NOW and then I hear it affirmed by sad-voiced pessimists, whispering in
the gloom, that people do not read as much poetry in our day as they did
in our grandfathers’, that this is distinctly the era of prose, and that
the poet is no longer, as Shelley claimed, the unacknowledged legislator
of the world. Perhaps these cheerless statements are true, though it
would be more agreeable not to believe them. Perhaps, with the exception
of Browning, whom we study because he is difficult to understand, and of
Shakespeare, whom we read because it is hard to content our souls
without him, the poets have slipped away from our crowded lives, and are
best known to us through the medium of their reviewers. We are always
wandering from the paths of pleasure, and this may be one of our
deviations. Yet what matters it, after all, while around us, on every
side, in schoolrooms and nurseries, in quiet corners and by cheerful
fires, the children are reading poetry?—reading it with a joyous
enthusiasm and an absolute surrendering of spirit which we can all
remember, but can never feel again. Well might Sainte-Beuve speak
bravely of the clear, fine penetration peculiar to childhood. Well might
he recall, with wistful sighs, “that instinctive knowledge which
afterwards ripens into judgment, but of which the fresh lucidity remains
forever unapproached.” He knew, as all critics have known, that it is
only the child who responds swiftly, pliantly, and unreservedly to the
allurements of the imagination. He knew that, when poetry is in
question, it is better to feel than to think; and that with the growth
of a guarded and disciplined intelligence, straining after the enjoyment
which perfection in literary art can give, the first careless rapture of
youth fades into a half-remembered dream.
If we are disposed to doubt the love that children bear to poetry, a
love concerning which they exhibit a good deal of reticence, let us
consider only the alacrity with which they study, for their own delight,
the poems that please them best. How should we fare, I wonder, if tried
by a similar test? How should we like to sit down and commit to memory
Tennyson’s “œnone,” or “Locksley Hall,” or Byron’s apostrophe to the
Ocean, or the battle scene in “Marmion”? Yet I have known children to
whom every word of these and many other poems was as familiar as the
alphabet; and a great deal more familiar—thank Heaven!—than the
multiplication table, or the capitals of the United States. A rightly
constituted child may find the paths of knowledge hopelessly barred by a
single page of geography, or by a single sum in fractions; but he will
range at pleasure through the paths of poetry, having the open sesame to
every door. Sir Walter Scott, who was essentially a rightly constituted
child, did not even wait for a formal introduction to his letters, but
managed to learn the ballad of Hardy-knute before he knew how to read,
and went shouting it around the house, warming his baby blood to
fighting-point, and training himself in very infancy to voice the
splendors of his manhood. He remembered this ballad, too, and loved it
all his life, reciting it once with vast enthusiasm to Lord Byron, whose
own unhappy childhood had been softened and vivified by the same
innocent delights.
In truth, the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its
impressions. If we had the time and courage to study a dozen verses
to-day, we should probably forget eleven of them in a fortnight; but the
poetry we learned as children remains, for the most part, indelibly
fixed in our memories, and constitutes a little Golden Treasury of our
own, more dear and valuable to us than any other collection, because it
contains only our chosen favorites, and is always within the reach of
reference. Once, when I was very young, I asked a girl companion—well
known now in the world of literature—if she did not grow weary waiting
for trains, which were always late, at the suburban station where she
went to school. “Oh, no,” was the cheerful reply. “If I have no book,
and there is no one here to talk with, I walk up and down the platform
and think over the poetry that I know.” Admirable occupation for an idle
minute! Even the tedium of railway traveling loses half its horrors if
one can withdraw at pleasure into the society of the poets and, soothed
by their gentle and harmonious voices, forget the irksome recurrence of
familiar things.
It has been often demonstrated, and as often forgotten, that children do
not need to have poetry written down to their intellectual level, and do
not love to see the stately Muse ostentatiously bending to their ear. In
the matter of prose, it seems necessary for them to have a literature of
their own, over which they linger willingly for a little while, as
though in the sunny antechamber of a king. But in the golden palace of
the poets there is no period of probation, there is no enforced
attendance upon petty things. The clear-eyed children go straight to the
heart of the mystery, and recognize in the music of words, in the
enduring charm of metrical quality, an element of never-ending delight.
