VI IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND ART

I

To hunt through English literature and art for representations of childhood would seem to be like looking for the persons of children in any place where people congregate. How could there be any conspicuous absence, except under conditions which necessarily exclude the very young? Yet it is impossible to follow the stream of English literature, with this pursuit in mind, without becoming aware that at one point in its course there is a marked access of this force of childhood. There is, to be sure, a fallacy lurking in the customary study of the development of literature. We fall into the way of thinking of that literature as an organism proceeding from simpler to more complex forms; we are attent upon the transition of one epoch into another; we come to regard each period as essentially anticipatory of the succeeding period. We make the same mistake often in our regard of historical sequence, looking at all past periods simply and exclusively with reference to the present stand from which we take our observations. A too keen sensibility to the logic which requires time for its conclusion, a too feeble sense of the logic which dwells in the relation between the seen and the unseen,—these stand in the way of a clear perception of the forces immanent in literature and life.

The distinction is worth bearing in mind when one surveys English literature with the purpose of recognizing the child in it. There are certain elemental facts and truths of which old and new cannot be predicated. The vision of helpless childhood is no modern discovery; it is no ancient revelation. The child at play was seen by Homer and by Cowper, and the latter did not derive his apprehension from any study of the former. The humanism which underlies all literature is independent of circumstances for its perception of the great moving forces of life; it is independent of the great changes in human history; even so great a change as the advent of Christianity could not interfere with the normal expression of elemental facts in life.

Wherein, then, lies the difference between an antique and a modern apprehension of childhood? For what may one look in a survey of English literature that he would not find in Greek or Roman authors? Is there any development of human thought in relation to childhood to be traced in a literature which has reflected the mind of the centuries since the Renaissance? The most aggressive type of modern Christianity, at any rate the most free type, is to be found amongst English-speaking people; and if Christianity has in any way modified the course of thought regarding the child, the effect will certainly be seen in English literature and art.

A recollection of ballad literature, without critical inquiry of the comparative age of the writings, brings to light the familiar and frequent incident of cruelty to children in some form: of the secret putting away of babes, as in the affecting ballad of the Queen’s Marie; of the cold and heartless murder, as in the Cruel Mother, and in the tragic tale of The Child’s Last Will, where a sudden dramatic and revealing turn is given, after the child has willed its various possessions, in the lines,—

That grewsome story of Lamkin, with its dripping of blood in almost every stanza, gets half its curdling power from the slow torture of the sensibilities, as the babe is slain and then rocked in its cradle, and the mother, summoned by its cries, meets her own fate at the hands of the treacherous nurse and Lamkin, whose name is a piece of bald irony:—

Another early and significant illustration is found in the popular story of Hugh of Lincoln; but instead of turning to the ballad of that name, one may better have recourse to Chaucer’s version as contained in the Canterbury tale of the Prioress. In the prologue to this tale appear the words of Scripture, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” in a paraphrase, and the Prioress turns to the Virgin, beseeching her to give words for the telling of the piteous tale. The story of Hugh of Lincoln—that in the reign of Henry III., the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy of eight years, named Hugh, tortured and crucified him—was received with great credit, for it concentrated the venomous enmity with which Christians regarded the Jews, and by a refinement of cruelty pictured the Jews in a solitary instance as behaving in a Christian-like manner. Chaucer tells the story with exquisite pathos, lingering upon the childish ways of Hugh, and preparing the tears of his readers by picturing the little boy as a miniature saint. It can scarcely be called a picture of artless childhood; for though touches here and there bring out the prattler, Chaucer appears to have meant that his readers should be especially impressed by the piety of this “litel clergeoun,” or chorister boy:—

And so we are told of the little fellow eager to learn the Alma Redemptoris of his elders, and conning it as he went to and from school, his way leading through the Jews’ quarter:—

The wicked Jews, vexed by his singing, kill him, and cast his body into a pit. His weeping mother seeks him, and, happening by the pit, is made aware of his presence by the miracle of his dead lips still singing the Alma Redemptoris.

