THE RUINOUS CULT OF INFANTILISM

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 65, 3 April 1937, Page 11

THE RUINOUS CULT OF INFANTILISM

Life of Grown-ups Sacrificed

ALL GREAT CIVILISATIONS pf the past were based upon the principle that the intereets of adults come before those of children, writes Aldous Huxley. , Socrates and Lucretius, Dante and Chaucer, Voltaire and Goethe, all tho great representatives of creative historical epochs, were mature men who produced mature works. The great change began with the nineteenth century. In the realm of concrete facts as well as in ; that of fiction, children in the hest years and greyJbearded infants made their appearance among the adults. The morbid ciilt of the infantile had started. An early symptom of tbis change niay be found in Wordsworth7s "The child is father of the man,77 an assertion which tended tp enhance the value of the jmmature at the expense off the mature. To all wtfters of former times the man had been father of the child. ln other words, they had -tlie interests and values of the mature age more at heart than those of childhiood. These symptoms became more pronounced with the emergence of Charles Piekens in the "field of literature. To him undoubtedly goes the merit of having invented on entirely new type of hero. .For Dickens the liighest type of man was not the heroic adult, but • the

middle-aged infanb Pickwick and the like of him, the typical Dickensian •saints. Considered objectively and without the halo of amusing ludicrousness • with which Dickens surrounded thean, these bald-headed old infants are most ,repulsive deformities. Almost simultaneously with Pickwick was' bom that other awful pro-duct-of the nineteenth century imagination, defined by Baudelaire as La Juene Fille Assassin de l'Art— th© art-killing young gii'l. For more than two geherations the creature ruled Europoan, particularly Anglo-Saxon culture imposing a literature girlishly reserved, and daring "authors to writ© anything not fit for a girl of twelve to r®ad. To this day this killer of arts and adult values «vields some power. Did she not quite recently inspire the American senatdr tvho declared that he preferred his child to become 'a dope fiend rather

than read one line of D. H. Lawrence, and that the virtue of one girl of sixteen was worth more than all th® boojss ever hrought to ihe United States? In the twentieth oentury the Pantheon of Infantilism was enrichbd by an important new addition: the chairabter - of Peter Pan, the hoy who never grows up. Thanks to Barrie, Jts spifitual father, infantilism became a goal towards wbich people aspired consciousIy,. and' it became so droll and. coquettish that it made one7s blood freeze in the * veins. ^ The alarming thing about it is 'that Peter Pan undoubtedly satisfied an existing need. Men wero revelling in infantilism. The universal admiration for its values became so great that the Catholic Church, an essentially mature institution, deemed it advisable to canonise jSaint Theresa of Lisieux, a striking example of modern infantilism., We have but jto compare the modern Saint Theresa wjth her great Spanish namesake from the sixteenthi century, (one of th© gfeatest charateters in tbe history of womanhood) to realise thsit peculiar and ominous things must bave happened to ihe western spjrit in recent times.

In America particularly, but t»/ a grt^lt extent also in our - country, -'the glorificatioja of infantile 'values has assumed such proportions that the life of the grown-ups is mostly sacrificed to the children. It is they who set the fashion in the family cirele and their elders obediently dance to their ttuie. Eaeh generation is expected to sacuific© its adult state on the altar of j the coming generation.^ "A.-* simple arithmetical calculation proves how ahBurd this is. Wo are children during twenty yeari but mature .during forty or fifty years. The glorification. of~ infantilism preventc ns, at least during two thirds of our existence, from leading a life befitting adult people. No doubt childhood haa its rights, but so has the adult state, whose values are no less worthy of • respect than those of childhood.