about children. They were moved by educational rather than by artistic
impulses, so that their creations were subordinate to the lessons which
they conveyed. During the period when Wordsworth, Lamb, De Quincey, and
Blake were idealizing childhood, and seeing in it artistic possibilities,
there flourished a school of writing for the young which also dealt with
childhood, but with a sturdy realism. This school had its representatives
in Mrs. Barbauld, Mr. Day, the Aikens, Maria Edgeworth, Ann and Jane
Taylor, and holds a place still with Evenings at Home, The Parent’s
Assistant, Hymns in Prose for Children, Hymns for Infant Minds, Frank,
and Sandford and Merton. The characteristics of this literature are
simple, and will be recalled by many who dwell with an affectionate and
regretful regard upon books which they find it somewhat difficult to
persuade their children to read.
These books were didactic; they assumed in the main the air of wise
teachers; they were sometimes condescending; they appealed to the
understanding rather than to the imagination of the child, and they
abounded in stores of useful information upon all manner of subjects.
They contained precursors of a long series of juvenile monitors, and
the grandfathers who knew Mr. Barlow had children who knew Mr. Holiday,
Rollo, Jonas, and Mr. George, and grandchildren who may be suspected
of an acquaintance with Mr. Bodley and his much traveled and very
inquisitive family.
Yet, the earlier works, though now somewhat antiquated, were not
infrequently lively and even humorous in their portraiture of children.
They were written in the main out of a sincere interest in the young,
and by those who were accustomed to watch the unfolding of childish
nature. If they reflected a somewhat formal relation between the old and
the young, it must be remembered that the actual relation was a formal
one: that the young had not yet come into familiar and genial relation
with the old. Indeed, the books themselves were somewhat revolutionary
in a small way. Much that seems stiff and even unnatural to us now was
quite easy and colloquial to their first readers, and in their eagerness
to lure children into ways of pleasant instruction, the authors broke
down something of the reserve which existed between fathers and sons in
the English life which they portrayed. Yet we cannot help being struck
by the contrast between the sublimated philosophy of Wordsworth and the
prosaic applications of the Edgeworth school. Heaven lies about us in our
infancy? Oh, yes, a heaven that is to be looked at through a spy-glass
and explained by means of a home-made orrery. It would seem as if the
spirit of childhood had been discerned with all its inherent capacity,
but that the actual children of this matter-of-fact world had not yet
been fairly seen by the light of this philosophy.
The literature which we are considering was indeed a serious attempt
at holding intercourse with childish minds. It had the embarrassment
of beginnings; there was about it an uncertain groping in the dark of
childhood, and it was desperately theory-ridden. But it had also the mark
of sincerity, and one feels in reading it that the writers were genuinely
indifferent in most cases to the figure they might be cutting before the
world; they were bent upon reaching this audience, and were unobservant
of the larger world behind. In most cases, I say. I suspect that Mrs.
Barbauld, with her solemn dullness, was the victim of a notion that she
was producing a new order of literature, and in this she was encouraged
by a circle of older readers; the children probably stared at her with
sufficient calmness to keep her ignorant of their real thoughts.
How real literature looked upon the dusty high-road laid out across the
fields by some of these writers may be read in the letters of the day.
Coleridge jibed at that “pleonasm of nakedness,” Mrs. Bare-bald, and
Lamb in a letter to Coleridge speaks his mind with refreshing frankness:
“Goody Two Shoes,” he says, “is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s
stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the shopman
at Newberry’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of
a shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense
lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B.’s books
convey, it seems, must come to a child in the _shape of knowledge_, and
his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when
he has learned that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a
horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales
which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to
be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in
the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of
averting this sore evil? Think of what you would have been now, if,
instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you
had been crammed with geography and natural history! Hang them! I mean
the cursed reasoning crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human
in man and child.” Yet Lamb and his sister both took a lively interest
in genuine books for the young, and their own contributions have,
alas! gone the way, for the most part, of other worn-out literature.
It was mainly as a direct educative power that this new interest in
children first found expression; with it, however, was mingled a more
artistic purpose, and the two streams of tendency have ever since been
recognizable, sometimes separate, oftener combined. The Lambs’ own work
was illustrative of this union of the didactic and the artistic. It is
outside the scope of this study to dwell at length upon this phase of
literature. It is enough to point out the fact that there is a distinct
class of books which has grown up quite within the memory of men now
living. It is involved with industrial and commercial interests; it
invites the attention of authors, and the infrequent criticism of
reviewers; it has its own subdivisions like the larger literature; it
boasts of cyclopædias and commentaries; it includes histories, travels,
poems, works in science, theological treatises. It is a distinct
principality of the Kingdom of Letters. It is idle to complain of the
present abundance of children’s books, as if somebody were to blame for
it. There has been no conspiracy of publishers and authors. It is worse
than folly to look with contempt upon the movement; the faithful student
will seek rather to study this new force, and if possible to guide it
into right channels.