In two other stories has Chaucer dwelt upon the pathos of childhood and bereft or suffering motherhood. In the Man of Law’s tale of Custance, there is a touching passage where Custance and her babe are driven away from the kingdom, and exposed to the sea in the ship which had brought them. The mother kneels upon the sand before embarking, and puts her trust in the Lord.

Then she commits herself and her child to Mary by the love of Mary’s child.

Again, in the Clerk’s tale of Patient Griselda, the effect of the story is greatly heightened by the narrative of the successive partings of the mother with her child; and the climax is reached in the burst of gladness and pent-up feeling which overtakes Griselda at the restoration of her son and daughter. It is noticeable that in these and other instances childhood appears chiefly as an appeal to pity, rarely as an object of direct love and joy. This is not to be wondered at when one considers the character of the English race, and the nature of the redemption which it has been undergoing in the slow process of its submission to the spirit of Christ. We say the English race, without stopping to make nice distinctions between the elements which existed at the time of the Great Charter, just as we may properly speak of the American people of the time of the Constitution.

This character is marked by a brutality, a murderous spirit, which lies scarcely concealed, to-day, in the temper of every English crowd, and has left its mark on literature from the ballads to Oliver Twist. This brutal instinct, this rude, savage, northern spirit, is discovered in conflict with the disarming power of the spirit of Christ, and the stages of the conflict are most clearly indicated in poetry, which is to England what pictorial and sculpturesque art is to the south, the highest exponent of its spiritual life. More comprehensively, English literature affords the most complete means of measuring the advance of England in humanity.

It belongs to the nature of this deep conflict that there should appear from time to time the finest exemplars of the ideals formed by the divine spirit, side by side with exhibitions of the most willful baseness. English literature abounds in these contrasts; it is still more expressive of tides of spiritual life, the elevation of thought and imagination succeeded by almost groveling animalism. And since one of the symbols of a perfected Christianity is the child, it is not unfair to seek for its presence in literature, nor would it be a rare thing to discover it in passages which hint at the conflict between the forces of good and evil so constantly going on.

It is not strange, therefore, that the earliest illustrations of childhood should mainly turn, as we have seen, upon that aspect which is at once most natural and most Christian. Pity, like a naked, new-born babe, does indeed ride the blast in those wild, more than half-savage bursts of the English spirit which are preserved for us in ballad literature; and in the first springs of English poetic art in Chaucer, the child is as it were the mediator between the rough story and the melody of the singer. One cannot fail to see how the introduction of the child by Chaucer, in close union with the mother, is almost a transfer of the Madonna into English poetry,—a Madonna not of ritual, but of humanity.

There are periods in the history of every nation when the inner life is more completely exposed to view, and when the student, if he be observant, may trace most clearly the fundamental arteries of being. Such a period in England was the Elizabethan era, when the tumultuous English spirit manifested itself in religion, in politics, in enterprise, in adventure, and in intellectual daring,—that era which was dominated by the great master of English speech. It is the fashion of every age to write its characteristics in forms which have become obsolete, and to resort to masquerade for a display of its real emotions. It was because chivalry was no longer the every-day habit of men that Spenser used it for his purposes, and translated the Seven Champions of Christendom into a profounder and more impassioned poem, emblematical of that great ethical conflict which has been a significant feature of English history from the first. In that series of knightly adventures, The Faery Queen, wherein the field of human character is traversed, sin traced to its lurking-place, and the old dragon of unrighteousness set upon furiously, there is a conspicuous incident contained in the second book. In each book Spenser conceives the antagonist of the knight, in some spiritual form, to have wrought a mischief which needs to be repaired and revenged. Thus a dragon occasions the adventures of the Red Cross knight, and in the legend of Sir Guyon the enchantress Acrasia, or Intemperance, has caused the death of a knight and his lady; the latter slays herself because of her husband’s death, and plunges her babe’s innocent hands into her own bloody breast for a witness. Sir Guyon and the Palmer, standing over the dead bodies, hold grave discourse upon the incident; then they bury the dead, and seek in vain to cleanse the babe’s hands in a neighboring fountain. The pure water will not be stained, and the child bears the name Ruddymane,—the Red-Handed,—and shall so bear the sign of a vengeance he is yet to execute.