When to this simple sensuous pleasure is added the enchantment of poetic
images, lovely and veiled and dimly understood, then the delight grows
sweeter and keener, the child’s soul flowers into a conscious love of
poetry, and one lifelong source of happiness is gained. But it is never
through infantine or juvenile verses that the end is reached. There is
no poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and it was not the least of
his joys to know that all over the English-speaking world children were
tuning their hearts to the music of his lines, were dreaming vaguely and
rapturously over the beauty he revealed. Therefore the insult seemed
greater and more wanton when this beloved idol of our nurseries
deliberately offered to his eager audience such anxiously babyish verses
as those about Minnie and Winnie, and the little city maiden who goes
straying among the flowers. Is there in Christendom a child who wants to
be told by one of the greatest of poets that
“Minnie and Winnie
Slept in a shell;”
that the shell was pink within and silver without; and that
“Sounds of the great sea
Wandered about.
“Two bright stars
Peep’d into the shell.
‘What are they dreaming of?
Who can tell?’
“Started a green linnet
Out of the croft;
‘Wake, little ladies,
The sun is aloft.’”
It is not in these tones that poetry speaks to the childish soul, though
it is too often in this fashion that the poet strives to adjust himself
to what he thinks is the childish standard. He lowers his sublime head
from the stars, and pipes with painstaking flatness on a little reed,
while the children wander far away, and listen breathlessly to older and
dreamier strains.
“She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot,
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.”
Here is the mystic note that childhood loves, and here, too, is the
sweet constraint of linked rhymes that makes music for its ears. How
many of us can remember well our early joy in this poem, which was but
as another and more exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly with Andersen’s
“Little Mermaid,” and “Undine,” and all sad stories of unhappy lives!
And who shall forget the sombre passion of “Oriana,” of those wailing
verses that rang through our little hearts like the shrill sobbing of
winter storms, of that strange tragedy that oppressed us more with fear
than pity!
“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,
And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow,
Oriana,
Alone I wander to and fro,
Oriana.”
If any one be inclined to think that children must understand poetry in
order to appreciate and enjoy it, that one enchanted line,—
“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,”—
should be sufficient to undeceive him forever. The spell of those finely
chosen words lies in the shadowy and half-seen picture they convey,—a
picture with indistinct outlines, as of an unknown land, where the
desolate spirit wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole poem is
inexpressibly alluring to an imaginative child, and its atmosphere of
bleak despondency darkens suddenly into horror at the breaking off of
the last line from visions of the grave and of peaceful death,—
“I hear the roaring of the sea,
Oriana.”
The same grace of indistinctness, though linked with a gentler mood and
with a softer music, makes the lullaby in “The Princess” a lasting
delight to children, while the pretty cradle-song in “Sea Dreams,”
beginning,—
“What does little birdie say
In her nest at peep of day?”
has never won their hearts. Its motive is too apparent, its nursery
flavor too pronounced. It has none of the condescension of “Minnie and
Winnie,” and grown people can read it with pleasure; but a simple
statement of obvious truths, or a simple line of obvious reasoning,
however dexterously narrated in prose or verse, has not the art to hold
a youthful soul in thrall.
