That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou,
O Derwent! winding among grassy holms
Where I was looking on, a babe in arms,
Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.”
Still more minutely does he disclose the consciousness of childhood in
his record of the mind of the Wanderer in The Excursion, in the lines
beginning:—
“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak
In summer tended cattle on the hills.”
It may be said that in all this Wordsworth is simply rehearsing and
expanding an exceptional experience; that his recollection of his own
childhood passed through the alembic of a fervid poetic imagination. Be
it so; we are not so much concerned to know how the poet came by this
divination, as to know that he should have treated it as universal and
common to the period of childhood. Again and again in descriptive poem,
in direct address, in indirect allusion, he so uses this knowledge as
to forbid us to regard it as peculiar and exceptional in his own view;
and a poet’s attestation to a universal experience is worth more than any
negation which comes from our individual blurred recollection. Wordsworth
discovers in childhood the germ of humanity; he sees there thoughts,
emotions, activities, sufferings, which are miniatures of the maturer
life,—but, he sees more than this and deeper. To him the child is not
a pigmy man; it has a life of its own, out of which something even may
pass, when childhood is left behind. It is not the ignorant innocence of
childhood, the infantile grace, which holds him, but a certain childish
possession, in which he sees a spiritual presence obscured in conscious
youth. Landor in one of his Imaginary Conversations stoutly asserts a
similar fact when he says, “Children are not men or women; they are
almost as different creatures, in many respects, as if they never were to
be one or the other; they are as unlike as buds are unlike flowers, and
almost as blossoms are unlike fruits.”[33]
In all this again, in this echo of the divine which Wordsworth hears in
the voice of childhood, there is reference, psychologically, to his
own personal experience. Yet why should we treat that as ruled out of
evidence, which only one here and another there acknowledges as a part of
his history? Is it not fairer, more reasonable, to take the experience
of a profound poet as the basis of spiritual truth than the negative
testimony of those whose eyes lack the wondrous power of seeing? In the
preface to his ode, Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of
Early Childhood, Wordsworth declares with great earnestness:—
“To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains
itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings
or experiences of my own mind, on which the structure of the poem partly
rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit
the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have said
elsewhere—
‘A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death!’
But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my
difficulty came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit
within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and
almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should
be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling
congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external existence,
and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but
inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times, while going to school,
have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from the abyss of
idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In
later periods of life I have deplored, as we all have reason to do, a
subjugation of an opposite character.”
Here Wordsworth defends the philosophy of the poem by making it an
induction from his own experience. There will be found many to question
its truth, because they have no recollections which correspond with
the poet’s; and others who will claim that the poem is but a fanciful
argument in behalf of the philosophic heresy of a preëxistent state. In
my judgment, Wordsworth’s preface is somewhat misleading by its reference
to this theory, although he has furnished hints in the same preface
of his more integral thought. As I have noticed before, his artistic
presentation is truer and more final than his exegesis. Whoever reads
this great ode is aware of the rise and fall of the tide of thought; he
hears the poet reasoning with himself; he sees him passing in imagination
out of childhood into age, yet constantly recovering himself to fresh
perception of the immortality which transcends earthly life. It is
visible childhood with its intimation of immortality which brings to
the poet, not regret for what is irretrievably lost, but firmer faith
in the reality of the unseen and eternal. The confusion into which some
have been cast by the ode arises from their bringing to the idea of
immortality the time conception; they conceive the poet to be hinting
of an indefinite time antedating the child’s birth, an indefinite time
extending beyond the man’s death, whereas Wordsworth’s conception of
immortality rests in the indestructibility of spirit by any temporal or
earthly conditions,—an indestructibility which even implies an absence of
beginning as well as of ending.
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,”
he declares. It is the investment of this visible life by an unseen,
unfelt, yet real spiritual presence for which he contends, and he
maintains that the inmost consciousness of childhood bears witness to
this truth; this consciousness fades as the earthly life penetrates the
soul, yet it is there and recurs in sudden moments.
“Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”
In thus connecting childhood with the highest hope of the human race,
Wordsworth was repeating the note which twice before had been struck in
great epochs of history. This third renaissance was the awaking of the
human soul to a sense of the common rights and duties of humanity, the
dignity and worth of the Person.