It is somewhat difficult to see into the full meaning of Spenser’s allegory, for the reason that the poet breaks through the meshes of his allegoric net and soars into a freer air; but there are certain strong lines running through the poem, and this of the ineradicable nature of sin is one of them. To Spenser, vexed with problems of life, that conception of childhood which knit it closely with the generations was a significant one, and in the bloody hand of the infant, which could not be suffered to stain the chaste fountain, he saw the dread transmission of an inherited guilt and wrong. The poet and the moralist struggle for ascendency, and in this conflict one may see reflected the passion for speculation in divinity which was already making deep marks in English literature.

But the Elizabethan era had its share of light-heartedness. The songs of the dramatists and other lyrics exhibit very clearly the influence upon literature of the revival of ancient learning. As the art of Italy showed the old poetic grace risen again under new conditions, so the dominant art of England caught a light from the uncovered glory of Greece and Rome. It was the time of the great translations of Phaer, Golding, North, and Chapman; and as those translations are bold appropriations of antiquity, not timid attempts at satisfying the requisitions of scholarship, so the figures of the old mythology are used freely and ingenuously; they are naturalized in English verse far more positively than afterwards in the elegantia of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway is an exquisite illustration of this rich, decorative use of the old fable. It was partly through this sportive appropriation of the myth of Amor, so vital in all literature, that the lullabies of the time came to get their sweetness. The poet, in putting songs into the mother’s mouth, is not so much reflecting the Virgin and Child as he is possessed with the spirit of Greek beauty, and his delicate fancy plays about the image of a little Love. Thus may we read the Golden Slumbers of Dekker, in his Patient Grissel. By a pretty conceit George Gascoigne, in his Lullaby of a Lover, captures the sentiment of a mother and babe, to make it tell the story of his own love and content. There is a touching song by Robert Greene in his Menaphon, where Sephestia puts into her lullaby the story of her parting with the child’s father:—

We are apt to look for everything in Shakespeare, but in this matter of childhood we must confess that there is a meagreness of reference which almost tempts us into constructing a theory to account for it. So far as dramatic representation is concerned, the necessary limitations of the stage easily account for the absence of the young. Girls were not allowed to act in Shakespeare’s time, and it is not easy to reduce boys capable of acting to the stature of young girls. More than this, boys and girls are not themselves dramatic in action, though in the more modern drama they are sometimes used, especially in domestic scenes, to heighten effects, and to make most reasonable people wish them in bed.

Still, within the limits enforced by his art, Shakespeare more than once rested much on youthful figures. The gay, agile Moth has a species of femineity about him, so that we fancy he would be most easily shown on the stage by a girl; but one readily recalls others who have distinct boyish properties. In Coriolanus, when the mother and wife go out to plead with the angry Roman, they take with them his little boy. Volumnia, frantic with fear, with love, and with a woman’s changing passion, calls upon one and another to join her in her entreaty. Virgilia, the wife, crowds in a word at the height of Volumnia’s appeal, when the voluble grandmother has been rather excitedly talking about Coriolanus treading on his mother’s womb, that brought him into the world. Virgilia strikes in,—

Whereupon young Marcius, with delicious boyish brag and chivalry:—

In the same play there is a description of the boy which tallies exactly with the single appearance which he makes in person. Valeria drops in upon the mother and grandmother in a friendly way, and civilly asks after the boy.

“Vir. I thank your ladyship; well, good madam.

“Vol. He had rather see the swords, and hear a drum, than look upon his schoolmaster.

“Val. O’ my word, the father’s son: I’ll swear, ’tis a very pretty boy. O’ my troth, I looked upon him o’ Wednesday half an hour together: has such a confirmed countenance. I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again: and over and over he comes, and up again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; O, I warrant, how he mammocked it!

“Vol. One on ’s father’s moods.

