“‘Mother, mother, what was that which my brother did gather up and eat,
so soon as we were come from the Gate that is at the head of this way?
You know that there was an orchard on the left hand, on the other side of
the wall, and some of the trees hung over the wall, and my brother did
plash and did eat.’
“‘True, my child,’ said Christiana, ‘he did take thereof and did eat,
naughty boy as he was. I did chide him, and yet he would eat thereof.’”
So Mr. Skill, the physician, proceeds to make a purge. “You know,” says
Bunyan, in a sly parenthesis, “physicians give strange medicines to
their patients.” “And it was made up,” he goes on, “into pills, with a
promise or two, and a proportionable quantity of salt. Now he was to take
them three at a time, fasting, in half a quarter of a pint of Tears of
Repentance. When this Portion was prepared and brought to the boy, he was
loth to take it, though torn with the gripes as if he should be pulled in
pieces. ‘Come, come,’ said the physician, ‘you must take it.’ ‘It goes
against my stomach,’ said the boy. ‘I must have you take it,’ said his
mother. ‘I shall vomit it up again,’ said the boy. ‘Pray, sir,’ said
Christiana to Mr. Skill, ‘how does it taste?’ ‘It has no ill taste,’ said
the doctor, and with that she touched one of the pills with the tip of
her tongue. ‘O Matthew,’ said she, ‘this Portion is sweeter than honey.
If thou lovest thy mother, if thou lovest thy brothers, if thou lovest
Mercy, if thou lovest thy life, take it.’ So with much ado, after a
short prayer for the blessing of God upon it, he took it, and it wrought
kindly with him. It caused him to purge, it caused him to sleep and rest
quietly, it put him into a fine heat and breathing sweat, and did quite
rid him of his gripes.”
The story is dotted with these lifelike incidents, and the consistency
is rather in the basis of the allegory than in the allegory itself. In
truth, we get in the Pilgrim’s Progress an inimitable picture of social
life in the lower middle class of England, and in this second part a very
vivid glimpse of a Puritan household. The glimpse is corrective of a too
stern and formal apprehension of social Puritanism, and in the story
are exhibited the natural charms and graces which not only could not be
expelled by a stern creed, but were essentially connected with the lofty
ideals which made Puritanism a mighty force in history. Bunyan had a
genius for story-telling, and his allegory is very frank; but what he
showed as well as what he did not show in his picture of Christiana and
the children indicates the constraint which rested upon the whole Puritan
conception of childhood. It is seen at its best in Bunyan, and this great
Puritan poet of common life found a place for it in his survey of man’s
estate; nature asserted itself in spite of and through Puritanism.
* * * * *
Milton’s Christmas Hymn has the organ roll of a mind moving among high
themes, and making the earth one of the golden spheres. Pope’s sacred
eclogue of the Messiah is perhaps the completest expression of the
religious sentiment of an age which was consciously bounded by space and
time. In Pope’s day, the world was scarcely a part of a greater universe;
eternity was only a prolongation of time, and the sense of beauty, acute
as it was, was always sharply defined. Pope’s rhymed couplets, with their
absolute finality, their clean conclusion, their epigrammatic snap, are
the most perfect symbols of the English mind of that period. When in the
Messiah we read,—
“Rapt into future times the bard begun,
A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a son!
...
Swift fly the years and rise the expected morn!
O spring to light, auspicious babe, be born!”
we remember Milton’s Infant God. The two poets touch, with a like
faintness, the childhood of Jesus, but the one through awe and grandeur
of contemplation, the other through the polite indifference of a man
of the world. Or take Pope’s mundane philosophy, as exhibited most
elaborately in his Essay on Man, and set it beside Shakespeare’s Seven
Ages of Man:—
“Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps and life’s poor play is o’er.”
This is the only passage in the Essay hinting at childhood, and suffices
to indicate how entirely insignificant in the eyes of the philosophy
underlying Pope and his school was the whole thought of childhood. The
passage, while not perhaps consciously imitative of Shakespeare, suggests
comparison, and one finds in Jaques under the greenwood a more human
feeling. Commend us to the tramp before the drawing-room philosopher!
* * * * *
The prelusive notes of a new literature were sounded by Fielding, Gray,
Goldsmith, and Cowper. It was to be a literature which touched the
earth again, the earth of a common nature, the earth also of a national
inheritance.
Fielding, though painting contemporary society in a manner borrowed in
a measure from the satiric drama, was moving constantly into the freer
domain of the novelist who is a critic of life, and when he would set
forth the indestructible force of a pure nature in a woman who is placed
in a loose society, as in Amelia, he instinctively hedges the wife about
with children, and it is a mark of his art that these children are not
mere pawns which are moved about to protect the queen; they are genuine
figures, their prattle is natural, and they are constantly illustrating
in the most innocent fashion the steadfastness of Amelia.
