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Title: Childhood in literature and art, with some observations on
literature for children
A study

Author: Horace Elisha Scudder

Release date: February 13, 2025 [eBook #75367]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1894

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDHOOD IN
LITERATURE AND ART, WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN ***

Horace E. Scudder
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CHILDHOOD
IN LITERATURE AND ART

WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

A Study

BY
HORACE E. SCUDDER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

Copyright, 1894,
By HORACE E. SCUDDER
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

TO

S·C·S·
WHO WAS A CHILD WHEN THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

CONTENTS
PAGE
I. Introduction 3
II. In Greek and Roman Literature 6
III. In Hebrew Life and Literature 39
IV. In Early Christianity 53
V. In Mediæval Art 81
VI. In English Literature and Art 104
VII. In French and German Literature 180
VIII. Hans Christian Andersen 201
IX. In American Literary Art 217
Index 247

CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE
AND ART

I
INTRODUCTION

There was a time, just beyond the memory of men now living, when the
Child was born in literature. At the same period books for children began to
be written. There were children, indeed, in literature before Wordsworth
created Alice Fell and Lucy Gray, or breathed the lines beginning,

“She was a phantom of delight,”

and there were books for the young before Mr. Day wrote Sandford and
Merton; especially is it to be noted that Goldsmith, who was an avant-
courier of Wordsworth, had a very delightful perception of the child, and
amused himself with him in the Vicar of Wakefield, while he or his double
entertained his little friends in real life with the Renowned History of
Goody Two Shoes. Nevertheless, there has been, since the day of
Wordsworth, such a succession of childish figures in prose and verse that
we are justified in believing childhood to have been discovered at the close
of the last century. The child has now become so common that we scarcely
consider how absent he is from the earlier literature. Men and women are
there, lovers, maidens, and youth, but these are all with us still. The child
has been added to the dramatis personæ of modern literature.
There is a correlation between childhood in literature and a literature for
children, but it will best be understood when one has considered the
meaning of the appearance and disappearance of the child in different
epochs of literature and art; for while a hasty survey certainly assures one
that the nineteenth century regards childhood far more intently than any
previous age, it is impossible that so elemental a figure as the child should

ever have been wholly lost to sight. A comparison of literatures with
reference to this figure may disclose some of the fundamental differences
which exist between this century and those which have preceded it; it may
also disclose a still deeper note of unity, struck by the essential spirit in
childhood itself. It is not worth while in such a study to have much recourse
to the minor masters; if a theme so elemental and so universal in its
relations is not to be illustrated from the great creative expositors of human
nature, it cannot have the importance which we claim for it.

II
IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE

I

When Dr. Schliemann with his little shovel uncovered the treasures of
Mycenæ and Ilium, a good many timid souls rejoiced exceedingly over a
convincing proof of the authenticity of the Homeric legends. There always
will be those who find the proof of a spiritual fact in some corresponding
material fact; who wish to see the bones of Agamemnon before they are
quite ready to believe in the Agamemnon of the Iliad; to whom the Bible is
not true until its truth has been confirmed by some external witness. But
when science has done its utmost, there still remains in a work of art a
certain testimony to truth, which may be illustrated by science, but cannot
be superseded by it. Agamemnon has lived all these years in the belief of
men without the aid of any cups, or saucers, or golden vessels, or even
bones. Literature, and especially imaginative literature, is the exponent of
the life of a people, and we must still go to it for our most intimate
knowledge. No careful antiquarian research can reproduce for us the
women of early Greece as Homer has set them before us in a few lines in
his pictures of Helen and Penelope and Nausikaä. When, therefore, we ask
ourselves of childhood in Greek life, we may reconstruct it out of the
multitudinous references in Greek literature to the education of children, to
their sports and games; and it is no very difficult task to follow the child
from birth through the nursery to the time when it assumes its place in the
active community: but the main inquiries must still be, What pictures have
we of childhood? What part does the child play in that drama which is set
before us in a microcosm by poets and tragedians?
The actions of Homer’s heroes are spiritualized by reflection. That is, as
the tree which meets the eye becomes a spiritual tree when one sees its
answering image in the pool which it overhangs, so those likenesses which
Homer sets over against the deeds of his heroes release the souls of the
deeds, and give them wings for a flight in the imagination. A crowd of men

flock to the assembly: seen in the bright reflection of Homer’s imagination,
they are a swarm of bees:—

“Being abroad, the earth was overlaid
With flockers to them, that came forth, as when of frequent bees
Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees
Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising new
From forth their sweet nest; as their store, still as it faded, grew,
And never would cease sending forth her clusters to the spring,
They still crowd out so; this flock here, that there, belaboring
The loaded flowers.”[1]

So Chapman, in his Gothic fashion, running up his little spires and
pinnacles upon the building which he has raised from Homer’s material; but
the idea is all Homer’s, and Chapman’s “repairing the degrees of their
egression endlessly,” with its resonant hum, is hardly more intentionally a
reflex of sound and motion than Homer’s αἰεὶ νέον ἐρχομενάων.
We look again at Chapman’s way of rendering the caressing little passage
in the fourth book of the Iliad, where Homer, wishing to speak of the ease
and tenderness with which Athene turns aside the arrow shot at Menelaos,
calls up the image of a mother brushing a fly from the face of her sleeping
child:—

“Stood close before, and slack’d the force the arrow did confer
With as much care and little hurt as doth a mother use,
And keep off from her babe, when sleep doth through his powers diffuse
His golden humor, and th’ assaults of rude and busy flies
She still checks with her careful hand.”[2]

Here the Englishman has caught the notion of ease, and emphasized that;
yet he has missed the tenderness, and all because he was not content to
accept the simple image, but must needs refract it into “assaults of rude and
busy flies.” Better is the rendering of the picturesque figure in which Ajax,
beset by the Trojans, is likened to an ass belabored by a pack of boys:—

“As when a dull mill ass comes near a goodly field of corn,
Kept from the birds by children’s cries, the boys are overborne

By his insensible approach, and simply he will eat
About whom many wands are broke, and still the children beat,
And still the self-providing ass doth with their weakness bear,
Not stirring till his paunch be full, and scarcely then will steer.”[3]
Apollo, sweeping away the rampart of the Greeks, does it as easily as a
boy, who has heaped a pile of sand upon the seashore in childish sport, in
sport razes it with feet and hands. Achilles half pities, half chides, the
imploring, weeping Patroclos, when he says,—

“Wherefore weeps my friend
So like a girl, who, though she sees her mother cannot tend
Her childish humors, hangs on her, and would be taken up,
Still viewing her with tear-drowned eyes, when she has made her stoop.”[4]

Chapman’s “hangs on her” is hardly so particular as Homer’s εἱανοῦ
ἀπτομένη, plucks at her gown; and he has quite missed the picture offered
by the poet, who makes the child, as soon as she discovers her mother, beg
to be taken up, and insistently stop her as she goes by on some errand. Here
again the naïve domestic scene in Homer is charged in Chapman with a
certain half-tragic meaning.
This, we think, completes the short catalogue of Homer’s indirect
reference to childhood, and the comparison with the Elizabethan poet’s use
of the same forms brings out more distinctly the sweet simplicity and native
dignity of the Greek. When childhood is thus referred to by Homer, it is
used with no condescension, and with no thought of investing it with any
adventitious property. It is a part of nature, as the bees are a part of nature;
and when Achilles likens his friend in his tears to a little girl wishing to be
taken up by her mother, he is not taunting him with being a “cry-baby.”
Leaving the indirect references, one recalls immediately the single
picture of childhood which stands among the heroic scenes of the Iliad.
When Hector has his memorable parting with Andromache, as related in the
sixth book of the Iliad, the child Astyanax is present in the nurse’s arms.
Here Chapman is so careless that we desert him, and fall back on a simple
rendering into prose of the passage relating to the child:—

“With this, famous Hector reached forth to take his boy, but back into the
bosom of his fair-girded nurse the boy shrank with a cry, frightened at the
sight of his dear father; for he was afraid of the brass,—yes, and of the
plume made of a horse’s mane, when he saw it nodding dreadfully at the
helmet’s peak. Then out laughed his dear father and his noble mother. Quick
from his head famous Hector took the helmet and laid it on the ground,
where it shone. Then he kissed his dear son and tossed him in the air, and
thus he prayed to Zeus and all the gods.... These were his words, and so he
placed the boy, his boy, in the hands of his dear wife; and she received him
into her odorous bosom, smiling through her tears. Her husband had
compassion on her when he saw it, and stroked her with his hand, spoke to
her, and called her by her name.”[5]
Like so many other passages in Homer, this at once offers themes for
sculpture. Flaxman was right when he presented his series of illustrations to
the Iliad and Odyssey in outline, and gave a statuesque character to the
groups, though his interpretation of this special scene is commonplace.
There is an elemental property about the life exhibited in Homer which the
firm boundaries of sculpture most fitly inclose. Thus childhood, in this
passage, is characterized by an entirely simple emotion,—the sudden fear of
an infant at the sight of his father’s shining helmet and frowning plume;
while the relation of maturity to childhood is presented in the strong man’s
concession to weakness, as he laughs and lays aside his helmet, and then
catches and tosses the child.
It is somewhat perilous to comment upon Homer. The appeal in his
poetry is so direct to universal feeling, and so free from the entanglements
of a too refined sensibility, that the moment one begins to enlarge upon the
sentiment in his epic one is in danger of importing into it subtleties which
would have been incomprehensible to Homer. There is preserved, especially
in the Iliad, the picture of a society which is physically developed, but
intellectually unrefined. The men weep like children when they cannot have
what they want, and the passions which stir life are those which lie nearest
the physical forms of expression. When we come thus upon this picture of
Hector’s parting with Andromache, we are impressed chiefly with the fact
that it is human life in outline. Here are great facts of human experience,
and they are so told that not one of them requires a word of explanation to
make it intelligible to a child. The child, we are reminded in a later

philosophy, is father of the man, and Astyanax is a miniature Hector; for we
have only to go forward a few pages to find Hector, when brought face to
face with Ajax, confessing to a terrible thumping of fear in his breast.
There is one figure in early Greek domestic life which has frequent
recognition in literature. It helps in our study of this subject to find the
nurse so conspicuous; in the passage last quoted she is given an epithet
which is reserved for goddesses and noble women. The definite regard paid
to one so identified with childhood is in accord with the open acceptance of
the physical aspect of human nature which is at the basis of the Homeric
poems. The frankness with which the elemental conditions of life are made
to serve the poet’s purpose, so that eating and drinking, sleeping and
fighting, weeping and laughing, running and dancing, are familiar incidents
of the poem, finds a place for the nurse and the house-dog. Few incidents in
the Odyssey are better remembered by its readers than the recognition of
the travel-worn Odysseus by the old watch-dog, and by the nurse who
washes the hero’s feet and discovers the scar of the wound made by the
boar’s tusk when the man before her was a youth.
The child, in the Homeric conception, was a little human creature
uninvested with any mystery, a part of that society which had itself scarcely
passed beyond the bounds of childhood. As the horizon which limited early
Greece was a narrow one, and the world in which the heroes moved was
surrounded by a vast terra incognita, so human life, in its Homeric
acceptance, was one of simple forms; that which lay beyond tangible and
visible experience was rarely visited, and was peopled with shapes which
brought a childish fright. There was, in a word, nothing in the development
of man’s nature, as recorded by Homer, which would make him look with
questioning toward his child. He regarded the world about him with
scarcely more mature thought than did the infant whom he tossed in the air,
and, until life should be apprehended in its more complex relations, he was
not likely to see in his child anything more than an epitome of his own little
round. The contrast between childhood and manhood was too faint to serve
much of a purpose in art.
The difference between Homer and the tragedians is at once perceived to
be the difference between a boy’s thought and a man’s thought. The
colonial growth, the Persian war, the political development, the commerce
with other peoples, were witnesses to a more complex life and the quick

causes of a profounder apprehension of human existence. It happens that we
have in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles an incident which offers a
suggestive comparison with the simple picture of the parting of Hector and
Andromache. In the earlier poem, the hero, expecting the fortunes of war,
disdains all suggestions of prudence, and speaks as a brave man must, who
sets honor above ease, and counts the cost of sacrifice only to stir himself to
greater courage and resolution. He asks that his child may take his place in
time, and he dries his wife’s tears with the simple words that no man can
separate him from her, that fate alone can intervene; in Chapman’s nervous
rendering:—

“Afflict me not, dear wife,
With these vain griefs. He doth not live that can disjoin my life
And this firm bosom but my fate; and fate, whose wings can fly?
Noble, ignoble, fate controls. Once born, the best must die.”

Here, the impending disaster to Troy, with the inclusion of Hector’s
fortune, appears as one fact out of many, an incident in life, bringing other
incidents in its train, yet scarcely more ethical in its relations than if it
followed from the throw of dice. In the Œdipus, when the king,
overwhelmed by his fate, in the supreme hour of his anguish takes
vengeance upon his eyes, there follows a passage of surpassing pathos. To
the mad violence has succeeded a moment of tender grief, and the unhappy
Œdipus stretches out his arms for his children, that he may bid them
farewell. His own terrible fate is dimmed in his thought by the suffering
which the inevitable curse of the house is to bring into their lives. He
reflects; he dismisses his sons,—they, at least, can fight their battles in the
world; he turns to his defenseless little daughters, and pours out for them
the tears of a stricken father. The not-to-be-questioned fate of Homer, an
inexplicable incident of life, which men must set aside from calculation and
thought because it is inexplicable, has become in Sophocles a terrible
mystery, connecting itself with man’s conduct, even when that is
unwittingly in violation of divine decree, and following him with such
unrelenting vigilance that death cannot be counted the end of perilous life.
The child, in the supreme moment of Hector’s destiny, is to him the
restoration of order, the replacement of his loss; the children, in the supreme
moment of the destiny of Œdipus, are to him only the means of prolonging

and rendering more murky the darkness which has fallen upon him. Hector,
looking upon Astyanax, sees the world rolling on, sunlight chasing shadow,
repeating the life he has known; Œdipus, looking upon Antigone and
Ismene, sees new disclosures of the possibilities of a dread power under
which the world is abiding.
In taking one step more from Sophocles to Euripides, there is food for
thought in a new treatment of childhood. Whatever view one may choose to
take of Euripides and his art in its relation to the heroic tragedy, there can be
no question as to the nearness in which Euripides stands to the characters of
his dramas, and this nearness is shown in nothing more than in the use
which he makes of domestic life. With him, children are the necessary
illustrations of humanity. Thus, in the Medea, when Medea is pleading with
Creon for a respite of a day only from banishment, the argument which
prevails is that which rests on pity for her little ones, and in the very centre
of Medea’s vengeance is that passion for her children which bids her slay
them rather than leave them

“Among their unfriends, to be trampled on.”

Again, in Alkestis, the last words of the heroine before she goes to her
sacrifice are a demand of Admetus that the integrity of their home shall be
preserved, and no step-dame take her place with the children. Both Alkestis
and Admetus, in that wonderful scene, are imaged to the eye as part of a
group, and, though the children themselves do not speak, the words and the
very gestures are directed toward them.

Alkestis. My children, ye have heard your father’s pledge
Never to set a step-dame over you,
Or thrust me from the allegiance of his heart.

Admetus. What now I say shall never be unsaid.

Alkestis. Then here our children I entrust to thee.

Admetus. And I receive them as the gage of love.

Alkestis. Be thou a mother to them in my place.

Admetus. Need were, when such a mother has been lost.

Alkestis. Children, I leave you when I fain would live.

Admetus. Alas! what shall I do, bereft of thee?

Alkestis. Time will assuage thy grief: the dead are nought.

Admetus. Take, take me with thee to the underworld.

Alkestis. It is enough that I must die for thee.

Admetus. O Heaven! of what a partner I am reft!

Alkestis. My eyes grow dim and the long sleep comes on.

Admetus. I too am lost if thou dost leave me, wife.

Alkestis. Think of me as of one that is no more.

Admetus. Lift up thy face, quit not thy children dear.

Alkestis. Not willingly; but, children, fare ye well.

Admetus. Oh, look upon them, look!

Alkestis. My end is come.

Admetus. Oh, leave us not.

Alkestis. Farewell.

Admetus. I am undone.

Chorus. Gone, gone; thy wife, Admetus, is no more.[6]
A fragment of Danaë puts into the mouth of Danaë herself apparently
lines which send one naturally to Simonides:—

“He, leaping to my arms and in my bosom,

Might haply sport, and with a crowd of kisses
Might win my soul forth; for there is no greater
Love-charm than close companionship, my father.”[7]
It cannot have escaped notice how large a part is played by children in
the spectacular appointments of the Greek drama. Those symbolic
processions, those groups of human life, those scenes of human passion, are
rendered more complete by the silent presence of children. They serve in
the temples; their eyes are quick to catch the coming of the messenger; they
suffer dumbly in the fate that pulls down royal houses and topples the
pillars of ancestral palaces. It was impossible that it should be otherwise.
The Greek mind, which found expression in tragic art, was oppressed by the
problems, not alone of individual fate, but of the subtle relations of human
life. The serpents winding about Laokoön entwined in their folds the
shrinking youths, and the father’s anguish was for the destiny which would
not let him suffer alone. Yet there is scarcely a child’s voice to be heard in
the whole range of Greek poetic art. The conception is universally of the
child, not as acting, far less as speaking, but as a passive member of the
social order. It is not its individual life so much as its related life which is
contemplated.
We are related to the Greeks not only through the higher forms of
literature, but through the political thought which had with them both
historical development and speculative representation. It comes thus within
the range of our inquiry to ask what recognition of childhood there was in
writings which sought to give an artistic form to political thought. There is a
frequent recurrence by Plato to the subject of childhood in the state, and we
may see in his presentation not only the germinal relation which childhood
bears, so that education becomes necessarily one of the significant functions
of government, but also what may not unfairly be called a reflection of
divinity.
The education which in the ideal state is to be given to children is
represented by him, indeed, as the evolution from the sensations of pleasure
and pain to the perception of virtue and vice. “Pleasure and pain,” he says,
[8]
“I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are
the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to
wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them,
even when declining in years; and he who possesses them, and the blessings

which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education
that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue
in children; when pleasure and friendship and pain and hatred are rightly
implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and
who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her.
This harmony of the soul, when perfected, is virtue; but the particular
training in respect of pleasure and pain which leads you always to hate what
you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love, from the beginning to
the end, may be separated off, and, in my view, will be rightly called
education.”
In the Republic, Plato theorizes at great length upon a possible selection
and training of children, which rests for its basis upon a too pronounced
physical assumption, so that one in reading certain passages might easily
fancy that he was considering the production of a superior breed of colts,
and that the soul was the product of material forces only; but the fifth book,
which contains these audacious speculations, may fairly be taken in the
spirit in which Proudhon is said to have thrown out some of his extravagant
assertions,—he expected to be beaten down in his price.
There are other passages, especially in the Laws, in reading which one is
struck by a certain reverence for childhood, as that interesting one where
caution is given against disturbing the uniformity of children’s plays on
account of their connection with the life of the state. The modern theories of
the Kindergarten find a notable support in Plato’s reasoning: “I say that in
states generally no one has observed that the plays of childhood have a
great deal to do with the permanence or want of permanence in legislation.
For when plays are ordered with a view to children having the same plays
and amusing themselves after the same manner and finding delight in the
same playthings, the more solemn institutions of the state are allowed to
remain undisturbed. Whereas, if sports are disturbed and innovations are
made in them, and they constantly change, and the young never speak of
their having the same likings or the same established notions of good and
bad taste, either in the bearing of their bodies or in their dress, but he who
devises something new and out of the way in figures and colors and the like
is held in special honor, we may truly say that no greater evil can happen in
a state; for he who changes the sports is secretly changing the manners of
the young, and making the old to be dishonored among them, and the new

to be honored. And I affirm that there is nothing which is a greater injury to
all states than saying or thinking thus.”[9]
It is, however, most germane to our purpose to cite a striking passage
from the Laws, in which Plato most distinctly recognizes the power resident
in childhood to assimilate the purest expression of truth. The Athenian, in
the dialogue, is speaking, and says: “The next suggestion which I have to
offer is that all our three choruses [that is, choruses representing the three
epochs of life] shall sing to the young and tender souls of children, reciting
in their strains all the noble thoughts of which we have already spoken, or
are about to speak; and the sum of them shall be that the life which is by the
gods deemed to be the happiest is the holiest, and we shall affirm this to be
a most certain truth; and the minds of our young disciples will be more
likely to receive these words of ours than any others which we might
address to them....
“First will enter, in their natural order, the sacred choir, composed of
children, which is to sing lustily the heaven-taught lay to the whole city.
Next will follow the chorus of young men under the age of thirty, who will
call upon the God Pæan to testify to the truth of their words, and will pray
to him to be gracious to the youth and to turn their hearts. Thirdly, the choir
of elder men, who are from thirty to sixty years of age, will also sing. There
remain those who are too old to sing, and they will tell stories illustrating
the same virtues, as with the voice of an oracle.”[10]
Plato used human society as material from which to construct an
organization artistically perfect and representing political order, just as
Pheidias or Praxiteles used clay as a material from which to construct the
human being artistically perfect and representing the soul of man. With this
fine organism of the ideal state Plato incorporated his conception of
childhood in its two relations of singing and being sung to. He thought of
the child as a member of the three-fold chorus of life: and when he set these
choirs hymning the divine strain, he made the recipients of the revelation to
be themselves children, the forming elements of the growing, organic state.
Certainly it is a wide arc which is spanned by these three great
representatives of Greek art, and in passing from Homer to Sophocles, and
from Sophocles to Plato, we are not merely considering the epic, the tragic,
and the philosophic treatment of childhood in literature; we are discovering
the development of the conception of childhood in a nation which has

communicated to history the eidolon of the fairest humanity. It is scarcely
too much to speak of it as the evolution of a soul, and to find, as one so
often finds in his study of Greece, the outline of the course of the world’s
thought.
The old, formal view of antiquity, which once placed Grecian life almost
beyond the pale of our human sympathy, and made the men and women
cold marble figures in our imagination, has given place to a warmer regard.
Through literary reproduction, which paraphrases Greek life in the dramatic
art of Browning and Fitzgerald, gives us Spencerian versions of Homer, or,
better still, the healthy childlike recital in Mr. Palmer’s version of the
Odyssey, and enables us to sit down after dinner with Plato, Mr. Jowett
being an idiomatic interpreter; through the discoveries of Schliemann and
others, by which the mythic and heroic ages of Greece are made almost
grotesquely familiar,—we are coming to read Grecian history, in Niebuhr’s
felicitous phrase, as if it really happened, and to lay aside our artificial and
distant ways of becoming familiar with Greek life. Yet the means which
have led to this modern attitude toward classic antiquity are themselves the
product of modern life; the secrets of Greek life are more open to us now
because our own life has become freer, more hospitable, and more catholic.
It is a delight to us to turn from the marble of Pheidias to the terra cotta of
the unknown modelers of the Tanagra figurines, while these homelike,
domestic images serve as interpreters, also, of the larger, nobler designs. So
we have recourse to those fragments of the Greek Anthology which give us
glimpses of Greek interiors, and by means of them we find a side-light
thrown upon the more majestic expressions of poetic and dramatic art.
The Anthology gathers for us the epigrams, epitaphs, proverbs, fables,
and little odds and ends which have been saved from the ruins of literature,
and in turning its leaves one is impressed by the large number of references
to childhood. It is as when, rambling through the streets of the uncovered
Pompeii, one comes upon the playthings of children dead nigh two
thousand years. Here are tender memorials of lost babes in inscriptions
upon forgotten tombs, and laments of fathers and mothers for the darkness
which has come upon their dwellings. We seem to hear the prattle of
infancy and the mother’s lullaby. The Greeks, as we, covered their loss with
an instinctive trust in some better fortune in store for the child, and hushed
their skepticism with the song of hope and the remembrance of stories

which they had come in colder hours to disbelieve. Here, for example, is an
anonymous elegy:—
“Thou hast not, O ruler Pluto, with pious intent, stolen for thy
underground world a girl of five years, admired by all. For thou hast cut, as
it were, from the root, a sweet-scented rose in the season of a commencing
spring, before it had completed its proper time. But come, Alexander and
Philtatus; do not any longer weep and pour forth lamentations for the
regretted girl. For she had, yes, she had a rosy face which meant that she
should remain in the immortal dwellings of the sky. Trust, then, to stories of
old. For it was not Death, but the Naiads, who stole the good girl as once
they stole Hylas.”[11]
Perhaps the most celebrated of these tender domestic passages is to be
found in the oft-quoted lines from Simonides, where Danaë sings over the
boy Perseus:—

“When in the ark of curious workmanship
The winds and swaying waters fearfully
Were rocking her, with streaming eyes, around
Her boy the mother threw her arms and said:

“‘O darling, I am very miserable;
But thou art cosy-warm and sound asleep
In this thy dull, close-cabin’d prison-house,
Stretched at full ease in the dark, ebon gloom.
Over thy head of long and tangled hair
The wave is rolling; but thou heedest not;
Nor heedest thou the noises of the winds,
Wrapt in thy purple cloak, sweet pretty one.

“‘But if this fearful place had fear for thee,
Those little ears would listen to my words;
But sleep on, baby, and let the sea-waves sleep,
And sleep our own immeasurable woes.
O father Zeus, I pray some change may come;
But, father, if my words are over-bold,
Have pity, and for the child’s sake pardon me.’”[12]

II

As before we stopped in front of the charming group which Homer gives
us in the parting of Hector and Andromache, with the child Astyanax set in
the midst, so in taking the poet who occupies the chief place in Latin
literature we find a significant contrast. The picture of Æneas bearing upon
his shoulders the aged Anchises and leading by the hand the young
Ascanius is a distinct Roman picture. The two poems move through
somewhat parallel cycles, and have adventures which are common to both;
but the figure of Odysseus is essentially a single figure, and his wanderings
may easily be taken to typify the excursions of the human soul. Æneas, on
the other hand, seems always the centre of a family group, and his
journeyings always appear to be movements toward a final city and nation.
The Greek idea of individuality and the Roman of relationship have signal
illustration in these poems. Throughout the Æneid the figure of Ascanius is
an important one. There is a nice disclosure of growth in personality, and
one is aware that the grandson is coming forward into his place as a
member of the family, to be thereafter representative. The poet never loses
sight of the boy’s future. Homer, in his shield of Achilles, that microcosm of
human life, forgets to make room for children. Virgil, in his prophetic
shield, shows the long triumphs from Ascanius down, and casts a light upon
the cave wherein the twin boys were suckled by the wolf. One of the most
interesting episodes in the Æneid is the childhood of Camilla, in which the
warrior maid’s nature is carried back and reproduced in diminutive form.
The evolutions of the boys in the fifth book, while full of boyish life, come
rather under the form of mimic soldiery than of spontaneous youth. In one
of the Eclogues, Virgil has a graceful suggestion of the stature of a child by
its ability to reach only the lowest branches of a tree.
Childhood, in Roman literature, is not contemplated as a fine revelation
of nature. In the grosser conception, children are reckoned as scarcely more
than cubs; but with the strong hold which the family idea had upon the
Roman mind, it was impossible that in the refinement which came
gradually upon life childhood should not play a part of its own in poetry,
and come to represent the more spiritual side of the family life. Thus
Catullus, in one of his nuptial odes, has a charming picture of infancy
awaking into consciousness and affection:—

“Soon my eyes shall see, mayhap,
Young Torquatus on the lap
Of his mother, as he stands
Stretching out his tiny hands,
And his little lips the while
Half open on his father’s smile.

“And oh! may he in all be like
Manlius, his sire, and strike
Strangers when the boy they meet
As his father’s counterfeit,
And his face the index be
Of his mother’s chastity.”[13]

The epitaphs and the elegies of the Greek Anthology have their
counterpart in Latin. Mr. Thompson has tried his hand at a passage from
Statius:[14]—

ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD.

Shall I not mourn thee, darling boy? with whom,
Childless I missed not children of my own;
I, who first caught and pressed thee to my breast,
And called thee mine, and taught thee sounds and words,
And solved the riddle of thy murmurings,
And stoop’d to catch thee creeping on the ground,
And propp’d thy steps, and ever had my lap
Ready, if drowsy were those little eyes,
To rock them with a lullaby to sleep;
Thy first word was my name, thy fun my smile,
And not a joy of thine but came from me.

