This
Mental Attitude Came Out Strikingly One Day When We Had A Funeral -
Always A Feast To The Villagers; That Is To Say, An Emotional Feast;
And On This Occasion The Circumstances Made The Ceremony A Peculiarly
Impressive One.
A young man, well known and generally liked, son of a small farmer,
died with tragic suddenness, and the little stone farm-house being
situated away on the borders of the parish, the funeral procession had
a considerable distance to walk to the village.
To the church I went to
view its approach; built on a rock, the church stands high in the
centre of the village, and from the broad stone steps in front one got
a fine view of the inland country and of the procession like an immense
black serpent winding along over green fields and stiles, now
disappearing in some hollow ground or behind grey masses of rock, then
emerging on the sight, and the voices of the singers bursting out loud
and clear in that still atmosphere.
When I arrived on the steps Mab was already there; the whole village
would be at that spot presently, but she was first. On that morning no
sooner had she heard that the funeral was going to take place than she
gave herself a holiday from school and made her docile mother dress her
in her daintiest clothes. She welcomed me with a glad face and put her
wee hand in mine; then the villagers - all those not in the procession -
began to arrive, and very soon we were in the middle of a throng; then,
as the six coffin-bearers came slowly toiling up the many steps, and
the singing all at once grew loud and swept as a big wave of sound over
us, the people were shaken with emotion, and all the faces, even of the
oldest men, were wet with tears - all except ours, Mab's and mine.
Our tearless condition - our ability to keep dry when it was raining, so
to say - resulted from quite different causes. Mine just then were the
eyes of a naturalist curiously observing the demeanour of the beings
around me. To Mab the whole spectacle was an act, an interlude, or
scene in that wonderful endless play which was a perpetual delight to
witness and in which she too was taking a part. And to see all her
friends, her grown-up playmates, enjoying themselves in this unusual
way, marching in a procession to the church, dressed in black, singing
hymns with tears in their eyes - why, this was even better than school
or Sunday service, romps in the playground or a children's tea. Every
time I looked down at my little mate she lifted a rosy face to mine
with her sweetest smile and bugloss eyes aglow with ineffable
happiness. And now that we are far apart my loveliest memory of her is
as she appeared then. I would not spoil that lovely image by going back
to look at her again. Three years! It was said of Lewis Carroll that he
ceased to care anything about his little Alices when they had come to
the age of ten. Seven is my limit: they are perfect then: but in Mab's
case the peculiar exquisite charm could hardly have lasted beyond the
age of six.
XVIII
FRECKLES
My meeting with Freckles only served to confirm me in the belief,
almost amounting to a conviction, that the female of our species
reaches its full mental development at an extraordinarily early age
compared to that of the male. In the male the receptive and elastic or
progressive period varies greatly; but judging from the number of cases
one meets with of men who have continued gaining in intellectual power
to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable
to conclude that the stationary individuals are only so because of the
condition of their lives having been inimical. In fact, stagnation
strikes us as an unnatural condition of mind. The man who dies at fifty
or sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, doubtless would,
if he had lived a lustrum or a decade longer, have attained to a still
greater height. "How disgusting it is," cried Ruskin, when he had
reached his threescore years and ten, "to find that just when one's
getting interested in life one has got to die!" Many can say as much;
all could say it, had not the mental machinery been disorganised by
some accident, or become rusted from neglect and carelessness. He who
is no more in mind at sixty than at thirty is but a half-grown man: his
is a case of arrested development.
It is hardly necessary to remark here that the mere accumulation of
knowledge is not the same thing as power of mind and its increase: the
man who astonishes you with the amount of knowledge stored in his brain
may be no greater in mind at seventy than at twenty.
Comparing the sexes again, we might say that the female mind reaches
perfection in childhood, long before the physical change from a
generalised to a specialised form; whereas the male retains a
generalised form to the end of life and never ceases to advance
mentally. The reason is obvious. There is no need for continued
progression in women, and Nature, like the grand old economist she is,
or can be when she likes, matures the mind quickly in one case and
slowly in the other; so slowly that he, the young male, goes crawling
on all fours as it were, a long distance after his little flying
sister - slowly because he has very far to go and must keep on for a
very, very long time.
I met Freckles in one of those small ancient out-of-the-world market
towns of the West of England - Somerset to be precise - which are just
like large old villages, where the turnpike road is for half a mile or
so a High Street, wide at one point, where the market is held.
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