a pit. His weeping mother seeks him, and, happening by the pit, is made
aware of his presence by the miracle of his dead lips still singing the
Alma Redemptoris.
In two other stories has Chaucer dwelt upon the pathos of childhood and
bereft or suffering motherhood. In the Man of Law’s tale of Custance,
there is a touching passage where Custance and her babe are driven away
from the kingdom, and exposed to the sea in the ship which had brought
them. The mother kneels upon the sand before embarking, and puts her
trust in the Lord.
“Her litel child lay wepying in hir arm,
And knelynge, pitously to hym she seyde,
‘Pees litel sone, I wol do thee noon harm!’
With that hir kerchief of hir heed she breyde,
And over hise litel eyen she it leyde,
And in hir arm she lulleth it ful faste
And in-to hevene hire eyen up she caste.”
Then she commits herself and her child to Mary by the love of Mary’s
child.
“And up she rist, and walketh doun the stronde
Toward the ship,—hir folweth al the prees,—
And evere she preyeth hire child to hold his pees.”
Again, in the Clerk’s tale of Patient Griselda, the effect of the story
is greatly heightened by the narrative of the successive partings of the
mother with her child; and the climax is reached in the burst of gladness
and pent-up feeling which overtakes Griselda at the restoration of her
son and daughter. It is noticeable that in these and other instances
childhood appears chiefly as an appeal to pity, rarely as an object of
direct love and joy. This is not to be wondered at when one considers the
character of the English race, and the nature of the redemption which
it has been undergoing in the slow process of its submission to the
spirit of Christ. We say the English race, without stopping to make nice
distinctions between the elements which existed at the time of the Great
Charter, just as we may properly speak of the American people of the time
of the Constitution.
This character is marked by a brutality, a murderous spirit, which
lies scarcely concealed, to-day, in the temper of every English crowd,
and has left its mark on literature from the ballads to Oliver Twist.
This brutal instinct, this rude, savage, northern spirit, is discovered
in conflict with the disarming power of the spirit of Christ, and the
stages of the conflict are most clearly indicated in poetry, which is to
England what pictorial and sculpturesque art is to the south, the highest
exponent of its spiritual life. More comprehensively, English literature
affords the most complete means of measuring the advance of England in
humanity.
It belongs to the nature of this deep conflict that there should
appear from time to time the finest exemplars of the ideals formed by
the divine spirit, side by side with exhibitions of the most willful
baseness. English literature abounds in these contrasts; it is still
more expressive of tides of spiritual life, the elevation of thought and
imagination succeeded by almost groveling animalism. And since one of
the symbols of a perfected Christianity is the child, it is not unfair
to seek for its presence in literature, nor would it be a rare thing to
discover it in passages which hint at the conflict between the forces of
good and evil so constantly going on.
It is not strange, therefore, that the earliest illustrations of
childhood should mainly turn, as we have seen, upon that aspect which is
at once most natural and most Christian. Pity, like a naked, new-born
babe, does indeed ride the blast in those wild, more than half-savage
bursts of the English spirit which are preserved for us in ballad
literature; and in the first springs of English poetic art in Chaucer,
the child is as it were the mediator between the rough story and the
melody of the singer. One cannot fail to see how the introduction of the
child by Chaucer, in close union with the mother, is almost a transfer of
the Madonna into English poetry,—a Madonna not of ritual, but of humanity.
* * * * *
There are periods in the history of every nation when the inner life
is more completely exposed to view, and when the student, if he be
observant, may trace most clearly the fundamental arteries of being. Such
a period in England was the Elizabethan era, when the tumultuous English
spirit manifested itself in religion, in politics, in enterprise, in
adventure, and in intellectual daring,—that era which was dominated by
the great master of English speech. It is the fashion of every age to
write its characteristics in forms which have become obsolete, and to
resort to masquerade for a display of its real emotions. It was because
chivalry was no longer the every-day habit of men that Spenser used it
for his purposes, and translated the Seven Champions of Christendom
into a profounder and more impassioned poem, emblematical of that great
ethical conflict which has been a significant feature of English history
from the first. In that series of knightly adventures, The Faery Queen,
wherein the field of human character is traversed, sin traced to its
lurking-place, and the old dragon of unrighteousness set upon furiously,
there is a conspicuous incident contained in the second book. In each
book Spenser conceives the antagonist of the knight, in some spiritual
form, to have wrought a mischief which needs to be repaired and revenged.
Thus a dragon occasions the adventures of the Red Cross knight, and in
the legend of Sir Guyon the enchantress Acrasia, or Intemperance, has
caused the death of a knight and his lady; the latter slays herself
because of her husband’s death, and plunges her babe’s innocent hands
into her own bloody breast for a witness. Sir Guyon and the Palmer,
standing over the dead bodies, hold grave discourse upon the incident;
then they bury the dead, and seek in vain to cleanse the babe’s hands in
a neighboring fountain. The pure water will not be stained, and the child
bears the name Ruddymane,—the Red-Handed,—and shall so bear the sign of a
vengeance he is yet to execute.