There is, too, that epitaph of Martial on the little girl Erotion, closing
with the lines which may possibly have been in Gray’s mind when he wrote
the discarded verse of his Elegy, Englished thus:—

“Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth
Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free;

Press lightly on her form, dear Mother Earth,
Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee.”[15]
In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find
references to childhood; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought
outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a
perception of the mystery of childhood is in a passage in Lucretius, where
the poet looks down with compassion upon the new-born infant as one of
the mysteries of nature: “Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the
cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to
life when first nature has cast him forth by great throes from his mother’s
womb, and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it
is to pass through so much misery in life.”[16] Lucretius displayed a
profound reverence for human affection. Scattered through his great poem
are fine lines in which childhood appears. “Soon,” he says, in one mournful
passage,—“soon shall thy home receive thee no more with glad welcome,
nor thy dear children run to snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with
silent gladness.”[17]
Juvenal, with the thought of youth as the possible restoration of a sinking
world, utters a cry, which has often been taken up by sensualists even, when
he injects into his pitiless satire the solemn words, “the greatest reverence is
due to the boy.”[18]
Any survey of ancient Greek and Roman life would be incomplete which
left out of view the supernatural element. We need not inquire whether there
was a conscious materialization of spiritual forces, or an idealization of
physical phenomena. We have simply to do with certain shapes and figures
which dwelt in the mind and formed a part of its furniture; coming and
going like shadows, yet like shadows confessing a forming substance;
embodying belief and symbolizing moods. In that overarching and
surrounding world, peopled by the countless personages of Greek and
Roman supernaturalism, we may discover, if we will, a vague, distorted, yet
sometimes transcendent reflection of the life which men and women were
living upon the more palpable and tangible earth.
What, then, has the childhood of the gods to tell us? We have the playful
incident of Hermes, or Mercurius, getting out of his cradle to steal the oxen
of Admetos, and the similar one of Herakles strangling the snakes that

attacked him just after his birth; but these are simply stories intended to
carry back into childhood the strength of the one and the cunning of the
other. It is more to our purpose to note the presence in the Pantheon of the
child who remains always a child, and is known to us familiarly as Eros, or
Cupid, or Amor. It is true that the myth includes the union of Cupid and
Psyche; nevertheless, the prevailing conception is of a boy, winged, armed
with bow and arrows, the son and messenger of Venus. It may be said that
the myth gradually adapted itself to this form, which is not especially
apparent in the earlier stories. The figure of Love, as thus presented, has
been more completely adopted into modern poetry than any other in the old
mythology, and it cannot be said that its characteristics have been materially
altered. It is doubtful whether the ancient idea was more simple than the
same when reproduced in Thorwaldsen’s sculpture, or in Ben Jonson’s
Venus’ Runaway. The central conception is essentially an unmoral one; it
knows not right or wrong, good or evil; the mischief-making is capricious,
and not malicious. There is the idea only of delight, of an innocence which
is untutored, of a will which is the wind’s will. It would seem as if, in
fastening upon childhood as the embodiment of love, the ancients, as well
as their modern heirs, were bent upon ridding life of conscience and fate,—
upon making love to have neither memory nor foresight, but only the joy of
the moment. This sporting child was a refuge, in their minds, from the ills
of life, a residence of the one central joy of the world. There is an infinite
pathos in the erection of childhood into a temple for the worship of Love.
There was, indeed, in the reception of this myth, a wide range from purity
to grossness, as the word “love” itself has to do service along an arc which
subtends heaven and hell; but when we distill the poetry and art which
gather about the myth of Cupid, the essence will be found in this conception
of love as a child,—a conception never wholly lost, even when the child
was robbed of the purity which we recognize as its ideal property. It should
be noted, also, that the Romans laid hold of this idea more eagerly than did
the Greeks; for the child itself, though more artistically set forth in Greek
literature, appears as a more vital force in Roman literature.[19]

III
IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE

The literature of Greece and Rome is a possession of the modern world.
For the most part it has been taken as an independent creation, studied
indeed with reference to language as the vehicle of thought, but after all
chiefly as an art. It is within a comparatively recent time that the conception
of an historical study of literature has been prominent, and that men have
gone to Greek and Roman poetry with an eager passion for the discovery of
ancient life. The result of these new methods has been to humanize our
conception of the literature under examination.
Singularly enough, while the modern world has been influenced by the
classic world chiefly through its language, literature, and institutions, the
third great stream of influence which has issued from ancient sources has
been one in which literature as such has been almost subordinated to the
religious and ethical ideas of which it was the vehicle; even the strong
institutional forces inherent in it have had only exceptional attention. There
was a time, indeed, when the history of the Jews, as contained in the books
of the Old Testament, was isolated from the history of mankind and treated
in an artificial manner, at its best made to illustrate conduct, somewhat as
Latin literature was made to exemplify syntax. The old distinction of sacred
and profane history did much to obscure the human element in what was
called sacred history, and to blot out the divine element in what was called
profane history. There are many who can remember the impression made
upon their minds when they learned for the first time of the
contemporaneousness of events in Jewish and Grecian history; and it is not
impossible that some can even recall a period in their lives when Bible
people and the Bible lands were almost as distinct and separate in their
conception as if they belonged to another planet.
Nevertheless, the reality of Old Testament history, while suffering from
lack of proportion in relation to other parts of human history, has been
impressed upon modern civilization through its close identification with the
religious life. The inheritance of these scriptures of the ancient Hebrew has

been so complete that the modern Jew is regarded almost as a pretender
when he sets up a claim to special possession. We jostle him out of the way,
and appropriate his national documents as the old title-deeds of Christianity.
There is, indeed, an historic truth involved in this; but, however we may
regard it, we are brought back to the significant fact that along with the
Greek and the Roman influence upon modern life has been the mighty force
of Hebraism. The Greek has impressed himself upon our modes and
processes of thought, the Roman upon our organization, the Hebrew upon
our religious and social life.[20]
It is certain that the Bible has been a storehouse from which have been
drawn illustrations of life and character, and that these have had an
authority beyond anything in classic history and literature. It has been the
book from which youth with us has drawn its conceptions of life outside of
the limited circle of human experience; and the geographical, historical, and
archæological apparatus employed to illustrate it has been far more
considerable than any like apparatus in classical study. The Bible has been
the university to the person of ordinary culture; it has brought into his life a
foreign element which Greece and Rome have been powerless to present;
and though the images of this remote foreign life often have been distorted,
and strangely mingled with familiar notions, there can be no doubt that the
mind has been enlarged by this extension of its interests and knowledge.
It is worth while, therefore, to ask what conceptions of childhood are
discoverable in the Old Testament literature. The actual appearances of
children in the narrative portions are not frequent. We have the incident of
the exposure of Moses as a babe in the bulrushes; the sickness and death of
Bathsheba’s child, with the pathetic story of the erring father’s fasting and
prayer; the expulsion of Ishmael; the childhood of Samuel in the temple; the
striking narrative of the restoration of the son of the widow of Zarephath by
Elijah; and the still more graphic and picturesque description of the
bringing back to life by Elisha of the child who had been born at his
intercession to the Shunamite, and had been sunstruck when in the field
with his father. Then there is the abrupt and hard to be explained narrative
of the jeering boys who followed the prophet Elisha with derisive cries, as
they saw how different he was in external appearance from the rugged and
awe-inspiring Elijah. Whatever may be the interpretation of the fearful
retribution which befell those rude boys, and the indication which was

shown of the majesty of the prophetic office, it is clear that the Jew of that
day would not have felt any disproportion between the guilt of the boys and
their dire and speedy punishment; he would have been impressed by the
sanctity of the prophet, and the swiftness of the divine demonstration. Life
and death were nothing before the integrity of the divine ideal, and the
complete subordination of children to the will of their parents accustomed
the mind to an easy assent to the exhibition of what seems to us almost
arbitrary will.
No attentive reader of the Old Testament has failed to remark the
prominence given to the preservation of the family succession, and to the
birth of male children. That laugh of Sarah—at first of scorn, then of
triumph—sounds out from the early records with a strange, prophetic voice;
and one reads the thirtieth chapter of the book of Genesis with a sense of
the wild, passionate rivalry of the two wives of Jacob, as they bring forth,
one after another, the twelve sons of the patriarch. The burst of praise also
from Hannah, when she was freed from her bitter shame and had brought
forth her son Samuel, has its echo through history and psalm and prophecy
until it issues in the clear, bell-like tones of the Magnificat, thenceforward
to be the hymn of triumph of the Christian church. The voice of God, as it
uttered itself in commandment and prophetic warning, was for children and
children’s children to the latest generation. It is not the person so much as
the family that is addressed, and the strongest warnings, the brightest
promises to the fathers, are through the children. The prophet Hosea could
use no more terrible word to the people than when, speaking as the
mouthpiece of God, he says: “Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy
God, I will also forget thy children;”[21] and Zechariah, inspiriting the
people, declares: “They shall remember me in far countries; and they shall
live with their children.”[22] The promise of the golden age of peace and
prosperity has its climax in the innocence of childhood. “There shall yet old
men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with
his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of
boys and girls playing in the streets thereof;”[23] while the lofty anticipation
of Isaiah, in words which still serve as symbols of hopeful humanity,
reaches its height in the prediction of a profound peace among the very
brutes, when the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf, the
young lion, and the fatling shall not only lay aside their mutual hate and

fear, but shall be obedient to the tender voice and gentle hand of a little
child, and even the noxious reptiles shall be playmates for the infant.[24] In
the Greek fable, Hercules in his cradle strangled the snakes by his might; in
the Jewish picture, the child enters fearlessly the very dens of the asp and
the adder, secure under the reign of a perfect righteousness.
Milton, in his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, has pointed out
this parallel:—

“He feels from Judah’s land
The dreaded infant’s hand,
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine;
Our babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damnëd crew.”

To the Jew, childhood was the sign of fulfillment of glorious promises.
The burden of psalm and prophecy was of a golden age to come, not of one
that was in the dim past. A nation is kept alive, not by memory, but by hope.
The God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob was the God of a procession
of generations, a God of sons and of sons’ sons; and when we read, in the
last words of the last canonical book of the Old Testament, that “he shall
turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to
their fathers,”[25] we are prepared for the opening, four centuries later, of
the last chapter in the ancient history of this people. In the adoration there
of the child we seem to see the concentration of Jewish hope which had for
centuries found expression in numberless ways. The Magnificat of Mary is
the song of Hannah, purified and ennobled by generations of deferred hope,
and in all the joy and prophecy of the shepherds, of Simeon and of Anna,
we listen to strains which have a familiar sound. It is indeed the expectation
of what this child will be and do which moves the pious souls about it, but
there is a direct veneration of the babe as containing the hope of the people.
In this supreme moment of the Jewish nation, age bows itself reverently
before childhood, and we are able by the light which the event throws
backward to perceive more clearly how great was the power of childhood,
through all the earlier periods, in its influence upon the imagination and

reason. We may fairly contend that the apprehension of the sanctity of
childhood was more positive with the Jew than with either the Greek or the
Roman.
It remains, however, that this third great stream of humanity passes out,
in the New Testament, from its Hebraic limitations, and we are unable,
except by a special effort, to think of it as Jewish at all. The Gospels
transcend national and local and temporal limits, and we find ourselves,
when considering them, reading the beginnings of modern, not the close of
Jewish history. The incidents lying along the margin of the Gospels and
relating to the birth of the Christ do, as we have seen, connect themselves
with the earlier national development, but the strong light which comes at
the dawn of Christianity inevitably draws the mind forward to the new day.
The evangelists record no incidents of the childhood of Jesus which
separate it from the childhood of other of the children of men. The flight
into Egypt is the flight of parents with a child; the presence of the boy in the
temple is marked by no abnormal sign, for it is a distorted imagination
which has given the unbiblical title to the scene,—Christ disputing with the
Doctors, or Christ teaching in the Temple. But as the narrative of the
Saviour’s ministry proceeds, we are reminded again and again of the
presence of children in the multitudes that flocked about him. The signs and
wonders which he wrought were more than once through the lives of the
young, and the suffering and disease of humanity which form the
background in the Gospels upon which we see sketched in lines of light the
outline of the redeeming Son of Man are shown in the persons of children,
while the deeper life of humanity is disclosed in the tenderness of parents. It
is in the Gospels that we have those vignettes of human life,—the healing
of the daughter of Jairus, the delivery of the boy possessed with devils, that
striking antithesis to the transfiguration which Raphael’s genius has served
to fix in the mind, the healing of the nobleman’s son, and the blessing of
children brought to the Master by their fond mothers. Most notable, too, is
the scene of the final entry into Jerusalem, when the Saviour appeared to
accept from children the tribute which he shunned when it came from their
elders.
Here, as in other cases, we ask what was the attitude of the Saviour
toward children, since the literature of the New Testament is so confessedly
a revelation of life and character that we instinctively refuse to treat it

otherwise. In vain do we listen to those who point out the ethical beauty of
the Sermon on the Mount, or the pathos of this or that incident; our minds
break through all considerations of style and form, to seize upon the facts
and truths in their relation to life. We do not ask, what is the representation
of childhood to be found in the writings of certain Jews known as Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John; we ask, what is there between children and the
central figure disclosed in those writings. We ask purposely, for, when we
leave behind this ancient world, we enter upon the examination of literature
and art which are never beyond the horizon lying under the rays of the Sun
of Righteousness. The attitude which Christ took toward children must
contain the explanation of the attitude which Christianity takes toward the
same, for the literature and art of Christendom become the exponents of the
conception had of the Christ.
There are two or three significant words and acts which leave us in no
doubt as to the general aspect which childhood wore to Jesus Christ. In the
conversation which he held with the intellectual Nicodemus, he asserted the
necessity of a new birth for mankind; in the rite of baptism he symbolized
the same truth; he expanded this word again, accompanying it by a
symbolic act, when he placed a child in the midst of his disciples and bade
them begin life over again; he illustrated the truth by an acted parable, when
he called little children to him with the words, “Of such is the kingdom of
heaven;” he turned from the hard, skeptical men of that generation with the
words of profound relief: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
them unto babes;” he symbolized the charity of life in the gift of a cup of
cold water to a child.
The eyes of this Jesus, the Saviour of men, were ever upon the new
heavens and the new earth. The kingdom of heaven was the burden of his
announcement; the new life which was to come to men shone most plainly
in the persons of young children. Not only were the babes whom he saw
and blessed to partake of the first entrance into the kingdom of the spirit,
but childhood possessed in his sight the potency of the new world; it was
under the protection of a father and mother; it was fearless and trusting; it
was unconscious of self; it lived and did not think about living. The words
of prophets and psalmists had again and again found in the throes of a
woman in labor a symbol of the struggle of humanity for a new generation.

By a bold and profound figure it was said of the great central person of
humanity: “He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.” A
foregleam of that satisfaction is found in his face as he gazes upon the
children who are brought to him. There is sorrow as he gazes upon the
world, and his face is set toward Jerusalem; there is a calm joy as he places
a child before him and sees in his young innocence the promise of the
kingdom of heaven; there is triumph in his voice as he rebukes the men who
would fain shut the mouths of the shouting children that run before him.
The pregnant words which Jesus Christ used regarding childhood, the
new birth, and the kingdom of heaven become indicative of the great
movements in life and literature and art from that day to this. The
successive gestations of history have their tokens in some specific regard of
childhood. There have been three such periods, so mighty that they mark
each the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. The first was the
genesis of the Christian church; the second was the Renaissance; the third
had its great sign in the French Revolution.

IV
IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

The parabolic expression, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will
raise it up,” has been applied with force to the destruction of Judaism, and
the reconstruction upon its ruins of a living Christianity. It may be applied
with equal justice, though in more recondite sense, to the death of the old
literature and art, and the resurrection of the beautiful creations of the
human mind in new form. The three days were more than a thousand years,
and during that long sleep what had become of those indestructible forces
of imagination and reason which combine in literature and art? Roughly
speaking, they were disjoined, and only when reunited did they again assert
themselves in living form. The power which kept each in abeyance was
structural Christianity, and only when that began to be burst asunder by the
vital force inherent in spiritual Christianity was there opportunity for the
free union of the imagination and reason. As the Jewish temple could no
longer inclose divinity, but was thrust apart by the expansive power of the
Christianity which was fostered within it, so the Christian church, viewed as
an institution which aimed at an inclosure of humanity, was in its turn
disrupted by the silent growth of the human spirit which had fed within its
walls upon the divine life. After the birth of Christianity the parallel
continuity of the old world was broken. The Greek, the Roman, and the
Hebrew no longer carried forward their separate movements. Christianity,
professing to annul these forces, had taken their place in history. Again, at
the Renaissance, it was found that the three great streams of human thought
had been flowing underground; they reissued to the light in a generous
flood, each combining with the others.
It was during this long period of apparent inaction in literature and art
that the imagination, dissevered from reason, was in a state of abnormal
activity. The compression of its field caused the faculty to find expression
through forms which were very closely connected with the dominant sphere
of human life. Before religious art and ecclesiastical architecture had
become the abundant expression of Christian imagination, there was

generated a great mass of legend and fable, which only by degrees became
formally embodied in literature or perpetuated in art and symbol. The
imaginative faculty had given it, for material in which to work the new life,
the soul of man as distinctly related to God. An ethical principle lay at the
foundation of Christianity, and the imagination, stimulated by faith, built
with materials drawn from ethical life. The germinal truth of Christianity,
that God had manifested himself to men in the person of Jesus Christ,
however it might be obscured or misunderstood, was the efficient cause of
the operations of the Christian imagination. This faculty set before itself the
perfect man, and in that conceived not the physical and intellectual man of
the Greek conception, nor the Cæsar of the Roman ideal, nor even the moral
man of the Jewish light, but a man whose perfection was the counterpart of
the perfection of God and its great exemplar, the man Jesus Christ. In his
life the central idea of service, of victory through suffering and humiliation,
of self-surrender, and of union with God was perceived with greater or less
clearness, and this idea was adumbrated in that vast gallery of saints
constructed by Christianity in its ceaseless endeavor to reproduce the
perfect type. Through all the extravagance and chaotic confusion of the
legendary lore of the mediæval church, one may discover the perpetually
recurring notes of the perfect life. The beatitudes—those spiritual witnesses
of the redeemed human character—are ever floating before the early
imagination, and offering the standards by which it measures its creations.
It was by no fortuitous suggestion, but by a profound sense of fitness, that
the church made the gospel of All Saints’ Day to consist of those sentences
which pronounce the blessedness of the poor in spirit, the meek, and the
persecuted for righteousness sake; while the epistle for the same day is the
roll-call of the saints who are to sit on the thrones of the twelve tribes, and
of the multitudes who have overcome the world.
It is not strange, therefore, that the imagination, busying itself about the
spiritual life of man, should have dwelt with special emphasis upon those
signs of the new life brought to light in the Gospels, which seemed to
contain the promise of perfection. It seized upon baptism as witnessing to a
regeneration; it traced the lives of saints back to a childhood which began
with baptism; it invested the weak things of the world with a mighty power;
and, keeping before it the pattern of the Head of the church, it traced in the
early life of the Saviour powers which confounded the common wisdom of
men. It dwelt with fondness upon the adoration of the Magi, as witnessing

to the supremacy of the infant Redeemer; and, occupied as it was with the
idea of a suffering Saviour, it carried the cross back to the cradle, and found
in the Massacre of the Innocents the type of a substitution and vicarious
sacrifice.
The simple annals of the Gospels shine with great beauty when
confronted by the ingenuity and curious adornment of the legends included
in the so-called Apocryphal Gospels. Yet these legends illustrate the
eagerness of the early Christian world to invest the person of Jesus with
every possible charm and power; and since the weakness of infancy and
childhood offers the strongest contrast to works of thaumaturgy, this period
is very fully elaborated. A reason may also be found in the silence of the
evangelists, which needed to be broken by the curious. Thus, when, in the
flight into Egypt, the Holy Family was made to seek rest in a cave, there
suddenly came out many dragons; and the children who were with the
family, when they saw the dragons, cried out in great terror.
“Then Jesus,” says the narrative, “went down from the bosom of his
mother, and stood on his feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus, and
thereafter retired.... And the young child Jesus, walking before them,
commanded them to hurt no man. But Mary and Joseph were very much
afraid lest the child should be hurt by the dragons. And Jesus said to them;
‘Do not be afraid, and do not consider me to be a little child; for I am and
always have been perfect, and all the beasts of the field must needs be tame
before me.’ Lions and panthers adored him likewise, and accompanied them
in the desert. Wherever Joseph and the blessed Mary went, these went
before them, showing them the way and bowing their heads, and showing
their submission by wagging their tails; they adored him with great
reverence. Now at first, when Mary saw the lions and the panthers, and
various kinds of wild beasts coming about them, she was very much afraid.
But the infant Jesus looked into her face with a joyful countenance, and
said: ‘Be not afraid, mother; for they come not to do thee harm, but they
make haste to serve both thee and me.’ With these words he drove all fear
from her heart. And the lions kept walking with them, and with the oxen
and the asses and the beasts of burden which carried their baggage, and did
not hurt a single one of them; but they were tame among the sheep and the
rams which they had brought with them from Judæa, and which they had

with them. They walked among wolves and feared nothing, and no one of
them was hurt by another.”[26]
So, too, when Mary looked helplessly up at the fruit of a palm-tree
hanging far out of her reach, the child Jesus, “with a joyful countenance,
reposing in the bosom of his mother, said to the palm, ‘O tree, bend thy
branches, and refresh my mother with thy fruit.’ And immediately at these
words the palm bent its top down to the very feet of the blessed Mary; and
they gathered from its fruit, with which they were all refreshed. And after
they had gathered all its fruit, it remained bent down, waiting the order to
rise from him who had commanded it to stoop. Then Jesus said to it, ‘Raise
thyself, O palm-tree, and be strong, and be the companion of my trees
which are in the paradise of my Father; and open from thy roots a vein of
water which has been hid in the earth, and let the waters flow, so that we
may be satisfied from thee.’ And it rose up immediately, and at its root there
began to come forth a spring of water, exceedingly clear and cool and
sparkling. And when they saw the spring of water they rejoiced with great
joy, and were satisfied, themselves and all their cattle and their beasts.
Wherefore they gave thanks to God.”
The legends which relate to the boyhood of Jesus carry back with a
violent or confused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus he is represented
more than once as willing the death of a playmate, and then contemptuously
bringing him to life again. A favorite story grossly misconceives the
incident of Christ with the Doctors in the temple, and makes him turn his
schoolmaster into ridicule. There are other stories, the incidents of which
are not reflections of anything in the Gospels, but are used to illustrate in a
childish way the wonder-working power of the boy. Here is one which
curiously mingles the miraculous power with the Saviour’s doctrine of the
Sabbath:—
“And it came to pass, after these things, that in the sight of all Jesus took
clay from the pools which he had made, and of it made twelve sparrows.
And it was the Sabbath when Jesus did this, and there were very many
children with him. When, therefore, one of the Jews had seen him doing
this, he said to Joseph, ‘Joseph, dost thou not see the child Jesus working on
the Sabbath at what it is not lawful for him to do? For he has made twelve
sparrows of clay.’ And when Joseph heard this, he reproved him, saying,
‘Wherefore doest thou on the Sabbath such things as are not lawful for us to

do?’ And when Jesus heard Joseph he struck his hands together, and said to
his sparrows, ‘Fly!’ and at the voice of his command they began to fly. And
in the sight and hearing of all that stood by he said to the birds, ‘Go and fly
through the earth, and through all the world, and live.’ And when those that
were there saw such miracles they were filled with great astonishment.”
It is interesting to note how many of these stories connect the child with
animals. The passage in Isaiah which prophesied the great peace in the
figure of a child leading wild beasts had something to do with this; so had
the birth of Jesus in a manger, and the incident of the entry into Jerusalem:
but I suspect that the imagination scarcely needed to hunt very far or very
curiously for suggestions, since the world over childhood has been
associated with brute life, and the writers of the Apocryphal Gospels had
only to make these animals savage when they would illustrate the potency
of the childhood of Jesus.
“There is a road going out of Jericho,” says the Pseudo-gospel of
Matthew, “and leading to the river Jordan, to the place where the children of
Israel crossed; and there the ark of the covenant is said to have rested. And
Jesus was eight years old, and he went out of Jericho and went towards the
Jordan. And there was beside the road, near the banks of the Jordan, a cave,
where a lioness was nursing her cubs; and no one was safe who walked that
way. Jesus, then, coming from Jericho, and knowing that in that cave the
lioness had brought forth her young, went into it in the sight of all. And
when the lions saw Jesus they ran to meet him, and adored him. And Jesus
was sitting in the cavern, and the lion’s cubs ran hither and thither round his
feet, fawning upon him and sporting. And the older lions, with their heads
bowed down, stood at a distance and adored him, and fawned upon him
with their tails. Then the people, who were standing afar off, not seeing
Jesus, said, ‘Unless he or his parents had committed grievous sins, he would
not of his own accord have offered himself up to the lions.’ And when the
people were thus reflecting within themselves, and were lying under great
sorrow, behold, on a sudden, in the sight of the people, Jesus came out of
the cave, and the lions went before him, and the lion’s cubs played with
each other before his feet. And the parents of Jesus stood afar off, with their
heads bowed down, and watched; likewise, also, the people stood at a
distance, on account of the lions; for they did not dare to come close to
them. Then Jesus began to say to the people, ‘How much better are the

beasts than you, seeing that they recognize their Lord and glorify him;
while you men, who have been made after the image and likeness of God,
do not know him! Beasts know me, and are tame; men see me, and do not
acknowledge me.’”
To the mind of these early Christians the life of Jesus was compounded
of holiness and supernatural power; so far as they distinguished these, the
holiness was the cause of the power, and hence, when the imagination
fashioned saints out of men and women, it followed the same course which
it had taken with the Master. The childhood of the saints was an anticipation
of maturer virtues and powers, rather than a manifestation of ingenuous
innocence. There was a tendency to explain exceptional qualities in lives by
extending them backward into youth, thereby gaining for them an apparent
corroboration. The instances of this in the legends are frequent. Mothers,
like the Virgin Mary, have premonitions that their children are to be in some
special manner children of God, and the characteristics of later life are
foreshadowed at birth. The Virgin herself was thus dealt with. The strong
human feeling which subsequently, when the tenderness of Christ had been
petrified into judgment, interposed the Virgin as mediator, found
gratification in surrounding Mary’s infancy and childhood with a
supernatural grace and power, the incidents in some cases being faint
reflections of incidents in the life of her son; as when we are told that
Joachim and Anna carried Mary, then three years old, to place her among
the virgins in the temple of God. “And when she was put down before the
doors of the temple, she went up the fifteen steps so swiftly that she did not
look back at all; nor did she, as children are wont to do, seek for her
parents. Whereupon her parents, each of them anxiously seeking for the
child, were both alike astonished until they found her in the temple, and the
priests of the temple themselves wondered.”
In like manner a halo of light played about S. Catherine’s head when she
was born. The year of the birth of S. Elizabeth of Hungary was full of
blessings to her country; the first words she uttered were those of prayer,
and when three years old she gave signs of the charity which marked her
life by giving her toys and garments to those less fortunate than herself. A
pretty story is told of her betrothal to Prince Louis of Thuringia. Herman of
Thuringia sent an embassy to the king of Hungary, desiring the little
Elizabeth, then only four years old, for his son; and the maiden

accompanied the embassy, carrying with her a silver cradle and silver bath,
which her father had given her. She was betrothed to Louis, and the little
pair played happily together in the same cradle. S. Genevieve of Paris was a
maiden of seven, who tended a flock of sheep at the village of Narterre.
Hither came S. Germain, and when the inhabitants were assembled to
receive his benediction his eyes rested on the little shepherdess, and seeing
her saintliness he set her apart as a bride of Christ. S. Gregory Nazianzen
had a dream when he was a boy, in which two heavenly virgins of celestial
beauty visited him: they were Chastity and Temperance, and so captivating
was their presence, so winning were their words, that he awoke to take
perpetual vows of continence. S. John Chrysostom was a dull boy at school,
and so disturbed was he by the ridicule of his fellows that he went into a
church to pray to the Virgin for help. A voice came from the image: “Kiss
me on the mouth, and thou shalt be endowed with all learning.” He did this,
and when he returned to his school-fellows they saw a golden circle about
his mouth, and his eloquence and brilliancy astounded them. Martyrdom
was the portion of these saintly children as well as of their elders. The story
is told of Hilarion, one of the four children of Saturninus the priest, that
when the proconsul of Carthage thought to have no difficulty in dealing
with one of tender age, the child resisted all cajolings and threats. “I am a
Christian,” said the little fellow. “I have been at the collect [that is, assisted
as an acolyte], and it was of my own voluntary choice, without any
compulsion.” Thereupon the proconsul, who was probably a father,
threatened him, as the story runs, “with those little punishments with which
children are accustomed to be chastised,” but the child only laughed at the
idea of giving up his faith for fear of a whipping. “I will cut off your nose
and ears!” shouted the exasperated inquisitor. “You may do it, but I shall be
a Christian still,” replied the undaunted boy; and when he was ordered off
to prison with the rest, he was heard to pipe forth, “God be thanked,” and so
was led away.
These random incidents are, for the most part, mainly anticipatory of
mature experience. They can be matched with the details of Protestant
hagiology as recorded in a class of books more common forty years ago
than now. It is their remoteness that lends a certain grace and charm to
them. The life of a little Christian in the fourth century is invested with an
attraction which is wanting in the circumstance of some juvenile saint living

