and we have plenty of stories written for children that attempt the same
thing, sometimes also with moderate success; for Andersen’s discovery
was after all but the simple application to literature of a faculty
which has always been exercised. The likeness that things inanimate
have to things animate is constantly forced upon us; it remained for
Andersen to pursue the comparison further, and, letting types loose
from their antitypes, to give them independent existence. The result
has been a surprise in literature and a genuine addition to literary
forms. It is possible to follow in his steps, now that he has shown us
the way, but it is no less evident that the success which he attained
was due not merely to his happy discovery of a latent property, but to
the nice feeling and strict obedience to laws of art with which he made
use of his discovery. Andersen’s genius enabled him to see the soul in a
darning-needle, and he perceived also the limitations of the life he was
to portray, so that while he was often on the edge of absurdity he did
not lose his balance. Especially is it to be noted that these stories,
which we regard as giving an opportunity for invention when the series of
old-fashioned fairy tales had been closed, show clearly the coming in of
that temper in novel-writing which is eager to describe things as they
are. Within the narrow limits of his miniature story, Andersen moves us
by the same impulse as the modern novelist who depends for his material
upon what he has actually seen and heard, and for his inspiration upon
the power to penetrate the heart of things; so that the old fairy tale
finds its successor in this new realistic wonder-story, just as the old
romance gives place to the new novel. In both, as in the corresponding
development of poetry and painting, is found a deeper sense of life and a
finer perception of the intrinsic value of common forms.
This, then, may be taken as the peculiar contribution of Andersen: that
he, appearing at a time when childhood had been laid open to view as a
real and indestructible part of human life, was the interpreter to the
world of that creative power which is significant of childhood. The
child spoke through him, and disclosed some secrets of life; childhood
in men heard the speech, and recognized it as an echo of their own
half-forgotten voices. The literature of this kind which he produced has
become a distinct and new form. It already has its imitations, and people
are said to write in the vein of Andersen. Such work, and Andersen’s in
particular, presents itself to us under two aspects: as literature in
which conceptions of childhood are embodied, and as literature which
feeds and stimulates the imagination of children. But this is precisely
the way in which a large body of current literature must be regarded.
IX
IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART
The conditions of life in the United States have been most favorable
to the growth of a special literature for children, but, with one or
two notable exceptions, the literature which is independent of special
audiences has had little to do with childhood as a subject, and art
has been singularly silent. There is scarcely anything in Irving, for
example, which touches upon child life. A sentence now and then in
Emerson shows an insight of youth, as when he speaks of the unerring
instinct with which a boy tells off in his mind the characters of the
company in a room. Bryant has touched the subject more nearly, but
chiefly in a half-fantastic way, in his Little People of the Snow and
Sella. Thoreau could hardly be expected to concern himself with the young
of the human race when he had nearer neighbors and their offspring.
Lowell has answered the appeal which the death of children makes to
the heart, but aside from his tender elegiac verses has scarcely dwelt
on childhood either in prose or verse. Holmes, with his boyishness of
temper, has caught occasionally at the ebullition of youthful spirits, as
in the humorous figure of young Benjamin Franklin in the Autocrat, and in
some of his autobiographic sketches. His School-Boy, also, adds another
to those charming memories of youth which have made Cowper, Goldsmith,
and Gray known to readers who else would scarcely have been drawn to
them; for the one unfailing poetic theme which finds a listener who has
passed his youth is the imaginative rendering of that youth.
Whittier, though his crystalline verse flows through the memory of many
children, has contributed very little to the portrayal of childhood. His
portrait of the Barefoot Boy and his tender recollection In School Days
are the only poems which deal directly with the subject, and neither
of them is wholly objective. They are a mature man’s reflection of
childhood. Snow-Bound rests upon the remembrance of boyish days, but
it deals rather with the circumstance of boyhood than with the boy’s
thoughts or feelings. Yet the poet shows unmistakably his sense of
childhood, although one would not be far wrong who understood him as
never separating the spirit of childhood from the human life at any
stage. His editorial work in the two volumes, Child-Life in Poetry and
Child-Life in Prose, is an indication of his interest in the subject, and
he was quick to catch the existence of the sentiment in its association
with another poet, whose name is more directly connected with childhood.
In his verses, The Poet and the Children, he gave expression to the
thought which occurred to many as they considered how soon Longfellow’s
death followed upon the spontaneous celebration of his birthday by
multitudes of children.
