Six year-old Barbara stood in her little frock of spotted muslin by the side of the grand piano piping out in a thin treble the words of this old French nursery rhyme. Her eyes were fixed on the illustration by Boutet de Monvel which shows three most unmistakeable gamins following in the wake of a fisher-girl who shrinks with a timid expression from the words which one can almost hear on their naughty little lips. Barbara understood the picture little more than she understood the words of the song and really, I reflected, that was a very good thing. The old French tune is very dainty, but there is in the words that tang of sexuality which the French seem to imbibe with their mother’s milk. “Ils vous font des caresses,” indeed! Six-year-old Barbara has better things to do at her age than to imagine that she is the quarry of the male with all the advantages and disadvantages of this position. Little French girls, for all the superficial strictness of their bringing up, are, apparently, never allowed to look on the world with any other eyes than the eyes of the woman. Our English girls learn to do this quickly enough, but at least they are allowed to begin their lives in perfect innocence. If they pay for this by seldom acquiring the last fine shade of attractive femininity, they gain in the frankness and fearlessness which are the gift of our incomparable English nursery ways. The bloom then fostered never entirely departs, no matter how experience may try it. To the last the English woman remains a sociable being with whom one could potentially set off with on a walking tour, an inconceivable enterprise with a French one or an Italian, who have learnt the grammar of passion and of its imitations young, to be obsessed with it always, while the English girl has been absorbing the grammar of health, of goodfellowship and of games.

I have no doubt of this, that one reason why the Englishwoman is a success is that she starts as a good little English girl, or even a bad one. No little girl in the world is so attractive, not the overdressed bÉbÉ, all ribbons and laces, of the French, not the dumpy product of the German, not the pallid bambina of the Italian, and least of all the spoilt little horror of the American. What can equal the creamy satin of her complexion, the sturdy straightness of her limbs, the curl of her hair, the joyous gleam of her eyes? Beauty, it is sad to say, too often leaves them as they grow older, but, when they are little girls, nearly all Englishwomen are not merely pretty, but beautiful. There can be no sight more nearly approaching the ideal of fairyland than Kensington Gardens on a fine morning of spring or summer, when the sun is glinting through the elm trees and the Broad Walk is all alive with hoops and perambulators. Nor is the sight less enchanting by the sea in the later summer, when golden locks tumble in the wind and bare legs twinkle in the waves. Even the little girls of the back street, when they are not too dirty, and of the remote village are beautiful with the glorious quality of British youth, which no competition can take away from us. It is not a fragile beauty nor one of languorous morbidezza, but it has a jovial quality, and breathes the spirit of the opening lines of “L’Allegro,” yet its colours have a delicacy in their brilliance which give it a special grace. Its merits are not all chargeable to us, the dwellers in England. It is due in part to the English climate which we ever curse and ever discuss, in part to the mixture of races which were blended into our admirable composition, and in part to our excellent nursery tradition and our incomparable English nurses.

The English nurse, though we can see that she varies in excellence, is supreme all over the world. We are all of us prone to idealise our nurses, for we only remember the comfort of their presences and are not aware of their acts of negligence or omission, such as giving us comforters to suck—as I am told, a deadly sin—or letting us fall out of perambulators while they were engaged in ambrosial dalliance. We remember with affection their features and their voices, the Moody and Sankey hymns that they used to sing us—diversified, in my own case, with "Ehren on the Rhine"—and the stories which they used to tell. They also used to have fascinating relations who were sometimes allowed to penetrate to us or whom we were allowed to visit. Modern children, I fear, miss these joys, for parents are getting so particular, no doubt quite rightly. Nurses are now trained in special institutions, so that they do all the right things and none of the wrong ones. They are ladylike, oh, so ladylike, and parents obey their commands in fear and trembling. You can see them any day in the Gardens walking along with turned up noses and conscientious faces—the very last thing in baby culture. But let not the Norland nurses take umbrage at these foolish remarks, for their training gives them, as I readily recognise, a superiority to the old-fashioned Nana which cannot be contested.