in the midst of indifferent scoffers of the early part of the nineteenth
century.
Occasionally, however, the legends inclose the saintly attributes in some
bit of romance, or betray a simple, ingenuous sympathy with childish
nature. The legend of S. Kenelm has a faint suspicion of kinship with the
story of the babes in the wood. King Kenwulf of Wessex died, and left two
daughters, Cwendrida and Burgenilda, and a son of seven years, named
Kenelm. The elder of the daughters wished the child out of the way, that she
might reign; so she gave money to Askbert, his guardian, the wicked uncle
of the story, and bade him privily slay the boy. So Askbert took Kenelm into
a wood, as if for a hunt, and by and by the child, tired with the heat, fell
asleep under the shade of a tree. Askbert, seeing his time had come, set to
work to dig a grave, that all might be in readiness; but Kenelm woke, and
said, “It is in vain that you think to kill me here. I shall be slain in another
spot. In token whereof, see this rod blossom;” and so saying, he stuck a
stick into the ground, and it instantly took root and began to flower. In after
days it was a great ash-tree, known as S. Kenelm’s ash. Then Askbert took
the little king to another spot, and the child, now wide awake, began to sing
the Te Deum. When he came to the verse, “The noble army of martyrs
praise Thee,” Askbert cut off his head, and then buried him in the wood.
Just as he did this, a white dove flew into the church of S. Peter in Rome,
and laid on the high altar a letter, which it bore in its beak. The letter was in
English, and it was some time before any one could be found who could
read it. Then it was discovered that Kenelm had been killed and his body
hidden away. The Pope thereupon wrote letters into England telling of this
sorry affair, and men went forth to find the body of the little king. They
were led by a pillar of light, which stood over the place where the body lay.
So they bore it off and buried it; but they built a chapel over the spot where
they had found the body, which is known as S. Kenelm’s chapel to this day.
There the chapel stands near Hales Owen; how else did it get its name? and
as Mr. Freeman sagely remarks, “It is hard to see what should have made
anybody invent such a tale, if nothing of the kind had ever happened.”
Another of the stories which has a half fairy-tale character is that of the
martyrdom of the little S. Christina, who was shut up in a high tower by her
father, and bidden spend her time before gold and silver gods; his private
purpose being to keep her out of the way of troublesome lovers. Christina

tired of her divine playthings, and in spite of her father’s indulgence, since
he obligingly took away all the images but three, would have nothing to do
with false gods. She was visited by angels and instructed in Christianity.
She combined courage in her new faith with a fine spirit of adventure; for
she is represented as smashing the idols, letting herself down by a rope
from her tower-prison, distributing the fragments of the idols among the
poor, and clambering up again before morning. Her martyrdom showed
various ingenious inventions of torture, but the odd part of the story is the
manner in which the gold and silver idols always suggest a girl’s playthings.
We are told that when she was taken into the temple of Apollo she bade the
idol step down and walk about the temple until she sent it back to its place.
Then, proceeds the story gravely, she was put in a cradle filled with boiling
pitch and oil, and four soldiers were set to rocking her.
In these and similar stories which abound in the Acta Sanctorum, the
simple attributes of childish nature rarely shine through the more formal
covering of churchly investiture. Nature could not always be expelled, but
the imagination, busy with the construction of the ideal Christian life, was
more concerned, as time went on, to make that conform to an ecclesiastical
standard. It is pathetic to see the occasional struggle of poor humanity to
break through the meshes in which it was entangled. The life of S. Francis
of Assisi is full of incidents which illustrate this. His familiar intercourse
with birds and beasts was but one of the signs of an effort to escape from
the cage in which he was an unconscious prisoner. One night, we are told,
he rose suddenly from the earthen floor which made his bed and rushed out
into the open air. A brother monk, who was praying in his cell, looked
through his window and saw S. Francis, under the light of the moon,
fashion seven little figures of snow. “Here is thy wife,” he said to himself:
“these four are thy sons and daughters; the other two are thy servant and
handmaid: and for all these thou art bound to provide. Make haste, then,
and provide clothing for them, lest they perish with cold. But if the care of
so many trouble thee, be thou careful to serve the Lord alone.” The
injunction to give up father and mother and family for the Lord’s sake,
when obeyed by one so tremulously alive to human sympathy as was S.
Francis, had in it a power suddenly to disclose the depths of the human
soul; nor can it be doubted that those who, like S. Francis, were eagerly
thrusting aside everything which seemed to stand between them and the
realization of the divine life paid heed to the significant words of the Lord

which made a child the symbol of that life. In practical dealing with the
evils of the world the early church never lost sight of children. Orphans,
especially the orphans of martyrs, were a sacred charge, and when
monasteries arose and became, at least in the West, centres of civilization,
they were refuges for foundlings as well as schools for the young. It is one
of the distinct signs of the higher life which Christianity was slowly
bringing into the world that the church adopted and protected children as
children, for their own sakes. Foundlings had before been nurtured for the
sake of profit, and we can easily do poor human nature the justice to believe
in instances where pity and love had their honest sway; but it certainly was
left to the church to incorporate in its very constitution that care of helpless
childhood which springs from a profound sense of the dignity of life, and a
growing conviction of the rights which pertain to personality.
For the history of Christianity is in the development of personality, and
childhood has, from the beginning, come under the influence of a power
which has been at work lifting the world into a recognition of its relation to
God. It was impossible that the few significant words spoken by Christ
should be forgotten; nevertheless, they do not seem to have impressed
themselves upon the consciousness of men. At least it may be said that in
the growth of Latin Christianity they do not come forward specifically as
furnishing the ground and reason for a regard for childhood. The work to be
done by the Latin church was largely one of organizing human society
under an anthropomorphic conception of God. It gave a certain fixed
objectivity to God, placed him at a distance from the world, and made the
approach to him to be by a succession of intermediary agents. Nevertheless,
the hierarchy which resulted rested upon ethical foundations. The whole
grand scheme did, in effect, rivet and fix the sense of personal responsibility
and personal integrity. It made each man and woman aware of his and her
relation to law in the person of its ministers, and this law was a law which
reached to the thoughts of the heart.
The system, as such, had little to do with childhood. It waited for its
close, but it pushed back its influence over the line of adolescence, making
as early as might be the day when the child should come into conscious
relation with the church. Through the family, however, it powerfully
affected the condition of childhood, for by its laws and its ritual it was
giving religious sanction to the family, even while it was gradually

divorcing itself from humanity under plea of a sanctity which was more
than human. Its conception of a religious devotedness which was too good
for this world, whereby contempt of the body was put in place of
redemption of the body, and celibacy made more honorable than marriage,
undermined its hold upon the world, which it sought to govern and to
furnish with ideals.
Inasmuch as this great system dealt with persons in relations which could
be exactly defined and formulated, it would be idle to seek in the literature
which reflects it for any considerable representation of that period of human
life in which the forms are as yet undetermined. Nevertheless, childhood
exercises even here its subtle power of recalling men to elemental truths.
Dante was the prophet of a spiritual Rome, which he saw in his vision
outlined against the background of the existing hierarchy. It would be in
vain to search through the Divine Comedy for many references to
childhood. As he says himself in the Inferno,—

“For this is not a sportive enterprise
To speak the universe’s lowest hold,
Nor suits a tongue that Pa and Mammy cries.”[27]

And the only picture of childhood in that vision is the melancholy one of
the horrid sufferings of Count Ugolino and his children in the Tower of
Hunger. In the Paradiso there are two passages of interest. Near the close of
the twenty-seventh canto, Beatrice, breaking forth into a rapt utterance of
the divine all in all, suddenly checks herself as she remembers how the
curse of covetousness shuts men out from entrance into the full circle of
divine movement, and then, with a swift and melancholy survey of the
changes in human life, cries bitterly:—

“Faith, Art, and Innocence are found alone
With little children; then they scatter fast
Before the down across the cheek have grown.
There is that lispeth, and doth learn to fast,
Who afterward, with tongue untied from May
To April, down his throat all meats will cast.
There is that, lisping, loveth to obey
His mother, and he’ll wish her in the tomb,

When sentences unbroken he can say.”
Again, in the thirty-second canto, S. Bernard is pointing out the circles of
the Rose, and after denoting the degrees of saints before Christ and after,
proceeds:—

“And from the seats, in midway rank, that knit
These double files, and downwards, thou wilt find
That none do for their own deserving sit,
But for another’s under terms assigned;
For every one of these hath been set free
Ere truly self-determined was the mind.
This by the childish features wilt thou see,
If well thou scan them, and if well thou list
Wilt hear it by the childlike symphony.”

Dante is perplexed by the difference even in these innocent babes, but S.
Bernard reminds him that there is difference in endowment, but that all are
subject to the divine all-embracing law:—

“And therefore these, who took such hasty flight,
Into the true life not without a cause
Are entered so, these more, and those less, bright,”—

an interpretation of the vision which is really less scholastic than suggested
by the deeper insight of the poetic mind.
The most significant passage, however, is found in the famous words at
the beginning of the Vita Nuova, which fix Dante’s first sight of Beatrice
when he was nine years old. “And since,” he closes, “to dwell upon the
passions and actions of such early youth seems like telling an idle tale, I
will leave them, and, passing over many things which might be drawn from
the original where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are
written in my memory under larger paragraphs.”[28] In these last words is
apparent Dante’s own judgment upon the worth of his recollections of
childhood: one page only in that book of his memory he deems worthy of
regard,—the page upon which fell the image of Beatrice. It will be said with
truth that the childhood of Dante and Beatrice is in reality the beginning of
maturity, for it is counted only as the initiation of a noble passion. The time,

indeed, had not yet come in the history of human life when the recollection
of that which is most distinctive of childhood forms the basis of speculation
and philosophic dream.
The absence of childhood from the visions of Dante is a negative witness
to the absence from the world, in the age prior to the Renaissance, of hope
and of simple faith and innocence. Dante’s faint recognition of these
qualities throws them back into a quickly forgotten and outgrown
childhood. The lisping child becomes the greedy worldling, the cruel and
unloving man, and the tyranny of an empire of souls is hinted at in the
justification by the poet of the presence of innocent babes in Paradise; they
are there by the interposition of a sacrificial act. The poet argues to still the
doubts of men at finding these children in Paradise. It would almost seem as
if the words had been forgotten which characterized heaven through the
very image of childhood.
Indeed, it is not to be wondered at that childhood was little regarded by
an age which found its chief interest in a thought of death. “Even the gay
and licentious Boccaccio,” we are reminded by Mr. Pater, “gives a keener
edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who
had taken refuge from the plague in a country house.”[29] The great
Florentine work was executed under this dominant thought; nevertheless, an
art which is largely concerned about tombs and sepulchral monuments
implies an overweening pride in life and a weightier sense of the years of
earth. The theology which had furnished the panoply within which the
human soul was fighting its battle emphasized the idea of time, and made
eternity itself a prolongation of human conditions. The imagination, at work
upon a future, constructed it out of the hard materials of the present, and
was always looking for some substantial bridge which should connect the
two worlds; seeing decay and change here, it transferred empires and
powers to the other side of the gulf, and sought to reërect them upon an
everlasting basis.
Such thought had little in common with the hope, the fearlessness, the
faith, of childhood, and thus childhood as an image had largely faded out of
art and literature. One only great exception there was,—the representation
in art of the child Jesus; and in the successive phases of this representation
may be read a remarkable history of the human soul.

V
IN MEDIÆVAL ART

The power of Christianity lies in its prophecy of universality, and the
most significant note of this power is in its comprehension of the poor and
the weak, not merely as the objects of a benediction proceeding from some
external society, but as themselves constituent members of that society,
sharing in all its rights and fulfilling its functions. When the last great
prophet of Israel and forerunner of Judaic Christianity sent to inquire what
evidence Jesus of Nazareth could give that he was the Christ, the answer
which came back had the conclusive words, “To the poor the gospel is
preached.” The same Jesus, when he would give his immediate followers
the completest type of the kingdom which was to prevail throughout the
world, took a child, and set him in the midst of them. There is no hardly
gained position in the development of human society which may not find its
genetic idea in some word or act of the Son of Man, and the proem to the
great song of an expectant democracy is in the brief hour of the first
Christian society, which held all things in common.
The sketch of a regenerated human society, contained in the New
Testament, has been long in filling out, and the day which the first
generation of Christians thought so near at hand has thus far had only a
succession of proleptic appearances; but from the first the note of the power
of Christianity, which lies in the recognition of poverty and weakness, has
never been wanting, and has been most loudly struck in the great epochs of
Christian revival. In the struggle after purity of associated life, which had
its witness in the orders of the church, poverty was accepted as a necessary
condition, and the constructive genius of the human mind, dealing with the
realities of Christian faith, rose to its highest point in presenting, not the
maturity, but the infancy of Jesus Christ. Each age offers its contribution to
the perfection of the Christian ideal, and while, in the centuries lying on
either side of the Renaissance, the church as an ecclesiastical system was
enforcing the dogma of mediatorial sacrifice as something outside of
humanity, the spirit of God, in the person of great painters, was drawing the

thoughts of men to the redemption of the world, which lies in the most
sacred of human relations. The great efflorescence of art, which we
recognize as the gift of these centuries, has left as its most distinctive
memorial the type of Christianity expressed in the Madonna.

I

In the Holy Family the child is the essential figure. In the earliest
examples of the mother and child, both Mary and Jesus are conceived as
symbols of religious faith, and the attitude of the child is unchildlike, being
that of a dispenser of blessings with uplifted hand. The group is not
distinctly of the mother and child, but of the Virgin and the Saviour, the
Saviour being represented as a child in order to indicate the ground of the
adoration paid to the Virgin. They stand before one as possessed of
coördinate dignity. It is a curious and suggestive fact that the Byzantine
type of the Madonna, which rarely departed much from this symbolic
treatment, has continued to be the preference of those whose conceptions of
the religious life are most closely identified with a remote
sacramentarianism. The Italian lemonade-seller has a Byzantine Madonna
in his booth: the Belgian churches abound in so-called sacred pictures: the
Russian merchant salutes an icon of the same type; and the ritualistic
enthusiast of the Anglican revival modifies his æsthetic views by his
religious sympathy, and stops short in his admiration with Cimabue and
Giotto.
In the development of the Madonna from its first form as a rigid symbol
to its latest as a realistic representation of motherhood, we are aware of a
change in the minds of the people who worship before the altars where the
pictures are placed, and in the minds of the painters who produce the almost
endless variations on this theme. The worshipper, dispossessed of a belief in
the fatherhood of God, came to take refuge in the motherhood of Mary.
Formally taught the wrath of God, he found in the familiar relation of
mother and child the most complete type vouchsafed to him of that love
which the church by many informal ways bade him believe lay somewhere
in the divine life.
Be this as it may, the treatment of the subject in a domestic and historical
form followed the treatment in a religious and ecclesiological mode. In the

earlier representations of the Madonna there was a twofold thought
exhibited. The mother was the queen of heaven, and she derived her dignity
from the child on her knee. Hence she is sometimes shown adoring the
child, and the child looks up into the mother’s face with his finger on his
lip, expressive of the utterance, I am the Word. This adoration of the child
by the mother was, however, but a transient phase: the increasing worship
paid to the Virgin forbade that she should be so subordinated; and in the
gradual expansion of the theme, by which saints and martyrs and angels
were grouped in attendant ministry, more and more importance was
attached to the person of the Virgin. The child looks up in wonder and
affectionate admiration. He caresses her, and offers her a child’s love
mingled with a divine being’s calm self-content.
For throughout the whole period of the religious presentation of the
Madonna, even when the Madonna herself is conspicuously the occasion of
the picture, we may observe the influence of the child,—an influence
sometimes subtle, sometimes open and manifest. It is not enough to say that
this child is Jesus, as it is not enough to say that the mother is the Virgin
Mary. The divine child is the sign of an ever-present childhood in humanity;
the divine mother the sign of a love which the religion of Christianity never
wholly forgot. The common imagination was perpetually seeking to relieve
Mary and Jesus of all attributes which interfered with the central and
inhering relation of mother and child: through this type of love the mind
apprehended the gospel of Christianity as in no other way.
Indeed, this apotheosis of childhood and maternity is at the core of the
religion of hope which was inclosed in the husk of mediæval Christianity,
and it was made the theme of many variations. Before it had ceased to be a
symbol of worship, it was offering a nucleus for the expression of a more
varied human hope and interest. The Holy Family in the hands of painters
and sculptors, and the humbler class of designers which sprang into notice
with the introduction of printing and engraving, becomes more and more
emblematic of a pure and happy domestic group. Joseph is more frequently
introduced, and John Baptist appears as a playmate of the child Jesus;
sometimes they are seen walking in companionship. Certain incidents in
later life are symbolically prefigured in the realistic treatment of homely
scenes, as in the Madonna by Giulio Romano, where the child stands in a
basin, while the young S. John pours water upon him, Mary washes him, S.

Elizabeth stands by holding a towel, and S. Joseph watches the scene,—an
evident prefigurement of the baptism in the Jordan. Or again, Mary, seated,
holds the infant Christ between her knees; Elizabeth leans over the back of
the chair; Joseph rests on his staff behind the Virgin; the little S. John and
an angel present grapes, while four other angels are gathering and bringing
them. By such a scene Ippolito Andreasi would remind people that Jesus is
the true vine.

II

The recognition of childhood as the heart of the family is discoverable
even more emphatically in the art of the northern people, among whom
domestic life always had greater respect. It may seem a trivial reason, but I
suspect nature holds the family more closely together in cold countries,
which compel much indoor and fireside life, than in lands which tempt to
vagrancy. At any rate, the fact remains that the Germanic peoples have been
home-cultivating. It did not need the Roman Tacitus to find this out, but his
testimony helps us to believe that the disposition was a radical one, which
Christianity reinforced rather than implanted. Lord Lindsay makes the
pregnant observation, “Our Saviour’s benediction of the little children as a
subject [is] from first to last Teutonic,—I scarcely recollect a single Italian
instance of it;”[30] and in the revival of religious art, at which Overbeck and
Cornelius assisted, this and similar subjects, by their frequency, mark a
differentiation from art south of the Alps, whose traditions, nevertheless, the
German school was consciously following.
Although of a period subsequent to the Renaissance, an excellent
illustration of the religious representation of the childhood of Jesus in
northern art is contained in a series of twelve prints executed in the
Netherlands, and described in detail by Mrs. Jameson.[31] The series is
entitled The Infancy of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the
title-page is surrounded by a border composed of musical instruments,
spinning-wheels, distaffs, and other implements of female industry,
intermixed with all kinds of masons’ and carpenters’ tools. In the first of the
prints, the figure of Christ is seen in a glory, surrounded by cherubim. In the
second, the Virgin is seated on the hill of Sion; the infant in her lap, with
outspread arms, looks up to a choir of angels, and is singing with them. In

the third, Jesus slumbering in his cradle is rocked by two angels, while
Mary sits by, engaged in needlework. Beneath is a lullaby in Latin which
has been translated:—

“Sleep, sweet babe! my cares beguiling,
Mother sits beside thee, smiling,
Sleep my darling, tenderly!
If thou sleep not, mother mourneth
Singing as her wheel she turneth,
Come soft slumber, balmily!”

The fourth shows the interior of a carpenter’s shop: Joseph is plying his
work, while Joachim stands near him; the Virgin is measuring linen, and S.
Anna looks on; two angels are at play with the infant Christ, who is blowing
soap-bubbles. In the fifth picture, Mary prepares the family meal, while
Joseph is in the background chopping wood; more in front, Jesus sweeps
together the chips, and two angels gather them. In the sixth, Mary is seen
reeling off a skein of thread; Joseph is squaring a plank; Jesus is picking up
chips, again assisted by two angels. The seventh shows Mary seated at her
spinning-wheel; Joseph, aided by Jesus, is sawing through a large beam, the
two angels standing by. The eighth is somewhat similar: Mary holds her
distaff, while Joseph saws a beam on which Jesus stands, and the two
angels help in the work. In the ninth print, Joseph is busy building the
framework of a house, assisted by one of the angels; Jesus is boring with a
large gimlet, the other angel helping him; and Mary winds thread. In the
next, Joseph is at work roofing the house; Jesus, in company with the
angels, carries a beam up the ladder; while below, in front, Mary is carding
wool or flax. The eleventh transfers the work, with an apparent adaptation
to Holland, to the building of a boat, where Joseph is helped by Jesus, who
holds a hammer and chisel, still attended by the angels; the Virgin is
knitting a stocking, and the newly built house is seen in the background. In
the last of the series, Joseph is erecting a fence round a garden; Jesus, with
the help of the angels, is fastening the palings together; while Mary is
weaving garlands of roses.
Here is a reproduction of the childhood of the Saviour in the terms of a
homely Netherland family life, the naturalistic treatment diversified by the
use of angelic machinery. The prints were a part of the apparatus used by

the priests in educating the people. However such instruction may have
fallen short of the highest truths of Christianity, its recognition of the simple
duties of life and its enforcement of these by the example of the Son of Man
make us slow to regard such interposition of the church as remote from the
spirit of Christ. If, as is quite possible, these prints were employed by the
Jesuits, then their significance becomes doubly noticeable. In that vigorous
attempt by Loyola and his order to maintain an organic Christian unity
against the apparent disruption of Christianity, such a mode as this would
find a place as serving to emphasize that connection between the church
and the family which the Jesuits instinctively felt to be essential to the
supremacy of the former.

III

Whatever light the treatment of the Madonna subject may throw upon the
ages in which it is uppermost in men’s thoughts, the common judgment is
sound which looks for the most significance in the works of Raphael. Even
those who turn severely away from him, and seek for purer art in his
predecessors, must needs use his name as one of epochal consequence. So
many forces of the age meet in Raphael, who was peculiarly open to
influences, that no other painter can so well be chosen as an exponent of the
idea of the time; and as one passes in review the successive Madonnas, one
may not only detect the influence of Perugino, of Leonardo, of
Michelangelo, and other masters, but may see the ripening of a mind, upon
which fell the spirit of the age, busy with other things than painting.
Of the early Madonnas of Raphael, it is noticeable how many present the
Virgin engaged in reading a book, while the child is occupied in other ways,
sometimes even seeking to interrupt the mother and disengage her attention.
Thus in one in the Berlin museum, which is formal, though unaffected,
Mary reads a book, while the child plays with a goldfinch; in the Madonna
in the Casa Connestabile, at Perugia, the child plays with the leaves of the
book; in the Madonna del Cardellino, the little S. John presents a goldfinch
to Jesus, and the mother looks away from her book to observe the children;
in that at Berlin, which is from the Casa Colonna, the child is held on the
mother’s knee in a somewhat struggling attitude, and has his left hand upon
the top of her dress, near her neck, his right upon her shoulder, while the
mother, with a look of maternal tenderness, holds the book aside. In the

middle period of Raphael’s work this motive appears once at least in the St.
Petersburg Madonna, which is a quiet landscape-scene, where the child is in
the Madonna’s lap: she holds a book, which she has just been reading; the
little S. John kneels before his divine companion with infantine grace, and
offers him a cross, which he receives with a look of tender love; the
Madonna’s eyes are directed to the prophetic play of the children with a
deep, earnest expression.
The use of the book is presumably to denote the Madonna’s piety; and in
the earlier pictures she is not only the object of adoration to the worshipper,
who sees her in her earthly form, yet endowed with sinless grace, but the
object also of interest to the child, who sees in her the mother. This
reciprocal relation of mother and child is sometimes expressed with great
force, as in the Madonna della Casa Tempi, in the Pinacothek at Munich,
where the Virgin, who is standing, tenderly presses the child’s head against
her face, while he appears to whisper words of endearment. In these and
other of the earlier Madonnas of Raphael, there is an enthusiasm, and a
dreamy sentiment which seems to seek expression chiefly through the
representation of holy womanhood, the child being a part of the
interpretation of the mother. The mystic solemnity of the subject is relieved
by a lightness of touch, which was the irrepressible assertion of a strong
human feeling.
Later, in what is called his middle period, a cheerfulness and happy
contemplation of life pervade Raphael’s work, as in the Bridgewater
Madonna, where the child, stretched in the mother’s lap, looks up with a
graceful and lively action, and fixes his eyes upon her in deep thought,
while she looks back with maternal, reverent joy. The Madonna of the Chair
illustrates the same general sentiment, where the mother appears as a
beautiful and blooming woman, looking out of the picture in the tranquil
enjoyment of motherly love; the child, full and strong in form, leans upon
her bosom in a child’s careless attitude, the picture of trust and content.
The works of Raphael’s third period, and those executed by his pupils in
a spirit and with a touch which leave them sometimes hardly
distinguishable from the master’s, show a profounder penetration of life,
and at the same time a firmer, more reasonable apprehension of the divinity
which lies inclosed in the subject. Mary is now something more than a
young man’s dream of virginal purity and maternal tenderness,—she is also

the blessed among women; the infant Christ is not only the innocent,
playful child, but the prophetic soul, conscious of his divinity and his
destiny. These characteristics pervade both the treatment which regards
them as historic personages and that which invests them with adorable
attributes as having their throne in heaven. The Holy Family is interpreted
in a large, serious, and dignified manner, and in the exalted, worshipped
Madonna there is a like vision of things eternal seen through the human
form.
To illustrate this an example may be taken of each class. The Madonna
del Passegio, in the Bridgewater gallery, is a well-known composition,
which represents the Madonna and child walking through a field; Joseph is
in advance, and has turned to look for the others. They have been stopped
by the infant S. John Baptist, clad in a rough skin, who presses eagerly
forward to kiss Jesus. The mother places a restraining hand upon the
shoulders of S. John, and half withdraws the child Jesus from his embrace.
A classic grace marks Jesus, who looks steadfastly into the eyes of the
impassioned John. The three figures in the principal group are conceived in
a noble manner: S. John, prophesying in his face the discovery of the Lamb
of God; Mary, looking down with a sweet gravity which marks the holy
children, and would separate Jesus as something more than human from too
close fellowship with John; Jesus himself, a picture of glorious childhood,
with a far-reaching look in his eye, as he gently thrusts back the mother
with one hand, and with the other lays hold of the cross which John bears.
On the other hand, an example of the treatment of the adorable Madonna
is that of San Sisto, in the Dresden gallery. It is not necessary to dwell on
the details of a picture which rises at once to every one’s mind. The
circumstance of innumerable angels’ heads, of the attendant S. Sixtus and S.
Barbara, the sweep of cloud and drapery, the suggestion of depths below
and of heights above, of heaven itself listening at the Madonna’s feet,—all
these translate the mother and babe with ineffable sweetness and dignity
into a heavenly place, and make them the centre of the spiritual universe.
Yet in all this Raphael has rested his art in no elaborate use of celestial
machinery. He has taken the simple, elemental relation, and invested it with
its eternal properties. He gives not a supernatural and transcendent mother
and child, but a glorified humanity. Therefore it is that this picture, and with
it the other great Madonnas of Raphael, may be taken entirely away from

altar and sanctuary, and placed in the shrine of the household. The
universality of the appeal is seen in the unhesitating adoption of the Sistine
Madonna as an expression of religious art by those who are even
antagonistic to the church which called it forth.

IV

The concentration of Raphael’s genius to so large an extent upon the
subject of the Madonna was not a mere accident of the time, nor, when
classic forms were renewing their power, was it a solecism. The spirit of the
Renaissance entered profoundly into Raphael’s work, and determined
powerfully the direction which it took. When he was engaged upon purely
classic themes, it is interesting to see how frequently he turned to the forms
of children. His decorative work is rich with the suggestion which they
bring. One may observe the graceful figures issuing from the midst of
flower and leaf; above all, one may note how repeatedly he presents the
myth of Amor, and recurs to the Amorini, types of childhood under a purely
naturalistic conception.
The child Jesus and the child Amor appear side by side in the creations of
Raphael’s genius. In the great Renaissance, of which he was so consummate
an exponent, the ancient classic world and the Christian met in these two
types of childhood: the one a childhood of the air, unmixed with good or
evil; the other a childhood of heaven and earth, proleptic of earthly conflict,
proleptic also of heavenly triumph. The coincidence is not of chance. The
new world into which men were looking was not, as some thought, to be in
the submersion of Christianity and a return to Paganism, nor, as others, in a
stern asceticism, which should render Christianity an exclusive church,
standing aloof from the world as from a thing wholly evil. There was to be
room for truth and love to dwell together, and the symbol of this union was
the child. Raphael’s Christ child drew into its features a classic loveliness;
his Amor took on a Christ-like purity and truthfulness.
Leslie, in his Handbook for Young Painters, makes a very sensible
reflection upon Raphael’s children, as distinguished from the unchildlike
children of Francia, for example. “A fault of many painters,” he says, “in
their representations of childhood is, that they make it taking an interest in
what can only concern more advanced periods of life. But Raphael’s

children, unless the subject requires it should be otherwise, are as we see
them generally in nature, wholly unconcerned with the incidents that
occupy the attention of their elders. Thus the boy, in the cartoon of the
Beautiful Gate, pulls the girdle of his grandfather, who is entirely absorbed
in what S. Peter is saying to the cripple. The child, impatient of delay, wants
the old man to move on. In the Sacrifice at Lystra, also, the two beautiful
boys placed at the altar, to officiate at the ceremony, are too young to
comprehend the meaning of what is going on about them. One is engrossed
with the pipes on which he is playing, and the attention of the other is
attracted by a ram brought for sacrifice. The quiet simplicity of these sweet
children has an indescribably charming effect in this picture, where every
other figure is under the influence of an excitement they alone do not
partake in. Children, in the works of inferior painters, are often nothing else
than little actors; but what I have noticed of Raphael’s children is true, in
many instances, of the children in the pictures of Rembrandt, Jan Steen,
Hogarth, and other great painters, who, like Raphael, looked to nature for
their incidents.”
There was one artist of this time who looked to nature not merely for the
incidents of childhood, but for the soul of childhood itself. It is impossible
to regard the work of Luca della Robbia, especially in that ware which
receives his name, without perceiving that here was a man who saw
children and rejoiced in their young lives with a simple, ingenuous delight.
The very spirit which led this artist to seek for expression in homely forms
of material, to domesticate art, as it were, was one which would make him
quick to seize upon, not the incidents alone, but the graces, of childhood.
Nor is it straining a point to say that the purity of his color was one with the
purity of this sympathy with childhood. The Renaissance as a witness to a
new occupation of the world by humanity finds its finest expression in the
hope which springs in the lovely figures of Luca della Robbia.
It is significant of this Renaissance—it is significant, I think we shall
find, of every great new birth in the world—that it turns its face toward
childhood, and looks into that image for the profoundest realization of its
hopes and dreams. In the attitude of men toward childhood we may
discover the near or far realization of that supreme hope and confidence
with which the great head of the human family saw, in the vision of a child,
the new heaven and the new earth. It was when his disciples were reasoning

among themselves which of them should be the greatest that Jesus took a
child, and set him by him, and said unto them, “Whosoever shall receive
this child in my name receiveth me.” The reception of the Christ by men,
from that day to this, has been marked by successive throes of humanity,
and in each great movement there has been a new apprehension of
childhood, a new recognition of the meaning involved in the pregnant
words of the Saviour. Such a recognition lies in the children of Raphael and
of Luca della Robbia. There may have been no express intimation on their
part of the connection between their works and the great prophecy, but it is
often for later generations to read more clearly the presence of a thought by
means of light thrown back upon it. The course of Christianity since the
Renaissance supplies such a light.

