VII

THE BABY

A baby spoils one for everything else. A baby is so delicious, so mysterious, so exquisite, that every- thing else seems horribly commonplace after the baby. There is simply nothing, either in the world or out of it, that can hold a candle to a real live baby. Carlyle never had any children. That explains a great deal. But I like to think of the stern old sage, in that last year of his life, nursing his cousin’s baby. It opened a new world to the great man. Lecky tells us that he used to look down into its dimpled face with inexpressible amazement. He regarded it as a wonder of Nature. He used to speak of it as ‘our baby,’ and said that it was ‘an odd kind of article,’ and that it was ‘very strange that Shakespeare should once have been like that!’ I have a notion of my own that Shakespeare was Shakespeare just because he was once like that, and just because he kept the child-heart always with him. I have somewhere read of Kingsley that, being unutterably bored on one occasion by the solemnities and formalities of some public or social function, he at last broke from the terrible restraint. Throwing off his coat, he astounded every one present by challenging them to race him to the top branch of a giant tree near by. And in a few minutes half the company were scrambling like monkeys among the swinging boughs. That is just the sort of man to write Westward Ho! Could Dickens have taken his place in literature if he had lost the ripple of childish merriment from that wonderful soul of his ? No, no, no; in literature, as in life, it is the little child that leads us. That is what the prophet said.

Poor little baby! Who can help pitying him? He seems so very much the sport of destiny, the child of fate. Was it altogether kind to involve him in all the amazing mysteries and endless problems of the universe without consulting him? Here he is, poor, sprawling, helpless little thing. Nobody asked him whether he wished to come. ‘Our spoonful of existence is served out to us,’ as a brilliant English essayist has put it,  ‘and no questions asked as to how we like it. Such points as to whether we would wake up in the twentieth century or in the old Stone period ; in Mars or on this planet; whether we should be male or female; prince, poet, or wood-cutter; and a thousand other things deemed by us important — all were determined without the smallest reference to the opinions of that speck of vitality inside us which we call “ourselves.”’  Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in Heretics, states the same peculiarity another way. ‘The best way,’ he says, ‘in which a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.’ There is something very impressive about this shaping of a baby’s destiny without consulting him. On a thousand small matters he will afterwards have his say. He may go this way or that way, do this thing or that thing. But the biggest issues of all he finds decided for him when he opens his eye upon them for the first time. Clearly, ‘we are not our own.’ That is what the apostle said.

A baby is a born leader. What a day that is in a woman’s life when, pressing her very own baby to her breast, she feels the exquisite rapture of motherhood! What a day that is in a man’s life when he takes into his arms for the first time the dear child of his own body! What happens on that day? the little child leads them out into a larger, ampler, richer, more glorious life ; that is all. ‘A little child shall lead them.’ Our babies remain babies for so long, as compared with the furry babies of the fields and of the forests, because we need their leadership. Our hearts need to be softened, and our souls sweetened, by their gentle ministries, and so they do not hurry to grow up. And every day of their baby lives they beckon us on towards goodness. Michael Fairless, in The Roadmender, tells a lovely story of the grimy little waif who put up his lips to be kissed by the hardened and vicious old organ-grinder Gawdine. Gawdine shook him off with a blow and a curse. The little child scampered tearfully away. A day or two later Gawdine met with an accident. In the hospital he was haunted by the memory of the wistful and upturned face. When he left the wards, he set out to search for it. He had the jigs and tunes that children love put in his organ. He played in alleys and by-ways where children congregated. He never found the child of the upturned face. But, in searching, he became gentle and kind and serious and noble. Michael Fairless says that if she had to write his epitaph it would be: ‘He saw the face of a little child, and looked on God.’ Dickens tells in The Old Curiosity Shop of the little child who led the old man away from his gambling haunts to the pure life of the countryside, where he forgot his vices. George Eliot tells of the little child who took the withered hand of the miser, taught him to make daisy chains, and led him into a love that was pure and unselfish and uplifting. ‘A little child shall lead them.’

Now, the world is always woefully slow in recognizing the things that matter. Thackeray used to greatly amuse Macaulay by telling him of an incident which he actually witnessed at the London Zoo. A crowd had gathered around the enclosure in which the hippopotamus was confined. On one outskirt of the crowd stood Thackeray; on another stood Macaulay. Macaulay’s History had just been published, and was the talk of the town. Two young ladies in the throng were admiring the hippopotamus when some one drew their attention to the presence of the historian. ‘Mr. Macaulay!’ cried the lovely pair. ‘Is that Mr. Macaulay? Never mind the hippopotamus!’ Precisely, it was the historian who was best worth looking at. Nobody knows now what became of the hippopotamus. The huge and ugly creature only emerges upon the history of the world through his chance association with that one incident. But Macaulay is immortal. Who would stare at a hippopotamus if he had the chance of seeing and hearing Macaulay? Yet the unseeing crowd at the Zoo went on admiring the thick-skinned amphibian, and only two elect souls left the crowd to gaze upon Macaulay! That is the way of the world. It never sees the things best worth seeing. Take the newspaper for example. People tear open their newspapers to read of the wars and the accidents and the politics and the sports and the prosecutions, as though these were the things of most importance! The really sensational item in the newspaper is always to be found in the column headed Births, Marriages, and Deaths. Not among the deaths, for those chapters have closed. Nor among the marriages, for here the great choice has been made, and life has taken its shape and colour. But among the births! These babies! What startling and sensational and epoch-making items of news these announcements may represent! The cablegrams are mere hippopotami; Macaulay is here! ‘A new universe is created,’ Jean Paul Richter used to say, and to say truly, ‘every time a child is born.’ This is the way in which God cleanses and sweetens and brightens His world; and He has no other way of doing it. He has no other way, because He wants no other way. The baby is sufficient for the task. What a baby cannot do, cannot be done.