It is significant that Gray, with his delicate taste and fine classical
scholarship, when he composed his Elegy used first the names of eminent
Romans when he wrote:—
“Some village Cato, who with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of the fields withstood;
Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Cæsar, guiltless of his country’s blood.”
He changed these names for those of English heroes, and in doing so broke
away from traditions which still had a strong hold in literature. It is a
pity that for a reason which hardly convinces us he should have thought
best to omit the charming stanza,—
“There, scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found:
The Red-breast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.”
When Gray wrote this he doubtless had in mind the ballad of the Children
in the Wood. In the succession of English pictures which he does give is
that lovely one,—
“For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening’s care;
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the evening kiss to share.”
In his poem On a Distant Prospect of Eton College he has lines which are
instinct with a feeling for childhood and youth. There is, it is true, a
touch of artificiality in the use made of childhood in this poem, as a
foil for tried manhood, its little life treated as the lost golden age of
mankind; but that sentiment was a prevailing one in the period.
Goldsmith, whose Bohemianism helped to release him from subservience to
declining fashions in literature, treats childhood in a more genuine and
artless fashion. In his prose and poetry I hear the first faint notes of
that song of childhood which in a generation more was to burst from many
lips. The sweetness which trembles in the Deserted Village finds easy
expression in forms and images which call up childhood to memory, as in
those lines,—
“The playful children just let loose from school,”
“E’en children followed with endearing wile,
And plucked his gown, to share the good man’s smile,”—
and in the quaint picture of the village school.
It is in the Vicar of Wakefield, however, that one finds the freest
play of fancy about childish figures. Goldsmith says of his hero that
“he unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth,—he is
a priest, a husbandman, and the father of a family;” and the whole of
the significant preface may lead one to revise the estimate of Goldsmith
which his contemporaries have fastened upon English literary history.
The waywardness and unconventionality of this man of genius and his
eager desire to be accepted by the world, which was then the great
world, were the characteristics which most impressed the shallower minds
about him. In truth, he had not only an extraordinary sympathy with the
ever-varying, ever-constant flux of human life, but he dropped a deeper
plummet than any English thinker since Milton.
It was in part his loneliness that threw him upon children for complete
sympathy; in part also his prophetic sense, for he had an unerring vision
of what constituted the strength and the weakness of England. After the
portraiture of the Vicar himself, there are no finer sketches than those
of the little children. “It would be fruitless,” says the unworldly
Vicar, “to deny exultation when I saw my little ones about me;” and from
time to time in the tale, the youngest children, Dick and Bill, trot
forward in an entirely natural manner. They show an engaging fondness for
Mr. Thornhill. “The whole family seemed earnest to please him.... My
little ones were no less busy, and fondly stuck close to the stranger.
All my endeavors could scarcely keep their dirty fingers from handling
and tarnishing the lace on his clothes, and lifting up the flaps of his
pocket holes to see what was there.” The character of Mr. Burchell is
largely drawn by its association with the children. The account given by
little Dick of the carrying off of Olivia is full of charming childish
spirit, and there is an exquisite passage where the Vicar returns home
with the news of Olivia’s recovery, and discovers his house to be on
fire, while in a tumult of confusion the older members of the family rush
out of the dwelling.
“I gazed upon them and upon it by turns,” proceeds the Vicar, “and then
looked round me for my two little ones; but they were not to be seen. O
misery! ‘Where,’ cried I, ‘where are my little ones?’ ‘They are burnt to
death in the flames,’ says my wife calmly, ‘and I will die with them.’
That moment I heard the cry of the babes within, who were just awaked
by the fire, and nothing could have stopped me. ‘Where, where are my
children?’ cried I, rushing through the flames, and bursting the door
of the chamber in which they were confined. ‘Where are my little ones?’
‘Here, dear papa, here we are!’ cried they together, while the flames
were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms,
and snatching them through the fire as fast as possible, just as I was
got out the roof sunk in. ‘Now,’ cried I, holding up my children, ‘now
let the flames burn on, and all my possessions perish. Here they are. I
have saved my treasure. Here, my dearest, here are our treasures, and
we shall yet be happy.’ We kissed our little darlings a thousand times;
they clasped us round the neck, and seemed to share our transports, while
their mother laughed and wept by turns.”
Cowper was more secluded from his time and its influence than Goldsmith,
but like him he felt the instinct for a return to the elemental in life
and nature. The gentleness of Cowper, combined with a poetic sensibility,
found expression in simple themes. His life, led in a pastoral country,
and occupied with trivial pleasures, offered him primitive material,
and he sang of hares, and goldfish, and children. His Tirocinium, or a
Review of Schools, though having a didactic intention, has some charming
bits of descriptive writing, as in the familiar lines which describe the
sport of
“The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot.”