* * * * *
The distinction between books for the young and books for the old is a
somewhat arbitrary one, and many have discovered for themselves and their
children that instead of one poor corner of literature being fenced off
for the lamb, planted with tender grass which is quickly devoured, and
with many medicinal but disagreeable herbs which are nibbled at when the
grass is gone, the whole wide pasture land is their native home, and the
grass more tender where fresh streams flow than it possibly can be in
the paddock, however carefully planted and watched. This community of
possession is more recognizable in the higher than in the lower forms
of literature. It is still more clear in pictorial art. Art is by its
nature more closely representative of childhood than literature can
be, and Gainsborough and Reynolds made no innovation when they painted
children, although the latter, by his evident partiality for these
subjects, does indicate a susceptibility to the new knowledge which was
coming upon the world. There are other influences which reinforce the
artistic pleasure, such as the domestic sense, the pride of family,
the ease of procuring unconscious models. No one can visit an English
exhibition of paintings without being struck by the extraordinary number
of subjects taken from childhood. It is in this field that Millais has
won famous laurels, and when the great body of book illustrations is
scanned, what designs have half the popularity of Doyle’s fairies and
Miss Greenaway’s idyllic children? I sometimes wonder why this should be
the case in England, when in America, the paradise of children, there is
a conspicuous absence of these subjects from galleries.
VII
IN FRENCH AND GERMAN LITERATURE
I
French literature before the Revolution was more barren of reference to
childhood than was English literature. Especially is this true of the
eighteenth century, with its superficial disbelief and its bitter protest
against superstition, under which term was comprehended the supernatural
as well as the preternatural. There were exceptions, as in the case of
Fénelon, and the constitutional sentiment of the French was easily moved
by the appeal of dependent childhood. In Rousseau one may read how it
is possible to weep over children, and yet leave one’s own to the cold
mercy of a foundling asylum. It is in Rousseau’s disciple, however,
Bernardin de St. Pierre, that we find the most artistic expression of
pure sentimentalism, and the story of Paul and Virginia is an effort at
representing a world where childhood, in its innocence, is conceived of
as the symbol of ideal human life. St. Pierre thought of childhood and
nature as possessed of strong negative virtues; they were uncontaminated,
they were unsophisticated. To escape from an evil world, he fled in
imagination to an island of the tropics, where all that life required
was readily furnished by lavish nature. He makes his family to consist
chiefly of women and children. The masculine element is avoided as
something disturbing, and except for the harmless old man who acts as
chorus, it is discovered first as a rude, barbaric, and cruel force in
the person of the governor of the island, who has no faith in Madame de
la Tour, and in the person of the planter at the Black River, who has
been an inhuman master to his slave.
The childhood of Paul and Virginia is made to have a pastoral, idyllic
character. Their sorrows and misfortunes come wholly from evils which lie
beyond their control. St. Pierre brought back a golden age by ignoring
the existence of evil in the heart of man; he conceived it possible to
construct an ideal world by what was vaguely expressed in the words
“a return to nature.” As he reflects in the story: “Their theology
consisted in sentiment like that of nature; and their morality in action
like that of the gospel. Those families had no particular days devoted
to pleasure, and others to sadness. Every day was to them a holiday, and
all which surrounded them one holy temple, where they forever adored an
Infinite Intelligence, almighty and the friend of humankind. A sentiment
of confidence in his supreme power filled their minds with consolation
for the past, with fortitude for the present, and with hope for the
future. Behold how these women, compelled by misfortune to return to a
state of nature, had unfolded in their own bosoms, and in those of their
children, the feelings which nature gives us, our best support under
evil!”
However we may discover the limitations of the sentimental philosophy,
and its inadequacy when brought face to face with evil in life, there
is a surface agreement with Christianity in this instinctive turning to
childhood as the hope of the world. Yet the difference is radical. The
child, in the Christian conception, holds the promise of things to come;
in the conception of French sentiment of the Rousseau and St. Pierre
type, the child is a refuge from present evil, a mournful reminiscence
of a lost Paradise. If only we could keep it a child! is the cry of this
school,—keep it from knowing this wicked, unhappy world! But alas! there
are separations and shipwrecks. Virginia is washed ashore by the cruel
waves. Paul, bereft of reason, dies, and is buried in the same grave. The
two, growing like plants in nature, are stricken down by the mysterious,
fateful powers of nature.