In any case, whether she be old-or new-fashioned, the English nurse is supreme. She is in demand all over Europe, she condescends to South America, and is worth her weight in gold in those far lands of the Empire where the one drawback to serving the state is that it makes the proper rearing of children an almost insoluble problem. To account for this superiority of the English nurse is not so easy, for her obviously high place in the ranks of good Englishwomen would, one might suppose, not be so obvious to dwellers in foreign lands, whose women, it is to be presumed, are fond enough of children and better acquainted with the climate and constitutions of their own country than a foreigner could be. A desire to implant early in their offspring a colloquial knowledge of our language cannot be the only reason why foreign parents engage English nurses. One of the real reasons is, I am sure, that the English nurse knows how to combine friendliness with discipline: it is a gift recognised in other relations as supremely belonging to the Englishman. Her pride, also, which stands out against undue interference by the parents in her administration of the nursery is another good reason. Nurses in other countries, I suspect, are apt to humour children too much, to spoil them themselves and to allow the parents to outrage to any extent the proved rules and traditions of infant hygiene, to dress them up and make dolls of them instead of treating them as the immature little animals that they are, to take them out and give them unwholesome food at restaurants, and, in general, to involve them too early in the cogs of adult life. It was against this tendency that Doctor Montessori made her protest, the gist of which is that the adult home is not adapted for giving that scope which is necessary for the proper bringing up of children.

It cannot be denied that an unnecessary fad may be made of the Montessori system, especially in this country for which it was not primarily invented, but the soundness of much that her theory contains is incontestable. Yet the English nursery was evolved long before Doctor Montessori, and it is there that most of what is valuable in her theories had already been developed. There is nothing for which the rather wasteful spaciousness of English life, as compared with that of other countries, is so valuable as for the institution of the nursery. We may overburden ourselves with bricks and mortar and insist on having a house where our fellows abroad are content with a flat: we may use two servants where they use one, and seem to them to strain a limited income quite unreasonably by insisting on so large a shell. That this habit is due to our reserve and the Englishman’s intense longing for privacy in domesticity is undeniable, but it is not all. As a matter of fact, the privacy of the Englishman’s home is, in a sense, far less jealously guarded than that of the Frenchman. But besides privacy an Englishman wants a little space before he can feel comfortable, and he knows instinctively that children want space too. To an English child the lot of a French, German or Italian child must seem intolerable. For no single moment, except when in bed, is it out of the sight of its elders’ eyes. It must always be good and always be tidy, or else in the common living rooms of the appartement it becomes an intolerable nuisance. Where can such a child expand, where can it indulge in those solitary dreams and quaint impulsive activities, the essence of whose enjoyment is that they shall be pursued in secrecy, and whose memory has an undying sweetness?

Contrast with this cramped life, even with an intense affection to grace it, more ardent than that tolerant good comradeship of many English parents with their little children, with the life of a child, even in a quite modest household, who from its earliest moments has had a part of the home sacred to it. That room, small or large, was always loved: it was a peaceful haven to return to after the adventures and exhibitions of a less sympathetic external world. There Nana held beneficent sway, but the real inhabitants were the children themselves and the favourite creatures of their play-world. There was room for disorder in the disorderly mood, even though it all had to be cleared up; there noise was not immediately hushed; there one could loll or sprawl without being reproved; there nothing was precious of that preciousness which meant that throwing cushions was a crime and breakage a disaster; there the air was fresh and not laden with the fumes of cigars or heavy perfumes; there meals could be eaten in one’s own time, for, fearful as were the treats of feeding with the grown-ups, it was discouraging to find that one’s efforts at spritely conversation were apt to fall flat, and that one must get finished about the same time as large people with large mouths who were allowed to talk with their mouths full, at the risk of being told that everybody was waiting and that one was not to talk any more. The nursery is the enemy of self-consciousness, it is the home of frankness and a light hearted innocence. No good Englishwoman is ever out of place in a nursery, whether it be hers or another’s: she knows instinctively that there are few places on earth where her virtues are more obvious, and she herself has been a little English girl in that happy nursery land which is the cradle of all good Englishwomen.