This testimony to Longfellow was scarcely the result of what he had
written either for or of children. It was rather a natural tribute to a
poet who had made himself a household word in American homes. Children
are brought up on poetry to a considerable extent; they are, moreover,
under training for the most part by young women, and the pure sentiment
which forms the unfailing element of Longfellow’s writings finds in such
teachers the readiest response. When one comes to consider the subjects
of Longfellow’s poetry, one finds that the number addressed to children,
or finding their motive in childhood, is not large. Those of direct
address are, To a Child, From my Arm-Chair, Weariness, Children; yet
which of these demands or would receive a response from children? Only
one, From my Arm-Chair, and that chiefly by the circumstance which called
it out, and on which the poet relies for holding the direct attention of
children. He gets far away from most children before he has reached the
end of his poem To a Child, and in the other two poems we hear only the
voice of a man in whom the presence of children awakens thoughts which
lie too deep for their tears, though not for his.
Turning aside from those which appeal in form to children, one finds
several which, like those last named, are evoked by the sentiment which
childhood suggests. Such are The Reaper and the Flowers, Resignation, The
Children’s Hour, and A Shadow, all in the minor key except The Children’s
Hour; and this poem, perfect as it is in a father’s apprehension, yields
only a subtle and half-understood fragrance to a child. One poem partly
rests on a man’s thought of his own childhood, My Lost Youth; The
Hanging of the Crane contains for its best lines a vignette of infancy;
a narrative poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, has for its chief figure
a child; and Hiawatha is bright with a sketch of Indian boyhood. The
translations show two or three which include this subject.
While, therefore, Longfellow is repeatedly aware of the presence of
children, it is not by the poems which spring out of that recognition
that he especially reaches them. In his poem From my Arm-Chair, he refers
to The Village Blacksmith; that has a single verse in which children
figure, but the whole poem will arrest the attention of children far more
than From my Arm-Chair, and it belongs to them more. It cannot be too
often repeated that books and poems about children are not necessarily
for children. The thoughts which the man has of the child often depend
wholly upon the fact that he has passed beyond childhood, and looks back
upon it; it is impossible for the child to stand by his side. Thus the
poem Weariness contains the reflection of a man who anticipates the after
life of children; there is nothing in it which belongs to the reflection
of childhood itself. Tennyson’s May Queen, which has found its way into
most of our anthologies for the young, is a notable example of a large
class of verses quite unfit for such a place. It may be said in general
that sentiment, when made a part of childhood, is very sure to be morbid
and unnatural. We have a sentiment which rises at the sight of childhood,
but children themselves have none of it; the more refined it is, the more
unfit it is to go into their books.
Here is a collection of poetry for children, having all the marks of a
sound and reputable work. As I turn its leaves, I come upon a long ballad
of The Dying Child, Longfellow’s The Reaper and the Flowers, a poem
called The Little Girl’s Lament, in which a child asks, “Is heaven a long
way off, mother?” and for two or three pages dwells upon a child’s pain
at the loss of her father; Tennyson’s May Queen, who is so unconscionably
long a time dying; Mrs. Hemans’s imitation of Mignon’s song in a poem
called The Better Land; and a poem by Dora Greenwell which I must regard
as the most admirable example of what a poem for a child should not be.
It is entitled A Story by the Fire, and begins,—
“Children love to hear of children!
I will tell of a little child
Who dwelt alone with his mother
By the edge of a forest wild.
One summer eve, from the forest,
Late, late, down the grassy track
The child came back with lingering step,
And looks oft turning back.
“‘Oh, mother!’ he said, ‘in the forest
I have met with a little child;
All day he played with me,—all day
He talked with me and smiled.
At last he left me alone, but then
He gave me this rosebud red;
And said he would come to me again
When all its leaves were spread.’”
Thereupon the child declares that it will put the rosebud in a glass, and
wait eagerly for the friend to come. So the night goes and the morning
comes, and the child sleeps.
“The mother went to his little room.
With all its leaves outspread
She saw a rose in fullest bloom;
And, in the little bed,
A child that did not breathe nor stir,—
A little, happy child,
Who had met his little friend again,
And in the meeting smiled.”
Here is a fantastic conception, extremely puzzling to a healthy-minded
child. Imagine the natural questions of a simple, ingenuous boy or girl
upon hearing this read. Who is this other child? Why was he coming back
when the rose was blown? You explain, as well as you are able, that it
was a phantom of death; or, if that seems too pallid, you try to imagine
that the poet meant Jesus Christ or an angel by this other little child:
but, in whatever way you explain it, you are obliged, if you will satisfy
the downright little inquirer, to say plainly, This little boy died, and
you begin to wish with all your heart that the poet with all her _ed_
rhymes had added _dead_. Then the puzzle begins over again to connect
the blooming rose and the little playmate with death. Do you say that
you will leave the delicate suggestion of the lines to find its way into
the child’s mind, and be the interpreter of the poem? This is what one
might plead in Wordsworth’s We are Seven, for instance. The comparison
suggested by the two poems is a partial answer. Wordsworth’s poem is
a plain, objective narrative, which a child might hear and enjoy with
scarcely a notion of what was implied in it, returning afterward to
the deep, underlying sense. This poem of Dora Greenwell’s has no real
objective character; the incident of the walk in the forest is of the
most shadowy sort, and is used for its subtlety. I object to subtlety in
literature for children. We have a right to demand that there shall be a
clear outward sense, whatever may be the deeper meaning to older people.
