To Be a Boy

In The Boyhood of Great Men, published by Harper and Brothers in 1853, but now, I fear, very little read, it is told of Sir Isaac Newton that ‘an accident first fired him to strive for distinction in the schoolroom. The boy who was immediately above him in the class, after treating him with a tyranny hard to bear, was cruel enough to kick him in the stomach with a severity that caused great pain. Newton resolved to have his revenge, but of such a kind as was natural to his reasoning mind, even at that immature age. He determined to excel his oppressor in their studies and lessons; and, setting himself to the task with zeal and diligence, he never halted in his course till he had found his way to the top of the class; thus exhibiting and leaving a noble example to others of his years similarly situated. Doubtless, after this, he would heartily forgive his crestfallen persecutor, who could not henceforth but feel ashamed of his unmanly conduct; while Newton would feel the proud consciousness of having done his duty after the bravest and noblest fashion which it is in the power of man to adopt.’

We cannot all be Sir Isaac Newtons, and, although I may wish for a passing moment that some sturdy little schoolfellow had kicked me too in the stomach, the resulting sequence of events would probably have been different, and the world would have gained little or nothing by my natural indignation. Having an impartial mind, I should like to know also why Sir Isaac was kicked, and what became afterward of the boy who kicked him. As his fame grew in the world, the reflected glory of having thus kicked Sir Isaac Newton in the stomach would presumably have brightened in proportion; but, lacking other distinction, the kicker served his evolutionary purpose and has now vanished. Yet this much remains of him — that his little foot kicks also in the stomach the widely accepted fallacy that boyhood is an age of unalloyed gold, to which every man now and then looks back, and vainly yearns to be a boy again.

‘Ah, happy years!’ — so sighed the poet Byron, — ‘once more, who would not be a boy?’ And so to-day, as may at least be reasonably deduced from general newspaper reading, sigh all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States. Not, indeed, for a boyhood like Sir Isaac Newton’s, but for the standard American boyhood, to which, in theory, every ageing American looks back with yearning reminiscence — that happy, happy time when he went barefooted, played ‘hookey’ from school, fished in the running brook with a bent pin for a hook, and swam, with other future bankers, merchants, clerks, clergymen, physicians and surgeons, confidence men, authors, pickpockets, actors, burglars, and so forth, in an old swimming-hole. The democracy of the old swimming-hole is the democracy of the United States, naked and unashamed; and even in the midst of a wave of crime (one might almost imagine), if the victim should say suddenly to the hold-up man, —

the hold-up man would drop his automatic gun, and the two would dissolve on each other’s necks in a flood of sympathetic tears.

It is a pleasant and harmless fallacy, and I for one would not destroy it. I am no such stickler for exactitude that I would take away from any man whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a barefoot boy, even if circumstances were against him, and his mother as adamant in her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is indestructible: the symbols may not have been universal, but it is true enough of boyhood that time then seemed to be without limit, and this unthinking sense of immortality is what men have lost and would fain recover. One forgets how cruel slow moved the hands of the schoolroom clock through the last, long, lingering, eternal fifteen minutes of the daily life-sentence to hard and uncongenial labor. One forgets how feverishly the seconds chased each other, faster than human feet could follow, when one’s little self was late for school, and the clamor of the distant bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the opportunity for stout heart to play ‘hookey,’ luring the finny tribe with a poor worm impaled on a bent pin: and that , in the opinion of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always did.

But in the painful reality most of us, I think, tried to overtake those feverish seconds, seeking indeed to outrun time, and somehow or other, though the bell had stopped ringing,get unostentatiously into our little seats before it stopped.

And so we ran and ran and ran, lifting one leaden foot after the other with hopeless determination, in a silent nightmare world, where the road was made of glue and the very trees along the way turned their leaves to watch us drag slowly by. Little respect we would have had then for the poet Byron and his ‘Ah, happy years! once more, who would not be a boy?’ But even then, when time seemed to stand still, or seemed to fly too fast, we had no consciousness that the clock of our individual being could ever run down and stop; and so happily careless were we of this treasure, that we often wished to be men! ‘When I was young,’ says the author of The Boy’s Week-Day Book, another volume which is not read nowadays as much as it used to be, —

I wonder what proud, aspiring thought Uncle Jones, as he called himself, just then had in mind; but it was evidently no wish to be a boy again: perhaps he meditated matrimony.

