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 / 
 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 IN LITERATURE AND ART 
 
 WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON 
 LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 
 
 a ^tuD^ 
 
 BY 
 
 HORACE E. SCUDDER 
 
 I 392.1 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 (arfte ClibcrsiiJc press, Cambriboe
 
 Copyright, 1894, 
 By HORACE E. SCUDDER 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridf/e, 3fass. U. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
 
 TO 
 
 s-c-s- 
 
 WHO WAS A CHILD WHEN THIS BOOK 
 WAS WRITTEN
 
 \
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 FAOE 
 
 I. Introddction 3 
 
 II. In Greek and Roman Literature . . 6 
 
 III. In Hebrew Life and Literature . 39 
 
 IV. In Early Christianity . . . .53 
 V. In Medieval Art 81 
 
 VI. In English Literature and Art . . 104 ^ 
 VII. In French ant) German Literature . 180 
 Vin. Hans Christian Andersen . . . 201 
 IX. In American Literary Art . . . lYl^ 
 Index 247
 
 c
 
 I 
 
 VN5^ 
 C5-S3 
 
 op, ) 
 
 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 AND ART 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 I3S2.I 
 There was a time, just beyond the mem- 
 ory of men now living, when the Child was 
 bom in literature. At the same period 
 books for children began to be written. 
 There were children, indeed, in literature 
 before Wordsworth created Alice Fell and 
 Lucy Gray, or breathed the lines beginning, 
 I 
 
 ]^ " She was a phantom of delight," 
 
 and there were books for the young before 
 Mr. Day wrote Sandford and Merton; 
 especially is it to be noted that Goldsmith, 
 who was an avant-courier of Wordsworth, 
 had a very delightfid perception of the 
 child, and amused himself with him in the 
 Vicar of Wakefield, while he or his double 
 entertained his little friends in real life with 
 the Renowned History of Goody Two Shoes.
 
 4 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Nevertheless, there has been, since the day 
 of Wordsworth, such a succession of childish 
 fig-ures in prose and verse that we are jus- 
 tified in believing childhood to have been 
 discovered at the close of the last century. 
 The child has now become so common that 
 we scarcely consider how absent he is from 
 the earlier literature. Men and women are 
 there, lovers, maidens, and youth, but these 
 are all with us still. The child has been 
 added to the dramatis personce of modern 
 literature. 
 
 There is a correlation between childhood 
 in literature and a literature for children, 
 but it will best be understood when one has 
 considered the meaning of the appearance 
 and disappearance of the child in different 
 epochs of literature and art ; for while a 
 hasty survey certainly assures one that the 
 nineteenth century regards childhood far 
 more intently than any previous age, it is 
 impossible that so elemental a figure as the 
 child should ever have been wholly lost to 
 sight. A comparison of literatures with ref- 
 erence to this figure may disclose some of 
 the fundamental differences which exist 
 between this century and those which have 
 preceded it ; it may also disclose a still
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 deeper note of unity, struck by the essential 
 spirit in childhood itself. It is not worth 
 while in such a study to have much recourse 
 to the minor masters ; if a theme so ele- 
 mental and so universal in its relations is 
 not to be illustrated from the great creative 
 expositors of human nature, it cannot have 
 the importance which we claim for it.
 
 II 
 
 IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE 
 I 
 
 When Dr. Schliemanu with his little 
 shovel uncovered the treasures of Mycenge 
 and Ilium, a good many timid souls rejoiced 
 exceedingly over a convincing proof of the 
 authenticity of the Homeric legends. There 
 alwaj^s will be those who find the proof of 
 a spiritual fact in some corresponding ma- 
 terial fact; who wish to see the bones of 
 Agamemnon before they are quite ready to 
 believe in the Agamemnon of the Iliad ; to 
 whom the Bible is not true until its truth 
 has been confirmed by some external wit- 
 ness. But when science has done its utmost, 
 there still remains in a work of art a certain 
 testimony to truth, which may be illustrated 
 by science, but cannot be superseded by it./ 
 Agamemnon has lived all these years in the 
 belief of men without the aid of any cups, 
 or saucers, or golden vessels, or even bones. 
 Literature, and especially imaginative lit-
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 7 
 