Yet who looks to the baby? Who turns to the baby as the strategic point in the struggle of nations? It is always so ; we are for ever staring at the hippopotamus. Europe was never darker than when Wyclif was born. But which of those villagers in the little Yorkshire hamlet suspected, as he saw that tiny baby in that modest cradle, that, with his nativity, the new day had dawned? Slavery was most strongly entrenched when Abraham Lincoln was born. Who that watched his baby antics on the one hand, and listened to the cry of the oppressed on the other, dreamed that the baby before them was the key to the whole situation? No; we never find room for the baby. He is always in the manger. It never occurs to us, as we confuse our minds with the world’s worries and the world’s woes, that the baby in its swaddling-clothes is really the way out. A century ago, for example, men were following, with bated breath, the march of Napoleon, and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest news of the wars. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think about babies? Everybody was thinking about battles. It was another case of the historian and the hippopotamus. For let us look at some of those babies. Why, in one year, lying midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, there stole into the world a host of heroes! During that one year, 1809, Mr. Gladstone was born at Liverpool; Alfred Tennyson was born at the Somersby rectory; and Oliver Wendell Holmes made his first appearance at Massachusetts. On the very self-same day of that self-same year Charles Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath at Old Kentucky. Music was enriched by the advent of Frederic Chopin at Warsaw, and of Felix Mendelssohn at Hamburg. Within the same year, too, Samuel Morley was born at Homerton, Edward FitzGerald at Woodbridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning at Durham, and Frances Kemble in London. But nobody thought of babies. Everybody was thinking of battles. Yet, viewing that age in the truer perspective which the distance of a hundred years enables us to command, we may well ask ourselves which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809?

During the next few years, whilst Wellington and Soult were still struggling in the Peninsular War, Thackeray, and Dickens, and Bright, and Browning and Livingstone, and a hundred other historic babies were born. But who cared? Who, for example took any notice of that baby at Blantyre? Children, feeling the first faint hint of spring in the air, paused to play for awhile on the green, and then scampered home to tell their mothers that there was a new baby down at Neil Livingstone’s store. But the excitement ended there. It was no time for gossip about babies. Down at the comer, where the crazy fingerpost marked the spot where the village lane joined the long main road, knots of eager men waited impatiently for the lumbering old stage-coach to bring news from the war. Europe was getting ready for Waterloo. And in Neil Livingstone’s odorous store, through those long evenings, half a dozen sturdy Scotsmen gathered to discuss the latest intelligence that had filtered through to Blantyre. What would Napoleon do next? Could he raise another army now that the stupendous proportions of the Moscow disaster had been realized? How fared the great Duke in the Peninsula? These were the questions that those brawny northerners discussed as they squatted on empty cases or leaned against the counter. For had not Neil Livingstone two brothers with Wellington at the front? And of what consequence, in comparison, was the puny baby whose shrill scream occasionally punctuated the conversation? How squalidly microscopic that baby seemed! And yet whilst they discussed countries that baby represented a continent, a continent as big as Europe and India and China and Australia put together ! The key of a new world was locked up in his heart. The baby was David Livingstone. That is always the blunder we short-sighted people make. We fancy that God can only manage His world by big battalions abroad, when all the while He is doing it by beautiful babies at home. When a wrong wants righting, or a work wants doing, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. That is why, long, long ago, a babe was born at Bethlehem. And that is why, just one short century since, a babe was born at Blantyre. The births column is the only really important one in each day’s news.

Mr. Will Crooks told rather a good story the other day. He knew a man, he said, who was always talking about the Empire. He attended every Empire meeting, and joined every Empire league. Every proposal for the expansion or aggrandisement of the Empire he applauded with enthusiasm and vigour. He enlarged upon the glories of Empire at breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, and on every available opportunity in between. The only drawback about him was that, compared with his imperial visions, his home appeared to him a rather poky place, and he treated his poor little wife with some impatience. One day he arrived before dinner was ready. The baby had been fretful; the stove had been troublesome; and everything had gone wrong. The imperial brow clouded, and there was thunder and lightning. The poor wife winced and wept beneath the storm; and then, smiling through her tears, she went towards her lord, laid the peevish baby in his arms, and said: ‘There, now, you mind your little bit of Empire, whilst I dish the potatoes!’ It is a fine thing to dream heroic dreams either of the future Empire or the future Church, but, in order to make those dreams come true, it is just possible that the first step towards it is to look well after the baby.

F. W. Boreham, 1914