If it be a matter of interest to know what poets are most dear to the
children around us, to the ordinary “apple-eating” little boys and girls
for whom we are hardly brave enough to predict a shining future, it is
delightful to be told by favorite authors and by well-loved men of
letters what poets first bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is
especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang admit us a little way into
his confidence, and confess to us that he disliked “Tam O’Shanter” when
his father read it aloud to him; preferring, very sensibly, “to take my
warlocks and bogies with great seriousness.” Of course he did, and the
sympathies of all children are with him in his choice. The ghastly
details of that witches’ Sabbath are far beyond a child’s limited
knowledge of demonology and the Scotch dialect. Tam’s escape and
Maggie’s final catastrophe seem like insults offered to the powers of
darkness; only the humor of the situation is apparent, and humor is
seldom, to the childish mind, a desirable element of poetry. Not all the
spirit of Caldecott’s illustrations can make “John Gilpin” a real
favorite in our nurseries, while “The Jackdaw of Rheims” is popular
simply because children, being proof against cynicism, accept the story
as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy for the thievish bird, and
many secret rejoicings over his restoration to grace and feathers. As
for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” its humor is swallowed up in tragedy,
and the terror of what is to come helps little readers over such sad
stumbling-blocks as
“So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!”
lines which are every whit as painful to their ears as to ours. I have
often wondered how the infant Southeys and Coleridges, that bright-eyed
group of alert and charming children, all afire with romantic impulses,
received “The Cataract of Lodore,” when papa Southey condescended to
read it in the schoolroom. What well-bred efforts to appear pleased and
grateful! What secret repulsion to a senseless clatter of words, as
remote from the silvery sweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters,
as from the unalterable requirements of poetic art!
“And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.”
Ah! unwise little son, to whose rash request generations of children
have owed the presence, in readers and elocution-books and volumes of
“Select Lyrics for the Nursery,” of those hated and hateful verses.
“Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott,” says Mr. Lang; with
“Marmion,” and the “Last Minstrel,” and “The Lady of the Lake,” read
“for the twentieth time,” and ever with fresh delight. Poetry came to
Scott with Shakespeare, studied rapturously by firelight in his mother’s
dressing-room, when all the household thought him fast asleep, and with
Pope’s translation of the Iliad, that royal road over which the Muse has
stepped, smiling, into many a boyish heart. Poetry came to Pope—poor
little lame lad—with Spenser’s “Faerie Queene;” with the brave
adventures of strong, valiant knights, who go forth, unblemished and
unfrighted, to do battle with dragons and “Paynims cruel.” And so the
links of the magic chain are woven, and child hands down to child the
spell that holds the centuries together. I cannot bear to hear the
unkind things which even the most tolerant of critics are wont to say
about Pope’s “Iliad,” remembering as I do how many boys have received
from its pages their first poetic stimulus, their first awakening to
noble things. What a charming picture we have of Coleridge, a feeble,
petulant child tossing with fever on his little bed, and of his brother
Francis stealing up, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his side and
read him Pope’s translation of Homer. The bond that drew these boys
together was forged in such breathless moments and in such mutual
pleasures; for Francis, the handsome, spirited sailor lad, who climbed
trees, and robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports, had little in
common with his small, silent, precocious brother. “Frank had a violent
love of beating me,” muses Coleridge, in a tone of mild complaint (and
no wonder, we think, for a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it
would have been hard to find). “But whenever that was superseded by any
humor or circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used to regard me
with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt.” More contempt than
admiration, probably; yet was all resentment forgotten, and all
unkindness at an end, while one boy read to the other the story of
Hector and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrow in his heart,
pacing round his dead comrade, as a tawny lioness paces round her young
when she sees the hunters coming through the woods. As a companion
picture to this we have little Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing Othello in
the nursery, and so carried away by the passionate impulse of these
lines,—
“In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus,”—
that he struck himself fiercely on the breast with an iron chisel, and
fainted under the blow. We can hardly believe that Shakespeare is beyond
the mental grasp of childhood, when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed on
winter nights to read “King Henry IV.,” and Rossetti, at nine, was
overwhelmed by the agony of Othello’s remorse.
