to have been to start with; little enough, indeed, there seems to be now—yet enough more to encourage us to believe that Baby is a lot further along in the right direction than he was a good many million years ago. And with this helpful conviction, Baby himself, whether he will grow up to write essays or commit picturesque murder, seems reasonably well satisfied. We solemn adults, standing around the crib, may well admire, not so much the pinkness and chubbiness of his toes, as the pinkness and chubbiness (if I may so express it) of his simple satisfaction with the mere fact of existence, his simple faith in the Universe. And when we think how impossible it is to think of its beginning, we, too, may capture something of this infantile optimism.

It is by no means impossible (though not susceptible of scientific proof) that Baby may have a life of his own; and, if we may assume Hercules weeping and saying, “Atta! Atta!”—because shrewd observers of babyhood declare it to be characteristic of babies to say, “Atta! Atta!” when something desirable, in this case two dead snakes, is removed from their range of vision,—may we not assume also a universal language of babies, and a place, such as it may be, from which they have emigrated? Here, indeed, one follows M. Maeterlinck, except that, in his judgment, unborn babies speak French. Such a theory is no help to the novelist, for in that case baby Mary Olivier’s impressions of Mr. Olivier must be rendered in baby—a language equally unknown to Miss Sinclair and to her readers. Babies have been heard to say, for example, “Nja njan dada atta mama papaÏ attaÏ na-na-na hatta meene-meene-meene momm momma ao-u”—and who but another baby knows whether this may not be speech? The assumption that this is an effort to speak the language of the baby’s elders is academic, as, for that matter, is the assumption that they are his elders. There may even be no baby at all; for, as Schopenhauer has almost brusquely put it, “The uneasiness that keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.” But this, I confess, is far too deep for me.

For all practical purposes, however, Baby is sufficiently real—substantial enough, indeed, as “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide” shows in Exercise 24, to be lifted by his little feet and stood on his little head; but, mercifully adds the “Guide,” “do not hold Baby on his head very long.” For all practical purposes we must, and do, assume our own existence. “Here we are,” as I have imagined Dr. Johnson saying to his innocent new-born comrade, “and we’ll have to make the best of it.” Nobody has thought of a better way, or any other way at all, for us to get here; and the familiar Biblical phrase, ‘born again,’ may perhaps be more literal than we are wont to imagine, and apply to this world as well as the next. Baby himself may just have been born again. That innocent-seeming and rather silly-sounding monologue, which we flatter ourselves is an earnest attempt to imitate our own speech,—“Nja njan dada atta mama papaÏ attaÏ na-na-na hatta meene-meene-meenee momm momma ao-u,”—may it not be the soliloquy of a gentle philosopher, or, again, the confession of an out-and-out rascal, talking to himself of his misdeeds, chuckling and cooing over them, indeed, before he forgets them in this new state of being? May not Papa, waggishly shaking his forefinger and saying, “You little rascal, you,” be speaking with a truthfulness which, if known, would make him sick?

Meanwhile, as says “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” “Don’t jerk Baby round. Never rush through his exercises, but talk to him in a happy, encouraging way. When he is able to talk he will be glad to tell you what great, good fun he has been having.”

So speaks, I think, a mother’s imagination; in sober reality, even the great good fun of Exercise 24 will be forgotten. Which is perhaps why, although I have heard men wish they could again be children, I have never heard any man say he would like to be a baby.