VI
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND ART

I

To hunt through English literature and art for representations of
childhood would seem to be like looking for the persons of children in any
place where people congregate. How could there be any conspicuous
absence, except under conditions which necessarily exclude the very
young? Yet it is impossible to follow the stream of English literature, with
this pursuit in mind, without becoming aware that at one point in its course
there is a marked access of this force of childhood. There is, to be sure, a
fallacy lurking in the customary study of the development of literature. We
fall into the way of thinking of that literature as an organism proceeding
from simpler to more complex forms; we are attent upon the transition of
one epoch into another; we come to regard each period as essentially
anticipatory of the succeeding period. We make the same mistake often in
our regard of historical sequence, looking at all past periods simply and
exclusively with reference to the present stand from which we take our
observations. A too keen sensibility to the logic which requires time for its
conclusion, a too feeble sense of the logic which dwells in the relation
between the seen and the unseen,—these stand in the way of a clear
perception of the forces immanent in literature and life.
The distinction is worth bearing in mind when one surveys English
literature with the purpose of recognizing the child in it. There are certain
elemental facts and truths of which old and new cannot be predicated. The
vision of helpless childhood is no modern discovery; it is no ancient
revelation. The child at play was seen by Homer and by Cowper, and the
latter did not derive his apprehension from any study of the former. The
humanism which underlies all literature is independent of circumstances for
its perception of the great moving forces of life; it is independent of the
great changes in human history; even so great a change as the advent of

Christianity could not interfere with the normal expression of elemental
facts in life.
Wherein, then, lies the difference between an antique and a modern
apprehension of childhood? For what may one look in a survey of English
literature that he would not find in Greek or Roman authors? Is there any
development of human thought in relation to childhood to be traced in a
literature which has reflected the mind of the centuries since the
Renaissance? The most aggressive type of modern Christianity, at any rate
the most free type, is to be found amongst English-speaking people; and if
Christianity has in any way modified the course of thought regarding the
child, the effect will certainly be seen in English literature and art.

A recollection of ballad literature, without critical inquiry of the
comparative age of the writings, brings to light the familiar and frequent
incident of cruelty to children in some form: of the secret putting away of
babes, as in the affecting ballad of the Queen’s Marie; of the cold and
heartless murder, as in the Cruel Mother, and in the tragic tale of The
Child’s Last Will, where a sudden dramatic and revealing turn is given,
after the child has willed its various possessions, in the lines,—

“‘What wish leav’st thou thy step-mother
Little daughter dear?’
‘Of hell the bitter sorrow
Sweet step-mother mine
For ah, all! I am so ill, ah!’

“‘What wish leav’st thou thy old nurse
Little daughter dear?’
‘For her I wish the same pangs
Sweet step-mother mine
For ah, ah! I am so ill, ah!’”

That grewsome story of Lamkin, with its dripping of blood in almost every
stanza, gets half its curdling power from the slow torture of the sensibilities,
as the babe is slain and then rocked in its cradle, and the mother, summoned

by its cries, meets her own fate at the hands of the treacherous nurse and
Lamkin, whose name is a piece of bald irony:—

“Then Lamkin’s ta’en a sharp knife
That hang down by his gaire,
And he has gi’en the bonny babe
A deep wound and a sair.

“Then Lamkin he rocked,
And the fause nourice sang
Till frae ilkae bore o’ the cradle
The red blood out sprang.

“Then out it spak the ladie
As she stood on the stair,
‘What ails my bairn, nourice,
That he’s greeting sae sair?

“‘O still my bairn, nourice
O still him wi’ the pap!’
‘He winna still, lady,
For this nor for that.’

“‘O still my bairn, nourice;
O still him wi’ the wand!’
‘He winna still, lady,
For a’ his father’s land.’

“‘O still my bairn, nourice,
Oh still him wi’ the bell!’
‘He winna still, lady,
Till ye come down yoursel.’

“O the firsten step she steppit,
She steppit on a stane;
But the neisten step she steppit,
She met him, Lamkin.”

Another early and significant illustration is found in the popular story of
Hugh of Lincoln; but instead of turning to the ballad of that name, one may
better have recourse to Chaucer’s version as contained in the Canterbury
tale of the Prioress. In the prologue to this tale appear the words of
Scripture, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” in a paraphrase, and
the Prioress turns to the Virgin, beseeching her to give words for the telling
of the piteous tale. The story of Hugh of Lincoln—that in the reign of
Henry III., the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy of eight years, named Hugh,
tortured and crucified him—was received with great credit, for it
concentrated the venomous enmity with which Christians regarded the
Jews, and by a refinement of cruelty pictured the Jews in a solitary instance
as behaving in a Christian-like manner. Chaucer tells the story with
exquisite pathos, lingering upon the childish ways of Hugh, and preparing
the tears of his readers by picturing the little boy as a miniature saint. It can
scarcely be called a picture of artless childhood; for though touches here
and there bring out the prattler, Chaucer appears to have meant that his
readers should be especially impressed by the piety of this “litel clergeoun,”
or chorister boy:—

“A litel clergeoun, seven yeer of age,
That day by day to scole was his wone;
And eek also, whereas he saugh thymage
Of Cristes mooder, he hadde in usage,
As hym was taught, to knele adoun and seye
His Ave Marie, as he goth by the weye.”

And so we are told of the little fellow eager to learn the Alma Redemptoris
of his elders, and conning it as he went to and from school, his way leading
through the Jews’ quarter:—

“As I have seyd, thurgh-out the Jewerie
This litel child, as he cam to and fro,
Ful murily wolde he synge and crie
O Alma redemptoris evere-mo
The swetnesse hath his herte perced so
Of Cristes mooder, that to hire to preye
He kan nat stynte of syngyng by the weye.”

The wicked Jews, vexed by his singing, kill him, and cast his body into a
pit. His weeping mother seeks him, and, happening by the pit, is made
aware of his presence by the miracle of his dead lips still singing the Alma
Redemptoris.
In two other stories has Chaucer dwelt upon the pathos of childhood and
bereft or suffering motherhood. In the Man of Law’s tale of Custance, there
is a touching passage where Custance and her babe are driven away from
the kingdom, and exposed to the sea in the ship which had brought them.
The mother kneels upon the sand before embarking, and puts her trust in the
Lord.

“Her litel child lay wepying in hir arm,
And knelynge, pitously to hym she seyde,
‘Pees litel sone, I wol do thee noon harm!’
With that hir kerchief of hir heed she breyde,
And over hise litel eyen she it leyde,
And in hir arm she lulleth it ful faste
And in-to hevene hire eyen up she caste.”

Then she commits herself and her child to Mary by the love of Mary’s
child.

“And up she rist, and walketh doun the stronde
Toward the ship,—hir folweth al the prees,—
And evere she preyeth hire child to hold his pees.”

Again, in the Clerk’s tale of Patient Griselda, the effect of the story is
greatly heightened by the narrative of the successive partings of the mother
with her child; and the climax is reached in the burst of gladness and pent-
up feeling which overtakes Griselda at the restoration of her son and
daughter. It is noticeable that in these and other instances childhood appears
chiefly as an appeal to pity, rarely as an object of direct love and joy. This is
not to be wondered at when one considers the character of the English race,
and the nature of the redemption which it has been undergoing in the slow
process of its submission to the spirit of Christ. We say the English race,
without stopping to make nice distinctions between the elements which

existed at the time of the Great Charter, just as we may properly speak of
the American people of the time of the Constitution.
This character is marked by a brutality, a murderous spirit, which lies
scarcely concealed, to-day, in the temper of every English crowd, and has
left its mark on literature from the ballads to Oliver Twist. This brutal
instinct, this rude, savage, northern spirit, is discovered in conflict with the
disarming power of the spirit of Christ, and the stages of the conflict are
most clearly indicated in poetry, which is to England what pictorial and
sculpturesque art is to the south, the highest exponent of its spiritual life.
More comprehensively, English literature affords the most complete means
of measuring the advance of England in humanity.
It belongs to the nature of this deep conflict that there should appear from
time to time the finest exemplars of the ideals formed by the divine spirit,
side by side with exhibitions of the most willful baseness. English literature
abounds in these contrasts; it is still more expressive of tides of spiritual
life, the elevation of thought and imagination succeeded by almost
groveling animalism. And since one of the symbols of a perfected
Christianity is the child, it is not unfair to seek for its presence in literature,
nor would it be a rare thing to discover it in passages which hint at the
conflict between the forces of good and evil so constantly going on.
It is not strange, therefore, that the earliest illustrations of childhood
should mainly turn, as we have seen, upon that aspect which is at once most
natural and most Christian. Pity, like a naked, new-born babe, does indeed
ride the blast in those wild, more than half-savage bursts of the English
spirit which are preserved for us in ballad literature; and in the first springs
of English poetic art in Chaucer, the child is as it were the mediator between
the rough story and the melody of the singer. One cannot fail to see how the
introduction of the child by Chaucer, in close union with the mother, is
almost a transfer of the Madonna into English poetry,—a Madonna not of
ritual, but of humanity.

There are periods in the history of every nation when the inner life is
more completely exposed to view, and when the student, if he be observant,
may trace most clearly the fundamental arteries of being. Such a period in
England was the Elizabethan era, when the tumultuous English spirit

manifested itself in religion, in politics, in enterprise, in adventure, and in
intellectual daring,—that era which was dominated by the great master of
English speech. It is the fashion of every age to write its characteristics in
forms which have become obsolete, and to resort to masquerade for a
display of its real emotions. It was because chivalry was no longer the
every-day habit of men that Spenser used it for his purposes, and translated
the Seven Champions of Christendom into a profounder and more
impassioned poem, emblematical of that great ethical conflict which has
been a significant feature of English history from the first. In that series of
knightly adventures, The Faery Queen, wherein the field of human
character is traversed, sin traced to its lurking-place, and the old dragon of
unrighteousness set upon furiously, there is a conspicuous incident
contained in the second book. In each book Spenser conceives the
antagonist of the knight, in some spiritual form, to have wrought a mischief
which needs to be repaired and revenged. Thus a dragon occasions the
adventures of the Red Cross knight, and in the legend of Sir Guyon the
enchantress Acrasia, or Intemperance, has caused the death of a knight and
his lady; the latter slays herself because of her husband’s death, and plunges
her babe’s innocent hands into her own bloody breast for a witness. Sir
Guyon and the Palmer, standing over the dead bodies, hold grave discourse
upon the incident; then they bury the dead, and seek in vain to cleanse the
babe’s hands in a neighboring fountain. The pure water will not be stained,
and the child bears the name Ruddymane,—the Red-Handed,—and shall so
bear the sign of a vengeance he is yet to execute.
It is somewhat difficult to see into the full meaning of Spenser’s allegory,
for the reason that the poet breaks through the meshes of his allegoric net
and soars into a freer air; but there are certain strong lines running through
the poem, and this of the ineradicable nature of sin is one of them. To
Spenser, vexed with problems of life, that conception of childhood which
knit it closely with the generations was a significant one, and in the bloody
hand of the infant, which could not be suffered to stain the chaste fountain,
he saw the dread transmission of an inherited guilt and wrong. The poet and
the moralist struggle for ascendency, and in this conflict one may see
reflected the passion for speculation in divinity which was already making
deep marks in English literature.

But the Elizabethan era had its share of light-heartedness. The songs of
the dramatists and other lyrics exhibit very clearly the influence upon
literature of the revival of ancient learning. As the art of Italy showed the
old poetic grace risen again under new conditions, so the dominant art of
England caught a light from the uncovered glory of Greece and Rome. It
was the time of the great translations of Phaer, Golding, North, and
Chapman; and as those translations are bold appropriations of antiquity, not
timid attempts at satisfying the requisitions of scholarship, so the figures of
the old mythology are used freely and ingenuously; they are naturalized in
English verse far more positively than afterwards in the elegantia of the
Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway is an
exquisite illustration of this rich, decorative use of the old fable. It was
partly through this sportive appropriation of the myth of Amor, so vital in
all literature, that the lullabies of the time came to get their sweetness. The
poet, in putting songs into the mother’s mouth, is not so much reflecting the
Virgin and Child as he is possessed with the spirit of Greek beauty, and his
delicate fancy plays about the image of a little Love. Thus may we read the
Golden Slumbers of Dekker, in his Patient Grissel. By a pretty conceit
George Gascoigne, in his Lullaby of a Lover, captures the sentiment of a
mother and babe, to make it tell the story of his own love and content.
There is a touching song by Robert Greene in his Menaphon, where
Sephestia puts into her lullaby the story of her parting with the child’s
father:—

“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt,
More thou crowed, more he cried,
Nature could not sorrow hide;
He must go, he must kiss
Child and mother, baby bless;
For he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow, father’s joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.”

We are apt to look for everything in Shakespeare, but in this matter of
childhood we must confess that there is a meagreness of reference which
almost tempts us into constructing a theory to account for it. So far as
dramatic representation is concerned, the necessary limitations of the stage
easily account for the absence of the young. Girls were not allowed to act in
Shakespeare’s time, and it is not easy to reduce boys capable of acting to
the stature of young girls. More than this, boys and girls are not themselves
dramatic in action, though in the more modern drama they are sometimes
used, especially in domestic scenes, to heighten effects, and to make most
reasonable people wish them in bed.
Still, within the limits enforced by his art, Shakespeare more than once
rested much on youthful figures. The gay, agile Moth has a species of
femineity about him, so that we fancy he would be most easily shown on
the stage by a girl; but one readily recalls others who have distinct boyish
properties. In Coriolanus, when the mother and wife go out to plead with
the angry Roman, they take with them his little boy. Volumnia, frantic with
fear, with love, and with a woman’s changing passion, calls upon one and
another to join her in her entreaty. Virgilia, the wife, crowds in a word at the
height of Volumnia’s appeal, when the voluble grandmother has been rather
excitedly talking about Coriolanus treading on his mother’s womb, that
brought him into the world. Virgilia strikes in,—

“Ay, and mine
That brought you forth this boy, to keep your name
Living to time.”

Whereupon young Marcius, with delicious boyish brag and chivalry:—

“A’ shall not tread on me;
I’ll run away till I am bigger, but then I’ll fight.”

In the same play there is a description of the boy which tallies exactly with
the single appearance which he makes in person. Valeria drops in upon the
mother and grandmother in a friendly way, and civilly asks after the boy.

“Vir. I thank your ladyship; well, good madam.

“Vol. He had rather see the swords, and hear a drum, than look
upon his schoolmaster.
“Val. O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear, ’tis a very pretty
boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an hour
together: has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a
gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after
it again: and over and over he comes, and up again; catched it again;
or whether his fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth
and tear it; O, I warrant, how he mammocked it!
“Vol. One on ’s father’s moods.
“Val. Indeed, la, ’tis a noble child.
“Vir. A crack, madam.”

The most eminent example in Shakespeare of active childhood is
unquestionably the part played by young Arthur in the drama of King John.
It is the youth of Arthur, his dependence, his sorry inheritance of misery, his
helplessness among the raging wolves about him, his childish victory over
Hubert, and his forlorn death, when he leaps trembling from the walls,
which impress the imagination. “Stay yet,” says Pembroke to Salisbury,—

“I’ll go with thee
And find the inheritance of this poor child,
His little kingdom of a forced grave.”

Shakespeare, busy with the story of kings, is moved with deep compassion
for this child among kings, who overcomes the hard heart of Hubert by his
innocent words, the very strength of feeble childhood, and falls like a poor
lamb upon the stones, where his princedom could not save him.
In that ghastly play of Titus Andronicus, which melts at last into
unavailing tears, with what exquisite grace is the closing scene humanized
by the passage where the elder Lucius calls his boy to the side of his dead
grandsire:—

“Come hither, boy; come, come, and learn of us
To melt in showers: thy grandsire loved thee well:

Many a matter hath he told to thee,
Meet and agreeing with thine infancy;
In that respect, then, like a loving child,
Shed yet some small drops from thy tender spring,
Because kind nature doth require it so.”
The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is in nothing figured more acutely
than when the woman and mother is made to say,—

“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you
Have done to this.”

In the witch’s hell-broth one ingredient is “finger of birth-strangled babe,”
while in the portents which rise to Macbeth’s vision a bloody child and a
child crowned, with a tree in his hand, are apparitions of ghostly prophecy.
Then in that scene where Ross discloses slowly and with pent-up passion
the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and Macduff hears as in a
dream, waking to the blinding light of horrid day, with what a piercing
shriek he cries out,—

“He has no children!”

and then surges back to his own pitiful state, transformed for a moment into
an infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has stolen his mate
and pretty brood.
By what marvelous flash of poetic power Shakespeare in this mighty
passage lifts that humblest image of parental care, a hen and chickens, into
the heights of human passion. Ah! as one sees a hen with a brood of
chickens under her,—how she gathers them under her wings, and will stay
in the cold if she can but keep them warm,—one’s mind turns to those
words of profound pathos spoken over the unloving Jerusalem; there was
the voice of a nature into which was gathered all the father’s and the
mother’s love. In these two passages one sees the irradiation of poor
feathered life with the glory of the image of the highest.

How important a part in the drama of King Richard III. do the young
princes play; as princes, indeed, in the unfolding of the plot, yet as children
in the poet’s portraiture of them. We hear their childish prattle, we see their
timid shrinking from the dark Tower, and then we have the effect of
innocent childhood upon the callous murderers, Dighton and Forrest, as
related in that short, sharp, dramatic account which Tyrrel gives:—

“Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this ruthless piece of butchery,
Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,
Melting with tenderness and kind compassion
Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories.
‘Lo, thus,’ quoth Dighton, ‘lay those tender babes:’
‘Thus, thus,’ quoth Forrest, ‘girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms:
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other.
A book of prayers on their pillow lay;
Which once,’ quoth Forrest, ‘almost changed my mind;
But O! the devil’—there the villain stopp’d;
Whilst Dighton thus told on: ‘We smothered
The most replenished sweet work of nature,
That from the prime creation e’er she framed.’
Thus both are gone with conscience and remorse;
They could not speak.”

The glances at infancy, though infrequent, are touched with strong human
feeling. Ægeon, narrating the strange adventures of his shipwreck, tells of
the

“Piteous plainings of the pretty babes
That mourned for fashion, ignorant what to fear;”

and scattered throughout the plays are passages and lines which touch
lightly or significantly the realm of childhood: as,—

“Pity like a naked, new-born babe;”

“’Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil,”
in Macbeth;

“Love is like a child
That longs for every thing that he can come by;”

“How wayward is this foolish love
That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse,
And presently all humble kiss the rod,”

in Two Gentlemen of Verona;

“Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks,”

says Desdemona; and Cleopatra, when the poisonous asp is planting its
fangs, says with saddest irony,—

“Peace! peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?”

There is a charming illustration of the blending of the classic myth of
Amor with actual childhood in these lines of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,
where Helena says,

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste:
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
As waggish boys in games themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjured everywhere.”

In the noonday musing of Jaques, when the summer sky hung over the
greenwood, and he fell to thinking of the round world and all that dwell

therein, the Seven Ages of Man passed in procession before him:—

“At first the infant
Muling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school,”

until the last poor shambling creature is borne off in second childhood.
There are doubtless other passages which might be gleaned, but the
survey is full enough to show how scantily, after all, Shakespeare has made
use of the figure and the image of childhood. The reflection has led an
ingenious writer to explain the fact by the circumstances of Shakespeare’s
life, which hindered his study of children. “He was clearly old for his age
when still a boy, and so would have associated, not with children, but with
young men. His marriage as a mere lad and the scanty legends of his youth
all tend in the same direction. The course of his life led him to live apart
from his children in their youth; his busy life in London brought him into
the interior of but few families; his son, of whom he saw but little, died
young. If our supposition be true, it is a pathetic thought that the great
dramatist was shut out from the one kind of companionship which, even
while it is in no degree intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental
powers, can take delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect
far more matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.”[32]
The explanation is rather ingenious than satisfying. Where did
Shakespeare get his knowledge of the abundant life which his dramas
present? He had the privilege of most people of remembering his own
boyhood, and the mind which could invent Hamlet out of such stuff as
experience and observation furnished could scarcely have missed
acquaintance enough with children to enable him to portray them whenever
the exigencies of his drama required. No, it is simpler to refer the absence
of children as actors to the limitations of the stage, and to ascribe the
infrequent references to childhood to the general neglect of the merely
domestic side of life in Shakespeare’s art. Shakespeare’s world was an out-
of-doors, public world, and his men, women, and lovers carried on their
lives with no denser concealment than a wood or an arras could afford.

The comprehensiveness of Shakespeare found some place for children;
the lofty narrowness of Milton, none. The word child, even, can scarcely be
found on a page of Milton’s verse. In his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity, with its Hymn, how slight is the mention of the child Jesus! How
far removed is the treatment from that employed in the great procession of
Madonnas!

“Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?”

The Infant God!—that is Milton’s attitude, more than half pagan. In
L’Allegro and in Comus the lightness, which denotes the farthest swing of
Milton’s fancy, is the relief which his poetic soul found from the high
themes of theology, in Greek art. One is aware that Milton’s fine
scholarship was the salvation of his poetry, as his Puritan sense of
personality held in check a nature which else might have run riot in
sportiveness and sensuousness. When he permitted himself his exquisite
short flights of fancy, the material in which he worked was not the fresh
spring of English nature, human or earthly, but the remote Arcadian
virginity which he had learned of in his books. Not dancing children, but
winged sprites, caught his poetic eye.
The weight of personal responsibility which rests upon the Puritan
conception of life offers small play for the wantonness and spontaneity of
childhood. Moreover, the theological substratum of Puritan morality denied
to childhood any freedom, and kept the life of man in waiting upon the
conscious turning of the soul to God. Hence childhood was a time of
probation and suspense. It was wrong, to begin with, and was repressed in
its nature until maturity should bring an active and conscious allegiance to
God. Hence, also, parental anxiety was forever earnestly seeking to
anticipate the maturity of age, and to secure for childhood that reasonable
intellectual belief which it held to be essential to salvation; there followed
often a replacement of free childhood by an abnormal development. In any
event, the tendency of the system was to ignore childhood, to get rid of it as
quickly as possible, and to make the state contain only self-conscious,
determinate citizens of the kingdom of heaven. There was, unwittingly, a
reversal of the divine message, and it was said in effect to children: Except

ye become as grown men and be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of
heaven.
Nevertheless, though Puritanism in its excessive anxiety may have
robbed childhood of its freedom, the whole spirit of the movement was one
conservative of family relations, and the narratives of domestic life under
Puritanic control are often full of a grave sweetness. Indeed, it may almost
be said that the domestic narrative was now born into English literature.
Nor could the intense concern for the spiritual well-being of children, a
religious passion reinforcing natural affection, fail to give an importance to
the individual life of the family, and prepare the way for that new
intelligence of the scope of childhood which was to come later to an
England still largely dominated by Puritan ideas.
Milton expressed the high flight of the soul above earthly things. He took
his place upon a summit where he could show the soul all the confines of
heaven and earth. Bunyan, stirred by like religious impulses, made his soul
trudge sturdily along toward an earthly paradise. The realism of his story
often veils successfully the spiritual sense, and makes it possible for
children to read the Pilgrim’s Progress with but faint conception of its
religious import. In the second part of the allegory, Christian’s wife and
children set out on their ramble, in Christian’s footsteps. There is no lack of
individuality in characterization of the persons. The children are distinctly
conceived as children; they are, to be sure, made to conform occasionally to
the demands of the spiritual side of the allegory, yet they remain children,
and by their speech and action betray the childish mind.
They come in sight of the lions, and “the boys that went before were glad
to cringe behind, for they were afraid of the lions, so they stepped back and
went behind.” When they come to the Porter’s Lodge, they abide there
awhile with Prudence, Piety, and Charity; Prudence catechizes the four
children, who return commendably correct answers. But Matthew, the
oldest boy, falls sick of the gripes; and when the physician asks Christiana
what he has been eating lately, she is as ignorant as any mother can be.
“Then said Samuel,” who is as communicative as most younger brothers,
“‘Mother, mother, what was that which my brother did gather up and eat, so
soon as we were come from the Gate that is at the head of this way? You
know that there was an orchard on the left hand, on the other side of the

wall, and some of the trees hung over the wall, and my brother did plash
and did eat.’
“‘True, my child,’ said Christiana, ‘he did take thereof and did eat,
naughty boy as he was. I did chide him, and yet he would eat thereof.’” So
Mr. Skill, the physician, proceeds to make a purge. “You know,” says
Bunyan, in a sly parenthesis, “physicians give strange medicines to their
patients.” “And it was made up,” he goes on, “into pills, with a promise or
two, and a proportionable quantity of salt. Now he was to take them three at
a time, fasting, in half a quarter of a pint of Tears of Repentance. When this
Portion was prepared and brought to the boy, he was loth to take it, though
torn with the gripes as if he should be pulled in pieces. ‘Come, come,’ said
the physician, ‘you must take it.’ ‘It goes against my stomach,’ said the boy.
‘I must have you take it,’ said his mother. ‘I shall vomit it up again,’ said the
boy. ‘Pray, sir,’ said Christiana to Mr. Skill, ‘how does it taste?’ ‘It has no ill
taste,’ said the doctor, and with that she touched one of the pills with the tip
of her tongue. ‘O Matthew,’ said she, ‘this Portion is sweeter than honey. If
thou lovest thy mother, if thou lovest thy brothers, if thou lovest Mercy, if
thou lovest thy life, take it.’ So with much ado, after a short prayer for the
blessing of God upon it, he took it, and it wrought kindly with him. It
caused him to purge, it caused him to sleep and rest quietly, it put him into a
fine heat and breathing sweat, and did quite rid him of his gripes.”
The story is dotted with these lifelike incidents, and the consistency is
rather in the basis of the allegory than in the allegory itself. In truth, we get
in the Pilgrim’s Progress an inimitable picture of social life in the lower
middle class of England, and in this second part a very vivid glimpse of a
Puritan household. The glimpse is corrective of a too stern and formal
apprehension of social Puritanism, and in the story are exhibited the natural
charms and graces which not only could not be expelled by a stern creed,
but were essentially connected with the lofty ideals which made Puritanism
a mighty force in history. Bunyan had a genius for story-telling, and his
allegory is very frank; but what he showed as well as what he did not show
in his picture of Christiana and the children indicates the constraint which
rested upon the whole Puritan conception of childhood. It is seen at its best
in Bunyan, and this great Puritan poet of common life found a place for it in
his survey of man’s estate; nature asserted itself in spite of and through
Puritanism.

Milton’s Christmas Hymn has the organ roll of a mind moving among
high themes, and making the earth one of the golden spheres. Pope’s sacred
eclogue of the Messiah is perhaps the completest expression of the religious
sentiment of an age which was consciously bounded by space and time. In
Pope’s day, the world was scarcely a part of a greater universe; eternity was
only a prolongation of time, and the sense of beauty, acute as it was, was
always sharply defined. Pope’s rhymed couplets, with their absolute
finality, their clean conclusion, their epigrammatic snap, are the most
perfect symbols of the English mind of that period. When in the Messiah we
read,—

“Rapt into future times the bard begun,
A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a son!
...
Swift fly the years and rise the expected morn!
O spring to light, auspicious babe, be born!”

we remember Milton’s Infant God. The two poets touch, with a like
faintness, the childhood of Jesus, but the one through awe and grandeur of
contemplation, the other through the polite indifference of a man of the
world. Or take Pope’s mundane philosophy, as exhibited most elaborately in
his Essay on Man, and set it beside Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man:—

“Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps and life’s poor play is o’er.”