It is somewhat difficult to see into the full meaning of Spenser’s
allegory, for the reason that the poet breaks through the meshes of his
allegoric net and soars into a freer air; but there are certain strong
lines running through the poem, and this of the ineradicable nature
of sin is one of them. To Spenser, vexed with problems of life, that
conception of childhood which knit it closely with the generations was a
significant one, and in the bloody hand of the infant, which could not
be suffered to stain the chaste fountain, he saw the dread transmission
of an inherited guilt and wrong. The poet and the moralist struggle for
ascendency, and in this conflict one may see reflected the passion for
speculation in divinity which was already making deep marks in English
literature.
But the Elizabethan era had its share of light-heartedness. The songs
of the dramatists and other lyrics exhibit very clearly the influence
upon literature of the revival of ancient learning. As the art of Italy
showed the old poetic grace risen again under new conditions, so the
dominant art of England caught a light from the uncovered glory of Greece
and Rome. It was the time of the great translations of Phaer, Golding,
North, and Chapman; and as those translations are bold appropriations
of antiquity, not timid attempts at satisfying the requisitions of
scholarship, so the figures of the old mythology are used freely and
ingenuously; they are naturalized in English verse far more positively
than afterwards in the _elegantia_ of the Queen Anne and Georgian
periods. Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway is an exquisite illustration of
this rich, decorative use of the old fable. It was partly through this
sportive appropriation of the myth of Amor, so vital in all literature,
that the lullabies of the time came to get their sweetness. The poet,
in putting songs into the mother’s mouth, is not so much reflecting the
Virgin and Child as he is possessed with the spirit of Greek beauty,
and his delicate fancy plays about the image of a little Love. Thus may
we read the Golden Slumbers of Dekker, in his Patient Grissel. By a
pretty conceit George Gascoigne, in his Lullaby of a Lover, captures the
sentiment of a mother and babe, to make it tell the story of his own love
and content. There is a touching song by Robert Greene in his Menaphon,
where Sephestia puts into her lullaby the story of her parting with the
child’s father:—
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt,
More thou crowed, more he cried,
Nature could not sorrow hide;
He must go, he must kiss
Child and mother, baby bless;
For he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow, father’s joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.”
We are apt to look for everything in Shakespeare, but in this matter of
childhood we must confess that there is a meagreness of reference which
almost tempts us into constructing a theory to account for it. So far
as dramatic representation is concerned, the necessary limitations of
the stage easily account for the absence of the young. Girls were not
allowed to act in Shakespeare’s time, and it is not easy to reduce boys
capable of acting to the stature of young girls. More than this, boys and
girls are not themselves dramatic in action, though in the more modern
drama they are sometimes used, especially in domestic scenes, to heighten
effects, and to make most reasonable people wish them in bed.
Still, within the limits enforced by his art, Shakespeare more than once
rested much on youthful figures. The gay, agile Moth has a species of
femineity about him, so that we fancy he would be most easily shown on
the stage by a girl; but one readily recalls others who have distinct
boyish properties. In Coriolanus, when the mother and wife go out to
plead with the angry Roman, they take with them his little boy. Volumnia,
frantic with fear, with love, and with a woman’s changing passion, calls
upon one and another to join her in her entreaty. Virgilia, the wife,
crowds in a word at the height of Volumnia’s appeal, when the voluble
grandmother has been rather excitedly talking about Coriolanus treading
on his mother’s womb, that brought him into the world. Virgilia strikes
in,—
“Ay, and mine
That brought you forth this boy, to keep your name
Living to time.”
Whereupon young Marcius, with delicious boyish brag and chivalry:—
“A’ shall not tread on me;
I’ll run away till I am bigger, but then I’ll fight.”
In the same play there is a description of the boy which tallies exactly
with the single appearance which he makes in person. Valeria drops in
upon the mother and grandmother in a friendly way, and civilly asks after
the boy.
“_Vir._ I thank your ladyship; well, good madam.
“_Vol._ He had rather see the swords, and hear a drum, than look
upon his schoolmaster.
“_Val._ O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear, ’tis a very
pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an
hour together: has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run
after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go
again; and after it again: and over and over he comes, and up
again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or
how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; O, I warrant,
how he mammocked it!
“_Vol._ One on ’s father’s moods.
“_Val._ Indeed, la, ’tis a noble child.
“_Vir._ A crack, madam.”