“Val. Indeed, la, ’tis a noble child.

“Vir. A crack, madam.”

The most eminent example in Shakespeare of active childhood is unquestionably the part played by young Arthur in the drama of King John. It is the youth of Arthur, his dependence, his sorry inheritance of misery, his helplessness among the raging wolves about him, his childish victory over Hubert, and his forlorn death, when he leaps trembling from the walls, which impress the imagination. “Stay yet,” says Pembroke to Salisbury,—

Shakespeare, busy with the story of kings, is moved with deep compassion for this child among kings, who overcomes the hard heart of Hubert by his innocent words, the very strength of feeble childhood, and falls like a poor lamb upon the stones, where his princedom could not save him.

In that ghastly play of Titus Andronicus, which melts at last into unavailing tears, with what exquisite grace is the closing scene humanized by the passage where the elder Lucius calls his boy to the side of his dead grandsire:—

The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is in nothing figured more acutely than when the woman and mother is made to say,—

In the witch’s hell-broth one ingredient is “finger of birth-strangled babe,” while in the portents which rise to Macbeth’s vision a bloody child and a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, are apparitions of ghostly prophecy. Then in that scene where Ross discloses slowly and with pent-up passion the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and Macduff hears as in a dream, waking to the blinding light of horrid day, with what a piercing shriek he cries out,—

and then surges back to his own pitiful state, transformed for a moment into an infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has stolen his mate and pretty brood.

By what marvelous flash of poetic power Shakespeare in this mighty passage lifts that humblest image of parental care, a hen and chickens, into the heights of human passion. Ah! as one sees a hen with a brood of chickens under her,—how she gathers them under her wings, and will stay in the cold if she can but keep them warm,—one’s mind turns to those words of profound pathos spoken over the unloving Jerusalem; there was the voice of a nature into which was gathered all the father’s and the mother’s love. In these two passages one sees the irradiation of poor feathered life with the glory of the image of the highest.

How important a part in the drama of King Richard III. do the young princes play; as princes, indeed, in the unfolding of the plot, yet as children in the poet’s portraiture of them. We hear their childish prattle, we see their timid shrinking from the dark Tower, and then we have the effect of innocent childhood upon the callous murderers, Dighton and Forrest, as related in that short, sharp, dramatic account which Tyrrel gives:—

The glances at infancy, though infrequent, are touched with strong human feeling. Ægeon, narrating the strange adventures of his shipwreck, tells of the

and scattered throughout the plays are passages and lines which touch lightly or significantly the realm of childhood: as,—

in Macbeth;

in Two Gentlemen of Verona;

says Desdemona; and Cleopatra, when the poisonous asp is planting its fangs, says with saddest irony,—

There is a charming illustration of the blending of the classic myth of Amor with actual childhood in these lines of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, where Helena says,

In the noonday musing of Jaques, when the summer sky hung over the greenwood, and he fell to thinking of the round world and all that dwell therein, the Seven Ages of Man passed in procession before him:—

until the last poor shambling creature is borne off in second childhood.

There are doubtless other passages which might be gleaned, but the survey is full enough to show how scantily, after all, Shakespeare has made use of the figure and the image of childhood. The reflection has led an ingenious writer to explain the fact by the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life, which hindered his study of children. “He was clearly old for his age when still a boy, and so would have associated, not with children, but with young men. His marriage as a mere lad and the scanty legends of his youth all tend in the same direction. The course of his life led him to live apart from his children in their youth; his busy life in London brought him into the interior of but few families; his son, of whom he saw but little, died young. If our supposition be true, it is a pathetic thought that the great dramatist was shut out from the one kind of companionship which, even while it is in no degree intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental powers, can take delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect far more matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.”[32]

The explanation is rather ingenious than satisfying. Where did Shakespeare get his knowledge of the abundant life which his dramas present? He had the privilege of most people of remembering his own boyhood, and the mind which could invent Hamlet out of such stuff as experience and observation furnished could scarcely have missed acquaintance enough with children to enable him to portray them whenever the exigencies of his drama required. No, it is simpler to refer the absence of children as actors to the limitations of the stage, and to ascribe the infrequent references to childhood to the general neglect of the merely domestic side of life in Shakespeare’s art. Shakespeare’s world was an out-of-doors, public world, and his men, women, and lovers carried on their lives with no denser concealment than a wood or an arras could afford.