This is the only passage in the Essay hinting at childhood, and suffices to
indicate how entirely insignificant in the eyes of the philosophy underlying
Pope and his school was the whole thought of childhood. The passage,
while not perhaps consciously imitative of Shakespeare, suggests
comparison, and one finds in Jaques under the greenwood a more human
feeling. Commend us to the tramp before the drawing-room philosopher!

The prelusive notes of a new literature were sounded by Fielding, Gray,
Goldsmith, and Cowper. It was to be a literature which touched the earth
again, the earth of a common nature, the earth also of a national inheritance.
Fielding, though painting contemporary society in a manner borrowed in
a measure from the satiric drama, was moving constantly into the freer
domain of the novelist who is a critic of life, and when he would set forth
the indestructible force of a pure nature in a woman who is placed in a loose
society, as in Amelia, he instinctively hedges the wife about with children,
and it is a mark of his art that these children are not mere pawns which are
moved about to protect the queen; they are genuine figures, their prattle is
natural, and they are constantly illustrating in the most innocent fashion the
steadfastness of Amelia.
It is significant that Gray, with his delicate taste and fine classical
scholarship, when he composed his Elegy used first the names of eminent
Romans when he wrote:—

“Some village Cato, who with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of the fields withstood;
Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Cæsar, guiltless of his country’s blood.”

He changed these names for those of English heroes, and in doing so broke
away from traditions which still had a strong hold in literature. It is a pity
that for a reason which hardly convinces us he should have thought best to
omit the charming stanza,—

“There, scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found:
The Red-breast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.”

When Gray wrote this he doubtless had in mind the ballad of the Children
in the Wood. In the succession of English pictures which he does give is
that lovely one,—

“For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening’s care;

No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the evening kiss to share.”
In his poem On a Distant Prospect of Eton College he has lines which are
instinct with a feeling for childhood and youth. There is, it is true, a touch
of artificiality in the use made of childhood in this poem, as a foil for tried
manhood, its little life treated as the lost golden age of mankind; but that
sentiment was a prevailing one in the period.
Goldsmith, whose Bohemianism helped to release him from subservience
to declining fashions in literature, treats childhood in a more genuine and
artless fashion. In his prose and poetry I hear the first faint notes of that
song of childhood which in a generation more was to burst from many lips.
The sweetness which trembles in the Deserted Village finds easy expression
in forms and images which call up childhood to memory, as in those lines,
—

“The playful children just let loose from school,”

“E’en children followed with endearing wile,
And plucked his gown, to share the good man’s smile,”—

and in the quaint picture of the village school.
It is in the Vicar of Wakefield, however, that one finds the freest play of
fancy about childish figures. Goldsmith says of his hero that “he unites in
himself the three greatest characters upon earth,—he is a priest, a
husbandman, and the father of a family;” and the whole of the significant
preface may lead one to revise the estimate of Goldsmith which his
contemporaries have fastened upon English literary history. The
waywardness and unconventionality of this man of genius and his eager
desire to be accepted by the world, which was then the great world, were
the characteristics which most impressed the shallower minds about him. In
truth, he had not only an extraordinary sympathy with the ever-varying,
ever-constant flux of human life, but he dropped a deeper plummet than any
English thinker since Milton.
It was in part his loneliness that threw him upon children for complete
sympathy; in part also his prophetic sense, for he had an unerring vision of
what constituted the strength and the weakness of England. After the

portraiture of the Vicar himself, there are no finer sketches than those of the
little children. “It would be fruitless,” says the unworldly Vicar, “to deny
exultation when I saw my little ones about me;” and from time to time in
the tale, the youngest children, Dick and Bill, trot forward in an entirely
natural manner. They show an engaging fondness for Mr. Thornhill. “The
whole family seemed earnest to please him.... My little ones were no less
busy, and fondly stuck close to the stranger. All my endeavors could
scarcely keep their dirty fingers from handling and tarnishing the lace on
his clothes, and lifting up the flaps of his pocket holes to see what was
there.” The character of Mr. Burchell is largely drawn by its association
with the children. The account given by little Dick of the carrying off of
Olivia is full of charming childish spirit, and there is an exquisite passage
where the Vicar returns home with the news of Olivia’s recovery, and
discovers his house to be on fire, while in a tumult of confusion the older
members of the family rush out of the dwelling.
“I gazed upon them and upon it by turns,” proceeds the Vicar, “and then
looked round me for my two little ones; but they were not to be seen. O
misery! ‘Where,’ cried I, ‘where are my little ones?’ ‘They are burnt to
death in the flames,’ says my wife calmly, ‘and I will die with them.’ That
moment I heard the cry of the babes within, who were just awaked by the
fire, and nothing could have stopped me. ‘Where, where are my children?’
cried I, rushing through the flames, and bursting the door of the chamber in
which they were confined. ‘Where are my little ones?’ ‘Here, dear papa,
here we are!’ cried they together, while the flames were just catching the
bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms, and snatching them
through the fire as fast as possible, just as I was got out the roof sunk in.
‘Now,’ cried I, holding up my children, ‘now let the flames burn on, and all
my possessions perish. Here they are. I have saved my treasure. Here, my
dearest, here are our treasures, and we shall yet be happy.’ We kissed our
little darlings a thousand times; they clasped us round the neck, and seemed
to share our transports, while their mother laughed and wept by turns.”
Cowper was more secluded from his time and its influence than
Goldsmith, but like him he felt the instinct for a return to the elemental in
life and nature. The gentleness of Cowper, combined with a poetic
sensibility, found expression in simple themes. His life, led in a pastoral
country, and occupied with trivial pleasures, offered him primitive material,

and he sang of hares, and goldfish, and children. His Tirocinium, or a
Review of Schools, though having a didactic intention, has some charming
bits of descriptive writing, as in the familiar lines which describe the sport
of

“The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot.”

The description melts, as do so many of Cowper’s retrospections, into a
tender melancholy. A deeper note still is struck in his Lines on the Receipt
of my Mother’s Picture.

The new birth which was coming to England had its premonitions in
literature. It had them also in art. In this period appeared Sir Joshua
Reynolds and Gainsborough: the one preëminently a painter of humanity,
the other of nature, and both of them moved by a spirit of freedom, under
well-recognized academic rules. There is in their work a lingering of the old
formal character which took sharp account of the diversities of rank, and
separated things common from things choice; yet they both belong to the
new world rather than to the old, and in nothing is this more remarkable
than in the number and character of the children pieces painted by
Reynolds. They are a delight to the eye, and in the true democracy of art we
know no distinction between Master Crewe as Henry VIII. and a Boy with a
Child on his back and cabbage nets in his hand. What a revelation of
childhood is in this great group! There is the tenderness of the Children in
the Wood, the peace of the Sleeping Child, where nature itself is in slumber,
the timidity of the Strawberry Girl, the wildness of the Gypsy Boy, the shy
grace of Pickaback, the delightful wonder of Master Bunbury, the sweet
simplicity and innocence in the pictures so named, and the spiritual yet
human beauty of the Angels’ heads. Reynolds studied the work of the
mediæval painters, but he came back to England and painted English
children. Goldsmith’s Vicar, Cowper’s Lines on his mother’s portrait, and
Reynolds’ children bring us close to the heart of our subject.

II

It was the saying of the Swedish seer Count Swedenborg, that a Day of
Judgment was to come upon men at the time of the French Revolution.
Then were the spirits to be judged. In whatever terms we may express the
fact, clear it is to us that the close of the last century marks a great epoch in
the history of Christendom, and the farther we withdraw from the events
which gather about our own birth as an organized nation, and those which
effected such enormous changes in European life, the more clearly do we
perceive that the movements of the present century are mainly along lines
which may be traced back to genetic beginnings then. There was indeed a
great awakening, a renaissance, a new birth.
The French Revolution was a sign of the times: it furnishes a convenient
name for an epoch, not merely because important changes in Christendom
were contemporaneous with it, but because they were intimately associated
with it. Then appeared the portent of Democracy, and the struggle of
humanity has ever since been for the realization of dreams which came as
visions of a great hope. Then began that examination of the foundation of
things in science and philosophy which has become a mighty passion in
intellectual life.
I have said that every great renaissance has left its record in the
recognition which childhood receives in literature and art. I add that the
scope and profundity of that renaissance may be measured by the form
which this recognition takes. At the birth of Christianity the pregnant
sentences, “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter the
kingdom of heaven,” “For of such is the kingdom of heaven,” “Verily I say
unto you, their angels do always behold the face of my Father in heaven,”
sound a depth unreached before. They were, like other words from the same
source, veritable prophecies, the perfect fulfillment of which waits the
perfect manifestation of the Son of Man. At the Renaissance, when
mediævalism gave way before modern life, art reflected the hopes of
mankind in the face of a divine child. At the great Revolution, when, amidst
fire and blood, the new life of humanity stood revealed, an unseen hand
again took a little child and placed him in the midst of men. It was reserved
for an English poet to be the one who most clearly discerned the face of the
child. Himself one of the great order of angels, he beheld in the child the
face of God. I may be pardoned, I trust, for thus reading in Western fashion
the meaning of that Oriental phrase which I find has perplexed theologians

and Biblical critics. Was it any new disclosure which the Christ made if he
merely said that the attendant ministers of children always beheld the face
of the Father in heaven? Was it not the very property of such angelic nature
that it should see God? But was it not rather a revelation to the crass minds
of those who thrust children aside, that the angels who moved between the
Father of spirits and these new-comers into the world saw in their faces a
witness to their divine origin? They saw the Father repeated in the child.
When Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads, a storm of ridicule fell
upon them. In that age, when the old and the new were clashing with each
other on every hand, so stark a symbol of the new as these ballads presented
could not fail to furnish an objective point for criticism which was born of
the old. Wordsworth, in his defensive Preface, declares, “The principal
object proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from
common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was
possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same
time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby
ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and
further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting, by
tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our
nature; chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a
state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because,
in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in
which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a
plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our
elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and,
consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly
communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those
elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations,
are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in
that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and
permanent forms of nature.”
Every one of these reasons, unless the last, which I do not understand, be
excepted, applies with additional force to the use of forms and images and
incidents drawn from childhood; and though Wordsworth takes no account
of this in his Preface, it is more to the point that he does freely and fully
recognize the fact in his poetry. The Preface, with its dry formality, was like

much of Wordsworth’s poetry,—Pegasus on a walk, his wings impeding
free action. It is one of the anomalies of nature that a poet with such insight
as Wordsworth should never apparently have discovered his own
pragmatical dullness. It seems to me that Wordsworth’s finer moods were
just those of which he never attempted to give a philosophic account, and
that he did not refer to childhood in his Preface is an evidence of his
inspiration when dealing with it.
Be this as it may, his treatment of childhood accords with his manifesto
to the British public. Could anything be more trivial, as judged by the
standards of the day, than his ballad of Alice Fell, or Poverty?—of which he
has himself said, “The humbleness, meanness if you like, of the subject,
together with the homely mode of treating it, brought upon me a world of
ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many
editions of my Poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my
friends, in particular my son-in-law, Edward Quillinan.” What is the motive
of a poem which excited such derision that the poet in a moment of alarm
withdrew it from publication, and when he restored it held his son-in-law
responsible? Simply the grief of a poor child, who had stolen a ride behind
the poet’s post-chaise, upon finding that her tattered cloak had become
caught in the wheel and irretrievably ruined. The poet makes no attempt to
dignify this grief; the incident is related in poetic form, but without any
poetic discovery beyond the simple worth of the grief. It is, perhaps, the
most audaciously matter of fact of all Wordsworth’s poems; and yet, such is
the difference in the audience to-day from what it was in Wordsworth’s time
that Alice Fell appears as a matter of course in all the anthologies for
children, and is read by men and women with positive sympathy, with a
tenderness for the forlorn little girl, and without a question as to the poem’s
right of existence. The misery, the grief of childhood, is conceived of as a
real thing, measured by the child’s mind into which we enter, and not by our
own standards of pain and loss.
Again, recall the poem of Lucy Gray, or Solitude. The story is far more
pathetic, and has an appeal to more catholic sensibility: a child, sent with a
lantern to town from the moor on which she lives, that she may light her
mother back through the snow, is lost among the hills, and her footsteps are
traced at last to the fatal bridge through which she has fallen. The incident
was one from real life; Wordsworth seized upon it, reproducing each detail,

and with a touch or two of genius made a wraith. He discovered, as no one
before had done, the element of solitude in childhood, and invested it with a
fine spiritual, ethereal quality, quite devoid of any ethical property,—a
subtle community with nature.
How completely Wordsworth entered the mind of a child and identified
himself with its movements is consciously betrayed in his pastoral, The Pet
Lamb. He puts into the mouth of Barbara Lewthwaite the imaginary song to
her lamb, and then says for himself,—

“As homeward through the lane I went with lazy feet,
This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat;
And it seemed, as I retraced the ballad line by line,
That but half of it was hers, and one half of it was mine.
Again and once again did I repeat the song;
Nay, said I, more than half to the damsel must belong,
For she looked with such a look and she spake with such a tone
That I almost received her heart into my own.”

His second thought was best: more than half did belong to the child, for he
himself was but the wise interpreter.
Wordsworth’s incidents of childhood are sometimes given a purely
objective character, as in Rural Architecture, The Anecdote for Fathers, The
Idle Shepherd Boys; but more often childhood is to him the occasion and
suggestion of the deeper thought of life. A kitten, playing with falling leaves
before the poet and his child Dora, leads him on by exquisite movement to
the thought of his own decay of life. But what impresses us most is the
twofold conception of childhood as a part of nature, and as containing
within itself not only the germ of human life, but the echo of the divine.
There are poems of surpassing beauty which so blend the child and nature
that we might almost fancy, as we look upon the poetical landscape, that we
are mistaking children for bushes, or bushes for children. Such is that one
beginning

“Three years she grew in sun and shower,”

and

“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!”

He drew images from his children and painted a deliberate portrait of his
daughter Catharine, solemnly entitled, Characteristics of a Child Three
Years Old.
Yet, though Wordsworth drew many suggestions from his own children
and from those whom he saw in his walks, it is remarkable how little he
regards children in their relation to parents in comparison of their individual
and isolated existence. Before Wordsworth, the child, in literature, was
almost wholly considered as one of a group, as a part of a family, and only
those phases of childhood were treated which were obvious to the most
careless observer. Wordsworth—and here is the notable fact—was the first
deliberately to conceive of childhood as a distinct, individual element of
human life. He first, to use a truer phrase, apprehended the personality of
childhood. He did this and gave it expression in artistic form in some of the
poems already named; he did it methodically and with philosophic intent in
his autobiographic poem The Prelude, and also in The Excursion. Listen
how he speaks of his infancy even, giving it by anticipation a life separate
from mother and nurse. “Was it for this?” he asks,—

“Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou,
O Derwent! winding among grassy holms
Where I was looking on, a babe in arms,
Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.”

Still more minutely does he disclose the consciousness of childhood in his
record of the mind of the Wanderer in The Excursion, in the lines
beginning:—

“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak
In summer tended cattle on the hills.”

It may be said that in all this Wordsworth is simply rehearsing and
expanding an exceptional experience; that his recollection of his own
childhood passed through the alembic of a fervid poetic imagination. Be it
so; we are not so much concerned to know how the poet came by this
divination, as to know that he should have treated it as universal and
common to the period of childhood. Again and again in descriptive poem,
in direct address, in indirect allusion, he so uses this knowledge as to forbid
us to regard it as peculiar and exceptional in his own view; and a poet’s
attestation to a universal experience is worth more than any negation which
comes from our individual blurred recollection. Wordsworth discovers in
childhood the germ of humanity; he sees there thoughts, emotions,
activities, sufferings, which are miniatures of the maturer life,—but, he sees
more than this and deeper. To him the child is not a pigmy man; it has a life
of its own, out of which something even may pass, when childhood is left
behind. It is not the ignorant innocence of childhood, the infantile grace,
which holds him, but a certain childish possession, in which he sees a
spiritual presence obscured in conscious youth. Landor in one of his
Imaginary Conversations stoutly asserts a similar fact when he says,
“Children are not men or women; they are almost as different creatures, in
many respects, as if they never were to be one or the other; they are as
unlike as buds are unlike flowers, and almost as blossoms are unlike
fruits.”[33]
In all this again, in this echo of the divine which Wordsworth hears in the
voice of childhood, there is reference, psychologically, to his own personal
experience. Yet why should we treat that as ruled out of evidence, which
only one here and another there acknowledges as a part of his history? Is it
not fairer, more reasonable, to take the experience of a profound poet as the
basis of spiritual truth than the negative testimony of those whose eyes lack
the wondrous power of seeing? In the preface to his ode, Intimations of
Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth
declares with great earnestness:—
“To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains
itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or

experiences of my own mind, on which the structure of the poem partly
rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the
notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have said elsewhere
—

‘A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death!’

But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty
came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used
to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade
myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in
something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I
was often unable to think of external existence, and I communed with all
that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial
nature. Many times, while going to school, have I grasped at a wall or tree
to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was
afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we all
have reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character.”
Here Wordsworth defends the philosophy of the poem by making it an
induction from his own experience. There will be found many to question
its truth, because they have no recollections which correspond with the
poet’s; and others who will claim that the poem is but a fanciful argument in
behalf of the philosophic heresy of a preëxistent state. In my judgment,
Wordsworth’s preface is somewhat misleading by its reference to this
theory, although he has furnished hints in the same preface of his more
integral thought. As I have noticed before, his artistic presentation is truer
and more final than his exegesis. Whoever reads this great ode is aware of
the rise and fall of the tide of thought; he hears the poet reasoning with
himself; he sees him passing in imagination out of childhood into age, yet
constantly recovering himself to fresh perception of the immortality which
transcends earthly life. It is visible childhood with its intimation of
immortality which brings to the poet, not regret for what is irretrievably
lost, but firmer faith in the reality of the unseen and eternal. The confusion
into which some have been cast by the ode arises from their bringing to the

idea of immortality the time conception; they conceive the poet to be
hinting of an indefinite time antedating the child’s birth, an indefinite time
extending beyond the man’s death, whereas Wordsworth’s conception of
immortality rests in the indestructibility of spirit by any temporal or earthly
conditions,—an indestructibility which even implies an absence of
beginning as well as of ending.

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,”

he declares. It is the investment of this visible life by an unseen, unfelt, yet
real spiritual presence for which he contends, and he maintains that the
inmost consciousness of childhood bears witness to this truth; this
consciousness fades as the earthly life penetrates the soul, yet it is there and
recurs in sudden moments.

“Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

In thus connecting childhood with the highest hope of the human race,
Wordsworth was repeating the note which twice before had been struck in
great epochs of history. This third renaissance was the awaking of the
human soul to a sense of the common rights and duties of humanity, the
dignity and worth of the Person.

The poetic form, while most perfectly inclosing these divinations of
childhood, and especially suited to the presentation of the faint and elusive
elements, is less adapted to the philosophic and discursive examination of
the subject of childhood. It is, then, an indication of the impression which
the idea had made upon men that a prose writer of the period, of singular
insight and subtlety, should have given some of his most characteristic
thought to an examination of the essential elements of childhood. De
Quincey was undoubtedly strongly affected by Wordsworth’s treatment of

the subject; he has left evidence upon this point. Nevertheless, he appears to
have sounded his own mind and appealed to his own memory for additional
and corroborative testimony. In his Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to the
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he offers an account of his
recollections of infancy, together with many reflections upon the experience
which he then underwent. If it be said that the opium-eater was an
untrustworthy witness, since his dreaming might well lead him to confuse
the subtle workings of a mature mind with the vivid remembrance of one or
two striking events of childhood, we may consider that De Quincey’s
imagination was a powerful one, and capable of interpreting the incidents
and emotions brought to it by memory, as a more prosaic mind could not.
We are compelled, of course, in all such cases, to submit the testimony of
such a man to the judgment of our own reason, but that reason ought, before
pronouncing a final verdict, to be educated to perceive the possibilities of a
wider range of observation than may have fallen to us individually, and to
submit the results to a comparison with known operations of the human
mind. Above all, it should be borne in mind that a distinction clearly exists
between a child’s consciousness and its power of expression. De Quincey
himself in a note says with acuteness and justice:—
“The reader must not forget in reading this and other passages that
though a child’s feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I
decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is this distinction or
this explanation from pointing to anything metaphysical or doubtful, that a
man must be grossly unobservant who is not aware of what I am here
noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but as a necessity of all
children. Whatsoever in a man’s mind blossoms and expands to his own
consciousness in mature life must have preëxisted in germ during his
infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep
feelings these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I,
the child, had the feelings; I, the man, decipher them. In the child lay the
handwriting mysterious to him; in me, the interpretation and the comment.”
Assuredly this is reasonable, and since we are looking for the recognition
of childhood in literature, we may wisely ask how it presents itself to a man
like De Quincey, who had peculiar power in one form of literature—the
autobiographic-imaginative. He entitles the first part of his Suspiria, The
Affliction of Childhood. It is the record of a child’s grief, interpreted by the

man when he could translate into speech the emotion which possessed him
in his early suffering; and near its close, De Quincey, partially summing up
his philosophy of the subject, declares:—
“God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in
darkness. But in solitude, above all things when made vocal by the truths
and services of a national church, God holds communion undisturbed with
children. Solitude, though silent as light, is like light the mightiest of
agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world
alone; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness that if he should be summoned to travel into God’s presence,
no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry
him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest,
warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty
galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this world appalls or
fascinates a child’s heart, is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through
which already he has passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through
which he has to pass; reflex of one solitude, prefiguration of another.
“Deeper than the deepest of solitudes is that which broods over
childhood, bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which watches
for it, within the gates of death. Reader, I tell you in truth, and hereafter I
will convince you of this truth, that for a Grecian child solitude was
nothing, but for a Christian child it has become the power of God and the
mystery of God. O mighty and essential solitude, that wast and art and art to
be! thou, kindling under the touch of Christian revelations, art now
transfigured forever, and hast passed from a blank negation into a secret
hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of infancy the very
dimmest of his truths!”
I must refer the reader to the entire chapter for a full exposition of De
Quincey’s views on this subject. Despite the bravura style, which makes us
in our soberer days listen a little incredulously to these far-fetched sighs and
breathings, the passage quoted bears testimony to that apprehension of
childhood which De Quincey shared with Wordsworth. Both of these
writers were looked upon in their day as somewhat reactionary in their
poetical philosophy; so much the more valuable is their declaration of a
poetical and philosophical faith which was fundamentally in unison with
the political faith that lay behind the outburst of the French Revolution. The

discovery of this new continent of childhood by such explorers of the
spiritual world marks the age as distinctly as does the discovery of new
lands and explorations in the earlier renaissance. It was indeed one of the
great signs of the period ushered in by the French Revolution and the
establishment of the American republic, that the bounds of the spiritual
world were extended. When poverty and childhood were annexed to the
poet’s domain, the world of literature and art suddenly became larger.

At such times there are likely to be singular exhibitions of genius, which
are ill-understood in contemporary life, but are perceived by later observers
to be part and parcel of the age in which they occur. Something like this
may be said of the pictures and poems of William Blake, who was a
visionary in a time when a red flame along the horizon made his spiritual
fires invisible. He has since been rediscovered, and has been for a
generation so potent an influence in English art that we may wisely attend
to him, not merely as a person of genius, but as furnishing an illustration of
some of the deep things of our subject.
No one acquainted with Blake’s work has failed to observe the recurrence
of a few types drawn from elemental figures. The lamb, the child, the old
man,—these appear and reappear, carrying the prevalent ideas in this artist’s
imagination. Of all these the child is the most central and emphatic, even as
the Songs of Innocence is the most perfect expression of Blake’s vision of
life. It may be said that in his mind childhood was largely resolvable into
infancy, and that when he looked upon a babe, he saw life in its purest form,
and that most suggestive of the divine, as in the exquisite cradle song, into
which is woven the weeping of the child Jesus for all the human race. The
two short antithetical poems, The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy
Found, reveal the depths which Blake penetrated when engaged in his
solitary voyage of discovery to the little known shores of childhood. They
have, to be sure, the teasing property of parables, and it would be hard to
render them into the unmistakable language of the understanding; but they
could be set to music, and like the Duke we exclaim:—

“That strain again! it had a dying fall.”

It must always be borne in mind that Blake’s contribution to the literature of
childhood is through highly idealized forms. It is spiritual or angelic
childhood which floats before his eyes, so that the little creatures who dance
on the green, the little chimney sweep, the children filing into St. Paul’s, are
translated by his visionary power into the images of an essential childhood;
they cease to be individual illustrations.

We are told that in the fearful days of the French Revolution there was an
eruption from the secret places of Paris of a vast horde of poor, ignorant,
and vicious people, who had been kept out of sight by lords and ladies. One
may accept the fact as symbolical of that emergence into the light of
Christianity of poverty and degradation. The poor had always been with the
world, but it is not too much to say that now for the first time did they begin
to be recognized as part and parcel of humanity. Wordsworth’s poems set
the seal upon this recognition. Dickens’s novels naturalized the poor in
literature, and, as in the case of Wordsworth, poverty and childhood went
hand in hand.
Dickens, however, though he made a distinct addition to the literature of
childhood, rather registered a presence already acknowledged than acted as
a prophet of childhood. The great beneficent and humanitarian movement
of the century was well under way, and had already found abundant
expression in ragged schools and Sunday-schools and in education
generally, when Dickens, with his quick reporter’s sight, seized upon salient
features in this new exhibition of humanity. He was quite aside from the
ordinary organized charities, but he was moved by much the same spirit as
that which was briskly at work among the poor and the young. He was
caught by the current, and his own personal experience was swift to give
special direction to his imagination.
Besides innumerable minor references, there are certain childish figures
in the multitude of the creations of Dickens, which at once rise to mind,—
Paul Dombey, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield in his
earliest days, and the Marchioness. Dickens found out very soon that the
power to bring tears into the eyes of people was a surer road to success than
even the power to amuse. When he was drawing the figures of children,
their tenderness, their weakness, their susceptibility, presented themselves

as the material in which he could skillfully work. Then he used the method
which had served him so well in his larger portraiture; he seized upon the
significant feature and emphasized it until it became the unmistakable mark
of the person. Childhood suggests weakness, and weakness is more
apparent when there is a foil of mental prematurity; so he invented the
hydrocephalic Paul Dombey. It suggests tenderness; he appealed to an
unhesitating sympathy and drew for us Little Nell, intensifying her nature
by bringing her into contrast and subtle companionship with her imbecile
grandfather. It is the defect of Dickens that by such characters he displayed
his skill in morbid conceptions. The little old man in Paul Dombey is not
without its prototype in real life, but Dickens appears to have produced it as
a type of tender childhood, much as one might select a consumptive for an
illustration of extreme refinement. Tiny Tim is a farther illustration of this
unhealthy love, on Dickens’s part, of that which is affecting through its
infirmity. That art is truest which sees children at play or in their mother’s
arms, not in hospitals or graveyards. It is the infirmity of humanitarianism
and of Dickens, its great exponent, that it regards death as the great fact of
life; that it seeks to ward it off as the greatest of evils, and when it comes,
hastens to cover it out of sight with flowers. This conception of death is
bound up with an overweening sense of the importance of these years of
life. There is a nobler way, and literature and art are slowly confessing it, as
they devote their strength to that which is eternal in life, not to that which is
perishable. Wordsworth’s maiden in We are Seven, with her simple,
unhesitating belief in the continuity of life, the imperishability of the
person, holds a surer place in literature than Paul Dombey, who makes the
ocean with its tides wait for him to die.
It is only fair to say, however, that the caricature to be found in Dickens
is scarcely more violent an extreme to some minds than is the idealism to be
found in Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Blake an opposite extreme to minds
otherwise constituted. The early life of Wordsworth, passed, as he tells us,
in the solitude of nature, explains much of his subsequent attitude toward
childhood and youth. It is out of such an experience that Lucy Gray was
written. In like manner the early life of Dickens discloses something of a
nature which reappears afterward in his pictures of childhood. A wounded
sensibility is unquestionably the pathetic history of many, and Dickens has
contributed to the natural history of childhood a distinct account of this
feature.

The first appearance of a new form in literature produces an impression
which can never be repeated. However freshly readers in this decade may
come to the works of Dickens, it is impossible that they should have the
same distinct sensation which men and women had who caught up the
numbers of The Old Curiosity Shop as they fell from the press for the first
time. There can never again be such a lamentation over Little Nell, when
men like Jeffrey, a hardened old critic, made no concealment of their tears.
Yet I am disposed to think that this does not give a complete account of the
phenomenon. Just as Wordsworth’s Alice Fell is now but one of a
procession of forlorn maidens, though at the head of it, so the children of
Dickens are merely somewhat more vivid personages in a multitude of
childish creation. The child is no longer a novelty either in poetry or in
fiction. It is an accepted character, one of the dramatis personæ of
literature.
For, when all is said of Dickens’s work, taken only as the product of a
mind singularly gifted with reporting what it has seen, there remains the
noticeable fact that scarcely had the echoes died away from the voice of
Wordsworth, who ushered in the literature of the new age, when a great
man of the people came forward, in the person of Dickens, and found it the
most natural thing in the world to give men pictures of child-life, and that
after the first surprise attendant upon novelty was over, writers of all sorts
were busy modeling these small figures.