The most eminent example in Shakespeare of active childhood is
unquestionably the part played by young Arthur in the drama of King
John. It is the youth of Arthur, his dependence, his sorry inheritance of
misery, his helplessness among the raging wolves about him, his childish
victory over Hubert, and his forlorn death, when he leaps trembling from
the walls, which impress the imagination. “Stay yet,” says Pembroke to
Salisbury,—
“I’ll go with thee
And find the inheritance of this poor child,
His little kingdom of a forced grave.”
Shakespeare, busy with the story of kings, is moved with deep compassion
for this child among kings, who overcomes the hard heart of Hubert by his
innocent words, the very strength of feeble childhood, and falls like a
poor lamb upon the stones, where his princedom could not save him.
In that ghastly play of Titus Andronicus, which melts at last into
unavailing tears, with what exquisite grace is the closing scene
humanized by the passage where the elder Lucius calls his boy to the side
of his dead grandsire:—
“Come hither, boy; come, come, and learn of us
To melt in showers: thy grandsire loved thee well:
Many a matter hath he told to thee,
Meet and agreeing with thine infancy;
In that respect, then, like a loving child,
Shed yet some small drops from thy tender spring,
Because kind nature doth require it so.”
The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is in nothing figured more acutely
than when the woman and mother is made to say,—
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you
Have done to this.”
In the witch’s hell-broth one ingredient is “finger of birth-strangled
babe,” while in the portents which rise to Macbeth’s vision a bloody
child and a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, are apparitions of
ghostly prophecy. Then in that scene where Ross discloses slowly and with
pent-up passion the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and Macduff
hears as in a dream, waking to the blinding light of horrid day, with
what a piercing shriek he cries out,—
“He has no children!”
and then surges back to his own pitiful state, transformed for a moment
into an infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has
stolen his mate and pretty brood.
By what marvelous flash of poetic power Shakespeare in this mighty
passage lifts that humblest image of parental care, a hen and chickens,
into the heights of human passion. Ah! as one sees a hen with a brood of
chickens under her,—how she gathers them under her wings, and will stay
in the cold if she can but keep them warm,—one’s mind turns to those
words of profound pathos spoken over the unloving Jerusalem; there was
the voice of a nature into which was gathered all the father’s and the
mother’s love. In these two passages one sees the irradiation of poor
feathered life with the glory of the image of the highest.
How important a part in the drama of King Richard III. do the young
princes play; as princes, indeed, in the unfolding of the plot, yet
as children in the poet’s portraiture of them. We hear their childish
prattle, we see their timid shrinking from the dark Tower, and then we
have the effect of innocent childhood upon the callous murderers, Dighton
and Forrest, as related in that short, sharp, dramatic account which
Tyrrel gives:—
“Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this ruthless piece of butchery,
Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,
Melting with tenderness and kind compassion
Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories.
‘Lo, thus,’ quoth Dighton, ‘lay those tender babes:’
‘Thus, thus,’ quoth Forrest, ‘girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms:
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other.
A book of prayers on their pillow lay;
Which once,’ quoth Forrest, ‘almost changed my mind;
But O! the devil’—there the villain stopp’d;
Whilst Dighton thus told on: ‘We smothered
The most replenished sweet work of nature,
That from the prime creation e’er she framed.’
Thus both are gone with conscience and remorse;
They could not speak.”
The glances at infancy, though infrequent, are touched with strong human
feeling. Ægeon, narrating the strange adventures of his shipwreck, tells
of the
“Piteous plainings of the pretty babes
That mourned for fashion, ignorant what to fear;”
and scattered throughout the plays are passages and lines which touch
lightly or significantly the realm of childhood: as,—
“Pity like a naked, new-born babe;”
“’Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil,”
in Macbeth;
“Love is like a child
That longs for every thing that he can come by;”
“How wayward is this foolish love
That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse,
And presently all humble kiss the rod,”
in Two Gentlemen of Verona;
“Those that do teach young babes
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks,”
says Desdemona; and Cleopatra, when the poisonous asp is planting its
fangs, says with saddest irony,—
“Peace! peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?”
There is a charming illustration of the blending of the classic myth of
Amor with actual childhood in these lines of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,
where Helena says,
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste:
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
As waggish boys in games themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjured everywhere.”
In the noonday musing of Jaques, when the summer sky hung over the
greenwood, and he fell to thinking of the round world and all that dwell
therein, the Seven Ages of Man passed in procession before him:—
“At first the infant
Muling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school,”
until the last poor shambling creature is borne off in second childhood.
