The Ripe Old Age of Ten
Walker, Helen
November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 9 THE RIPE OLD AGE OF TEN By HELEN WALKER I WISH I could go back to that ripe old age. But in...
...Kenneth Grahame knew, and called it The Golden Age...
...But when supernatural powers chose not to take a hand but to let the Princess and Curdie work things out for themselves, then the only defense against the evil ones was verse, for, wrote George MacDonald, "they hated verse of every kind, and some kinds they could not endure at all...
...Bah...
...What are the triumph* of our famous aviators compared to the glory of superbly riding the air on the magic carpet from Bagdad...
...I suspect they could not make any themselves, and that was why they disliked it so much...
...Blessed be the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang, and George MacDonaldl A libel long current among hard-headed materialists against the fairy-tale is that it always throws a wrong perspective on life by coloring it with a too impossible optimism...
...Do you remember how, in At the Back of the North Wind, "Diamond had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked strange about him—just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody...
...Don't you remember, on long winter evenings, how you actually were the beautiful, slim princess who let down her long, golden hair from her tower-prison to form a rope-ladder for the handsome, rescuing prince...
...Andrew Lang used the colors of the rainbow ia naming his fairy-books, and rightly so, for hope is the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, and the proper heritage only of children, who alone can know it unalloyed...
...For while he may have journeyed in a glass-bottomed boat to view the wonders of a tropical sea-bed, yet has he ever cruised east of the moon and west of the sun in a golden barque with mother-of-pearl sails...
...simply produced so many apples and cherries . . . They were unaware of Indians, nor recked they anything of pirates with pistols, though the whole placed swarmed with such portents...
...The goblins, those fearful creatures with enormous misshapen heads, and soft feet with no toes, rebels 10 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 against a good king, could only be scattered by a "great shining light in whose rays appeared a white dove," and the presence of these ever resulted in their confusion...
...Then there were the fascinating speculations that arose in one's mind as one read...
...Indeed, it was one of the most hopeless features of their character . . . that, having absolute license to indulge in the pleasures of life, they could get no good out of it...
...Ah, yes, I was—that is the truth of it—so who shall blame me for wishing myself back in that glorious age...
...If we are not, at the present moment, wearing hats, at least let us take off our spectacles to our intellectual superiors, the children...
...And this all because you were an intelligent reader, in the prime of your life at the ripe old age of ten...
...Pick up The Blue Fairy Book, steal a handful of ginger cookies from the pantry when the cook isn't looking, and faring forth into the back-yard, do you "shinny" (vocabulary, again, aetat ten—superbly expressive) up the old apple tree to that familiar, comfortable crotch—the best reading vantage in the world . . . Ah, you see how difficult it is...
...Is there a grown-up who can bring to the reading of a book the qualities possessed by any child at that magnificent, ample time of life—that believing epoch, when the eyes of the mind are clear and fresh, when the imagination is hardy, vibrant and palpitating, when play is by far the only serious business of life...
...But at that time I had freckles, a snub nose, and short black hair," I have remonstrated...
...for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject...
...When Diamond, for the moment, had lost Lady North Wind in the lonely, dark garden, "he came to the conclusion that whether he was in a dream or not, there could be no harm in crying a little...
...As for George MacD'onald, that gentle Scotch dominie wrote his Princess and the Goblin, and At the Back of the North Wind, for children, yet are their pages full of a spirituality and mysticism, and a delicious, subtle humor older readers may well hunger for—but he did not deem it wise to waste it on them...
...It is, as all people of my mature generation should agree (provided they be truthful) in estimates of themselves, the only intelligent age we ever know...
...At that time, he says, "these elders, our betters by a trick of chance, commanded no respect, but only a certain blend of envy of their good luck, and pity for their inability to make use of it...
...Indeed, it did...
...The author goes on to say that "I don't mind people crying so much as I mind what they cry about, and how they cry—whether they cry quietly like ladies and gentlemen, or go shrieking like vulgar emperors, or ill-natured cooks...
...jiggernut, jaugernut, qui-jigeree," did one escape from being transformed into a fawn...
...He wrote for the intelligent readers—the children...
...The delectable ginger cookie complemented and made gloriously complete the intellectual rhapsody of The Wizard of Oz...