 erature, is the exponent of the life of a 
 people, and we must still go to it for our 
 most intimate knowledge. No careful anti- 
 quarian research can reproduce for us the 
 women of early Greece as Homer has set 
 them before us in a few lines in his pictures 
 of Helen and Penelope and NausikaJi. 
 When, therefore, we ask ourselves of child- 
 hood in Greek life, we may reconstruct it 
 out of the multitudinous references in Greek 
 literature to the education of children, to 
 their sports and games ; and it is no very 
 difficult task to follow the child from birth 
 through the nursery to the time when it 
 assumes its place in the active community : 
 but the main inquiries must still be, What 
 pictures have we of childhood ? What part 
 does the child play in that drama which is 
 set before us in a microcosm by poets and 
 tragedians ? 
 
 The actions of Homer's heroes are spirit- 
 ualized by reflection. That is, as the tree 
 which meets the eye becomes a spiritual tree 
 when one sees its answering image in the 
 pool which it overhangs, so those likenesses 
 which Homer sets over against the deeds of 
 his heroes release the souls of the deeds, and 
 give them wings for a flight in the imagi-
 
 8 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 nation. A crowd of men flock to the as- 
 sembly : seen in the bright reflection of 
 Homer's imagination, they are a swarm of 
 bees : — 
 
 " Being abroad, the earth was overlaid 
 With fleckers to them, that came forth, aa when of 
 
 frequent bees 
 Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees 
 Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising new 
 From forth their sweet nest ; as their store, still as it 
 
 faded, grew. 
 And never would cease sending forth her clusters to 
 
 the spring, 
 They stUl crowd out so ; this flock here, that there, 
 
 belaboring 
 The loaded flowers." ^ 
 
 So Chapman, in his Gothic fashion, run- 
 ning up his little spires and pinnacles upon 
 the building which he has raised from Ho- 
 mer's material ; but the idea is all Homer's, 
 and Chapman's " repairing the degrees of 
 their egression endlessly," with its resonant 
 hum, is hardly more intentionally a reflex 
 of sound and motion than Homer's aUl veov 
 ip)(Oix€vd(i)v. 
 
 We look again at Chapman's way of ren- 
 dering the caressing little passage in the 
 fourth book of the Iliad, where Homer, 
 wishing to speak of the ease and tenderness 
 
 ^ Chapman's The Iliads of Horner, ii. 70-77.
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 9 
 
 with which Athene turns aside the arrow 
 shot at Menelaos, calls up the image of a 
 mother brushing a fly from the face of her 
 sleeping child : — 
 
 "Stood close before, and slack'd the force the arrow 
 
 did confer 
 With as much care and little hurt as doth a mother 
 
 use, 
 And keep off from her babe, when sleep doth through 
 
 his powers diffuse 
 His golden humor, and th' assaults of rude and busy 
 
 flies 
 She still checks with her careful hand." ^ 
 
 Here the Englishman has caught the 
 notion of ease, and emphasized that ; yet 
 he has missed the tenderness, and all be- 
 cause he was not content to accept the sim- 
 ple image, but must needs refract it into 
 "assaults of rude and busy flies." Better 
 is the rendering of the picturesque figure in 
 which Ajax, beset by the Trojans, is likened 
 to an ass belabored by a pack of boys : — 
 
 " As when a dull mill ass comes near a goodly field of 
 
 com. 
 Kept from the birds by children's cries, the boys are 
 
 overborne 
 By his insensible approach, and simply he will eat 
 About whom many wands are broke, and stiU the 
 
 children beat, 
 
 1 mads, iv. 147-151.
 
