Horace E. Scudder
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL; A Biography. With portraits and other
illustrations, an Appendix, and a full Bibliography. 2 vols. crown 8vo,
$3.50, net.
MEN AND LETTERS. Essays in Characterization and Criticism. 12mo, gilt
top, $1.25.
CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE AND ART: With some Observations on Literature for
Children, 12mo, gilt top, $1.25.
NOAH WEBSTER. In American Men of Letters. With Portrait. 16mo, $1.25.
GEORGE WASHINGTON. An Historical Biography. 16mo, 75 cents. In Riverside
School Library, 60 cents, net.
THE DWELLERS IN FIVE SISTERS COURT. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.
STORIES AND ROMANCES. 16mo, $1.25.
DREAM CHILDREN. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00.
SEVEN LITTLE PEOPLE AND THEIR FRIENDS. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00.
STORIES FROM MY ATTIC. For Children. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00.
BOSTON TOWN. The Story of Boston told to Children. Illustrated. Square
8vo, $1.50.
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK. A Collection of the Best Literature for Children.
Illustrated. Small 4to, $2.50.
THE BOOK OF FABLES. 16mo, 50 cents.
THE BOOK OF FOLK STORIES. 16mo, 60 cents.
THE BOOK OF LEGENDS. 16mo, 50 cents.
THE BODLEY BOOKS. Including Doings of the Bodley Family in Town and
Country, The Bodleys Telling Stories, The Bodleys on Wheels, The Bodleys
Afoot, Mr. Bodley Abroad, The Bodley Grandchildren and their Journey in
Holland, The English Bodleys, and The Viking Bodleys. Illustrated. Eight
vols. square 8vo, $1.50 per volume; the set, $12.00.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
CHILDHOOD
IN LITERATURE AND ART
_WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN_
A Study
BY
HORACE E. SCUDDER
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
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.