Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the
sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads
against their mothers, And THAT cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds
are chirping in the nest, The young fawns are playing with the
shadows, The young flowers are blowing towards the west--
But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are
weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the
others, In the country of the free.
Do you question the young children in the sorrow, Why their
tears are falling so? The old man may weep for his to-morrow
Which is lost in long ago; The old tree is leafless in the
forest, The old year is ending in the frost, The old wound,
if stricken, is the sorest, The old hope is hardest to be
lost; But the young, young children, O my brothers, Do you
ask them why they stand Weeping sore before the bosoms of their
mothers, In our happy Fatherland?
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city, Sing
out, children, as the little thrushes do. Pluck your handfuls of
the meadow cowslips pretty, Laugh aloud to feel your fingers
let them through!
Only in recent years has there grown into fulness a conception of
what the duty of society is towards the child. For near two
thousand years it was a world of grown-ups for grown-ups.
Children there have been--many millions of them--but they were
merely incidental to the scheme of things. Society regarded them
not as an asset, except perhaps for purposes of selfish
exploitation. If literature reflects contemporary life with
fidelity, we may well marvel that for so many hundreds of years
the boys and girls of their generation were so little regarded
that they are rarely mentioned in song or story. When they are,
we are afforded glimpses of a curious attitude of aloofness or of
harshness. Nowhere do we meet the artlessness of childhood. In a
footnote here, in a marginal gloss there, such references as
appear point to torture and cruelty, to distress and tears. In
the early legends of the Christians, in the pagan ballads of the
olden time, what there is of child life but illustrates the
brutal selfishness of the elders.
Certainly, no people understood as well as did the Jews that the
child is the prophecy of the future, and that a nation is kept
alive not by memory but by hope. Childhood to them 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." So in the greatest of all books we come frequently
upon phrases displaying this attitude:
"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."
"They shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live
with their children."
And most significant of all: "Suffer the little children to come
unto me."
In the centuries intervening, up to a hundred years ago, the men
of pen and the men of brush give us a few touches now and then
suggestive of childhood. However, they are observers rather than
interpreters of childhood and its meaning. In the works of the
great master painters, the dominant note is that of maternity, or
the motive is devotional purely. Milton's great ode on the
Nativity bears no message other than this. In the graphic tale
that Chaucer tells about Hugh of Lincoln, race hatred is the
underlying sentiment, and the innocence of the unfortunate
widow's son appears merely to heighten the evil of his captors
and not as typical of boyhood.
Of the goodly company known collectively as the Elizabethan
writers, silence as to the element of childhood is profound. In
all the comedies and the tragedies of the greatest dramatist of
all, children play but minor parts. In none of them save in King
John, where historic necessity precludes the absence of the
princes in the Tower, they might be wholly omitted without
impairment of the structure. In the Merry Wives of Windsor,
Mistress Anne Page's son is briefly introduced, and is there made
the vehicle for conversation which in this age might be regarded
as gross suggestiveness.
True, that is a rarely tender passage in the Winter's Tale
wherein Hermione speaks with her beloved boy, and the pathos of
Arthur's plea as he asks Hubert to spare his eyes is of course a
masterpiece of literature; these, however, the sum total of the
great dramatist's significant references to childhood.
In the great works on canvas, save where the Christ-child is
depicted, may be noted that same absence of the spirit of
childhood. Wealthy and royal patrons, indeed, encouraged great
artists to add favorite sons and daughters to the array of
portraits in their family galleries. In time, the artists gave to
the progeny of the nobility and the aristocracy generally, such
creations as to them seemed appropriate to their years. These
poses are but the caricature of childhood. Morland,
Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other artists of their day
represented the children of their wealthy patrons in attitudes
which savor somewhat of burlesque, though it may have been
intended quite seriously to hedge them about with spontaneity.
It has been said that "a child's life finds its chief expression
in play, and that in play its social instincts are developed." If
this be true, we find in some contemporary canvases of this
English school a curious reproduction of the favorite pastimes of
children. One is called "bird-nesting," the title descriptive of
the favorite diversion thus depicted. Another bears the legend
"Snow-balling," and with no apparent disapproval save on the part
of the little victims, shows a group of larger children
ruthlessly snow-balling some smaller ones who have sought shelter
in the portico of a church. Some distance down the street the
form of an aged woman suggests another victim of youthful
playfulness.