The description melts, as do so many of Cowper’s retrospections, into
a tender melancholy. A deeper note still is struck in his Lines on the
Receipt of my Mother’s Picture.
* * * * *
The new birth which was coming to England had its premonitions in
literature. It had them also in art. In this period appeared Sir Joshua
Reynolds and Gainsborough: the one preëminently a painter of humanity,
the other of nature, and both of them moved by a spirit of freedom, under
well-recognized academic rules. There is in their work a lingering of
the old formal character which took sharp account of the diversities
of rank, and separated things common from things choice; yet they both
belong to the new world rather than to the old, and in nothing is this
more remarkable than in the number and character of the children pieces
painted by Reynolds. They are a delight to the eye, and in the true
democracy of art we know no distinction between Master Crewe as Henry
VIII. and a Boy with a Child on his back and cabbage nets in his hand.
What a revelation of childhood is in this great group! There is the
tenderness of the Children in the Wood, the peace of the Sleeping Child,
where nature itself is in slumber, the timidity of the Strawberry Girl,
the wildness of the Gypsy Boy, the shy grace of Pickaback, the delightful
wonder of Master Bunbury, the sweet simplicity and innocence in the
pictures so named, and the spiritual yet human beauty of the Angels’
heads. Reynolds studied the work of the mediæval painters, but he came
back to England and painted English children. Goldsmith’s Vicar, Cowper’s
Lines on his mother’s portrait, and Reynolds’ children bring us close to
the heart of our subject.
II
It was the saying of the Swedish seer Count Swedenborg, that a Day of
Judgment was to come upon men at the time of the French Revolution. Then
were the spirits to be judged. In whatever terms we may express the fact,
clear it is to us that the close of the last century marks a great epoch
in the history of Christendom, and the farther we withdraw from the
events which gather about our own birth as an organized nation, and those
which effected such enormous changes in European life, the more clearly
do we perceive that the movements of the present century are mainly along
lines which may be traced back to genetic beginnings then. There was
indeed a great awakening, a renaissance, a new birth.
The French Revolution was a sign of the times: it furnishes a convenient
name for an epoch, not merely because important changes in Christendom
were contemporaneous with it, but because they were intimately associated
with it. Then appeared the portent of Democracy, and the struggle of
humanity has ever since been for the realization of dreams which came as
visions of a great hope. Then began that examination of the foundation
of things in science and philosophy which has become a mighty passion in
intellectual life.
I have said that every great renaissance has left its record in the
recognition which childhood receives in literature and art. I add that
the scope and profundity of that renaissance may be measured by the form
which this recognition takes. At the birth of Christianity the pregnant
sentences, “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter the
kingdom of heaven,” “For of such is the kingdom of heaven,” “Verily I
say unto you, their angels do always behold the face of my Father in
heaven,” sound a depth unreached before. They were, like other words from
the same source, veritable prophecies, the perfect fulfillment of which
waits the perfect manifestation of the Son of Man. At the Renaissance,
when mediævalism gave way before modern life, art reflected the hopes of
mankind in the face of a divine child. At the great Revolution, when,
amidst fire and blood, the new life of humanity stood revealed, an unseen
hand again took a little child and placed him in the midst of men. It was
reserved for an English poet to be the one who most clearly discerned the
face of the child. Himself one of the great order of angels, he beheld in
the child the face of God. I may be pardoned, I trust, for thus reading
in Western fashion the meaning of that Oriental phrase which I find has
perplexed theologians and Biblical critics. Was it any new disclosure
which the Christ made if he merely said that the attendant ministers of
children always beheld the face of the Father in heaven? Was it not the
very property of such angelic nature that it should see God? But was it
not rather a revelation to the crass minds of those who thrust children
aside, that the angels who moved between the Father of spirits and these
new-comers into the world saw in their faces a witness to their divine
origin? They saw the Father repeated in the child.
When Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads, a storm of ridicule fell
upon them. In that age, when the old and the new were clashing with
each other on every hand, so stark a symbol of the new as these ballads
presented could not fail to furnish an objective point for criticism
which was born of the old. Wordsworth, in his defensive Preface,
declares, “The principal object proposed in these Poems was to choose
incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe
them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language
really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain
coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to
the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these
incidents and situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though
not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly as far as
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.
Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition,
the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can
attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and
more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary
feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may
be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because
the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings,
and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily
comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that
condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and
permanent forms of nature.”