Hans Andersen’s story of The Ugly Duckling is a consummate example of a
narrative which is enjoyable by the most matter-of-fact child, and yet
recalls to the older reader a life’s history.
I have been led into a long digression through the natural correlation
which exists between childhood in literature and a literature for
children. Let me get back to my main topic by a similar path. The one
author in America whose works yield the most fruitful examples in
illustration of our subject is Hawthorne, and at the same time he is
the most masterly of all our authors who have aimed at writing for an
audience of children. Whatever may become of the great mass of books for
young people published in America during the past fifty years,—and most
of it is already crumbling in memory,—it requires no heroism to predict
an immortality of fame for the little books which Hawthorne wrote with
so much good nature and evident pleasure, Grandfather’s Chair and the
Wonder Book, with its companion, Tanglewood Tales. Mr. Parkman has given
a new reading in the minds of many people to the troubles in Acadia, but
he has not disturbed the vitality of Evangeline; one may add footnote
after footnote to modify or correct the statements in The Courtship of
Miles Standish, but the poem will continue to be accepted as a picture
of Pilgrim times. So the researches of antiquarians, with more material
at their command than Hawthorne enjoyed, may lead them to different
conclusions from those which he reached in his sketches of early New
England history, but they cannot destroy that charm in the rendering
which makes the book a classic.
More notable still is Hawthorne’s version of Greek myths. Probably he
had no further authority for the stories than Lemprière. He only added
the touch of his own genius. Only! and the old rods blossomed with
a new variety of fruit and flower. It is easily said that Hawthorne
Yankeeized the stories, that he used the Greek stones for constructing a
Gothic building, but this is academic criticism. He really succeeded in
naturalizing the Greek myths in American soil, and all the labors of all
the Coxes will not succeed in supplanting them. Moreover, I venture to
think that Hawthorne’s fame is more firmly fixed by means of the Wonder
Book. The presence of an audience of children had a singular power over
him. I do not care for the embroidery of actual child life which he has
devised for these tales; it is scarcely more than a fashion, and already
strikes one as quaint and out of date. But I cannot read the tales
themselves without being aware that Hawthorne was breathing one air when
he was writing them and another when he was at work on his romances. He
illustrates in a delicate and subtle manner the line of Juvenal which
bids the old remember the respect due to the young. Juvenal uses it to
shame men into decorum; but just as any sensitive person will restrain
himself in expression before children, so Hawthorne appears to have
restrained his thought in their silent presence,—to have done this, and
also to have admitted into it the sunshine which their presence brought.
With what bright and joyous playfulness he repeats the old stories,
and with what a paternal air he makes the tales yield their morsels of
wisdom! There is no opening of dark passages, no peering into recesses,
but a happy, generous spirit reigns throughout.
All this could have been predicated from the delightful glimpses which
we now have of Hawthorne’s relations to his children, glimpses which his
Note-Books, indeed, had already afforded, and which were not wanting also
in his finished work. Nor was this interest in childhood something which
sprang up after he had children of his own. In that lonely period of his
young manhood, when he held converse only with himself, his Note-Books
attest how his observation took in the young and his fancy played about
them. As early as 1836 he makes a note: “To picture a child’s (one of
four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s
day,—his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of
passion, perhaps a whipping, etc.” Again, how delicate is the hint
conveyed in a passage describing one of his solitary walks! “Another time
I came suddenly on a small Canadian boy, who was in a hollow place among
the ruined logs of an old causeway, picking raspberries,—lonely among
bushes and gorges, far up the wild valley; and the lonelier seemed the
little boy for the bright sunshine, that showed no one else in a wide
space of view except him and me.” He has elsewhere a quick picture of a
boy running at full speed; a wistful look at a sleeping infant, which
somehow touches one almost as if one had seen a sketch for a Madonna; and
then this passage, significant of the working of his mind,—he is noting a
Mediterranean boy from Malaga whom he saw on the wharf: “I must remember
this little boy, and perhaps I may make something more beautiful of him
than these rough and imperfect touches would promise.”
The relation which Hawthorne held to his own children, as illustrated
both in the memoirs of him and in his Note-Books, was unquestionably a
sign of that profound humanity which was the deep spring of his writings.