But what of the children whose only nursery is the streets and whose only nurse is a sister but little older than themselves? Well, I believe a great many of them have a happy childhood though they are denied some of the privileges of more gently nurtured children. The little girls with tattered frocks who dance so gaily to the wandering barrel organ no more suggest despair than their brothers who, of a Saturday afternoon, come to play noisy cricket and football outside my window. Nevertheless we cannot afford to be complacent about them. We have only to think of winter borne with poor food and decaying boots; of the appeals for comforts from the poorer parishes of the big towns where the children’s wants make education almost a mockery till they can be to some extent filled. An Italian, or was it a Spaniard, once commenting on our country said: “You have a society for the prevention of cruelty to children: we have none in Italy because it is not necessary. No Italian is cruel to children.” This was possibly an exaggeration, for there are fiends in all nations; but it is a blot on our country that such a society should be so vitally necessary to counteract the harm that poverty and ignorance can do to the precious young lives in whom lies the hope of the future. Dirt and ignorance, drink and vice, these are the enemies of little English girls and boys. The very excellence of children’s upbringing in the upper and middle classes make the backwardness lower down all the more a disgrace. It is a disgrace which we all share, for the responsibility for improvement is incumbent on us all. In education alone is there any hope. All honour therefore to those men and women who by the institution of baby clinics and mothers’ classes endeavour to mitigate the evils that should never exist. The spoiling of one Englishwoman would be a grievous thing, yet thousands are spoiled every year by ignorance, overcrowding, and bad example. The first few chapters of William de Morgan’s “Alice for Short” are not the work of a romantic imagination, but of an observant mind. How far is that wretched mite, who lived in a damp cellar with two drunken parents, from the Alice of “Alice in Wonderland,” who is the very soul of England’s childhood! Absolute equality, no matter what some socialists say, can never exist, but the chances for the two Alices should not differ by so vast a measure. The burden of lessening it must be borne by us all, and no sudden remedy will be of any use. One thing which English parents will never allow is the assumption by the state of the duty of bringing up their children. Nurseries wide enough to hold all the children in England might be built with enough English nurses to staff them, clothes might be provided, toys and even food, but it would be in vain. The cry of pauperisation, or tyranny, or militarism, or some other cry would go up, but the root of the matter would be that Alf Smith and Emma his wife, whatever their views might be upon the nationalisation of railways and mines, have no intention of demanding or submitting to the nationalisation of children. The only alternative is to improve the home of Alf Smith and Emma, or at least to see that little Susie and Jane, their daughters, by some means or other, grow up determined to give their children better training, more care, more space, and higher ideals, though not necessarily greater joyousness, than were theirs in early childhood.

But this is not a sociological treatise. There are people enough already who have remedies to suggest for all the evils of the day. Let me return to Lewis Carroll’s Alice who so engagingly dreamed herself into Wonderland. She belonged to a day before any remarkable innovations in children’s education had arrived among us. The kindergarten may have been in existence then, but Montessori and Dalcroze were not heard of. I have sometimes wondered, I must confess, if the admirable principles of these and other educational spell-workers are not too apt to develop into fads and poses. There are people to-day, for instance, who have a passion for making education play and and play education instead of keeping the two healthily separate. Any decent English girl or boy, if not unduly forced, can learn the rudiments of the three Rs without being beguiled into it by an artful series of games with a purpose which have neither the fun of hide-and-seek nor the zest of hunt-the-slipper. Surely it is a fallacy to proceed on the assumption that children’s brains are sluggish and revolt as naturally against systematic instruction as the palate against unpleasant medicine: a child’s brain, on the contrary, is extraordinarily active and pecks about after knowledge as keenly as any farmyard chicken after grains. While we may be thankful that there is a wholesome fear to-day of brutalising young minds by useless drudgery, dull, formal methods and unsympathetic discipline, we should take care to avoid the equally great danger of overstimulating that very delicate and sensitive instrument, a child’s brain, by encouraging it to absorb too much. After all, we do not encourage a child to eat more than it can digest. Besides, a good trainer knows that conscious effort, without which no activity can produce the best results, cannot grow suddenly out of unconscious following of impulse. The period of effort may be as short as you please and be followed by as long periods as you like of pleasant relaxation, but the mind cannot be accustomed too early to struggling against inertia, and a system of education which only follows the path of inertia can hardly be the best one.