The child once introduced into literature, the significance of its
appearance thereafter is not so much in individual instances as in the
general and familiar acceptance of the phenomenon. At least, so it appears
from our near view. It is not impossible that later students may perceive
notes in our literature of more meaning than we now surmise. They may
understand better than we why Tennyson should have made a babe the
heroine of The Princess, as he acknowledges to Mr. Dawson that he did,
though only one or two critics had discovered the fact, and why Mr.
Swinburne, who is supposed to scoff at a literature virginibus puerisque,
should have devoted so much of his lyric energy to childhood. The stream
which ran with so broken a course down to Wordsworth has spread now
into a broad, full river. Childhood is part and parcel of every poet’s
material; children play in and out of fiction, and readers are accustomed to

meeting them in books, and to finding them often as finely discriminated by
the novelist as are their elders.
Meanwhile, from the time when childhood was newly discovered, that is
to say, roughly, in the closing years of the last century, there has been a
literature in process of formation which has for its audience children
themselves. I called attention briefly, at the beginning of this study, to the
interesting fact that there was a correlation in time, at least, between
childhood in literature and a literature for children. A nearer study of the
literature of this century shows very clearly that while the great constructive
artists have been making room for the figures of infancy and youth, and
even consciously explaining their presence, a host of minor writers, without
much thought of art, have been busy over the same figures for other
purposes. Not only so, but in several instances the great artists themselves
have distinctly turned aside from their ordinary audience and appealed
directly to children.
Where was the child in English literature before Goldsmith? and where
before Goldsmith’s time was there a book for children? There have been, it
is true, nursery tales in all ages: ditties, and songs, and lullabies; unwritten
stories, which mothers in England told when they themselves could have
read nothing; but there came a time when children were distinctly
recognized as the occasion of formal literature, when authors and publishers
began to heed a new public. It was impossible that there should be this
discovery of childhood without a corresponding effort on the part of men
and women to get at it, and to hold direct intercourse with it.
By a natural instinct, writers for children began at once to write about
children. They were moved by educational rather than by artistic impulses,
so that their creations were subordinate to the lessons which they conveyed.
During the period when Wordsworth, Lamb, De Quincey, and Blake were
idealizing childhood, and seeing in it artistic possibilities, there flourished a
school of writing for the young which also dealt with childhood, but with a
sturdy realism. This school had its representatives in Mrs. Barbauld, Mr.
Day, the Aikens, Maria Edgeworth, Ann and Jane Taylor, and holds a place
still with Evenings at Home, The Parent’s Assistant, Hymns in Prose for
Children, Hymns for Infant Minds, Frank, and Sandford and Merton. The
characteristics of this literature are simple, and will be recalled by many

who dwell with an affectionate and regretful regard upon books which they
find it somewhat difficult to persuade their children to read.
These books were didactic; they assumed in the main the air of wise
teachers; they were sometimes condescending; they appealed to the
understanding rather than to the imagination of the child, and they
abounded in stores of useful information upon all manner of subjects. They
contained precursors of a long series of juvenile monitors, and the
grandfathers who knew Mr. Barlow had children who knew Mr. Holiday,
Rollo, Jonas, and Mr. George, and grandchildren who may be suspected of
an acquaintance with Mr. Bodley and his much traveled and very inquisitive
family.
Yet, the earlier works, though now somewhat antiquated, were not
infrequently lively and even humorous in their portraiture of children. They
were written in the main out of a sincere interest in the young, and by those
who were accustomed to watch the unfolding of childish nature. If they
reflected a somewhat formal relation between the old and the young, it must
be remembered that the actual relation was a formal one: that the young had
not yet come into familiar and genial relation with the old. Indeed, the
books themselves were somewhat revolutionary in a small way. Much that
seems stiff and even unnatural to us now was quite easy and colloquial to
their first readers, and in their eagerness to lure children into ways of
pleasant instruction, the authors broke down something of the reserve which
existed between fathers and sons in the English life which they portrayed.
Yet we cannot help being struck by the contrast between the sublimated
philosophy of Wordsworth and the prosaic applications of the Edgeworth
school. Heaven lies about us in our infancy? Oh, yes, a heaven that is to be
looked at through a spy-glass and explained by means of a home-made
orrery. It would seem as if the spirit of childhood had been discerned with
all its inherent capacity, but that the actual children of this matter-of-fact
world had not yet been fairly seen by the light of this philosophy.
The literature which we are considering was indeed a serious attempt at
holding intercourse with childish minds. It had the embarrassment of
beginnings; there was about it an uncertain groping in the dark of
childhood, and it was desperately theory-ridden. But it had also the mark of
sincerity, and one feels in reading it that the writers were genuinely
indifferent in most cases to the figure they might be cutting before the

world; they were bent upon reaching this audience, and were unobservant
of the larger world behind. In most cases, I say. I suspect that Mrs.
Barbauld, with her solemn dullness, was the victim of a notion that she was
producing a new order of literature, and in this she was encouraged by a
circle of older readers; the children probably stared at her with sufficient
calmness to keep her ignorant of their real thoughts.
How real literature looked upon the dusty high-road laid out across the
fields by some of these writers may be read in the letters of the day.
Coleridge jibed at that “pleonasm of nakedness,” Mrs. Bare-bald, and Lamb
in a letter to Coleridge speaks his mind with refreshing frankness: “Goody
Two Shoes,” he says, “is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has
banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman at Newberry’s
hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf when
Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles
about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.’s books convey, it
seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty
noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learned
that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like;
instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man,
while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science
has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men.
Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think of what you would
have been now, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in
childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Hang them! I mean the cursed reasoning crew, those blights and blasts of all
that is human in man and child.” Yet Lamb and his sister both took a lively
interest in genuine books for the young, and their own contributions have,
alas! gone the way, for the most part, of other worn-out literature. It was
mainly as a direct educative power that this new interest in children first
found expression; with it, however, was mingled a more artistic purpose,
and the two streams of tendency have ever since been recognizable,
sometimes separate, oftener combined. The Lambs’ own work was
illustrative of this union of the didactic and the artistic. It is outside the
scope of this study to dwell at length upon this phase of literature. It is
enough to point out the fact that there is a distinct class of books which has
grown up quite within the memory of men now living. It is involved with
industrial and commercial interests; it invites the attention of authors, and

the infrequent criticism of reviewers; it has its own subdivisions like the
larger literature; it boasts of cyclopædias and commentaries; it includes
histories, travels, poems, works in science, theological treatises. It is a
distinct principality of the Kingdom of Letters. It is idle to complain of the
present abundance of children’s books, as if somebody were to blame for it.
There has been no conspiracy of publishers and authors. It is worse than
folly to look with contempt upon the movement; the faithful student will
seek rather to study this new force, and if possible to guide it into right
channels.

The distinction between books for the young and books for the old is a
somewhat arbitrary one, and many have discovered for themselves and their
children that instead of one poor corner of literature being fenced off for the
lamb, planted with tender grass which is quickly devoured, and with many
medicinal but disagreeable herbs which are nibbled at when the grass is
gone, the whole wide pasture land is their native home, and the grass more
tender where fresh streams flow than it possibly can be in the paddock,
however carefully planted and watched. This community of possession is
more recognizable in the higher than in the lower forms of literature. It is
still more clear in pictorial art. Art is by its nature more closely
representative of childhood than literature can be, and Gainsborough and
Reynolds made no innovation when they painted children, although the
latter, by his evident partiality for these subjects, does indicate a
susceptibility to the new knowledge which was coming upon the world.
There are other influences which reinforce the artistic pleasure, such as the
domestic sense, the pride of family, the ease of procuring unconscious
models. No one can visit an English exhibition of paintings without being
struck by the extraordinary number of subjects taken from childhood. It is
in this field that Millais has won famous laurels, and when the great body of
book illustrations is scanned, what designs have half the popularity of
Doyle’s fairies and Miss Greenaway’s idyllic children? I sometimes wonder
why this should be the case in England, when in America, the paradise of
children, there is a conspicuous absence of these subjects from galleries.

VII
IN FRENCH AND GERMAN LITERATURE

I

French literature before the Revolution was more barren of reference to
childhood than was English literature. Especially is this true of the
eighteenth century, with its superficial disbelief and its bitter protest against
superstition, under which term was comprehended the supernatural as well
as the preternatural. There were exceptions, as in the case of Fénelon, and
the constitutional sentiment of the French was easily moved by the appeal
of dependent childhood. In Rousseau one may read how it is possible to
weep over children, and yet leave one’s own to the cold mercy of a
foundling asylum. It is in Rousseau’s disciple, however, Bernardin de St.
Pierre, that we find the most artistic expression of pure sentimentalism, and
the story of Paul and Virginia is an effort at representing a world where
childhood, in its innocence, is conceived of as the symbol of ideal human
life. St. Pierre thought of childhood and nature as possessed of strong
negative virtues; they were uncontaminated, they were unsophisticated. To
escape from an evil world, he fled in imagination to an island of the tropics,
where all that life required was readily furnished by lavish nature. He
makes his family to consist chiefly of women and children. The masculine
element is avoided as something disturbing, and except for the harmless old
man who acts as chorus, it is discovered first as a rude, barbaric, and cruel
force in the person of the governor of the island, who has no faith in
Madame de la Tour, and in the person of the planter at the Black River, who
has been an inhuman master to his slave.
The childhood of Paul and Virginia is made to have a pastoral, idyllic
character. Their sorrows and misfortunes come wholly from evils which lie
beyond their control. St. Pierre brought back a golden age by ignoring the
existence of evil in the heart of man; he conceived it possible to construct
an ideal world by what was vaguely expressed in the words “a return to
nature.” As he reflects in the story: “Their theology consisted in sentiment

like that of nature; and their morality in action like that of the gospel. Those
families had no particular days devoted to pleasure, and others to sadness.
Every day was to them a holiday, and all which surrounded them one holy
temple, where they forever adored an Infinite Intelligence, almighty and the
friend of humankind. A sentiment of confidence in his supreme power filled
their minds with consolation for the past, with fortitude for the present, and
with hope for the future. Behold how these women, compelled by
misfortune to return to a state of nature, had unfolded in their own bosoms,
and in those of their children, the feelings which nature gives us, our best
support under evil!”
However we may discover the limitations of the sentimental philosophy,
and its inadequacy when brought face to face with evil in life, there is a
surface agreement with Christianity in this instinctive turning to childhood
as the hope of the world. Yet the difference is radical. The child, in the
Christian conception, holds the promise of things to come; in the
conception of French sentiment of the Rousseau and St. Pierre type, the
child is a refuge from present evil, a mournful reminiscence of a lost
Paradise. If only we could keep it a child! is the cry of this school,—keep it
from knowing this wicked, unhappy world! But alas! there are separations
and shipwrecks. Virginia is washed ashore by the cruel waves. Paul, bereft
of reason, dies, and is buried in the same grave. The two, growing like
plants in nature, are stricken down by the mysterious, fateful powers of
nature.
The contrast between this unreal recourse to nature and the strong yet
subtle return which characterizes Wordsworth and his school is probably
more apparent to the English and American mind than to the French. Yet a
reasonable comparison betrays the fatal weakness of the one in that it leaves
out of view whatever in nature disturbs a smooth, summer-day world. When
St. Pierre talks of a return to nature, he does not mean the jungle and the
pestiferous swamp; he regards these as left behind in Paris. Yet the
conclusion of his story is the confession wrung from faithful art that Nature
is after all but a step-mother to humanity.
In the great romantic movement which revolutionized French literature,
an immense impetus was given to the mind, and literature thenceforth
reflected a wider range of thought and feeling. In few respects does this
appear more significantly than in the treatment of childhood. There is a

robustness about the sentiment which separates it from the earlier regard of
such writers as we have named. Lamartine, who certainly was not devoid of
sentiment, passes by his own earliest childhood in Les Confidences with
indifference. “I shall not,” he says, “follow the example of J. J. Rousseau in
his Confessions. I shall not relate to you the trifling events of my early
childhood. Man only dates from the commencement of feeling and thought;
until the man is a being, he is not even a child.... Let us leave, then, the
cradle to the nurses, and our first smiles, our first tears, and our first lisping
accents to the ecstasies of our mothers. I do not wish to inflict on you any
but my earliest recollections, embellished by the light of reason.” He gives,
accordingly, two scenes of his childhood: one an interior, where his father
reads aloud to his mother from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered; the other an
outdoor scene, where he engages in the rural sports of the neighborhood.
Each picture is delightfully drawn, with minute detail, with poetic touch,
with affectionate recollection. Encouraged, apparently, by the warmth
which this memory has inspired, Lamartine continues to dwell upon the
images of his childhood, especially as it has to do with the thought of his
mother. He paints the simple garden attached to his father’s home, and
resting a moment reflects:—
“Yes, that is indeed all, and yet that is what sufficed during so many
years for the gratification, for the reveries, for the sweet leisures, and for the
as sweet labors of a father, a mother, and eight children! Such is what still
suffices, even at the present day, for the nourishment of these recollections.
Such is the Eden of their childhood, where their most serene thoughts take
refuge when they wish to receive a little of that dew of the morning life, a
little of that beaming light of early dawn, which shines pure and radiant for
man only amid the scenes of his birth. There is not a tree, there is not a
carnation, there is not a mossy stone of this garden, which is not entwined
in their soul as if it formed part of it. This nook of earth seems to us
immense, such a host of objects and of recollections does it contain for us in
so narrow a space.”
The fullness with which Lamartine treats the recollection of his youth
partakes of the general spirit of French memoirs,—a spirit, to speak
roughly, which regards persons rather than institutions,—but indicates also
something of the new spirit which informed literature when it elevated
childhood into a place of real dignity. There are passages, indeed, which

have a special significance as intimating a consciousness of the deeper
relations of childhood. Michelet, for instance, in his philosophy of the
unfolding of woman’s life, recognizes the characteristics of maidenhood as
anticipatory of maturity, and does it with so serious a contemplation that we
forget to smile when we discover him profoundly observant of those
instincts of maternity which are shown in the care of a child for its doll.
This attitude toward the child is observable in the masters of modern
French literature. However far they may be removed from any mere
domestic regard of the subject, they apprehend the peculiar sacredness
attaching to children. Alfred de Musset, for example, though by no means a
poet of the family, can never speak of children without emotion. Not to
multiply instances, it is enough to take the great poet of the period. Victor
Hugo deserves, it has been said, to be called the poet of infancy, not only
for the reason that he has written of the young freely, but has in his Les
Enfants, Livre des Mères, written for them. It is to be observed that the
suggestion comes, with Hugo, chiefly from the children of his family; from
his brother Eugène, who died an early death; from his daughter, whom he
mourns in tender verse; and from his grandchildren. One feels the sincerity
of a great poet when he draws the inspiration for such themes from his own
familiar kind.
It may be said in general of the contribution made to this literature by the
French that it partakes of those qualities of lightness and grace which mark
the greater literature; that the image of childhood is a joyous, innocent one,
and satisfies the eye that looks for beauty and delicacy. Sentiment
predominates, but it is a sentiment that makes little draught upon thought.
There is a disposition now to regard children as dolls and playthings, the
amusement of the hour; now to make them the object of an attitudinizing
sentiment, which is practically wasted unless there be some one at hand to
applaud it.

II

When we pass from France to Germany we are aware that, however we
may use the same terms, and recognize the existence of sentiment as a
strong element in the literature of both countries, there is a radical
difference in tone. It is not merely that French sentiment is graceful and

German sentiment clumsy: the grace of the one connects itself with a fine
art,—we feel an instinctive good taste in its expression; in the other, the
awkwardness, the obtrusiveness, seem to be the issue of an excess of
natural and homely feeling. It would be too much to say that French
sentiment is insincere and German sentiment unpleasantly sincere; that the
one is assumed and the other uncalculating,—we cannot thus dismiss
elementary feeling in two great peoples. But an Englishman or American, to
whom, in his reserve, the sentiment of either nation is apt to be a little
oppressive, is very likely to smile at the French and feel uncomfortable in
the presence of the German; to regard the French feeling as a temporary
mood, the German as a permanent state.
Be this as it may, it is true that the German feeling with regard to
childhood, as it finds expression in life and literature, revolves very closely
about the child in its home, not the child as a charming object in nature.
Childhood, in German literature, is conceived very generally in its purely
domestic relations, and is so positive an element as to have attracted the
attention of other nations, and even to have given rise to a petty cult.
Coleridge, writing from Germany in 1799, reports to his English readers, as
something strange to himself, and of local significance only, the custom of
Christmas gifts from parents to children and from children to parents. He is
especially struck with the custom of representing these presents as coming
from Jesus Christ.
The whole structure of Santa Claus and Kriss Kringle, the Christ Child
and Pelznichel, with the attendant ceremonies of the Christmas tree, is built
into the child life of Germany and the Low Countries; and it is by the
energy of this childish miracle that it has passed over into English, and
especially into American life. All this warmth of domestic feeling is by no
means a modern discovery. It is a prime characteristic of the Germanic
people, and one strong reason for the ascendency of Lutheranism may be
found in the singular exposition of the German character which Luther
presented. He was not merely a man of the people; through his life and
writings and organizing faculty he impressed himself positively on the
German national character, not turning it aside, but deepening the channels
in which it ran. Certain it is that the luxuriance of his nature was almost
riotous on the side of family life. “The leader of the age,” says Canon
Mozley, “and the adviser of princes, affecting no station and courting no

great men, was externally one of the common crowd, and the plainest of it.
In domestic life the same heart and nature appear. There he overflows with
affection, warmth, tenderness; with all the amiable banter of the husband,
and all the sweet arts and pretty nonsense of a father among his little
children. Whether he is joking, lecturing his ‘rib Catharine,’ his ‘gracious
dame Catharine,’ or writing a description of fairyland and horses with silver
saddles to his ‘voracious, bibacious, loquacious,’ little John; or whether he
is in the agony of grief over the death-bed of his favorite daughter,
Magdalene, we see the same exuberant, tender character.”[34]
In this sketch of Luther we may read some of the general characteristics
of the Germanic life, and we are ready, at the first suggestion, to assent to
the proposition that the German people, judged by the apparatus of
childhood, books, pictures, toys, and schools, stands before other nations.
The material for the portraiture of childhood has been abundant; the social
history, the biographies, give constant intimations of the fullness with
which family life, inclosing childhood, has been dwelt upon in the mind.
The autobiographies of poets and novelists almost invariably give great
attention to the period of childhood. A very interesting illustration of this
may be found in the life of Richter, who stands at the head of the great
Germans in his portrayal of childhood.
“Men who have a firm hold on nothing else,” says Richter in his brief
autobiography, “delight in deep, far-reaching recollection of their days of
childhood, and in this billowy existence they anchor on that, far more than
on the thought of later difficulties. Perhaps for two reasons: that in this
retrospection they press nearer to the gate of life guarded by spiritual
existences; and secondly, that they hope, in the spiritual power of an earlier
consciousness, to make themselves independent of the little, contemptible
annoyances that surround humanity.” He then recites an incident from his
second year, and continues: “This little morning-star of earliest recollection
stands yet tolerably clear in its low horizon, but growing paler as the
daylight of life rises higher. And now I remember only this clearly, that in
earlier life I remembered everything clearly.”
How clearly will be apparent to the reader who follows Richter through
the minute and detailed narrative of his childish life, and in his writings the
images of this early life are constantly reappearing under different forms.
Something is no doubt due to the early birth in Richter of a self-

consciousness, bred in part by the solitude of his life. It may be said with
some assurance that the vividness of early recollection has much to do with
determining the poet and novelist and essayist in his choice of themes
bearing directly upon childhood. The childish experience of Wordsworth,
De Quincey, Dickens, Lamartine, and Richter is clearly traceable in the
writings of these men. If they look into their own hearts and write, the
images which they bring forth are so abundantly of childhood that they
cannot avoid making use of them, especially since they retain recollections
which demand the interpretation of the maturer mind. That they should so
freely draw from this storehouse of childish experience reflects also the
temper of the age for which they write. The fullness with which the themes
of childhood are treated means not that a few men have suddenly
discovered the subject, but that all are sensitive to these same impressions.
It is not, however, the vividness of recollection alone, but the early birth
of consciousness, which will determine the treatment of the subject. If one
remember the facts of his early years rather than how he thought and felt
about those facts, he will be less inclined to dwell upon the facts afterward,
or make use of them in his work. They will have little significance to him. A
distinction in this view is to be observed between Richter and Goethe. The
autobiographies of the two men reveal the different impressions made upon
them by their childhood. The facts which Goethe recalls are but little
associated with contemporaneous reflection upon the facts, and they serve
but a trifling purpose in Goethe’s art. The facts which Richter recalls are
imbedded in a distinct conception regarding them, and perform a very
positive function in his art.
The character of Mignon may be dismissed from special consideration,
for it is clear that Goethe used Mignon’s diminutiveness and implied youth
only to heighten the effect of her elfish and dwarfish nature. The most
considerable reference to childhood is perhaps in the Sorrows of Young
Werther, where the relations between Werther and Charlotte comprise a
sketchy group of children who act as foils or accompaniments to the pair.
Werther discovers Charlotte, it will be remembered, cutting slices of bread
for her younger brothers and sisters; it is by this means that Goethe would
give a charm to the character, presenting it in its homely, domestic setting.
But his purpose is also to intimate the exceeding sensibility of Werther, and
he represents him as taking a most affectionate interest in the little children

whom he sees on his walks. I suspect, indeed, that Goethe in this has
distinctly borrowed from the Vicar of Wakefield; at any rate, the
comparison is easily suggested, and one brings away the impression of
Goldsmith’s genuine feeling and of Goethe’s deliberate assumption of a
feeling for artistic purposes. Nevertheless, Goethe makes very positive use
of childhood in this novel, not only through the figures of children, but also
through the sentiment of childhood.
“Nothing on this earth, my dear Wilhelm,” says Werther, “affects my
heart so much as children. When I consider them; when I mark in the little
creatures the seeds of all those virtues and qualities which they will one day
find so indispensable; when I behold in the obstinate all the future firmness
and constancy of a noble character, in the capricious that levity and gayety
of temper which will carry them lightly over the dangers and troubles of
life, their whole nature simple and unpolluted, then I call to mind the golden
words of the Great Teacher of mankind: ‘Except ye become as little
children.’ And now, my friend, these children, who are our equals, whom
we ought to consider as our models, we treat as subjects. They are allowed
no will of their own! And have we then none ourselves? Whence comes our
exclusive right? Is it because we are older and more experienced? Great
God! from the height of thy heaven, thou beholdest great children and little
children, and no others; and thy Son has long since declared which afford
the greatest pleasure. But they believe in him, and hear him not,—that too is
an old story; and they train their children after their own image.”
We must regard this as a somewhat distorted application of the words of
the gospel, but it is interesting as denoting that Goethe also, who stood so
much in the centre of illumination, had perceived the revealing light to fall
upon the heads of young children. It is not, however, so much by his direct
as by his indirect influence that Goethe is connected with our subject. If
Luther was both an exponent of German feeling and a determining cause of
its direction, Goethe occupies a similar relation as an expression of German
intellectualism and a stimulator of German thought. A hundred years after
his birth, when measures were taking to celebrate the centenary by the
establishment of some educational foundation to bear his name, the
enthusiastic supporters of Froebel sought to divert public interest into the
channel of this movement for the cultivation of childhood. Froebel’s
philosophy has affected modern educational systems even where his

method has not been scrupulously followed. Its influence upon literature
and art can scarcely be traced, except so far as it has tended to give
direction and set limits to the great body of books and pictures, which,
made for children, are also expository and illustrative of the life of children.
I mention him simply as an additional illustration of the grasp which the
whole subject of childhood has obtained in Germany; it has made itself felt
in religion and politics; so revolutionary was Froebel’s philosophy held to
be that his schools were suppressed at one time by the government as
tending to subvert the state. This was not strange, since Froebel’s own view
as to the education of children was radical and comprehensive.
A child’s life finds its chief expression in play, and in play its social
instincts are developed. Now the kindergarten recognizes the fact that play
is the child’s business, not his recreation, and undertakes to guide and form
the child through play. It converts that which would otherwise be aimless or
willful into creative, orderly, and governed action. Out of the play as
governed by the wise kindergartner grows a spirit of courtesy, self-control,
forbearance, unselfishness. The whole force of the education is directed
toward a development of the child which never forgets that he is a person in
harmonious relation to others. Community, not competition, is the
watchword of the school. In this view the kindergarten has its basis in the
same law which lies at the foundation of a free republic. Obedience, as
taught by the system of public schools, is an obedience to rules; it may be
likened to the obedience of the soldier,—a noble thing, but not the highest
form of human subjection of the will. Obedience as evolved in the true
kindergarten is a conscious obedience to law. The unity of life in the school,
with entire freedom of development in the individual, is the aim of the
kindergarten.

The enthusiasm which made itself felt in France in the rise of the
romantic school, with its expression chiefly through poetry, the drama, and
fiction, disclosed its power likewise in Germany. There, however, other
channels offered a course for the new current. The rise of the school of
religious painters, of which Overbeck and Cornelius were eminent
examples, was a distinct issue of the movement of the times. It was
regarded as reactionary by some, but its reaction was rather in form than in
spirit. It ran counter to a Philistinism which was complacent and indifferent

to spiritual life, and it sought to embody its ideas in forms which not only
Philistinism but humanism contemned, yet it was all the while working in
the interest of a higher freedom. It is noticeable, therefore, that this religious
art, in its choice of subjects, not only resorted to the early ecclesiological
type, but struck out into a new path, choosing themes which imply a
subjective view of Christianity. Thus, Overbeck’s picture of Christ blessing
little children, a subject which is a favorite one of modern religious art, is a
distinct recognition of modern sentiment. Here is the relation borne by the
Christ to little children presented by a religious art, which, however much it
might seek to reinstate the old forms, could not help being affected by the
new life of Christianity. Overbeck went to the early Florentines for his
masters, but he did not find this subject among their works. He caught it
from the new reading of the old gospel.