The contrast between this unreal recourse to nature and the strong yet
subtle return which characterizes Wordsworth and his school is probably
more apparent to the English and American mind than to the French. Yet
a reasonable comparison betrays the fatal weakness of the one in that
it leaves out of view whatever in nature disturbs a smooth, summer-day
world. When St. Pierre talks of a return to nature, he does not mean
the jungle and the pestiferous swamp; he regards these as left behind
in Paris. Yet the conclusion of his story is the confession wrung from
faithful art that Nature is after all but a step-mother to humanity.
In the great romantic movement which revolutionized French literature,
an immense impetus was given to the mind, and literature thenceforth
reflected a wider range of thought and feeling. In few respects does
this appear more significantly than in the treatment of childhood. There
is a robustness about the sentiment which separates it from the earlier
regard of such writers as we have named. Lamartine, who certainly was
not devoid of sentiment, passes by his own earliest childhood in Les
Confidences with indifference. “I shall not,” he says, “follow the
example of J. J. Rousseau in his Confessions. I shall not relate to
you the trifling events of my early childhood. Man only dates from
the commencement of feeling and thought; until the man is a being, he
is not even a child.... Let us leave, then, the cradle to the nurses,
and our first smiles, our first tears, and our first lisping accents
to the ecstasies of our mothers. I do not wish to inflict on you any
but my earliest recollections, embellished by the light of reason.” He
gives, accordingly, two scenes of his childhood: one an interior, where
his father reads aloud to his mother from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered;
the other an outdoor scene, where he engages in the rural sports of
the neighborhood. Each picture is delightfully drawn, with minute
detail, with poetic touch, with affectionate recollection. Encouraged,
apparently, by the warmth which this memory has inspired, Lamartine
continues to dwell upon the images of his childhood, especially as it
has to do with the thought of his mother. He paints the simple garden
attached to his father’s home, and resting a moment reflects:—
“Yes, that is indeed all, and yet that is what sufficed during so many
years for the gratification, for the reveries, for the sweet leisures,
and for the as sweet labors of a father, a mother, and eight children!
Such is what still suffices, even at the present day, for the nourishment
of these recollections. Such is the Eden of their childhood, where their
most serene thoughts take refuge when they wish to receive a little of
that dew of the morning life, a little of that beaming light of early
dawn, which shines pure and radiant for man only amid the scenes of his
birth. There is not a tree, there is not a carnation, there is not a
mossy stone of this garden, which is not entwined in their soul as if it
formed part of it. This nook of earth seems to us immense, such a host
of objects and of recollections does it contain for us in so narrow a
space.”
The fullness with which Lamartine treats the recollection of his youth
partakes of the general spirit of French memoirs,—a spirit, to speak
roughly, which regards persons rather than institutions,—but indicates
also something of the new spirit which informed literature when it
elevated childhood into a place of real dignity. There are passages,
indeed, which have a special significance as intimating a consciousness
of the deeper relations of childhood. Michelet, for instance, in
his philosophy of the unfolding of woman’s life, recognizes the
characteristics of maidenhood as anticipatory of maturity, and does it
with so serious a contemplation that we forget to smile when we discover
him profoundly observant of those instincts of maternity which are shown
in the care of a child for its doll.
This attitude toward the child is observable in the masters of modern
French literature. However far they may be removed from any mere domestic
regard of the subject, they apprehend the peculiar sacredness attaching
to children. Alfred de Musset, for example, though by no means a poet of
the family, can never speak of children without emotion. Not to multiply
instances, it is enough to take the great poet of the period. Victor Hugo
deserves, it has been said, to be called the poet of infancy, not only
for the reason that he has written of the young freely, but has in his
Les Enfants, Livre des Mères, written for them. It is to be observed that
the suggestion comes, with Hugo, chiefly from the children of his family;
from his brother Eugène, who died an early death; from his daughter, whom
he mourns in tender verse; and from his grandchildren. One feels the
sincerity of a great poet when he draws the inspiration for such themes
from his own familiar kind.
It may be said in general of the contribution made to this literature by
the French that it partakes of those qualities of lightness and grace
which mark the greater literature; that the image of childhood is a
joyous, innocent one, and satisfies the eye that looks for beauty and
delicacy. Sentiment predominates, but it is a sentiment that makes little
draught upon thought. There is a disposition now to regard children as
dolls and playthings, the amusement of the hour; now to make them the
object of an attitudinizing sentiment, which is practically wasted unless
there be some one at hand to applaud it.