When Alice met the Dodo and his companions she proposed a race not a bout of Dalcrozian eurhythmics, and I do not know that she was much to be pitied. Eurhythmics are excellent things in themselves, but mothers who see in them a complete substitute for reading and racing are making a sad mistake. Every Alice, like Lewis Carroll’s heroine, lives in a dream-world which gradually fades away with the trailing “clouds of glory” into reality, but some parents seem to delight in artificially increasing the fairylike mist of unreality, or at least unworldliness, which surrounds the marvellous time of childhood. They try to keep the child in a kind of mental incubator with elaborate stained glass walls, as if the “dome of many coloured glass” under which we are all born were not enough to stain “the white radiance of eternity.” To do this, in my opinion, is unkind to little Alice. She cannot remain the sleeping beauty for ever, and the odds are that it will not be a Prince Charming who arouses her, but some ugly apparition of the everyday for which her experience has in no way prepared her. As a nation we are mightily fond of illusions, and suffer sadly from indulgence in them. We can overcome best by seeing clearly what it is that stands over against us, and dreamy Alice will be none the worse for being allowed to see a little clearly among the many happy fantasies of her days of wonderland. Old Kingsley had his cranks, but he did not wander far from the mark in his “Waterbabies.” Poor little Tom, the sweep’s lad, came up too hard against bitter realities of a certain material kind, from which his creator rescued him by handing him over to the jolly water babies in the river at the bottom of Harthover Fell. But the fairy life and the caresses of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby could not save Tom from coming up against certain harder spiritual realities, by mastery of which alone could he become a man. His soul was saved by the uncomfortable Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, tempered by the loving care of little Effie. If you object that he had much better have became a complete fairy or a Peter Pan who never grew up, then I disagree with you, and the fairies do not agree with you either. They would prefer to have the immortal soul in the perishable body like Hans Andersen’s mermaid who gave up her tail to walk among men, though to walk was like treading on sharp knives. Good Englishwomen are such admirable mortals that it would be a thousand pities to make bad fairies of them. Some mothers of little Alices like to think of life as a long episode in the Russian ballet, all gay colour and perfect pose: they forget that Madame Karsavina works more hours in a day to attain this perfection than they do in a week to attain nothing at all. They are unaware of the surprising fact that it is possible to be more than a little ordinary and only moderately ornamental, and yet to be reasonably happy and useful. What I should like to see to-day would be more reality in the nursery and more dreams in the board school.

If more reality is wanted in the nursery, it is still more wanted in the schoolroom, though fortunately there is a great deal more there now than in the day of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. She, if you remember, in a moment of bewilderment reflected that she could answer some of Mangnall’s questions. You will only find Mangnall’s questions to-day in some dusty bookshelf of a country inn with the maiden name of a portly landlady in faded ink upon the flyleaf. It was simply a portable dictionary of elementary and usually inaccurate knowledge, dished up with most undesirably stuffy maxims, to be learned by rote and not to be understood at all. It could only convey the impression that the aim of lessons was to imbibe a certain quantity of dry facts without the slightest connection and forming no pathway to any connected presentation of reality. The old methods of the Misses Pinkerton’s academy and the old bogey-morality and dragon-instruction of the Goodchild family were still thriving when Alice passed into the looking-glass. The aim of that education was not to make a child an intelligent being or to bring out its natural talents by careful nurture, but, especially if it was a girl, to produce a docile parrot which could read, write and do sums, without asking too many inconvenient questions. To the arch priests and priestesses of that dead formula the idea of a child’s having tastes would have been a dreadful heresy: a child, at all events a girl, had no business with such subversive things. Her business was to acquire humility, deportment and a use of the globes, in fine to learn the things, and those only, which “a lady should know.”

Schools and governesses are better now, but some of the old confusions still hover round the education of a girl. Nowadays everybody airs his views about the public schools in print, but there is a certain element of simplicity in a boy’s education: in most cases, after all, he has got to be prepared for a definite profession. There is no definite profession for which little Alice is to be prepared, unless she takes the reins into her own hands in time, as some of our older Alices are learning to do. There is still the impression abroad, even among the wage-earning classes, that, until it is more or less discernible whether and what she is going to marry, it does not matter very much what she learns or what she does, provided that she keeps out of mischief. In those families, especially, where in the last resort it is not necessary for the daughters to earn their living in the labour market, this policy of drift is most obvious. A little French, a little music, a little history, a little recitation of approved poets—that is the recipe for the education of a “nice, refined girl.” As if any girl worth her salt would be content with a diet of spoon feeding. It is only those who have never learnt anything that imagine any useful learning to be possible without the desire to know more than it was good for you to be taught. The child’s mind is a bursting reservoir of energy, and it is hard that it should be wasted by being drained to make imitation waterfalls in an artificial garden. It usually shows a tendency to flow in some definite direction: why, in Heaven’s name, should it be diverted?