There are doubtless other passages which might be gleaned, but the
survey is full enough to show how scantily, after all, Shakespeare has
made use of the figure and the image of childhood. The reflection has
led an ingenious writer to explain the fact by the circumstances of
Shakespeare’s life, which hindered his study of children. “He was clearly
old for his age when still a boy, and so would have associated, not
with children, but with young men. His marriage as a mere lad and the
scanty legends of his youth all tend in the same direction. The course
of his life led him to live apart from his children in their youth; his
busy life in London brought him into the interior of but few families;
his son, of whom he saw but little, died young. If our supposition be
true, it is a pathetic thought that the great dramatist was shut out
from the one kind of companionship which, even while it is in no degree
intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental powers, can take
delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect far more
matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.”[32]
The explanation is rather ingenious than satisfying. Where did
Shakespeare get his knowledge of the abundant life which his dramas
present? He had the privilege of most people of remembering his own
boyhood, and the mind which could invent Hamlet out of such stuff
as experience and observation furnished could scarcely have missed
acquaintance enough with children to enable him to portray them whenever
the exigencies of his drama required. No, it is simpler to refer the
absence of children as actors to the limitations of the stage, and to
ascribe the infrequent references to childhood to the general neglect
of the merely domestic side of life in Shakespeare’s art. Shakespeare’s
world was an out-of-doors, public world, and his men, women, and lovers
carried on their lives with no denser concealment than a wood or an arras
could afford.
The comprehensiveness of Shakespeare found some place for children; the
lofty narrowness of Milton, none. The word _child_, even, can scarcely
be found on a page of Milton’s verse. In his Ode on the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity, with its Hymn, how slight is the mention of the child
Jesus! How far removed is the treatment from that employed in the great
procession of Madonnas!
“Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?”
The Infant God!—that is Milton’s attitude, more than half pagan. In
L’Allegro and in Comus the lightness, which denotes the farthest swing
of Milton’s fancy, is the relief which his poetic soul found from the
high themes of theology, in Greek art. One is aware that Milton’s fine
scholarship was the salvation of his poetry, as his Puritan sense of
personality held in check a nature which else might have run riot in
sportiveness and sensuousness. When he permitted himself his exquisite
short flights of fancy, the material in which he worked was not the fresh
spring of English nature, human or earthly, but the remote Arcadian
virginity which he had learned of in his books. Not dancing children,
but winged sprites, caught his poetic eye.
The weight of personal responsibility which rests upon the Puritan
conception of life offers small play for the wantonness and spontaneity
of childhood. Moreover, the theological substratum of Puritan morality
denied to childhood any freedom, and kept the life of man in waiting upon
the conscious turning of the soul to God. Hence childhood was a time of
probation and suspense. It was wrong, to begin with, and was repressed
in its nature until maturity should bring an active and conscious
allegiance to God. Hence, also, parental anxiety was forever earnestly
seeking to anticipate the maturity of age, and to secure for childhood
that reasonable intellectual belief which it held to be essential to
salvation; there followed often a replacement of free childhood by an
abnormal development. In any event, the tendency of the system was to
ignore childhood, to get rid of it as quickly as possible, and to make
the state contain only self-conscious, determinate citizens of the
kingdom of heaven. There was, unwittingly, a reversal of the divine
message, and it was said in effect to children: Except ye become as
grown men and be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
Nevertheless, though Puritanism in its excessive anxiety may have robbed
childhood of its freedom, the whole spirit of the movement was one
conservative of family relations, and the narratives of domestic life
under Puritanic control are often full of a grave sweetness. Indeed, it
may almost be said that the domestic narrative was now born into English
literature. Nor could the intense concern for the spiritual well-being
of children, a religious passion reinforcing natural affection, fail to
give an importance to the individual life of the family, and prepare the
way for that new intelligence of the scope of childhood which was to come
later to an England still largely dominated by Puritan ideas.
Milton expressed the high flight of the soul above earthly things.
He took his place upon a summit where he could show the soul all the
confines of heaven and earth. Bunyan, stirred by like religious impulses,
made his soul trudge sturdily along toward an earthly paradise. The
realism of his story often veils successfully the spiritual sense,
and makes it possible for children to read the Pilgrim’s Progress
with but faint conception of its religious import. In the second
part of the allegory, Christian’s wife and children set out on their
ramble, in Christian’s footsteps. There is no lack of individuality in
characterization of the persons. The children are distinctly conceived
as children; they are, to be sure, made to conform occasionally to the
demands of the spiritual side of the allegory, yet they remain children,
and by their speech and action betray the childish mind.
They come in sight of the lions, and “the boys that went before were glad
to cringe behind, for they were afraid of the lions, so they stepped back
and went behind.” When they come to the Porter’s Lodge, they abide there
awhile with Prudence, Piety, and Charity; Prudence catechizes the four
children, who return commendably correct answers. But Matthew, the oldest
boy, falls sick of the gripes; and when the physician asks Christiana
what he has been eating lately, she is as ignorant as any mother can be.