VIII
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

As Overbeck and his school returned to the religious art which preceded
the Renaissance, so Thorwaldsen, like Canova and lesser men, turned back
to Greek art, and was working contemporaneously with Overbeck at Rome
in a very different temper. To him the central figure of Christianity was not
a child in its mother’s arms, but a strong, thoughtful man; for childhood he
turned to the sportive conception of Amor, which he embodied in a great
variety of forms. The myth appealed, aside from the opportunity which it
offered for the expression of sensuous beauty, to his northern love of
fairyland. His countryman, Andersen, tells us how, when they were all
seated in the dusk, Thorwaldsen would come from his work and beg for a
fairy-tale.
It is Andersen himself who has made the most unique contribution not
only to the literature which children read, but to that which is illustrative of
childhood. He attained his eminence sheerly by the exhibition of a power
which resulted from his information by the spirit of childhood. He was not
only an interpreter of childhood; he was the first child who made a real
contribution to literature. The work by which he is best known is nothing
more nor less than an artistic creation of precisely the order which is
common among children.
It is customary to speak of his best known short stories as fairy tales;
wonder-stories is in some respects a more exact description, but the name
has hardly a native sound. Andersen himself classed his stories under the
two heads of historier and eventyr; the historier corresponds well enough
with its English mate, being the history of human action, or, since it is a
short history, the story; the eventyr, more nearly allied perhaps to the
German abenteuer than to the English adventure, presumes an element of
strangeness causing wonder, while it does not necessarily demand the
machinery of the supernatural. When we speak of fairy tales, we have
before our minds the existence, for artistic purposes, of a spiritual world
peopled with beings that exercise themselves in human affairs, and are

endowed in the main with human attributes, though possessed of certain
ethereal advantages, and generally under orders from some superior power,
often dimly understood as fate; the Italians, indeed, call the fairy fata. In a
rough way we include under the title of fairies all the terrible and grotesque
shapes as well, and this world of spiritual beings is made to consist of
giants, ogres, brownies, pixies, nisses, gnomes, elves, and whatever other
creatures have found in it a local habitation and name. The fairy itself is
generally represented as very diminutive, the result, apparently, of an
attempted compromise between the imagination and the senses, by which
the existence of fairies for certain purposes is conceded on condition they
shall be made so small that the senses may be excused from recognizing
them.
The belief in fairies gave rise to the genuine fairy tale, which is now an
acknowledged classic, and the gradual elimination of this belief from the
civilized mind has been attended with some awkwardness. These creations
of fancy—if we must so dismiss them—had secured a somewhat positive
recognition in literature before it was finally discovered that they came out
of the unseen and therefore could have no life. Once received into literature
they could not well be ignored, but the understanding, which appears to
serve as special police in such cases, now has orders to admit no new-
comers unless they answer to one of three classes: either they must be direct
descendants of the fairies of literature, having certain marks about them to
indicate their parentage, or they must be teachers of morality thus disguised,
or they may be mere masqueraders; one thing is certain, they must spring
from no belief in fairy life, but be one and all referred to some sufficient
cause,—a dream, a moral lesson, a chemical experiment. But it is found that
literature has its own sympathies, not always compassed by the mere
understanding, and the consequence is that the sham fairies in the sham
fairy tales never really get into literature at all, but disappear in limbo;
while every now and then a genuine fairy, born of a genuine, poetic belief,
secures a place in spite of the vigilance of the guard.
Perhaps nothing has done more to vulgarize the fairy than its introduction
upon the stage; the charm of the fairy tale is in its divorce from human
experience; the charm of the stage is in its realization, in miniature, of
human life. If the frog is heard to speak, if the dog is turned before one’s
eyes into a prince, by having cold water dashed over it, the charm of the

fairy tale has fled, and in its place we have only the perplexing pleasure of
legerdemain. The effect of producing these scenes upon the stage is to bring
them one step nearer to sensuous reality, and one step further from
imaginative reality; and since the real life of fairy is in the imagination, a
wrong is committed when it is dragged from its shadowy hiding-place and
made to turn into ashes under the calcium light of the understanding.
By a tacit agreement fairy tales have come to be consigned to the
nursery; the old tools of superstition have become the child’s toys, and
when a writer comes forward, now, bringing new fairy tales, it is almost
always with an apology, not for trespassing upon ground already occupied,
but for indulging in what is no longer belief, but make-belief. “My story,”
he is apt to say, “is not true; we none of us believe it, and I shall give you
good evidence before I am done that least of all do I believe it. I shall
probably explain it by referring it to a strange dream, or shall justify it by
the excellent lesson it is to teach. I adopt the fairy form as suited to the
imagination of children; it is a childish thing, and I am half ashamed, as a
grown person, to be found engaged in such nonsense.” Out of this way of
regarding fairy tales has come that peculiar monstrosity of the times, the
scientific fairy tale, which is nothing short of an insult to a whole race of
innocent beings. It may be accepted as a foregone conclusion that with a
disbelief in fairies the genuine fairy tale has died, and that it is better to
content ourselves with those stories which sprang from actual belief, telling
them over to successive generations of children, than to seek to extend the
literature by any ingenuity of modern skepticism. There they are, the fairy
tales without authorship, as imperishable as nursery ditties; scholarly
collections of them may be made, but they will have their true preservation,
not as specimens in a museum of literary curiosities, but as children’s toys.
Like the sleeping princess in the wood, the fairy tale may be hedged about
with bristling notes and thickets of commentaries, but the child will pass
straight to the beauty, and awaken for his own delight the old charmed life.
It is worth noting, then, that just when historical criticism, under the
impulse of the Grimms, was ordering and accounting for these fragile
creations,—a sure mark that they were ceasing to exist as living forms in
literature,—Hans Christian Andersen should have come forward as master
in a new order of stories, which may be regarded as the true literary
successor to the old order of fairy tales, answering the demands of a spirit

which rejects the pale ghost of the scientific or moral or jocular or pedantic
fairy tale. Andersen, indeed, has invented fairy tales purely such, and has
given form and enduring substance to traditional stories current in
Scandinavia; but it is not upon such work that his real fame rests, and it is
certain that while he will be mentioned in the biographical dictionaries as
the writer of novels, poems, romances, dramas, sketches of travel, and an
autobiography, he will be known and read as the author of certain short
stories, of which the charm at first glance seems to be in the sudden
discovery of life and humor in what are ordinarily regarded as inanimate
objects, or what are somewhat compassionately called dumb animals. When
we have read and studied the stories further, and perceived their ingenuity
and wit and humane philosophy, we can after all give no better account of
their charm than just this, that they disclose the possible or fancied parallel
to human life carried on by what our senses tell us has no life, or our reason
assures us has no rational power.
The life which Andersen sets before us is in fact a dramatic
representation upon an imaginary stage, with puppets that are not pulled by
strings, but have their own muscular and nervous economy. The life which
he displays is not a travesty of human life, it is human life repeated in
miniature under conditions which give a charming and unexpected variety.
By some transmigration, souls have passed into tin-soldiers, balls, tops,
beetles, money-pigs, coins, shoes, leap-frogs, matches, and even such
attenuated individualities as darning-needles; and when, informing these
apparently dead or stupid bodies, they begin to make manifestations, it is
always in perfect consistency with the ordinary conditions of the bodies
they occupy, though the several objects become by this endowment of souls
suddenly expanded in their capacity. Perhaps in nothing is Andersen’s
delicacy of artistic feeling better shown than in the manner in which he
deals with his animated creations when they are brought into direct relations
with human beings. The absurdity which the bald understanding perceives
is dexterously suppressed by a reduction of all the factors to one common
term. For example, in his story of The Leap-Frog, he tells how a flea, a
grasshopper and a leap-frog once wanted to see which could jump highest,
and invited the whole world “and everybody else besides who chose to
come,” to see the performance. The king promised to give his daughter to
the one who jumped the highest, for it was stale fun when there was no
prize to jump for. The flea and the grasshopper came forward in turn and

put in their claims; the leap-frog also appeared, but was silent. The flea
jumped so high that nobody could see where he went to, so they all asserted
that he had not jumped at all; the grasshopper jumped in the king’s face, and
was set down as an ill-mannered thing; the leap-frog, after reflection, leaped
into the lap of the princess, and thereupon the king said, “There is nothing
above my daughter; therefore to bound up to her is the highest jump that
can be made: but for this, one must possess understanding, and the leap-
frog has shown that he has understanding. He is brave and intellectual.”
“And so,” the story declares, “he won the princess.” The barren absurdity of
a leap-frog marrying a princess is perhaps the first thing that strikes the
impartial reader of this abstract, and there is very likely something offensive
to him in the notion; but in the story itself this absurdity is so delightfully
veiled by the succession of happy turns in the characterization of the three
jumpers, as well as of the old king, the house-dog, and the old councilor
“who had had three orders given him to make him hold his tongue,” that the
final impression upon the mind is that of a harmonizing of all the
characters, and the king, princess, and councilor can scarcely be
distinguished in kind from the flea, grasshopper, leap-frog, and house-dog.
After that, the marriage of the leap-frog and princess is quite a matter of
course.
The use of speaking animals in story was no discovery of Andersen’s,
and yet in the distinction between his wonder-story and the well-known
fable lies an explanation of the charm which attaches to his work. The end
of every fable is hæc fabula docet, and it was for this palpable end that the
fable was created. The lion, the fox, the mouse, the dog, are in a very
limited way true to the accepted nature of the animals which they represent,
and their intercourse with each other is governed by the ordinary rules of
animal life, but the actions and words are distinctly illustrative of some
morality. The fable is an animated proverb. The animals are made to act and
speak in accordance with some intended lesson, and have this for the reason
of their being. The lesson is first; the characters, created afterward, are, for
purposes of the teacher, disguised as animals; very little of the animal
appears, but very much of the lesson. The art which invented the fable was
a modest handmaid to morality. In Andersen’s stories, however, the spring
is not in the didactic but in the imaginative. He sees the beetle in the
imperial stable stretching out his thin legs to be shod with golden shoes like
the emperor’s favorite horse, and the personality of the beetle determines

the movement of the story throughout; egotism, pride at being proud,
jealousy, and unbounded self-conceit are the furniture of this beetle’s soul,
and his adventures one by one disclose his character. Is there a lesson in all
this? Precisely as there is a lesson in any picture of human life where the
same traits are sketched. The beetle, after all his adventures, some of them
ignominious but none expelling his self-conceit, finds himself again in the
emperor’s stable, having solved the problem why the emperor’s horse had
golden shoes. “They were given to the horse on my account,” he says, and
adds, “the world is not so bad after all, but one must know how to take
things as they come.” There is in this and other of Andersen’s stories a
singular shrewdness, as of a very keen observer of life, singular because at
first blush the author seems to be a sentimentalist. The satires, like The
Emperor’s New Clothes and The Swiftest Runners, mark this characteristic
of shrewd observation very cleverly. Perhaps, after all, we are stating most
simply the distinction between his story and the fable when we say that
humor is a prominent element in the one and absent in the other; and to say
that there is humor is to say that there is real life.
It is frequently said that Andersen’s stories accomplish their purpose of
amusing children by being childish, yet it is impossible for a mature person
to read them without detecting repeatedly the marks of experience. There is
a subtle undercurrent of wisdom that has nothing to do with childishness,
and the child who is entertained returns to the same story afterward to find a
deeper significance than it was possible for him to apprehend at the first
reading. The forms and the incident are in consonance with childish
experience, but the spirit which moves through the story comes from a mind
that has seen and felt the analogue of the story in some broader or coarser
form. The story of The Ugly Duckling is an inimitable presentation of
Andersen’s own tearful and finally triumphant life; yet no child who reads
the story has its sympathy for a moment withdrawn from the duckling and
transferred to a human being. Andersen’s nice sense of artistic limitations
saves him from making the older thought obtrude itself upon the notice of
children, and his power of placing himself at the same angle of vision with
children is remarkably shown in one instance, where, in Little Klaus and
Big Klaus, death is treated as a mere incident in the story, a surprise but not
a terror.

The naïveté which is so conspicuous an element in Andersen’s stories
was an expression of his own singularly artless nature. He was a child all
his life; his was a condition of almost arrested development. He was
obedient to the demands of his spiritual nature, and these led him into a
fresh field of fancy and imagination. What separates him and gives him a
distinct place in literature is, as I have said, that he was the first child who
had contributed to literature. His very autobiography discloses at every turn
this controlling genius of childhood, and the testimony of his friends
confirms it.
Now that Andersen has told his stories, it seems an easy thing to do, and
we have plenty of stories written for children that attempt the same thing,
sometimes also with moderate success; for Andersen’s discovery was after
all but the simple application to literature of a faculty which has always
been exercised. The likeness that things inanimate have to things animate is
constantly forced upon us; it remained for Andersen to pursue the
comparison further, and, letting types loose from their antitypes, to give
them independent existence. The result has been a surprise in literature and
a genuine addition to literary forms. It is possible to follow in his steps, now
that he has shown us the way, but it is no less evident that the success which
he attained was due not merely to his happy discovery of a latent property,
but to the nice feeling and strict obedience to laws of art with which he
made use of his discovery. Andersen’s genius enabled him to see the soul in
a darning-needle, and he perceived also the limitations of the life he was to
portray, so that while he was often on the edge of absurdity he did not lose
his balance. Especially is it to be noted that these stories, which we regard
as giving an opportunity for invention when the series of old-fashioned
fairy tales had been closed, show clearly the coming in of that temper in
novel-writing which is eager to describe things as they are. Within the
narrow limits of his miniature story, Andersen moves us by the same
impulse as the modern novelist who depends for his material upon what he
has actually seen and heard, and for his inspiration upon the power to
penetrate the heart of things; so that the old fairy tale finds its successor in
this new realistic wonder-story, just as the old romance gives place to the
new novel. In both, as in the corresponding development of poetry and
painting, is found a deeper sense of life and a finer perception of the
intrinsic value of common forms.

This, then, may be taken as the peculiar contribution of Andersen: that
he, appearing at a time when childhood had been laid open to view as a real
and indestructible part of human life, was the interpreter to the world of that
creative power which is significant of childhood. The child spoke through
him, and disclosed some secrets of life; childhood in men heard the speech,
and recognized it as an echo of their own half-forgotten voices. The
literature of this kind which he produced has become a distinct and new
form. It already has its imitations, and people are said to write in the vein of
Andersen. Such work, and Andersen’s in particular, presents itself to us
under two aspects: as literature in which conceptions of childhood are
embodied, and as literature which feeds and stimulates the imagination of
children. But this is precisely the way in which a large body of current
literature must be regarded.

IX
IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART

The conditions of life in the United States have been most favorable to
the growth of a special literature for children, but, with one or two notable
exceptions, the literature which is independent of special audiences has had
little to do with childhood as a subject, and art has been singularly silent.
There is scarcely anything in Irving, for example, which touches upon child
life. A sentence now and then in Emerson shows an insight of youth, as
when he speaks of the unerring instinct with which a boy tells off in his
mind the characters of the company in a room. Bryant has touched the
subject more nearly, but chiefly in a half-fantastic way, in his Little People
of the Snow and Sella. Thoreau could hardly be expected to concern
himself with the young of the human race when he had nearer neighbors
and their offspring. Lowell has answered the appeal which the death of
children makes to the heart, but aside from his tender elegiac verses has
scarcely dwelt on childhood either in prose or verse. Holmes, with his
boyishness of temper, has caught occasionally at the ebullition of youthful
spirits, as in the humorous figure of young Benjamin Franklin in the
Autocrat, and in some of his autobiographic sketches. His School-Boy, also,
adds another to those charming memories of youth which have made
Cowper, Goldsmith, and Gray known to readers who else would scarcely
have been drawn to them; for the one unfailing poetic theme which finds a
listener who has passed his youth is the imaginative rendering of that youth.
Whittier, though his crystalline verse flows through the memory of many
children, has contributed very little to the portrayal of childhood. His
portrait of the Barefoot Boy and his tender recollection In School Days are
the only poems which deal directly with the subject, and neither of them is
wholly objective. They are a mature man’s reflection of childhood. Snow-
Bound rests upon the remembrance of boyish days, but it deals rather with
the circumstance of boyhood than with the boy’s thoughts or feelings. Yet
the poet shows unmistakably his sense of childhood, although one would
not be far wrong who understood him as never separating the spirit of

childhood from the human life at any stage. His editorial work in the two
volumes, Child-Life in Poetry and Child-Life in Prose, is an indication of
his interest in the subject, and he was quick to catch the existence of the
sentiment in its association with another poet, whose name is more directly
connected with childhood. In his verses, The Poet and the Children, he gave
expression to the thought which occurred to many as they considered how
soon Longfellow’s death followed upon the spontaneous celebration of his
birthday by multitudes of children.
This testimony to Longfellow was scarcely the result of what he had
written either for or of children. It was rather a natural tribute to a poet who
had made himself a household word in American homes. Children are
brought up on poetry to a considerable extent; they are, moreover, under
training for the most part by young women, and the pure sentiment which
forms the unfailing element of Longfellow’s writings finds in such teachers
the readiest response. When one comes to consider the subjects of
Longfellow’s poetry, one finds that the number addressed to children, or
finding their motive in childhood, is not large. Those of direct address are,
To a Child, From my Arm-Chair, Weariness, Children; yet which of these
demands or would receive a response from children? Only one, From my
Arm-Chair, and that chiefly by the circumstance which called it out, and on
which the poet relies for holding the direct attention of children. He gets far
away from most children before he has reached the end of his poem To a
Child, and in the other two poems we hear only the voice of a man in whom
the presence of children awakens thoughts which lie too deep for their tears,
though not for his.
Turning aside from those which appeal in form to children, one finds
several which, like those last named, are evoked by the sentiment which
childhood suggests. Such are The Reaper and the Flowers, Resignation, The
Children’s Hour, and A Shadow, all in the minor key except The Children’s
Hour; and this poem, perfect as it is in a father’s apprehension, yields only a
subtle and half-understood fragrance to a child. One poem partly rests on a
man’s thought of his own childhood, My Lost Youth; The Hanging of the
Crane contains for its best lines a vignette of infancy; a narrative poem, The
Wreck of the Hesperus, has for its chief figure a child; and Hiawatha is
bright with a sketch of Indian boyhood. The translations show two or three
which include this subject.

While, therefore, Longfellow is repeatedly aware of the presence of
children, it is not by the poems which spring out of that recognition that he
especially reaches them. In his poem From my Arm-Chair, he refers to The
Village Blacksmith; that has a single verse in which children figure, but the
whole poem will arrest the attention of children far more than From my
Arm-Chair, and it belongs to them more. It cannot be too often repeated that
books and poems about children are not necessarily for children. The
thoughts which the man has of the child often depend wholly upon the fact
that he has passed beyond childhood, and looks back upon it; it is
impossible for the child to stand by his side. Thus the poem Weariness
contains the reflection of a man who anticipates the after life of children;
there is nothing in it which belongs to the reflection of childhood itself.
Tennyson’s May Queen, which has found its way into most of our
anthologies for the young, is a notable example of a large class of verses
quite unfit for such a place. It may be said in general that sentiment, when
made a part of childhood, is very sure to be morbid and unnatural. We have
a sentiment which rises at the sight of childhood, but children themselves
have none of it; the more refined it is, the more unfit it is to go into their
books.
Here is a collection of poetry for children, having all the marks of a
sound and reputable work. As I turn its leaves, I come upon a long ballad of
The Dying Child, Longfellow’s The Reaper and the Flowers, a poem called
The Little Girl’s Lament, in which a child asks, “Is heaven a long way off,
mother?” and for two or three pages dwells upon a child’s pain at the loss of
her father; Tennyson’s May Queen, who is so unconscionably long a time
dying; Mrs. Hemans’s imitation of Mignon’s song in a poem called The
Better Land; and a poem by Dora Greenwell which I must regard as the
most admirable example of what a poem for a child should not be. It is
entitled A Story by the Fire, and begins,—

“Children love to hear of children!
I will tell of a little child
Who dwelt alone with his mother
By the edge of a forest wild.
One summer eve, from the forest,
Late, late, down the grassy track
The child came back with lingering step,

And looks oft turning back.

“‘Oh, mother!’ he said, ‘in the forest
I have met with a little child;
All day he played with me,—all day
He talked with me and smiled.
At last he left me alone, but then
He gave me this rosebud red;
And said he would come to me again
When all its leaves were spread.’”
Thereupon the child declares that it will put the rosebud in a glass, and wait
eagerly for the friend to come. So the night goes and the morning comes,
and the child sleeps.

“The mother went to his little room.
With all its leaves outspread
She saw a rose in fullest bloom;
And, in the little bed,
A child that did not breathe nor stir,—
A little, happy child,
Who had met his little friend again,
And in the meeting smiled.”

Here is a fantastic conception, extremely puzzling to a healthy-minded
child. Imagine the natural questions of a simple, ingenuous boy or girl upon
hearing this read. Who is this other child? Why was he coming back when
the rose was blown? You explain, as well as you are able, that it was a
phantom of death; or, if that seems too pallid, you try to imagine that the
poet meant Jesus Christ or an angel by this other little child: but, in
whatever way you explain it, you are obliged, if you will satisfy the
downright little inquirer, to say plainly, This little boy died, and you begin
to wish with all your heart that the poet with all her ed rhymes had added
dead. Then the puzzle begins over again to connect the blooming rose and
the little playmate with death. Do you say that you will leave the delicate
suggestion of the lines to find its way into the child’s mind, and be the
interpreter of the poem? This is what one might plead in Wordsworth’s We
are Seven, for instance. The comparison suggested by the two poems is a

partial answer. Wordsworth’s poem is a plain, objective narrative, which a
child might hear and enjoy with scarcely a notion of what was implied in it,
returning afterward to the deep, underlying sense. This poem of Dora
Greenwell’s has no real objective character; the incident of the walk in the
forest is of the most shadowy sort, and is used for its subtlety. I object to
subtlety in literature for children. We have a right to demand that there shall
be a clear outward sense, whatever may be the deeper meaning to older
people. Hans Andersen’s story of The Ugly Duckling is a consummate
example of a narrative which is enjoyable by the most matter-of-fact child,
and yet recalls to the older reader a life’s history.
I have been led into a long digression through the natural correlation
which exists between childhood in literature and a literature for children.
Let me get back to my main topic by a similar path. The one author in
America whose works yield the most fruitful examples in illustration of our
subject is Hawthorne, and at the same time he is the most masterly of all
our authors who have aimed at writing for an audience of children.
Whatever may become of the great mass of books for young people
published in America during the past fifty years,—and most of it is already
crumbling in memory,—it requires no heroism to predict an immortality of
fame for the little books which Hawthorne wrote with so much good nature
and evident pleasure, Grandfather’s Chair and the Wonder Book, with its
companion, Tanglewood Tales. Mr. Parkman has given a new reading in the
minds of many people to the troubles in Acadia, but he has not disturbed the
vitality of Evangeline; one may add footnote after footnote to modify or
correct the statements in The Courtship of Miles Standish, but the poem
will continue to be accepted as a picture of Pilgrim times. So the researches
of antiquarians, with more material at their command than Hawthorne
enjoyed, may lead them to different conclusions from those which he
reached in his sketches of early New England history, but they cannot
destroy that charm in the rendering which makes the book a classic.
More notable still is Hawthorne’s version of Greek myths. Probably he
had no further authority for the stories than Lemprière. He only added the
touch of his own genius. Only! and the old rods blossomed with a new
variety of fruit and flower. It is easily said that Hawthorne Yankeeized the
stories, that he used the Greek stones for constructing a Gothic building, but
this is academic criticism. He really succeeded in naturalizing the Greek

myths in American soil, and all the labors of all the Coxes will not succeed
in supplanting them. Moreover, I venture to think that Hawthorne’s fame is
more firmly fixed by means of the Wonder Book. The presence of an
audience of children had a singular power over him. I do not care for the
embroidery of actual child life which he has devised for these tales; it is
scarcely more than a fashion, and already strikes one as quaint and out of
date. But I cannot read the tales themselves without being aware that
Hawthorne was breathing one air when he was writing them and another
when he was at work on his romances. He illustrates in a delicate and subtle
manner the line of Juvenal which bids the old remember the respect due to
the young. Juvenal uses it to shame men into decorum; but just as any
sensitive person will restrain himself in expression before children, so
Hawthorne appears to have restrained his thought in their silent presence,—
to have done this, and also to have admitted into it the sunshine which their
presence brought. With what bright and joyous playfulness he repeats the
old stories, and with what a paternal air he makes the tales yield their
morsels of wisdom! There is no opening of dark passages, no peering into
recesses, but a happy, generous spirit reigns throughout.
All this could have been predicated from the delightful glimpses which
we now have of Hawthorne’s relations to his children, glimpses which his
Note-Books, indeed, had already afforded, and which were not wanting also
in his finished work. Nor was this interest in childhood something which
sprang up after he had children of his own. In that lonely period of his
young manhood, when he held converse only with himself, his Note-Books
attest how his observation took in the young and his fancy played about
them. As early as 1836 he makes a note: “To picture a child’s (one of four
or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s day,—his first
awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a
whipping, etc.” Again, how delicate is the hint conveyed in a passage
describing one of his solitary walks! “Another time I came suddenly on a
small Canadian boy, who was in a hollow place among the ruined logs of an
old causeway, picking raspberries,—lonely among bushes and gorges, far
up the wild valley; and the lonelier seemed the little boy for the bright
sunshine, that showed no one else in a wide space of view except him and
me.” He has elsewhere a quick picture of a boy running at full speed; a
wistful look at a sleeping infant, which somehow touches one almost as if
one had seen a sketch for a Madonna; and then this passage, significant of

the working of his mind,—he is noting a Mediterranean boy from Malaga
whom he saw on the wharf: “I must remember this little boy, and perhaps I
may make something more beautiful of him than these rough and imperfect
touches would promise.”
The relation which Hawthorne held to his own children, as illustrated
both in the memoirs of him and in his Note-Books, was unquestionably a
sign of that profound humanity which was the deep spring of his writings.
But it was not, as some seem to think, a selfish love which he bore for
them; he could show to them, because the relation was one of the elemental
things in nature, a fullness of feeling which found expression otherwise
only as all his nature found outlet,—in spiritual communion with mankind.
How deep this inherent love of childhood lay is instanced in that passage in
Our Old Home which one reads as it were with uncovered head. It is in the
chapter entitled Some Glimpses of English Poverty, and relates how one of
the party visiting an almshouse—Hawthorne himself, as his wife has since
told us—was unexpectedly and most unwillingly made the object of
demonstrative attention on the part of a poor, scrofulous, repulsive waif of
humanity. Nothing that he had done had attracted the child,—only what he
was; and so, moved by compassion, this strange, shy man took the child in
his arms and kissed it. Let any one read the entire passage, note the mingled
emotions which play about the scene like a bit of iridescent glass, and dare
to speak of Hawthorne again except with reverence.
In the same chapter occurs that delicious little description of children
playing in the street, where the watchfulness of the older children over the
younger is noted, and a small brother, who is hovering about his sister, is
gravely noted as “working a kind of miracle to transport her from one dust
heap to another.” He makes the reflection, “Beholding such works of love
and duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so impossible after all for
these neglected children to find a path through the squalor and evil of their
circumstances up to the gate of heaven.”
One of the earliest and most ambitious of his short tales, The Gentle Boy,
gathers into itself the whole history of a pathetic childhood, and there seems
to have been an intention to produce in Ilbrahim precisely those features
which mark the childish martyr and confessor. Again, among the Twice-
Told Tales is the winning sketch of Little Annie’s Ramble, valuable most of
all for its unconscious testimony to the abiding sense of companionship

which Hawthorne found with children. In Edward Fane’s Rosebud, also, is
a passage referring to the death of a child, which is the only approach to the
morbid in connection with childhood that I recall in Hawthorne. Little
Daffydowndilly, a quaint apologue, has by virtue of its unquestionable
fitness found its way into all reading-books for the young.
The story, however, which all would select as most expressive of
Hawthorne’s sympathy with childhood is The Snow Image. In that the half-
conventional figures which served to introduce the stories in the Wonder
Book have passed, by a very slight transformation, into quaint
impersonations. They have the outward likeness of boys and girls, but, by
the alchemy which Hawthorne used chiefly upon men and women, they are
made to have ingenuous and artless converse with a being of other than
flesh and blood. It is the charm of this exquisite tale that the children create
the object in which they believe so implicitly. Would it be straining a point
too far to say that as Andersen managed, whether consciously or not, to
write his own spiritual biography in his tale of The Ugly Duckling, so
Hawthorne in The Snow Image saw himself as in a glass? At any rate, we
can ourselves see him reflected in those childish figures, absorbed in the
creation out of the cold snow of a sprite which cannot without peril come
too near the warm life of the common world, regarded with half-pitying
love and belief by one, good-naturedly scorned by crasser man.
In his romances children play no unimportant part. It is Ned Higgins’s
cent which does the mischief with Hepzibah, in The House of the Seven
Gables, transforming her from a shrinking gentlewoman into an ignoble
shopkeeper; and thus it becomes only right and proper that Ned Higgins’s
portrait should be drawn at full length with a gravity and seriousness which
would not be wasted on a grown man like Dixey. In The Scarlet Letter one
might almost call Pearl the central figure. Certainly, as she flashes in and
out of the sombre shadows, she contrives to touch with light one character
after another, revealing, interpreting, compelling. In the deeper lines one
reads how this child concentrates in herself the dread consequences of sin.
The Puritan, uttering the wrath of God descending from the fathers to the
children, never spoke in more searching accents than Hawthorne in the
person of Pearl. “The child,” he says, “could not be made amenable to rules.
In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a
being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in

disorder.” When one stops to think of The Scarlet Letter without Pearl, he
discovers suddenly how vital the child is to the story. The scene in the
woods, that moving passage where Pearl compels her mother to replace the
scarlet A, and all the capricious behavior toward the minister show how
much value Hawthorne placed on this figure in his drama: and when the
climax is reached, and Hester, Arthur, and Pearl stand together on the
scaffold, the supreme moment may fairly be said to be that commemorated
in the words, “Pearl kissed his lips.”
It is noteworthy, also, that when Hawthorne was struggling with fate,
and, with the consciousness of death stealing over him, made ineffectual
efforts to embody his profoundest thoughts of life and immortality, he
should have expended his chief art in loving characterization of Pansie, in
the Dolliver Romance. Whatever might have come of this last effort, could
fate have been conquered, I for one am profoundly grateful that the two
figures of grandsire and grandchild stand thus fully wrought, to guard the
gateway of Hawthorne’s passage out of life.