For my own part I cannot successfully wish to be a boy; I remain impervious to all the efforts of all the editors of all the newspapers in the United States to dim my eye; and there must be many another eye like mine, or else I am unbelievably unique. I lean back in my chair, closing this undimmed organ, and do my best; but, contrary to all editorial expectation, I can summon no desire to go barefooted, fish with a bent pin, or revisit the old swimming-hole, —

I prefer a beach and a bathing-suit and somebody of my own age. Yet do not think, shocked reader, that I am unsympathetic with youth. I am more sympathetic — that is all — with my contemporaries; and the thought forces itself upon me that boyhood is a narrow and conventional period, in which, in my own case, my desire to go barefoot was exactly similar to my mother’s determination to wear a bustle. Equally anxious to follow the fashions of our respective sets, neither understood the other; and I would no more have worn a bustle than my mother would have gone barefoot.

My father, similarly thwarted in a single desire, would have cared less: his broader interests — politics, business, family, the local and world gossip that immersed him in his newspaper, art, literature, music, and the drama, to say nothing of professional baseball and pugilism (in which, however, many fathers and sons have a common interest) — would have absorbed his disappointment.

But my narrower world, so to speak, was all feet. An unconventional boy, as I think the most erudite student of boy-life and boy-psychology will admit, is much more rare than an unconventional man; and even then his unconventionality is likely to be imposed on him ‘ for his own good ’ by well-meaning but tyrannical parents.

‘I have known boys,’ wrote Uncle Jones, observing but not comprehending this characteristic fact, ‘when playing at “hare-and-hounds” and “follow my leader,” scramble over hedges, leap over brooks, and mount up precipices, in a manner which they would not have dared to attempt, had it not been for the examples set them by their schoolfellows; but I do not remember any instance of a boy imitating another on account of his good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety.'

Naturally not. While you and I, Uncle Jones, might be expected to imitate each other’s good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety, — though I do not say that we would, — from the point of view of a boy, these virtues are unconventional. Their practice shocks and disconcerts the observer. The behavior of Sir Isaac Newton when he was kicked in the stomach was perfectly scandalous.

And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy that a man would find interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his desire, to ‘make’ the time for it, as he makes time for his adult pleasures, and if he is not too old or too fat? He can spend his vacation at the old swimming-hole — but he never does it. He can go barefooted whenever he wishes: his mother can no longer forbid him to do it. He can fish with a bent pin in the porcelain bathtub, adding a gold-fish to make the pursuit more exciting, every morning before he takes his bath. He can chase butterflies: here and there, indeed, a man makes a profession of it, and institutions of learning call him an entomologist, and pay him much honor and a small salary. Nobody forbids him to enlarge his mental horizon by reading the lives of criminals and detectives; and I can myself direct him to many an entertaining book which is at once far worse and far better, morally and artistically, than the sober narratives that Old Sleuth used to write by the yard and boys to read by stealth. He can roll a hoop; in many cases it would do him good to roll it down to the office in the morning and back home at night.

If he can persuade other ageing men, wishful of renewed boyhood, to join him, he can play marbles, ‘tick,’ ‘pussin-the-corner,’ ‘hop-scotch,’ ‘ring-taw,’ and ‘ hot beans ready buttered, ’—Uncle Jones mentions these games; I do not remember all of them myself, but ‘hot beans ready buttered ’ sounds especially interesting), — and where better than in some green , quiet corner at the Country Club? And why, if you will raise the question of conventionality, why more foolish than golf or folk-dancing?

But what he cannot do is to assume the boy’s unconsciousness of his own mortality. What he cannot unload is his own consciousness of responsibility to and for others. Life, in short, has provided the man with a worrying company of creditors of whom the boy knows nothing — Creditor Cost-of-Living, Creditor Ambition, Creditor Conscience, and Creditor Death. And the boy is unmarried! It is even claimed by one philosopher of my acquaintance that this is why men wish they were boys again. I grant the plausibility of this opinion, for the more a man is devoted to his wife and family, the more he is beset and worried by these troublesome creditors, the more, one may reasonably argue, he feels the need of time to meet his obligations, and is apt now and then to envy the boy his narrow, conventional, but immortal-feeling life.

Uncle Jones misses, I think, this fundamental fact. He is always trying to destroy the boy’s sense of immortality in this world by trying to persuade him to read the Bible and prepare for immortality in the next. ‘When a boy first begins his A B C,’ says Uncle Jones, ‘it is terrible work for him for a short time; yet how soon he gets over it, and begins to read! And, then, what a pleasure to be able to read a good and pleasant book! Oh, it is worth while to go through the trouble of learning to read fifty times over, to obtain the advantage of reading the Bible.’