The
SEVEN AGES of MAN

BY
RALPH BERGENGREN







The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston

Copyright, 1921, by
Ralph Bergengren

CONTENTS

I

BABY, BABY

OF the many questions that Mr. Boswell, at one time and another, asked his friend, Dr. Johnson, I can hardly recall another more searching than one that he himself describes as whimsical.

“I know not how so whimsical a thought came into my head,” says Boswell, “but I asked, ‘If, sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with you, what would you do?’

“Johnson: Why, sir, I should not much like my company.

“Boswell: But would you take the trouble of rearing it?

“He seemed, as may be supposed, unwilling to pursue the subject: but, upon my persevering in my question, replied, ‘Why, yes, sir, I would; but I must have all conveniences. If I had no garden, I would make a shed on the roof, and take it there for fresh air. I should feed it, and wash it much, and with warm water, to please it, not with cold water, to give it pain.’

“Boswell: But, sir, does not heat relax?

“Johnson: Sir, you are not to imagine the water is to be very hot. I would not coddle the child.”

It appears, too, that the Doctor had given some thought to the subject, although never expecting to be a mother himself: his immediate insistence upon fresh air promises well for the infant, and the frequency with which he proposes to wash his little companion indicates that, so long as the water-supply of the castle lasted, he would have done his part. A cow in the castle seems to have been taken for granted; but, in 1769, even Dr. Johnson would have known little or nothing about formulas, nor would it have occurred to him to make a pasteurizing apparatus, as so many parents do nowadays, out of a large tin pail and a pie-plate. Here the baby would have had to take his eighteenth-century chance. And I wish, too, that he might have had a copy of “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” that modern compendium of twenty-four exercises, by which a reasonably strongarmed mother may strengthen and develop the infant’s tiny muscles; for I like to think of Dr. Johnson exercising his innocent companion in his shed on the roof. “Sir,” he says, “I do not much like my employment; but here we are, and we’ll have to make the best of it.”

Such an experience, no doubt, would have been good for Dr. Johnson, and good for the baby (if it survived). “That into which his little mind is to develop,” says “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” “is plastic—like a wax record, ready to retain such impressions as are made upon it”; and on this wax some, at least, of the impressions left by Dr. Johnson must have been valuable. But on the real mystery of babyhood—the insoluble enigma that the “Guide” can only in small measure dispose of by comparing the rearing of an infant with the home-manufacture of a record for the gramaphone—the experience would have thrown no light.

The Doctor, I dare say, would have written a paper on the feeding and washing of infants, and later dictionaries of familiar quotation might perhaps have been enriched by the phrase,“‘The baby is grandfather to the man.’—Johnson.” But of this grandfather the man has no memory. His babyhood is a past concerning which he is perforce silent, a time when it is only by the report of others that he knows he was living. His little mind seems to have been more than a little blank; and although gifted novelists have set themselves the imaginative task of thinking and writing like babies, none, in my reading, has ever plausibly succeeded. The best they can do is to think and write like little adults. I recall, for example, the