The advent of the child in literature at the close of the last century was
characterized, as I have pointed out, by a recognition of personality in
childhood as distinct from relationship. The child as one of the family had
always been recognized, and the child also in its more elemental nature; it
was the child as possessed of consciousness, as isolated, as disclosing a
nature capable of independent action, thought, and feeling, that now came
forward into the world’s view, and was added to the stock of the world’s
literature, philosophy, and art.
“The real virtues of one age,” says Mozley, “become the spurious ones of
the next,” and it is hardly strange that the abnormal development of this
treatment of childhood should be most apparent in the United States, where
individualism has had freest play. The discovery appears to have been made
here that the child is not merely a person, but a very free and independent
person indeed. The sixteenth amendment to the constitution reads, “The
rights and caprices of children in the United States shall not be denied or
abridged on account of age, sex, or formal condition of tutelage,” and this
amendment has been recognized in literature, as in life, while waiting its
legal adoption. It has been recognized by the silence of great literature, or

by the kind of mention which it has there received. I am speaking of the
literature which is now current rather than of that which we agree to regard
as standard American literature; yet even in that I think our study shows the
sign of what was to be. The only picture of childhood in the poets drawn
from real life is that of the country boy, while all the other references are to
an ideal conception. Hawthorne, in his isolation, wrote of a world which
was reconstructed out of elemental material, and his insight as well as his
marvelous sympathy with childhood precluded him from using diseased
forms. But since the day of these men, the literature which is most
representative of national life has been singularly devoid of reference to
childhood. One notable exception emphasizes this silence. Our keenest
social satirist has not spared the children. They are found in company with
the young American girl, and we feel the sting of the lash which falls upon
them.
Again the silence of art is noticeable. There was so little art
contemporaneous with our greater literature, and the best of that was so
closely confined to landscape, that it is all the more observable how meagre
is the show in our picture galleries of any history of childhood. Now and
then a portrait appears, the child usually of the artist’s patron, but there is
little sign that artists seek in the life of children for subjects upon which to
expend thought and power. They are not drawn to them, apparently, except
when they appear in some foreign guise as beggars, where the
picturesqueness of attire offers the chief motive.
In illustration of this, I may be pardoned if I mention my own experience
when conducting, a few years ago, an illustrated magazine for young
people. I did my best to obtain pictures of child life from painters who were
not merely professional book-illustrators, and the only two that I succeeded
in securing were one by Mr. Lambdin, and Mr. La Farge’s design
accompanying Browning’s poem of The Pied Piper. On the lower ground of
illustrations of text, it was only now and then that I was able to obtain any
simple, unaffected design, showing an understanding of a child’s figure and
face. It was commonly a young woman who was most successful, and what
her work gained in genuineness it was apt to lose in correctness of drawing.
I shall be told that matters have improved since then, and shall be pointed
to the current magazines of the same grade as the Riverside. I am quite
willing to concede that the demand for work of this kind has had the effect

of stimulating designers, but I maintain that the best illustrations in these
magazines are not those which directly represent children. And when I say
children, I mean those in whom consciousness is developed, not infants and
toddlers, who are often represented with as much cleverness as other small
animals and pets. It is more to the point that, while the introduction of
processes and the substitution of photography for direct drawing on the
wood have greatly enlarged the field from which wood-cuts may be drawn,
there is little, if any, increase in the number of strong designs illustrative of
childhood. Formerly the painter was deterred from contributing designs by
the slight mechanical difficulties of drawing on boxwood. Unless he was in
the way of such work, he disliked laying his brush down and taking up the
pencil. Now everything is done for him, and his painting is translated by the
engraver without the necessity of any help from him. Yet how rarely, with
the magazines at hand to use his paintings, does the painter voluntarily seek
such subjects!
But if there is silence or scorn in great literature, there is plenty of
expression in that minor literature which has sprung up, apparently, in the
interest of childhood. It is here, in the books for young people, that one may
discover the most flagrant illustration of that spurious individuality in
childhood which I have maintained to be conspicuous in our country. Any
one who has been compelled to make the acquaintance of this literature
must have observed how very little parents and guardians figure in it, and
how completely children are separated from their elders. The most popular
books for the young are those which represent boys and girls as seeking
their fortune, working out their own schemes, driving railway trains and
steamboats it may be, managing farms, or engaged in adventures which
elicit all their uncommon heroism. The same tendency is exhibited in less
exaggerated form: children in the schoolroom, or at play, forming clubs
amongst themselves, having their own views upon all conceivable subjects,
torturing the English language without rebuke, opening correspondence
with newspapers and magazines, starting newspapers and magazines of
their own, organizing, setting up miniature society,—this is the general
spectacle to be observed in books for young people, and the parent or two,
now and then visible, is as much in the background as the child was in
earlier literature.

All this is more or less a reflection of actual life, and as such has an
unconscious value. I would not press its significance too far, but I think it
points to a serious defect in our society life. This very ephemeral literature
is symptomatic of a condition of things, rather than causative. It has not
nearly so much influence on young life as it is itself the natural concomitant
of a maladjustment of society, and the corrective will be found only as a
healthier social condition is reached. The disintegration of the family,
through a feeble sense of the sacredness of marriage, is an evil which is not
to be remedied by any specific of law or literature, but so long as it goes on
it inevitably affects literature.
I venture to make two modest suggestions toward the solution of these
larger problems into the discussion of which our subject has led me. One is
for those who are busy with the production of books for young people.
Consider if it be not possible to report the activity and comradery of the
young in closer and more generous association with the life of their elders.
The spectacle of a healthy family life, in which children move freely and
joyously, is not so rare as to make models hard to be found, and one would
do a great service to young America who should bring back the wise mother
and father into juvenile literature.
Again, next to a purified and enriched literature of this sort is a thorough
subordination of it. The separation of a class of books for the use of the
young specifically is not now to be avoided, but in the thoughtlessness with
which it has been accepted as the only literature for the young a great
wrong has been inflicted. The lean cattle have devoured the fat. I have great
faith in the power of noble literature when brought into simple contact with
the child’s mind, always assuming that it is the literature which deals with
elemental feeling, thought, and action which is so presented. I think the
solution of the problem which vexes us will be found not so much in the
writing of good books for children as in the wise choice of those parts of the
world’s literature which contain an appeal to the child’s nature and
understanding. It is not the books written expressly for children so much as
it is the books written out of minds which have not lost their childhood that
are to form the body of literature which shall be classic for the young. As
Mr. Ruskin rightly says, “The greatest books contain food for all ages, and
an intelligent and rightly bred youth or girl ought to enjoy much even in
Plato by the time they are fifteen or sixteen.”

It may fairly be asked how we shall persuade children to read classic
literature. It is a partial answer to say, Read it to them yourself. If we would
only consider the subtle strengthening of ties which comes from two people
reading the same book together, breathing at once its breath, and each
giving the other unconsciously his interpretation of it, it would be seen how
in this simple habit of reading aloud lies a power too fine for analysis, yet
stronger than iron in welding souls together. To my thinking there is no
academy on earth equal to that found in many homes of a mother reading to
her child.
There is, however, a vast organization inclusive of childhood to which we
may justly commit the task of familiarizing children with great literature,
and of giving them a distaste for ignoble books. There is no other time of
life than that embraced by the common-school course so fit for introduction
to the highest, finest literature of the world. Our schools are too much given
over to the acquisition of knowledge. What they need is to recognize the
power which lies in enlightenment. In the susceptible period of youth we
must introduce through the medium of literature the light which will give
the eye the precious power of seeing. But look at the apparatus now in use.
Look at the reading-books which are given to children in the mechanical
system of grading. Is this feast of scraps really the best we can offer for the
intellectual and spiritual nourishment of the young? What do these books
teach the child of reading? They supply him with the power to read print at
sight, to pronounce accurately the several words that meet the eye, and to
know the time value of the several marks of punctuation; but they no more
make readers of children than an accordeon supplies one with the power to
appreciate and enjoy a sonata of Beethoven.
I do not object to intelligent drill, but I maintain that in our schools it
bears little or no relation to the actual use of the power of reading. The best
of the education of children is not their ability to take up the daily
newspaper or the monthly magazine after they leave school, but their
interest in good literature and their power to read it with apprehension if not
comprehension. This can be taught in school. Not only so, it ought to be
taught, for unless the child’s mind is plainly set in this direction, it is very
unlikely that he will find the way for himself. I look, therefore, with the
greatest interest upon that movement in our public schools which tends to
bring the great literature before children.

The study of childhood in literature has led insensibly to observations on
literature for children. The two subjects are not far apart, for both testify to
the same fact, that in the growth of human life there has been an irregular
but positive advance, and a profounder perception of the rights and duties
involved in personality.
What may lie in the future I will not venture to predict, but it is quite safe
to say that the form in which childhood is presented will still depend upon
the sympathy of imaginative writers with the ideal of childhood, and that
the form of literature for children will be determined by the greater or less
care with which society guards the sanctity of childish life.

FOOTNOTES
[1] Chapman’s The Iliads of Homer, ii. 70-77.
[2] Iliads, iv. 147-151.
[3] Iliads, xvi. 5-8.
[4] Ibid. xi. 485-490.
[5] Iliad, vi. 466-475, 482-485.
[6] Goldwin Smith’s translation.
[7] John Addington Symonds’s translation.
[8] Laws, ii. 653. In this and subsequent passages Jowett’s translation is used.
[9] Laws, vii. 797.
[10] Laws, ii. 664.
[11] Epigrammata Despota, DCCXI.
[12] D’Arcy W. Thompson, in his Ancient Leaves.
[13] Theodore Martin’s translation.
[14] Silvæ, v. 5, 79-87.
[15] Contributors’ Club, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1881.
[16] De Rerum Natura, V. 222-227, cited in Sellar’s The Roman Poets of the
Republic, p. 396.
[17] Ibid. III. 894-896. Sellar, p. 364.
[18] Satire xiv. 47.
[19] A thoughtful writer in The Spectator, 3 September, 1887, notes the
absence of representations of childhood in ancient art and literature, and the
following number of the journal contains a note of protest from Mr. Alfred
Austin, in which he says pertinently: “Is it not the foible of modern art, if I may
use a homely expression, to make a fuss over what it feels, or wants others to
feel, whereas an older and a nobler art, which is by no means extinct among us,
prefers to indicate emotion rather than to dwell on it?”
[20] See an interesting statement of this Biblical force in the preface to
Matthew Arnold’s The Great Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration, London, 1872.
[21] Hosea iv. 6.
[22] Zech. x. 9.
[23] Zech. viii. 4. 5.
[24] Isa. xi. 6-8.
[25] Malachi iv. 6.

[26] This and the other passages from the Apocryphal Gospels here cited are
in the translation by Alexander Walker.
[27] Canto xxxii. 7-9, Cayley’s translation.
[28] C. E. Norton’s translation.
[29] Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 84.
[30] Sketches of the History of Christian Art, iii. 270.
[31] Legends of the Madonna, Part III.
[32] On Reading Shakespeare Through. The [London] Spectator, August 26,
1882.
[33] Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa.
[34] Essays, Historical and Theological. By J. B. Mozley, i. 430, 431.

INDEX.

Admetus, 19, 20.
Æneas, 31, 32.
Æneid, childhood in the, 31, 32.
Agamemnon, belief in, not dependent on the spade, 6.
Alice Fell, 3, 147.
Alkestis, a scene from the, 19, 20.
Amelia, Fielding’s, 135.
Amor, the myth of, 36-38;
as treated by Raphael, 99;
in the Elizabethan lullabies, 116, 117;
in Shakespeare, 124;
in Thorwaldsen’s art, 201.
Anchises, 31.
Ancient Leaves, cited, 31, 33.
Andersen, Hans Christian, the unique contribution of, to literature,
201;
the distinction between his stories and fairy tales, 202;
the basis of his fame, 207;
the life of his creations, 208;
their relation to human beings, 209;
the spring in his stories, 211;
his satires, 212;
the deeper experience in them, 213;
his essential childishness, 214;
his place with novelists, 215;
his interpretation of childhood, 216.
Andromache, the parting of, with Hector, 11, 12;

the scene compared with one in the Œdipus Tyrannus, 16-18;
and contrasted with Virgil, 31.
Angels of children, 144, 145.
Anna the prophetess, 47.
Anthology, the Greek, 28-30.
Antigone, 18.
Apocryphal Gospels, the legends of the, 57-64.
Art, American, as it relates to children, 237, 238.
Art, modern, the foible of, 38.
Arthur, in King John, 120.
Ascanius, 31, 32.
Askbert, 68, 69.
Astyanax, 11;
a miniature Hector, 14.
Atlantic Monthly, The, cited, 34.
Austin, Alfred, cited, 38.

Ballads relating to children, 106-108;
characteristics of, 113.
Barbauld, Mrs., 173;
her relation to the literature of childhood, 175;
Coleridge and Lamb on, 174.
Bathsheba’s child, 42.
Beatrice, first seen by Dante, 77.
Better Land, The, 222.
Bible, the truth of the, not dependent on external witness, 6;
the university to many in modern times, 41, 42.
Blake, William, 163-165.

Boccaccio, 79.
Browning, Robert, as an interpreter of Greek life, 27;
his Pied Piper, 237.
Bryant, William Cullen, 217.
Bunyan, childhood in, 129-133.
Byzantine type of the Madonna, 83, 84.

Catullus, 33.
Chapman’s translation of Homer, quoted, 8, 9, 10, 16;
the quality of his defects, 9, 10.
Chaucer’s treatment of childhood, 108-111;
compared with the Madonna in art, 113.
Childhood, discovered at the close of the last century, 4;
in literature as related to literature for children, 4;
in Greek life, how attested, 7;
indirect reference to it in Homer, 8-11;
the direct reference, 11, 12;
in the Greek tragedians, 16-21;
in Plato, 22-26;
in the Greek Anthology, 29, 30;
in Virgil, 31, 32;
conception of, in Roman literature, 32, 33;
in Catullus, 33;
in epitaphs, 33, 34;
in Lucretius, 34;
in Juvenal, 35;
in classic conception of the supernatural, 34-36;
in the myth of Amor, 36-38;
in Old Testament literature, 42-46;
in New Testament literature, 48, 49;
attitude of the Saviour toward, 49;
as a sign of history, 52;
in the legends of the Apocryphal Gospels, 57-64;

of saints, 65-71;
under the forming power of Christianity, 73;
in Dante, 75-78;
in the representations of the Holy Family, 83-87;
in the art of the northern peoples, 87-92;
in the Madonnas of Raphael, 92-98;
in Raphael’s Amor, 98, 99;
in his representations of children generally, 100, 101;
in the art of Luca della Robbia, 101, 102;
its elemental force the same in all literatures, 105;
in ballad literature, 106-108;
in Chaucer, 108-111;
its character in early English literature, 112, 113;
in Spenser, 114, 115;
in the lighter strains of Elizabethan literature, 116, 117;
in Shakespeare, 117-126;
its absence in Milton, 127, 128;
how regarded in Puritanism, 128, 129;
in Bunyan, 129-133;
in Pope, 133, 134;
in Fielding, 135;
in Gray, 135-137;
in Goldsmith, 137-140;
in Cowper, 140, 141;
in the art of Reynolds and Gainsborough, 141, 142;
in Wordsworth, 144-157;
in De Quincey, 158-162;
in William Blake, 163-165;
in Dickens, 165-170;
in Paul and Virginia, 181-183;
in Lamartine, 184-186;
in Michelet de Musset, and Victor Hugo, 186, 187;
in German sentiment, 189;
illustrated by Luther, 190, 191;
in Richter, 191, 192;
in Goethe, 194-196;
in Froebel’s system, 197, 198;

in Overbeck’s art, 199, 200;
in Hans Christian Andersen, 201-216;
in Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Holmes, 217, 218;
in Whittier, 218, 219;
in Longfellow, 219-222;
mistakenly presented in sentimental verse, 222-225;
in Hawthorne, 225-234.
Child-Life in Poetry, 219.
Child-Life in Prose, 219.
Children, books for, the beginning of, 171, 172;
the characteristics of this beginning, 173;
their revolutionary character, 174;
the sincerity of the early books, 175;
the union of the didactic and artistic in, 177;
a new branch of literature, 177, 178;
art in connection with, 179.
Children’s Hour, The, 220.
Child’s Last Will, The, 106.
Christ, the childhood of, 48;
his scenes with children, 48, 49;
his attitude toward childhood, 49-52;
an efficient cause of the imagination, 55;
legends of, in the Apocryphal Gospels, 57-64;
his symbolic use of the child, 81;
his infancy the subject of art, 82;
especially in Netherlands, 89;
his words illustrative of human history, 102.
Christianity and French sentiment, 182.
Christianity, living and structural, 53;
its supersedure of ancient life, 54;
its germinal truth, 55;
its operative imagination, 56;
its care of children, especially orphans, 73;
its office of organization, 74;

its influence on the family, 75;
its insistence on death, 79;
in what its power consists, 81;
its ideals, 82;
its type in the Madonna, 83;
does not interfere with elemental facts, 105.
Christmas in Germany, 189.
Cimabue, 84.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on Mrs. Barbauld, 176;
on Christmas in Germany, 189.
Comus, 127.
Confidences, Les, 184.
Coriolanus, 118.
Cornelius, 88.
Courtship of Miles Standish, The, 226.
Cowper, William, 140, 141.
Cruel Mother, The, ballad of, 106.
Cupid and Psyche, 36.

Danaë, the, of Euripides, 20;
of Simonides, 30.
Dante, childhood in, 75-78.
Day, Thomas, author of Sanford and Merton, 3.
Death of children, how regarded by Dickens, 167;
by Wordsworth, 168.
Democracy revealed in the French Revolution, 143.
De Quincey, Thomas, reflections of, on his childhood, 158-162.
Deserted Village, The, 137.
Dickens, Charles, his naturalization of the poor in literature, 165;

his report of childhood, 166;
the children created by, 166-170;
compared with Wordsworth, 168, 169.
Distant Prospect of Eton College, On a, 136.
Dolliver Romance, The, 234.
Doyle, Richard, 179.
Drama, children in, 20.
Dying Child, The, 222.

Edgeworth, Maria, and Wordsworth, 174.
Edward Fane’s Rosebud, 231.
Elegy, Gray’s, 135, 136.
Elijah, the prophet, 42;
the incident of the boys and, 43.
Elisha, 43.
Elizabethan era, characteristics of, 113, 116.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 217.
English race, characteristics of the, exemplified in literature, 111-113.
Eros, the myth of, 36-38.
Erotion, 34.
Essay on Man, The, 134.
Euripides, in his view of children, 19;
examples from, 20.
Evangeline, 226.
Excursion, The, 151, 152.

Fables, Andersen’s stories distinguished from, 210, 211.

Faery Queen, The, 114, 115.
Fairy-tales, Andersen’s stories distinguished from, 202;
the origin of, 203;
fading out from modern literature, 204;
upon the stage, 204, 205;
the scientific fairy-tale, 206.
Fénelon, 180.
Fielding, Henry, in his Amelia, 135.
Fitzgerald, Edward, 27.
Flaxman, John, his illustration of Homer in outline, 12.
French literature as regards childhood, 180-188.
French Revolution, the, a sign of regeneration, 52;
a day of judgment, 142;
the name for an epoch, 143;
synchronous with a revelation of childhood, 144;
its connection with English literature, 162;
the eruption of poverty in, 165.
Froebel’s kindergarten system, 197, 198.
From my Arm Chair, 220, 221.

Gainsborough, Thomas, 141.
Gascoigne, George, 117.
Gentle Boy, The, 231.
Germanic peoples, home-cultivating, 88.
German literature and childhood, 188-198.
Giotto, 84.
Goethe, compared with Richter as regards memory of childhood, 194;
his Mignon, 194;
his indebtedness to the Vicar of Wakefield, 195;
his Sorrows of Werther, 195;

compared with Luther, 196.
Goldsmith, Oliver, avant-courier of Wordsworth, 3;
the precursor of the poets of childhood, 137;
his position in literature, 138;
his Vicar of Wakefield, 138-140.
Goody Two Shoes, 3.
Grandfather’s Chair, 226.
Gray, Thomas, 135-137.
Gray, Thomas, borrowing possibly from Martial, 34.
Greece, life in ancient, how illustrated, 7;
silence of the child in the art of, 21;
our relation to, 21;
modern interpretations of, 27, 28;
compared with Rome, 31;
compared with Judæa, 42.
Greenaway, Kate, 179.
Greene, Robert, 117.
Greenwell, Dora, her poem, A Story by the Fire, an example of
pernicious literature, 222-225.
Grimm, the brothers, 207.

Hannah, the song of, 44, 47.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, the most abundant of American authors in his
treatment of childhood, 225;
his use of New England history, 226;
his rendering of Greek myths, 226, 227;
his observation of childhood, 228, 229;
his relation to children, 229, 230;
his apologue in The Snow-Image, 232;
children in his romances, 232, 233;
his Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, 233, 234;
his Pansie in The Dolliver Romance, 234.

Hebrew life, in its influence on modern thought, 39-41;
the child in, 46, 47;
its transformation into Christianity, 47, 48, 53.
Hector parting with Andromache, 11, 12;
face to face with Ajax, 14;
comforts his wife, 16, 17.
Hemans, Felicia, 222.
Hen and chickens, in the Bible and Shakespeare, 122.
Herakles, 36.
Hermes, 36.
Hiawatha, 221.
Hilarion, 67.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 218.
Holy Family, the child in the, 83;
character of the early type of the, 83;
emblematic of domesticity, 86, 87.
Homer, authenticity of the legend of, supposed to be proved by
Schliemann, 6;
a better preserver of Greek womanhood than antiquaries, 7;
the value of his similes, 7, 8;
passages in illustration of his indirect reference to childhood, 8-
11;
the elemental character of, 12;
the peril of commenting on, 13;
the nurse in, 14;
his view of childhood, 15;
compared with that of the tragedians, 16-18;
with that of Virgil, 31, 32.
Hosea, quoted, 44.
House of the Seven Gables, The, 232, 233.
Hubert, 120.

Hugh of Lincoln, 108.
Hugo, Victor, 187.

Iliad, the swarm of bees in the, 8;
the passage describing the brushing away of a fly, 9;
the ass belabored by a pack of boys, 9;
Achilles chiding Patroclos, 10;
Hector parting with Andromache, 11, 12;
statuesque scenes in, 12.
Imaginary Conversations, quoted, 153.
Imagination, the, abnormal activity of, in early Christianity, 54;
the direction of its new force, 56, 57.
Intimations of Immortality, 154, 156, 157.
Irving, Washington, 217.
Isaiah, quoted, 45.
Ishmael, 42.
Ismene, 18.

Jacob, the two wives of, 44.
James, Henry, alluded to, 236.
Jeffrey, Francis, 169.
Jerusalem, the entry into, 49, 52.
John the Baptist, 81.
Jonson, Ben, 37.
Jonson, Ben, Venus’ Runaway of, 116.
Jowett, Benjamin, translation by, 22-26.
Juvenal, 35, 227.

Kenwulf of Wessex, 68.
Kindergarten, the, fortified by reference to Plato, 24;
in connection with politics, 197, 198.
King John, 119, 120.
Kriss Kringle, 189.

La Farge, John, 237.
L’Allegro, 127.
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 184-186.
Lamb, Charles, on Mrs. Barbauld’s work, 176, 177;
his and his sister’s books, 177.
Lambdin, George C., 237.
Lamkin, the ballad of, 107, 108.
Landor, Walter Savage, remark of, on children, 153.
Laokoön, 21.
Laws, Plato’s, cited, 22, 24, 25.
Legends of the Madonna, 89.
Leslie, C. R., on Raphael’s children, 100.
Lindsay, Lord, quoted, 88.
Lines on the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture, 141, 142.
Literature for children in the United States, 235, 236;
some of its tendencies, 239, 240;
measures for its enrichment, 240.
Literature, the source of knowledge, 7;
of Christendom, the exposition of the conception of the Christ,
50;
inaction in, 54;
fallacy in the study of the development of, 104;
its bounds enlarged, 163.

Little Annie’s Ramble, 231.
Little Daffydowndilly, 231.
Little Girl’s Lament, The, 222.
Little People of the Snow, 217.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, childhood in the writings of, 219-221.
Love, the figure of, in classic and modern art, 37.
Lowell, James Russell, 217.
Loyola, 91.
Luca della Robbia, the children of, 101.
Lucretius, 34, 35.
Lucy Gray, 3, 148.
Luther, Martin, an exponent of German character, 190;
his treatment of childhood, 190.

Macbeth, 121, 123.
Madonna, development of the, 84-87;
treatment of by Raphael, 92-98;
a domestic subject, 98.
Magnificat, The, 44, 47.
Man of Law’s Tale, The, 110.
Marcius, 118.
Martial, 34.
Martin, Theodore, translation by, 33.
Mary, the Virgin, legends concerning, in the Apocryphal Gospels, 58-
60;
her childhood, 65;
her appearance in early art, 83;
her motherhood, 84;
her relation to Jesus, 85.

May Queen, The, 222.
Medea, The, cited, 19.
Menaphon, 117.
Mercurius, 36.
Messiah, Pope’s, 133, 134.
Michelet, 186.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, 124.
Millais, John Everett, 179.
Milton, John, quoted, 46;
the absence of childhood in, 127, 128;
compared with Bunyan, 129;
with Pope, 133.
Moses, 42.
Moth, Shakespeare’s, 118.
Mozley, T. B., quoted, 190, 191, 235.
Musset, Alfred de, 186.
My Lost Youth, 221.

Netherland family life, pictured in the life of our Lord, 89-92.
New Testament, childhood in the, 47-52.
Nicodemus, 50.
Niebuhr, B. G., 28.
Norton, Charles Eliot, translation by, 78.
Note-Books, Hawthorne’s, 228, 229.
Nurse, the, in Greek life, 14;
in the Odyssey, 14, 15.

Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, 127, 133.
Odysseus and his nurse, 15.
Odyssey, memorable incidents in the, 14, 15.
Œdipus Tyrannus contrasted with the Iliad, 16-18.
Old Testament, childhood in the, 42-46.
Our Old Home, 230.
Overbeck, 88, 199-201.

Palmer, George Herbert, as a translator of Homer, 28.
Parkman, Francis, 226.
Pater, Walter, quoted, 79.
Patient Griselda, 111.
Paul and Virginia, representative of innocent childhood, 180;
an escape from the world, 181;
an attempt at the preservation of childhood, 183.
Pet Lamb, The, 149.
Pheidias, 26, 28.
Pied Piper, The, 237.
Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 130-133.
Plato, references of, to childhood, 22-26;
compared with artists, 26;
can be read by children, 242.
Pope, Alexander, 133;
compared with Milton, 133, 134;
with Shakespeare, 134.
Prelude, The, 151.
Princess, The, 170.
Puritanism, the attitude of, toward childhood, 128, 129.

Queen’s Marie, the ballad of the, 106.

Raphael, an exponent of the idea of his time, 92;
the Madonnas of, 92;
in the Berlin Museum, 93;
Casa Connestabile, 93;
del Cardellino, 93;
at St. Petersburg, 93;
della Casa Tempi, 94;
at Bridgewater, 95;
del Passegio, 96;
San Sisto, 97, 98;
treatment by, of Amor, 99;
his children, 100.
Reaper and the Flowers, The, 220, 222.
Renaissance, the spirit of the, in Raphael’s work, 98;
childhood in its relation to the, 102.
Republic, Plato’s, cited, 23.
Resignation, 220.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 141, 142.
Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, autobiography of, 191;
early birth of consciousness in, 192;
compared with Goethe, 194.
Riverside Magazine for Young People, The, 237, 238.
Roman literature, childhood in, 31-38.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 180, 182, 184.
Ruskin, John, 242.

Samuel, 42.
Sanford and Merton, 3.

Sarah, the laugh of, 44.
Scarlet Letter, The, 233, 234.
Schliemann, Dr., 6.
School, great literature in, 242.
Sella, 217.
Sellar, John Y., quoted, 35.
Sentiment, French and German, as seen by the English and American,
188.
Shadow, A, 220.
Shakespeare, childhood in, 117;
limitations of the exhibition, 117, 118;
his Moth, 118;
his Coriolanus, 118, 119;
his King John, 119, 120;
his Titus Andronicus, 120, 121;
his Macbeth, 121;
his Richard III., 122;
random passages in, relating to childhood, 123-125;
reasons for the scanty reference, 125, 126;
compared with Pope, 134.
Shunamite, the, 43.
Simeon, 47.
Simonides, 20;
quoted, 30.
Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 88.
Smith, Goldwin, translation by, 20.
Snow-Bound, 218.
Snow-Image, The, 232.
Solitude, the, of childhood, 160-162.
Songs of Innocence, 164.

Sophocles, the Œdipus Tyrannus of, 16.
Sparrows, the story of the miraculous, 61, 62.
Spectator, The, a writer in, quoted, 38.
Spenser, Edmund, his Faery Queen, 114, 115.
Statius, 33.
Story by the Fire, A, an example of what a poem for a child should not
be, 222-225.
Supernaturalism in ancient literature, 35, 36.
Suspiria de Profundis, 158-162.
Swedenborg, a saying of, 142.
Symonds, John Addington, translation by, 20.
S. Bernard, 76, 77.
S. Catherine, 65.
S. Christina, 70.
S. Elizabeth of Hungary, 65, 66.
S. Francis of Assisi, 71, 72.
S. Genevieve, 66.
S. Gregory Nazianzen, 66.
S. John Chrysostom, 66.
S. Kenelm, 68-70.
St. Pierre, Bernardin, 180-183.

Tanagra figurines, 28.
Tanglewood Tales, 226.
Tennyson, Alfred, makes a heroine of the babe, 170;
his May Queen, 222.
Thompson, D’Arcy W., translation by, 31, 33.

Thoreau, Henry David, 217.
Thorwaldsen, 37, 201.
Tirocinium, 140.
Titus Andronicus, 120, 121.
To a Child, 220.
Translations, the great, of the Elizabethan era, 116.
Twice-Told Tales, 231.
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 124.

Ugly Duckling, The, 213;
compared with The Snow-Image, 232.
Ugolino, Count, 76.

Vicar of Wakefield, The, 3, 137-140, 142.
Village Blacksmith, The, 221.
Virgil, contrasted with Homer, 31, 32;
his treatment of childhood, 32.
Virgilia, 118, 119.
Volumnia, 118, 119.

We are Seven, 168-224.
Weariness, 220, 221.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, childhood in the writings of, 218, 219.
Wonder-Book, Hawthorne’s, 226, 227, 232.
Wordsworth, William, the creator of Alice Fell and Lucy Gray, 3;
quoted, 3;
the ridicule of his Lyrical Ballads, 145;
his defensive Preface, 145-147;

his apology for Alice Fell, 147, 148;
his poem of Lucy Gray, 148, 149;
his poem of The Pet Lamb, 149, 150;
his treatment of incidents of childhood, 150;
the first to treat the child as an individual, 151;
his draft on his own experience, 152;
his poetic interpretation of childhood, 153-156;
his ode, Intimations of Immortality, 156, 157;
his treatment of death, 168;
his We are Seven contrasted with A Story of the Fire, 224, 225.
Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 221.

Zarephath, the widow of, 42.
Zechariah, quoted, 45.

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