* * * * *
The poetic form, while most perfectly inclosing these divinations of
childhood, and especially suited to the presentation of the faint and
elusive elements, is less adapted to the philosophic and discursive
examination of the subject of childhood. It is, then, an indication of
the impression which the idea had made upon men that a prose writer of
the period, of singular insight and subtlety, should have given some
of his most characteristic thought to an examination of the essential
elements of childhood. De Quincey was undoubtedly strongly affected
by Wordsworth’s treatment of the subject; he has left evidence upon
this point. Nevertheless, he appears to have sounded his own mind and
appealed to his own memory for additional and corroborative testimony.
In his Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to the Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater, he offers an account of his recollections of infancy,
together with many reflections upon the experience which he then
underwent. If it be said that the opium-eater was an untrustworthy
witness, since his dreaming might well lead him to confuse the subtle
workings of a mature mind with the vivid remembrance of one or two
striking events of childhood, we may consider that De Quincey’s
imagination was a powerful one, and capable of interpreting the incidents
and emotions brought to it by memory, as a more prosaic mind could not.
We are compelled, of course, in all such cases, to submit the testimony
of such a man to the judgment of our own reason, but that reason ought,
before pronouncing a final verdict, to be educated to perceive the
possibilities of a wider range of observation than may have fallen to
us individually, and to submit the results to a comparison with known
operations of the human mind. Above all, it should be borne in mind that
a distinction clearly exists between a child’s consciousness and its
power of expression. De Quincey himself in a note says with acuteness and
justice:—
“The reader must not forget in reading this and other passages that
though a child’s feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks.
I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is this
distinction or this explanation from pointing to anything metaphysical
or doubtful, that a man must be grossly unobservant who is not aware of
what I am here noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but
as a necessity of all children. Whatsoever in a man’s mind blossoms and
expands to his own consciousness in mature life must have preëxisted
in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child,
consciously read in my own deep feelings these ideas. No, not at all; nor
was it possible for a child to do so. I, the child, had the feelings; I,
the man, decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to
him; in me, the interpretation and the comment.”
Assuredly this is reasonable, and since we are looking for the
recognition of childhood in literature, we may wisely ask how it presents
itself to a man like De Quincey, who had peculiar power in one form of
literature—the autobiographic-imaginative. He entitles the first part of
his Suspiria, The Affliction of Childhood. It is the record of a child’s
grief, interpreted by the man when he could translate into speech the
emotion which possessed him in his early suffering; and near its close,
De Quincey, partially summing up his philosophy of the subject, declares:—
“God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk
in darkness. But in solitude, above all things when made vocal by the
truths and services of a national church, God holds communion undisturbed
with children. Solitude, though silent as light, is like light the
mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come
into this world alone; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a
dread, whispering consciousness that if he should be summoned to travel
into God’s presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the
hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child,
all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore,
which in this world appalls or fascinates a child’s heart, is but the
echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, and
of another solitude, deeper still, through which he has to pass; reflex
of one solitude, prefiguration of another.
“Deeper than the deepest of solitudes is that which broods over
childhood, bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which
watches for it, within the gates of death. Reader, I tell you in truth,
and hereafter I will convince you of this truth, that for a Grecian child
solitude was nothing, but for a Christian child it has become the power
of God and the mystery of God. O mighty and essential solitude, that
wast and art and art to be! thou, kindling under the touch of Christian
revelations, art now transfigured forever, and hast passed from a blank
negation into a secret hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of
infancy the very dimmest of his truths!”
I must refer the reader to the entire chapter for a full exposition of De
Quincey’s views on this subject. Despite the bravura style, which makes
us in our soberer days listen a little incredulously to these far-fetched
sighs and breathings, the passage quoted bears testimony to that
apprehension of childhood which De Quincey shared with Wordsworth. Both
of these writers were looked upon in their day as somewhat reactionary in
their poetical philosophy; so much the more valuable is their declaration
of a poetical and philosophical faith which was fundamentally in unison
with the political faith that lay behind the outburst of the French
Revolution. The discovery of this new continent of childhood by such
explorers of the spiritual world marks the age as distinctly as does the
discovery of new lands and explorations in the earlier renaissance. It
was indeed one of the great signs of the period ushered in by the French
Revolution and the establishment of the American republic, that the
bounds of the spiritual world were extended. When poverty and childhood
were annexed to the poet’s domain, the world of literature and art
suddenly became larger.