Every one of these reasons, unless the last, which I do not understand,
be excepted, applies with additional force to the use of forms and
images and incidents drawn from childhood; and though Wordsworth takes
no account of this in his Preface, it is more to the point that he does
freely and fully recognize the fact in his poetry. The Preface, with its
dry formality, was like much of Wordsworth’s poetry,—Pegasus on a walk,
his wings impeding free action. It is one of the anomalies of nature
that a poet with such insight as Wordsworth should never apparently
have discovered his own pragmatical dullness. It seems to me that
Wordsworth’s finer moods were just those of which he never attempted to
give a philosophic account, and that he did not refer to childhood in his
Preface is an evidence of his inspiration when dealing with it.
Be this as it may, his treatment of childhood accords with his manifesto
to the British public. Could anything be more trivial, as judged by the
standards of the day, than his ballad of Alice Fell, or Poverty?—of
which he has himself said, “The humbleness, meanness if you like, of the
subject, together with the homely mode of treating it, brought upon me
a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded
it from many editions of my Poems, till it was restored at the request
of some of my friends, in particular my son-in-law, Edward Quillinan.”
What is the motive of a poem which excited such derision that the poet in
a moment of alarm withdrew it from publication, and when he restored it
held his son-in-law responsible? Simply the grief of a poor child, who
had stolen a ride behind the poet’s post-chaise, upon finding that her
tattered cloak had become caught in the wheel and irretrievably ruined.
The poet makes no attempt to dignify this grief; the incident is related
in poetic form, but without any poetic discovery beyond the simple worth
of the grief. It is, perhaps, the most audaciously matter of fact of
all Wordsworth’s poems; and yet, such is the difference in the audience
to-day from what it was in Wordsworth’s time that Alice Fell appears as
a matter of course in all the anthologies for children, and is read by
men and women with positive sympathy, with a tenderness for the forlorn
little girl, and without a question as to the poem’s right of existence.
The misery, the grief of childhood, is conceived of as a real thing,
measured by the child’s mind into which we enter, and not by our own
standards of pain and loss.
Again, recall the poem of Lucy Gray, or Solitude. The story is far more
pathetic, and has an appeal to more catholic sensibility: a child, sent
with a lantern to town from the moor on which she lives, that she may
light her mother back through the snow, is lost among the hills, and her
footsteps are traced at last to the fatal bridge through which she has
fallen. The incident was one from real life; Wordsworth seized upon it,
reproducing each detail, and with a touch or two of genius made a wraith.
He discovered, as no one before had done, the element of solitude in
childhood, and invested it with a fine spiritual, ethereal quality, quite
devoid of any ethical property,—a subtle community with nature.
How completely Wordsworth entered the mind of a child and identified
himself with its movements is consciously betrayed in his pastoral, The
Pet Lamb. He puts into the mouth of Barbara Lewthwaite the imaginary song
to her lamb, and then says for himself,—
“As homeward through the lane I went with lazy feet,
This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat;
And it seemed, as I retraced the ballad line by line,
That but half of it was hers, and one half of it was mine.
Again and once again did I repeat the song;
Nay, said I, more than half to the damsel must belong,
For she looked with such a look and she spake with such a tone
That I almost received her heart into my own.”
His second thought was best: more than half did belong to the child, for
he himself was but the wise interpreter.
Wordsworth’s incidents of childhood are sometimes given a purely
objective character, as in Rural Architecture, The Anecdote for Fathers,
The Idle Shepherd Boys; but more often childhood is to him the occasion
and suggestion of the deeper thought of life. A kitten, playing with
falling leaves before the poet and his child Dora, leads him on by
exquisite movement to the thought of his own decay of life. But what
impresses us most is the twofold conception of childhood as a part of
nature, and as containing within itself not only the germ of human life,
but the echo of the divine. There are poems of surpassing beauty which so
blend the child and nature that we might almost fancy, as we look upon
the poetical landscape, that we are mistaking children for bushes, or
bushes for children. Such is that one beginning
“Three years she grew in sun and shower,”
and
“Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!”
He drew images from his children and painted a deliberate portrait of his
daughter Catharine, solemnly entitled, Characteristics of a Child Three
Years Old.
Yet, though Wordsworth drew many suggestions from his own children and
from those whom he saw in his walks, it is remarkable how little he
regards children in their relation to parents in comparison of their
individual and isolated existence. Before Wordsworth, the child, in
literature, was almost wholly considered as one of a group, as a part
of a family, and only those phases of childhood were treated which
were obvious to the most careless observer. Wordsworth—and here is the
notable fact—was the first deliberately to conceive of childhood as a
distinct, individual element of human life. He first, to use a truer
phrase, apprehended the personality of childhood. He did this and gave it
expression in artistic form in some of the poems already named; he did it
methodically and with philosophic intent in his autobiographic poem The
Prelude, and also in The Excursion. Listen how he speaks of his infancy
even, giving it by anticipation a life separate from mother and nurse.
“Was it for this?” he asks,—