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.