* * * * *
At such times there are likely to be singular exhibitions of genius,
which are ill-understood in contemporary life, but are perceived by later
observers to be part and parcel of the age in which they occur. Something
like this may be said of the pictures and poems of William Blake, who
was a visionary in a time when a red flame along the horizon made his
spiritual fires invisible. He has since been rediscovered, and has been
for a generation so potent an influence in English art that we may wisely
attend to him, not merely as a person of genius, but as furnishing an
illustration of some of the deep things of our subject.
No one acquainted with Blake’s work has failed to observe the recurrence
of a few types drawn from elemental figures. The lamb, the child, the old
man,—these appear and reappear, carrying the prevalent ideas in this
artist’s imagination. Of all these the child is the most central and
emphatic, even as the Songs of Innocence is the most perfect expression
of Blake’s vision of life. It may be said that in his mind childhood was
largely resolvable into infancy, and that when he looked upon a babe,
he saw life in its purest form, and that most suggestive of the divine,
as in the exquisite cradle song, into which is woven the weeping of the
child Jesus for all the human race. The two short antithetical poems, The
Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, reveal the depths which Blake
penetrated when engaged in his solitary voyage of discovery to the little
known shores of childhood. They have, to be sure, the teasing property
of parables, and it would be hard to render them into the unmistakable
language of the understanding; but they could be set to music, and like
the Duke we exclaim:—
“That strain again! it had a dying fall.”
It must always be borne in mind that Blake’s contribution to the
literature of childhood is through highly idealized forms. It is
spiritual or angelic childhood which floats before his eyes, so that the
little creatures who dance on the green, the little chimney sweep, the
children filing into St. Paul’s, are translated by his visionary power
into the images of an essential childhood; they cease to be individual
illustrations.
* * * * *
We are told that in the fearful days of the French Revolution there was
an eruption from the secret places of Paris of a vast horde of poor,
ignorant, and vicious people, who had been kept out of sight by lords and
ladies. One may accept the fact as symbolical of that emergence into the
light of Christianity of poverty and degradation. The poor had always
been with the world, but it is not too much to say that now for the first
time did they begin to be recognized as part and parcel of humanity.
Wordsworth’s poems set the seal upon this recognition. Dickens’s novels
naturalized the poor in literature, and, as in the case of Wordsworth,
poverty and childhood went hand in hand.
Dickens, however, though he made a distinct addition to the literature
of childhood, rather registered a presence already acknowledged than
acted as a prophet of childhood. The great beneficent and humanitarian
movement of the century was well under way, and had already found
abundant expression in ragged schools and Sunday-schools and in education
generally, when Dickens, with his quick reporter’s sight, seized upon
salient features in this new exhibition of humanity. He was quite aside
from the ordinary organized charities, but he was moved by much the same
spirit as that which was briskly at work among the poor and the young. He
was caught by the current, and his own personal experience was swift to
give special direction to his imagination.
Besides innumerable minor references, there are certain childish figures
in the multitude of the creations of Dickens, which at once rise to
mind,—Paul Dombey, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield
in his earliest days, and the Marchioness. Dickens found out very soon
that the power to bring tears into the eyes of people was a surer road
to success than even the power to amuse. When he was drawing the figures
of children, their tenderness, their weakness, their susceptibility,
presented themselves as the material in which he could skillfully work.
Then he used the method which had served him so well in his larger
portraiture; he seized upon the significant feature and emphasized it
until it became the unmistakable mark of the person. Childhood suggests
weakness, and weakness is more apparent when there is a foil of mental
prematurity; so he invented the hydrocephalic Paul Dombey. It suggests
tenderness; he appealed to an unhesitating sympathy and drew for us
Little Nell, intensifying her nature by bringing her into contrast and
subtle companionship with her imbecile grandfather. It is the defect
of Dickens that by such characters he displayed his skill in morbid
conceptions. The little old man in Paul Dombey is not without its
prototype in real life, but Dickens appears to have produced it as a
type of tender childhood, much as one might select a consumptive for an
illustration of extreme refinement. Tiny Tim is a farther illustration
of this unhealthy love, on Dickens’s part, of that which is affecting
through its infirmity. That art is truest which sees children at play
or in their mother’s arms, not in hospitals or graveyards. It is the
infirmity of humanitarianism and of Dickens, its great exponent, that
it regards death as the great fact of life; that it seeks to ward it
off as the greatest of evils, and when it comes, hastens to cover it
out of sight with flowers. This conception of death is bound up with an
overweening sense of the importance of these years of life. There is a
nobler way, and literature and art are slowly confessing it, as they
devote their strength to that which is eternal in life, not to that which
is perishable. Wordsworth’s maiden in We are Seven, with her simple,
unhesitating belief in the continuity of life, the imperishability of the
person, holds a surer place in literature than Paul Dombey, who makes the
ocean with its tides wait for him to die.