On the other hand, there are writers, and very brilliant writers, too,
whose early lives appear to have been undisturbed by such keenly
imaginative pastimes, and for whom there are no well-loved and familiar
figures illumined forever in “that bright, clear, undying light that
borders the edge of the oblivion of infancy.” Count Tolstoi confesses
himself to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his fellow-students at
the University of Moscow, who seemed to him so coarse and inelegant, and
yet who had read and enjoyed so much. “Pushkin and Zhukovsky were
literature to them,” he says wistfully, “and not, as to me, little books
in yellow bindings which I had studied as a child.” But how, one
wonders, could Pushkin have remained merely a “little book in yellow
binding” to any boy who had had the happiness of studying him as a
child? Pushkin is the Russian Byron, and embodies in his poems the same
spirit of restless discontent, of dejected languor, of passionate
revolt; not revolt against the Tsar, which is a limited and individual
judgment, but revolt against the bitter penalties of life, which is a
sentiment common to the youth of all nations and of every age. Yet there
are Englishmen who have no word save that of scorn for Byron, and I feel
uncertain whether such critics ever enjoyed the privilege of being boys
at all. If to George Meredith’s composed and complacent mind there
strays any wanton recollection of young, impetuous days, how can he
write with pen of gall these worse than churlish lines on Manfred?—
“Projected from the bilious Childe,
This clatterjaw his foot could set
On Alps, without a breast beguiled
To glow in shedding rascal sweat.
Somewhere about his grinder teeth
He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath,
And summoned Nature to her feud
With bile and buskin attitude.”
There is more of this pretty poem, but I have quoted as much as my own
irascibility can bear. I, at least, have been a child, and have spent
some of my childhood’s happiest hours with Manfred on the Alps; and have
with him beheld
“the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs
In dizziness of distance,”
and have believed with all a child’s sincerity in his remorseful gloom:—
“for I have ceased
To justify my deeds unto myself—
The last infirmity of evil.”
Every line is inexpressibly dear to me now, recalling, as it does, the
time “when I was in my father’s house, and my path ran down with butter
and honey.” Once more I see the big, bare, old-fashioned parlor, to dust
which was my daily task, my dear mother having striven long and vainly
to teach my idle little hands some useful housewifely accomplishment. In
one corner stood a console-table, with chilly Parian ornaments on top,
and underneath a pile of heavy books; Wordsworth, Moore, the poems of
Frances Sargent Osgood,—no lack of variety here,—“The Lady of the Lake,”
and Byron in an embossed brown binding, with closely printed double
columns, well calculated to dim the keenest sight in Christendom. Not
that mysterious and malignant mountain which rose frowning from the sea,
and drew all ships shattered to its feet, was more irresistible in its
attraction than this brown, bulky Byron. I could not pass it by! My
dusting never got beyond the table where it lay; but sitting crumpled on
the floor, with the enchanted volume on my lap, I speedily forgot
everything in the world save only the wandering Childe,
“Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight,”
or “The Corsair,” or “Mazeppa,” or “Manfred,” best loved of that dark
group. Perhaps Byron is not considered wholesome reading for little
girls in these careful days when expurgated editions of “The Vicar of
Wakefield” and “Paul and Virginia” find favor in our nurseries. On this
score I have no defense to offer, and I am not proposing the poet as a
safe text-book for early youth; but having never been told that there
was such a thing as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared at least
that alert curiosity concerning it which is one of the most unpleasant
results of our present guarded system. Moreover, we have Goethe’s word
for it that Byron is not as immoral as the newspapers, and certainly he
is more agreeable reading. I do sincerely believe that if part of his
attraction for the young lies in what Mr. Pater calls “the grieved
dejection, the endless regret,” which to the undisciplined soul sounds
like the true murmur of life, a better part lies in his large grasp of
nature,—not nature in her minute and lovely detail, but in her vast
outlines, her salient features, her solemn majesty and strength. Crags
and misty mountain tops, storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the
restless deep,—these are the aspects of nature that childhood prizes,
and loves to hear described in vigorous verse. The pink-tipped daisy,
the yellow primrose, and the freckled nest-eggs
“Hatching in the hawthorn-tree”
belong to a late stage of development. Eugénie de Guérin, who recognized
as clearly as Sainte-Beuve the “fine penetration” peculiar to children,
and who regarded them ever with half-wistful, half-wondering delight,
has written some very charming suggestions about the kind of poetry,
“pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate,” which she considered proper food
for these highly idealized little people,—“angels upon earth.” The only
discouraging part of her pretty pleading is her frank admission that—in
French literature, at least—there is no such poetry as she describes,
which shows how hard it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of
excellence. She endeavored sincerely, in her “Infantines,” to remedy
this defect, to “speak to childhood in its own language;” and her verses
on “Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings,” are quaintly conceived and
full of gentle fancies. No child is strongly moved, or taught the
enduring delight of song, by such lines as these, but most children will
take a genuine pleasure in the baby angel who played with little Abel
under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll and blew the first
bubble, and who finds a friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this
big gray world. Strange to say, he has his English counterpart in Mr.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Unseen Playmate,” that shadowy companion whose
home is the cave dug by childish hands, and who is ready to share all
games in the most engaging spirit of accommodation.