The comprehensiveness of Shakespeare found some place for children; the lofty narrowness of Milton, none. The word child, even, can scarcely be found on a page of Milton’s verse. In his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, with its Hymn, how slight is the mention of the child Jesus! How far removed is the treatment from that employed in the great procession of Madonnas!

The Infant God!—that is Milton’s attitude, more than half pagan. In L’Allegro and in Comus the lightness, which denotes the farthest swing of Milton’s fancy, is the relief which his poetic soul found from the high themes of theology, in Greek art. One is aware that Milton’s fine scholarship was the salvation of his poetry, as his Puritan sense of personality held in check a nature which else might have run riot in sportiveness and sensuousness. When he permitted himself his exquisite short flights of fancy, the material in which he worked was not the fresh spring of English nature, human or earthly, but the remote Arcadian virginity which he had learned of in his books. Not dancing children, but winged sprites, caught his poetic eye.

The weight of personal responsibility which rests upon the Puritan conception of life offers small play for the wantonness and spontaneity of childhood. Moreover, the theological substratum of Puritan morality denied to childhood any freedom, and kept the life of man in waiting upon the conscious turning of the soul to God. Hence childhood was a time of probation and suspense. It was wrong, to begin with, and was repressed in its nature until maturity should bring an active and conscious allegiance to God. Hence, also, parental anxiety was forever earnestly seeking to anticipate the maturity of age, and to secure for childhood that reasonable intellectual belief which it held to be essential to salvation; there followed often a replacement of free childhood by an abnormal development. In any event, the tendency of the system was to ignore childhood, to get rid of it as quickly as possible, and to make the state contain only self-conscious, determinate citizens of the kingdom of heaven. There was, unwittingly, a reversal of the divine message, and it was said in effect to children: Except ye become as grown men and be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.

Nevertheless, though Puritanism in its excessive anxiety may have robbed childhood of its freedom, the whole spirit of the movement was one conservative of family relations, and the narratives of domestic life under Puritanic control are often full of a grave sweetness. Indeed, it may almost be said that the domestic narrative was now born into English literature. Nor could the intense concern for the spiritual well-being of children, a religious passion reinforcing natural affection, fail to give an importance to the individual life of the family, and prepare the way for that new intelligence of the scope of childhood which was to come later to an England still largely dominated by Puritan ideas.

Milton expressed the high flight of the soul above earthly things. He took his place upon a summit where he could show the soul all the confines of heaven and earth. Bunyan, stirred by like religious impulses, made his soul trudge sturdily along toward an earthly paradise. The realism of his story often veils successfully the spiritual sense, and makes it possible for children to read the Pilgrim’s Progress with but faint conception of its religious import. In the second part of the allegory, Christian’s wife and children set out on their ramble, in Christian’s footsteps. There is no lack of individuality in characterization of the persons. The children are distinctly conceived as children; they are, to be sure, made to conform occasionally to the demands of the spiritual side of the allegory, yet they remain children, and by their speech and action betray the childish mind.

They come in sight of the lions, and “the boys that went before were glad to cringe behind, for they were afraid of the lions, so they stepped back and went behind.” When they come to the Porter’s Lodge, they abide there awhile with Prudence, Piety, and Charity; Prudence catechizes the four children, who return commendably correct answers. But Matthew, the oldest boy, falls sick of the gripes; and when the physician asks Christiana what he has been eating lately, she is as ignorant as any mother can be.

“Then said Samuel,” who is as communicative as most younger brothers, “‘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,—

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:—

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:—

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,—

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,—

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,—

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 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,—

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

and

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,—

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:—

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—

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.

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.

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:—

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.

By a natural instinct, writers for children began at once to write 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.