It is only fair to say, however, that the caricature to be found in
Dickens is scarcely more violent an extreme to some minds than is the
idealism to be found in Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Blake an opposite
extreme to minds otherwise constituted. The early life of Wordsworth,
passed, as he tells us, in the solitude of nature, explains much of his
subsequent attitude toward childhood and youth. It is out of such an
experience that Lucy Gray was written. In like manner the early life of
Dickens discloses something of a nature which reappears afterward in
his pictures of childhood. A wounded sensibility is unquestionably the
pathetic history of many, and Dickens has contributed to the natural
history of childhood a distinct account of this feature.
The first appearance of a new form in literature produces an impression
which can never be repeated. However freshly readers in this decade may
come to the works of Dickens, it is impossible that they should have the
same distinct sensation which men and women had who caught up the numbers
of The Old Curiosity Shop as they fell from the press for the first time.
There can never again be such a lamentation over Little Nell, when men
like Jeffrey, a hardened old critic, made no concealment of their tears.
Yet I am disposed to think that this does not give a complete account
of the phenomenon. Just as Wordsworth’s Alice Fell is now but one of a
procession of forlorn maidens, though at the head of it, so the children
of Dickens are merely somewhat more vivid personages in a multitude of
childish creation. The child is no longer a novelty either in poetry or
in fiction. It is an accepted character, one of the _dramatis personæ_ of
literature.
For, when all is said of Dickens’s work, taken only as the product of a
mind singularly gifted with reporting what it has seen, there remains the
noticeable fact that scarcely had the echoes died away from the voice of
Wordsworth, who ushered in the literature of the new age, when a great
man of the people came forward, in the person of Dickens, and found it
the most natural thing in the world to give men pictures of child-life,
and that after the first surprise attendant upon novelty was over,
writers of all sorts were busy modeling these small figures.
* * * * *
The child once introduced into literature, the significance of its
appearance thereafter is not so much in individual instances as in the
general and familiar acceptance of the phenomenon. At least, so it
appears from our near view. It is not impossible that later students may
perceive notes in our literature of more meaning than we now surmise.
They may understand better than we why Tennyson should have made a babe
the heroine of The Princess, as he acknowledges to Mr. Dawson that he
did, though only one or two critics had discovered the fact, and why
Mr. Swinburne, who is supposed to scoff at a literature _virginibus
puerisque_, should have devoted so much of his lyric energy to childhood.
The stream which ran with so broken a course down to Wordsworth has
spread now into a broad, full river. Childhood is part and parcel of
every poet’s material; children play in and out of fiction, and readers
are accustomed to meeting them in books, and to finding them often as
finely discriminated by the novelist as are their elders.
Meanwhile, from the time when childhood was newly discovered, that is to
say, roughly, in the closing years of the last century, there has been a
literature in process of formation which has for its audience children
themselves. I called attention briefly, at the beginning of this study,
to the interesting fact that there was a correlation in time, at least,
between childhood in literature and a literature for children. A nearer
study of the literature of this century shows very clearly that while
the great constructive artists have been making room for the figures of
infancy and youth, and even consciously explaining their presence, a host
of minor writers, without much thought of art, have been busy over the
same figures for other purposes. Not only so, but in several instances
the great artists themselves have distinctly turned aside from their
ordinary audience and appealed directly to children.
Where was the child in English literature before Goldsmith? and where
before Goldsmith’s time was there a book for children? There have been,
it is true, nursery tales in all ages: ditties, and songs, and lullabies;
unwritten stories, which mothers in England told when they themselves
could have read nothing; but there came a time when children were
distinctly recognized as the occasion of formal literature, when authors
and publishers began to heed a new public. It was impossible that there
should be this discovery of childhood without a corresponding effort on
the part of men and women to get at it, and to hold direct intercourse
with it.