But it was not, as some seem to think, a selfish love which he bore
for them; he could show to them, because the relation was one of the
elemental things in nature, a fullness of feeling which found expression
otherwise only as all his nature found outlet,—in spiritual communion
with mankind. How deep this inherent love of childhood lay is instanced
in that passage in Our Old Home which one reads as it were with uncovered
head. It is in the chapter entitled Some Glimpses of English Poverty, and
relates how one of the party visiting an almshouse—Hawthorne himself, as
his wife has since told us—was unexpectedly and most unwillingly made
the object of demonstrative attention on the part of a poor, scrofulous,
repulsive waif of humanity. Nothing that he had done had attracted the
child,—only what he was; and so, moved by compassion, this strange, shy
man took the child in his arms and kissed it. Let any one read the entire
passage, note the mingled emotions which play about the scene like a bit
of iridescent glass, and dare to speak of Hawthorne again except with
reverence.
In the same chapter occurs that delicious little description of children
playing in the street, where the watchfulness of the older children over
the younger is noted, and a small brother, who is hovering about his
sister, is gravely noted as “working a kind of miracle to transport her
from one dust heap to another.” He makes the reflection, “Beholding
such works of love and duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so
impossible after all for these neglected children to find a path through
the squalor and evil of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven.”
One of the earliest and most ambitious of his short tales, The Gentle
Boy, gathers into itself the whole history of a pathetic childhood, and
there seems to have been an intention to produce in Ilbrahim precisely
those features which mark the childish martyr and confessor. Again, among
the Twice-Told Tales is the winning sketch of Little Annie’s Ramble,
valuable most of all for its unconscious testimony to the abiding sense
of companionship which Hawthorne found with children. In Edward Fane’s
Rosebud, also, is a passage referring to the death of a child, which
is the only approach to the morbid in connection with childhood that I
recall in Hawthorne. Little Daffydowndilly, a quaint apologue, has by
virtue of its unquestionable fitness found its way into all reading-books
for the young.
The story, however, which all would select as most expressive of
Hawthorne’s sympathy with childhood is The Snow Image. In that the
half-conventional figures which served to introduce the stories in the
Wonder Book have passed, by a very slight transformation, into quaint
impersonations. They have the outward likeness of boys and girls, but,
by the alchemy which Hawthorne used chiefly upon men and women, they
are made to have ingenuous and artless converse with a being of other
than flesh and blood. It is the charm of this exquisite tale that the
children create the object in which they believe so implicitly. Would it
be straining a point too far to say that as Andersen managed, whether
consciously or not, to write his own spiritual biography in his tale of
The Ugly Duckling, so Hawthorne in The Snow Image saw himself as in a
glass? At any rate, we can ourselves see him reflected in those childish
figures, absorbed in the creation out of the cold snow of a sprite which
cannot without peril come too near the warm life of the common world,
regarded with half-pitying love and belief by one, good-naturedly scorned
by crasser man.
In his romances children play no unimportant part. It is Ned Higgins’s
cent which does the mischief with Hepzibah, in The House of the Seven
Gables, transforming her from a shrinking gentlewoman into an ignoble
shopkeeper; and thus it becomes only right and proper that Ned Higgins’s
portrait should be drawn at full length with a gravity and seriousness
which would not be wasted on a grown man like Dixey. In The Scarlet
Letter one might almost call Pearl the central figure. Certainly, as she
flashes in and out of the sombre shadows, she contrives to touch with
light one character after another, revealing, interpreting, compelling.
In the deeper lines one reads how this child concentrates in herself
the dread consequences of sin. The Puritan, uttering the wrath of
God descending from the fathers to the children, never spoke in more
searching accents than Hawthorne in the person of Pearl. “The child,”
he says, “could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence
a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements
were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder.” When one
stops to think of The Scarlet Letter without Pearl, he discovers suddenly
how vital the child is to the story. The scene in the woods, that moving
passage where Pearl compels her mother to replace the scarlet A, and all
the capricious behavior toward the minister show how much value Hawthorne
placed on this figure in his drama: and when the climax is reached, and
Hester, Arthur, and Pearl stand together on the scaffold, the supreme
moment may fairly be said to be that commemorated in the words, “Pearl
kissed his lips.”
It is noteworthy, also, that when Hawthorne was struggling with fate,
and, with the consciousness of death stealing over him, made ineffectual
efforts to embody his profoundest thoughts of life and immortality, he
should have expended his chief art in loving characterization of Pansie,
in the Dolliver Romance. Whatever might have come of this last effort,
could fate have been conquered, I for one am profoundly grateful that
the two figures of grandsire and grandchild stand thus fully wrought, to
guard the gateway of Hawthorne’s passage out of life.
* * * * *
The advent of the child in literature at the close of the last century
was characterized, as I have pointed out, by a recognition of personality
in childhood as distinct from relationship. The child as one of the
family had always been recognized, and the child also in its more
elemental nature; it was the child as possessed of consciousness, as
isolated, as disclosing a nature capable of independent action, thought,
and feeling, that now came forward into the world’s view, and was added
to the stock of the world’s literature, philosophy, and art.