II
When we pass from France to Germany we are aware that, however we may
use the same terms, and recognize the existence of sentiment as a
strong element in the literature of both countries, there is a radical
difference in tone. It is not merely that French sentiment is graceful
and German sentiment clumsy: the grace of the one connects itself with
a fine art,—we feel an instinctive good taste in its expression; in the
other, the awkwardness, the obtrusiveness, seem to be the issue of an
excess of natural and homely feeling. It would be too much to say that
French sentiment is insincere and German sentiment unpleasantly sincere;
that the one is assumed and the other uncalculating,—we cannot thus
dismiss elementary feeling in two great peoples. But an Englishman or
American, to whom, in his reserve, the sentiment of either nation is apt
to be a little oppressive, is very likely to smile at the French and
feel uncomfortable in the presence of the German; to regard the French
feeling as a temporary mood, the German as a permanent state.
Be this as it may, it is true that the German feeling with regard to
childhood, as it finds expression in life and literature, revolves very
closely about the child in its home, not the child as a charming object
in nature. Childhood, in German literature, is conceived very generally
in its purely domestic relations, and is so positive an element as to
have attracted the attention of other nations, and even to have given
rise to a petty cult. Coleridge, writing from Germany in 1799, reports
to his English readers, as something strange to himself, and of local
significance only, the custom of Christmas gifts from parents to children
and from children to parents. He is especially struck with the custom of
representing these presents as coming from Jesus Christ.
The whole structure of Santa Claus and Kriss Kringle, the Christ Child
and Pelznichel, with the attendant ceremonies of the Christmas tree, is
built into the child life of Germany and the Low Countries; and it is by
the energy of this childish miracle that it has passed over into English,
and especially into American life. All this warmth of domestic feeling
is by no means a modern discovery. It is a prime characteristic of the
Germanic people, and one strong reason for the ascendency of Lutheranism
may be found in the singular exposition of the German character which
Luther presented. He was not merely a man of the people; through his life
and writings and organizing faculty he impressed himself positively on
the German national character, not turning it aside, but deepening the
channels in which it ran. Certain it is that the luxuriance of his nature
was almost riotous on the side of family life. “The leader of the age,”
says Canon Mozley, “and the adviser of princes, affecting no station and
courting no great men, was externally one of the common crowd, and the
plainest of it. In domestic life the same heart and nature appear. There
he overflows with affection, warmth, tenderness; with all the amiable
banter of the husband, and all the sweet arts and pretty nonsense of a
father among his little children. Whether he is joking, lecturing his
‘rib Catharine,’ his ‘gracious dame Catharine,’ or writing a description
of fairyland and horses with silver saddles to his ‘voracious,
bibacious, loquacious,’ little John; or whether he is in the agony of
grief over the death-bed of his favorite daughter, Magdalene, we see the
same exuberant, tender character.”[34]
In this sketch of Luther we may read some of the general characteristics
of the Germanic life, and we are ready, at the first suggestion, to
assent to the proposition that the German people, judged by the apparatus
of childhood, books, pictures, toys, and schools, stands before other
nations. The material for the portraiture of childhood has been abundant;
the social history, the biographies, give constant intimations of the
fullness with which family life, inclosing childhood, has been dwelt upon
in the mind. The autobiographies of poets and novelists almost invariably
give great attention to the period of childhood. A very interesting
illustration of this may be found in the life of Richter, who stands at
the head of the great Germans in his portrayal of childhood.
“Men who have a firm hold on nothing else,” says Richter in his brief
autobiography, “delight in deep, far-reaching recollection of their days
of childhood, and in this billowy existence they anchor on that, far
more than on the thought of later difficulties. Perhaps for two reasons:
that in this retrospection they press nearer to the gate of life guarded
by spiritual existences; and secondly, that they hope, in the spiritual
power of an earlier consciousness, to make themselves independent of
the little, contemptible annoyances that surround humanity.” He then
recites an incident from his second year, and continues: “This little
morning-star of earliest recollection stands yet tolerably clear in its
low horizon, but growing paler as the daylight of life rises higher.
And now I remember only this clearly, that in earlier life I remembered
everything clearly.”
How clearly will be apparent to the reader who follows Richter through
the minute and detailed narrative of his childish life, and in his
writings the images of this early life are constantly reappearing under
different forms. Something is no doubt due to the early birth in Richter
of a self-consciousness, bred in part by the solitude of his life. It
may be said with some assurance that the vividness of early recollection
has much to do with determining the poet and novelist and essayist
in his choice of themes bearing directly upon childhood. The childish
experience of Wordsworth, De Quincey, Dickens, Lamartine, and Richter is
clearly traceable in the writings of these men. If they look into their
own hearts and write, the images which they bring forth are so abundantly
of childhood that they cannot avoid making use of them, especially since
they retain recollections which demand the interpretation of the maturer
mind. That they should so freely draw from this storehouse of childish
experience reflects also the temper of the age for which they write. The
fullness with which the themes of childhood are treated means not that a
few men have suddenly discovered the subject, but that all are sensitive
to these same impressions.