“’Tis he, when you play with your soldiers of tin,
That sides with the Frenchmen, and never can win;”
a touch of combative veracity which brings us down at once from
Mademoiselle de Guérin’s fancy flights to the real playground, where
real children, very faintly resembling “angels upon earth,” are busy
with mimic warfare. Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whose verses,
written especially for the nursery, have found their way straight into
little hearts. His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy, and the
ease with which he enters into that brilliant world of imagination
wherein children habitually dwell, make him their natural friend and
minstrel. If some of the rhymes in “A Child’s Garden of Verses” seem a
trifle bald and babyish, even these are guiltless of condescension;
while others, like “Travel,” “Shadow March,” and “The Land of
Story-Books,” are instinct with poetic life. I can only regret that a
picture so faultless in detail as “Shadow March,” where we see the
crawling darkness peer through the window pane, and hear the beating of
the little boy’s heart as he creeps fearfully up the stair, should be
marred at its close by a single line of false imagery:—
“All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.”
So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must know that shadows do not tramp,
and that the recurrence of a short, vigorous word which tells so
admirably in Scott’s “William and Helen,” and wherever the effect of
sound combined with motion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of place in
describing the ghostly things that glide with horrible noiselessness at
the feet of the frightened lad. Children, moreover, are keenly alive to
the value and the suggestiveness of terms. A little eight-year-old girl
of my acquaintance, who was reciting “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” stopped
short at these lines,—
“Adown the glen rode armed men,
Their trampling sounded nearer,”—
and called out excitedly, “Don’t you hear the horses?” She, at least,
heard them as if with the swift apprehension of fear, heard them loud
above the sounds of winds and waters, and rendered her unconscious
tribute of praise to the sympathetic selection of words.
There is, as we know, a great deal of poetry written every year for
childish readers. Some of it makes its appearance in Christmas books,
which are so beautifully bound and illustrated that the little foolish,
feeble verses are forgiven, and in fact forgotten, ignored altogether
amid more important accessories. Better poems than these are published
in children’s periodicals, where they form a notable feature, and are, I
dare say, read by the young people whose tastes are catered to in this
fashion. Those of us who are familiar with these periodicals—either
weeklies or monthlies—are well aware that the verses they offer may be
easily divided into three classes. First, mere rhymes and jingles,
intended for very little readers, and with which it would be simple
churlishness to quarrel. They do not aspire to be poetry, they are
sometimes very amusing, and they have an easy swing that is pleasant
alike to young ears and old. It must be a hard heart that does not
sympathize with the unlucky and ill-mated gnome who was
“full of fun and frolic,
But his wife was melancholic;”
or with the small damsel in pigtail and pinafore who comforts herself at
the piano with this engaging but dubious maxim:—
“Practicing is good for a good little girl;
It makes her nose straight, and it makes her hair curl.”
The second kind of verse appears to be written solely for the sake of
the accompanying illustration, and is often the work of the illustrator,
who is more at home with his pencil than his pen. Occasionally it is
comic, occasionally sentimental or descriptive; for the most part it is
something in this style:—