The two great needs in education are enthusiasm and personality, enthusiasm in the pupil and personality in the teacher. Personality is the great wizard who can produce water from stones and gold mines from sand. It would be better to learn skittles from a great man than all the graces in the world from a mere practitioner of knowledge. No system is bad enough to withstand the electric influence of personality, and none is so good that it will succeed if there is no personality to give it life. We have strong characters in England: it is a matter in which we flatter ourselves that we are not behind the rest of the world: yet so often our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses seem to be inanimate beings, mere machines for hearing lessons, setting papers and giving marks. Those to whom learning has been a perfunctory business bear the signs of it all their lives. There are too many of them, and the majority of them are women. They are the people who care to know nothing for its own sake; they regard the suggestion that one could read any book but a light novel as humorous; there is no subject that they can discuss intelligently or with any sign of original reflection. Where they so far rouse themselves as to express views, the views will be nothing but the expression of their appetites, desires and prejudices given by the particular penny paper which they read. They have no interests outside housekeeping, and they don’t take the trouble to do even that scientifically. One sees them in shoals in teashops and on beaches, with their cheap novel in their hand and a vaguely discontented look upon their faces. Their discontent is not surprising, for how can anyone be contented who has never taken a lively interest in anything but food and clothing? If little Alice’s mother lets her become as one of these she is cruelly betraying a sacred trust: she is doing her best to turn the living thing to which she gave birth into a dead one. If she has not the personality herself to turn Alice’s enthusiasms, about which there will be no doubt at all, to good account, then let her have the sense to look for somebody who has.

Little Alice before long will probably make clear what she wants to learn: if so, she may as well learn it. Nobody has yet formulated the end of education with final completeness: it is largely a matter of acquiring good habits and an internal harmony which ensure smooth and profitable running when the engine is competent to run by itself. It certainly does not matter much what is learnt, provided that it is learned thoroughly and with eagerness. Some people insist that mastery of tools is the ideal of education: but what are little Alice’s tools? They are partly physical, partly emotional and partly intellectual: her great charm, in contrast to her sisters in Latin countries and in America, is that she is not encouraged to learn the use of her physical attractions and feminine emotions too early. Mastery of tools and mastery of self are formulas better applicable to the maturer education of the young man. The tools of a woman are hardly suitable in the hands of a little girl, whose older self is still to be. If I were to invent a formula for little Alice it would be something like “happiness, eagerness and enthusiasm.” If she has these while she is young, misery, apathy and boredom are not likely to be hers when she is older.

Barbara has finished her song, and has settled down to give the Teddy Bear a teaparty. There she sits, the acutest judge and observer of her father in all the world. She is gathering memories which will never leave her, as I gathered them from my father—the smell of his shaving soap in the morning, the scratch of his rougher cheek in the good-night kiss, the feel of his clothes, the tones of his voice in pleasure and in anger, his difficult standard of good manners, his awful moments of irritation when he was almost too dreadful to look on and his voice was like the rumbling of an earthquake, his little mysterious jokes with my mother at which I laughed without in the least knowing why, the way in which he could be humoured, the hush that was expected when he was said to be tired or busy, his real but diffident sympathy in tragedies, the jolly way he took sovereigns out of his waistcoat pocket, his one glorious outburst when bicycling against the driver of an obstructive dray, the radiance shed by his approval and the gloom of his, as I now suspect, often legendary displeasure, his never failing urbanity, of a consistency almost comic, amid the extemporary and the haphazard. A sensitive plate is now taking in my own foibles and mannerisms. When in after years that plate is fully developed and the results are contemplated with amused commiseration, I shall be content if there is no injured comment on the chance given to the owner and developer of that plate of becoming what she ought to be, an Englishwoman of the best kind.