A century and a half ago there was born, frail at first but with
constant growth, a perception that the great moving forces of
life contain elements hitherto disregarded. Rousseau sounded his
thesis, Pestalozzi began to teach, and but a little later on,
Froebel expounded his tenets. We need not be concerned as to the
controversial disputation of rival schools of pedagogues whose
claims for one ignore the merits of the other. A new thought came
into being, and both Pestalozzi and Froebel contributed to its
diffusion--whether in the form of Pestalozzi's ideal, "I must do
good to the child," or Froebel's, "I must do good through the
child," or perhaps a measurable merging of the two.
Responsive to the note of life and thought around them, the great
authors of prose and verse began to inject the new expression of
feeling into what they wrote. Perhaps best reflected, as indeed
it proved most potent in molding public opinion, this thought
entered into the novels of Charles Dickens. These, in the
development of child life as a social force, not only recorded
history; they made history, and the virile pencils of Leech and
Phiz and Cruikshank aided what became a movement.
For the first time in literature, with sympathetic insight, there
was laid bare the misery of childhood among the lowly and
unfortunate, and the pathos of unhappy childhood was pictured
with all its tragic consequences to society as a whole. In the
story of Poor Joe, the street-crossing sweeper, who was always
told to move on, we read the stories of thousands of the boys of
to-day. His brief tenantry of Tom-all-Alones shows us the
prototype of many thousands of living places in the slums of our
own time. Conditions which environ growing boys and girls --not
only thousands of men, but many millions--in the congested cities
of the Anglo-Saxon world, are well suggested by the names which
have been given in derision, or brutally descriptive as the case
may be, to such centers of human hiving as the Houses of Blazes
and Chicken-foot Alley, in Providence; Hell's Kitchen in New
York; the Bad Lands in Milwaukee; Tin Can Alley, Bubbly Creek and
Whiskey Row back of the stockyards in Chicago. In these regions
and in others like them darkness and filth hold forth together
where the macaroni are drying; broken pipes discharge sewage in
the basement living quarters where the bananas are ripening;
darkness and filth dwell together in the tenement cellars where
the garment-worker sews the buttons on for the sweat-shop
taskmaster; goats live amiably with human kids in the cob-webbed
basements where little hands are twisting stems for flowers; in
the unlovely stable lofts where dwell a dozen persons in a place
never intended for one; in windowless attics of tall tenements
where frail lives grow frailer day by day.
Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They are winding
stems of roses, one by one, one by one-- Little children who
have never learned to play; Teresina softly crying that her
fingers ache today, Tiny Fiametta nodding when the twilight
slips in, gray.
High above the clattering street, ambulance and fire-gong beat;
They sit, curling crimson petals, one by one, one by one.
Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They have never
seen a rosebush nor a dewdrop in the sun. They will dream of the
vendetta, Teresina, Fiametta,
Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating; They will
dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating, Never of
a wild rose thicket, nor the singing of a cricket; But the
ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams, And
their tired lids will flutter with the street's hysteric screams
Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They are winding
stems of roses, one by one, one by one; Let them have a long,
long playtime, Lord of Toil, when toil is done; Fill their
baby hands with roses, joyous roses of the sun.
Reverting to Poor Tom, well may the words of Dickens in Bleak
House serve as a text for to-day: "There is not an atom of Tom's
shrine, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he
lives, nor an obscurity or degradation about him, nor an
ignorance, nor a wickedness, nor a brutality of his committing,
but shall work its retribution, through every order of society up
to the proudest of the proud and the highest of the high."
Whatever of permanence the ideal democracy which underlies our
institutions may achieve, it will not be the survival of
conditions such as these, but the fruition of their betterment.
Recognition of the sinister elements involved determines the
modern type of library work with children. That work rests upon a
knowledge of the background which has been pictured, upon the use
of methods that shall reach sanely and effectively the
contributing causes, upon correlation of all the social forces
that can be brought to bear unitedly.
Recognition of conditions and causation gives power to, and
justifies the modern trend of, library work with children as the
most important and far-reaching of all its great work. Of thirty
million men and women, and their children, who have come from
Over-seas in two generations, 83 per cent were dwellers along the
rim of the Mediterranean. Largely from that source have our towns
grown overnight into swarming cities. Their children of to-day
will be the men and women who in a generation will make or unmake
the Republic. Ignorance and greed, rather than necessity, breed
the chief menace in our national life. Alone as a detached social
force, the library cannot hope to combat these, but in
correlation with other forces may serve as one of the most potent
agencies. In the children's rooms and in kindred places, the
missionaries of the book take the disregarded bits of life about
them and weave them into a human element of power. The children's
rooms in the library and what they imply in the life of the
people, are of such recent origin and growth that the complete
force of their present-day work will not be fully apparent for a
quarter century. What they hope to do, the instruments they
purpose to use, are given succinctly in the pronouncement of one
of our most progressive libraries