...As one looks back, one feels that sometimes there was something about the Brothers Grimm, even in spite of the beauty of th«ir tales, a little suggestive of their name—for surely the story of The Fisherman and His Wife spells bkak disaster for those not wisely temperate in their enjoyment of the gifts of the gods, Hans Andersen's Little Match-Girl is one of the saddest things in literature...
...they have replied...
...but perhaps, one figured, it was only that he was opposed to liquor and purposely spurned it...
...Roosevelt may have captured the ovis-poli, but has he ever conquered a shimmering dragon with emerald eyes and fiery tongue...
...The books have told me as much...
...This tongue-in-the-cheek attitude of the relator was rather baffling and disappointing...
...Not even Mr...
...Perhaps you will pause a moment, you bespectacled, elderly, scholarly readers of books—you who have spent long years in universities and longer years in the world in the study of books, reading of books, and acquiring of books—yea, even those of you who have made the writing or criticism of books your business in life—perhaps you will pause and consider the truth of this: the only really intelligent reader is the child...
...The back-stairs at night were enchanted, and one could only defeat the genie who guarded them and successfully mount, by going two steps up and one step down, meticulously treading, no matter how an impatient nurse at the top might scold...
...They might dabble in the pond all day, hunt the chickens, climb trees in the most uncompromising Sunday clothes...
...A certain book of European folk-lore ended each story happily with the wedding feast of the prince and princess in full swing, but the concluding sentence in each story always read: "And they feasted for forty days and forty nights, and I, too, was there—only all the mead I drank ran down my beard...
...Nor were reading and "make-believe" the only joys of that epoch, for the carnal nature then rejoiced in food as at no other epoch...
...But in the present period of my senescence, all that can be done is to survey the long aeons that have passed since then, and memory having failed as well as other faculties, recall what will come back of its own accord out of that rapturous past...
...At times, you were yourself a fairy, clad in sparkling gossamer raiment, with a wand of silver tipped by a glowing star (though your elders saw only a fat little girl in a brown "sailor-suit," running about and touching objects with the bent, wire rib of an abandoned umbrella...
...William Beebe's...
...Oh, no, my dear—I may be a bad wizard, but I'm a good humbug.' ") No adult king with all the treasures of the world ever experienced a keener pleasure...
...Those of us who have passed that first decimal mark, have indeed gone into an over-ripe old age where minds are dimmed with scepticism and tainted with disbelief, disillusion, and too much knowledge—where imaginations are soft and "squshy" (to employ the far superior vocabulary of the ripe old age of ten) with too close a proximity to a dull and horrible materialism...
...Charms had to be recited to pass safely the big jardiniere in the hall that was inhabited by a witch, for only on the solemn pronouncement of "hazel-nut, hazel-nut, wild apple tree...
...No, it comes only once in a lifetime, and all you be-spectacled, mature readers who feel with superiority that you can easily reclaim this ripe old age of ten and become once again really intelligent readers, put yourselves to a test...
...Not all these heroes and heroines "lived happily ever after...
...One only mentions these to show that this experience of childhood, gained through the living of books, has its grave as well as its gay—and haven't the wisest taught us that only of such commingling is the most rounded-out life achieved...
...The books, themselves, have whispered to me that the only reason they tolerate us at all, is because, though at times it seems difficult to believe, we ourselves have once been children— once fluttered and thrilled to a fine rapture they were able to give us then, but which is now utterly lost...
...Now how could I—" "Nevertheless, you were the beautiful, slim, golden-haired princess," they have interrupted authoritatively...
...I [says the author] have seen this world look as strange as ever I saw Fairyland...
...he could begin whenever he liked...
...All these are but mere amateurs—the only age at which they really conquered distance, sea, earth, and air was at the ripe old age of ten...
...But," I have whispered back to them, "surely only education and experience can appreciate books...
...At that time, one had one's existence in all the fairytales—a wealth of experience and exciting circumstance that surely the most eventful and adventuresome mature life can never hope to approach within a thousand miles...
...for all emperors are not gentlemen, and all cooks are not ladies...
...In fact, it really cannot be done...
...Do you think that education and experience can replace that actual living the book that was yours when you were ten...
...Moreover, my figure, if such it could be called, was rotund and what is known as chubby...
...But I confess that I have not yet seen Fairyland at its best...
...I am always going to see it so sometime...
...they were free to fire cannons and explode mines on the lawn—yet they never did any of these things . . . To anything but appearances they were blind...
...For them, the orchard (a place elf-haunted, wonderful...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 1