 10 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 And still the self-providing ass doth with their weak- 
 ness bear, 
 
 Not stirring till his paunch be full, and scarcely then 
 will steer." * 
 
 Apollo, sweeping away the rampart of the 
 Greeks, does it as easily as a boy, who has 
 heaped a pile of sand upon the seashore 
 in childish sport, in sport razes it with feet 
 and hands. Achilles half pities, half chides, 
 the imploring, weeping Patroclos, when he 
 says, — 
 
 " Wlierefore weeps my friend 
 So like a girl, who, though she sees her mother cannot 
 
 tend 
 Her childish humors, hangs on her, and would be 
 
 taken up, 
 Still viewing her with tear-drowned eyes, when she 
 
 has made her stoop." ^ 
 
 Chapman's " hangs on her " is hardly so 
 particular as Homer's elavov aTrTOfxevrj, plucks 
 at her gown; and he has quite missed the 
 picture offered by the poet, who makes the 
 child, as soon as she discovers her mother, 
 beg to be taken up, and insistently stop her 
 as she goes by on some errand. Here again 
 the naive domestic scene in Homer is 
 charged in Chapman with a certain half- 
 tragic meaning. 
 
 This, we think, completes the short cata- 
 1 Iliads, xvi. 5-8. 2 m^^ ^i. 485-490.
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 11 
 
 logue of Homer's indirect reference to child- 
 hood, and the comparison with the Eliza- 
 bethan poet's use of the same forms brings 
 out more distinctly the sweet simplicity and 
 native dignity of the Greek. When child- 
 hood is thus referred to by Homer, it is used; 
 with no condescension, and with no thought 
 of investing it with any adventitious prop- 
 erty. It is a part of nature, as the bees are 
 a part of nature ; and when Achilles likens 
 his friend in his tears to a little girl wishing 
 to be taken up by her mother, he is not 
 taunting him with being a " cry-baby." 
 
 Leaving the indirect references, one re- 
 calls immediately the single picture of child- 
 hood which stands among the heroic scenes 
 of the Iliad. When Hector has his mem- 
 orable parting with Andi'omache, as re- 
 lated in the sixth book of the Iliad, the 
 child Astyanax is present in the nurse's 
 arms. Here Chapman is so careless that 
 we desert him, and fall back on a simple 
 rendering into prose of the passage relating 
 to the child : — 
 
 " With this, famous Hector reached forth 
 to take his boy, but back into the bosom of 
 his fair-girded nurse the boy shrank with 
 a cry, frightened at the sight of his dear
 
 12 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 father ; for he was afraid of the brass, — 
 yes, and of the plume made of a horse's 
 mane, when he saw it nodding dreadfully at 
 the helmet's peak. Then out laughed his 
 dear father and his noble mother. Quick 
 from his head famous Hector took the hel- 
 met and laid it on the ground, where it 
 shone. Then he kissed his dear son and 
 tossed him in the air, and thus he prayed 
 to Zeus and all the gods. . . . These were 
 his words, and so he placed the boy, his 
 boy, in the hands of his dear wife; and 
 she received him into her odorous bosom, 
 smiling through her tears. Her husband 
 had compassion on her when he saw it, and 
 stroked her with his hand, spoke to her, and 
 called her by her name." ^ 
 
 Like so many other passages in Ho- 
 mer, this at once offers themes for sculp- 
 ture, riaxman was right when he presented 
 his series of illustrations to the Iliad and 
 Odyssey in outline, and gave a statuesque 
 character to the groups, though his inter- 
 pretation of this special scene is common- 
 place. There is an elemental property 
 about the life exhibited in Homer which 
 the firm boundaries of sculpture most fitly 
 1 Eiad, vi. 466-475, 482-485.
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 13 
 
 inclose. Thus childhood, in this passage, is 
 characterized by an entirely simple emotion, 
 — the sudden fear of an infant at the sight 
 of his father's shining helmet and frowning 
 plume ; while the relation of maturity to 
 childhood is presented in the strong man's 
 concession to weakness, as he laughs and 
 lays aside his helmet, and then catches and 
 tosses the child. 
 
 It is somewhat perilous to comment upon 
 Homer. The appeal in his poetry is so di- 
 rect to universal feeling, and so free from the 
 entanglements of a too refined sensibility, 
 that the moment one begins to enlarge upon 
 the sentiment in his epic one is in dan- 
 ger of importing into it subtleties which 
 would have been incomprehensible to Homer. 
 fThere is preserved, especially in the Iliad, 
 the picture of a society which is physically 
 developed, but intellectually unrefined. The 
 men weep like children when they cannot 
 have what they want, and the passions which 
 stir life are those which lie nearest the phy- 
 sical forms of expression. When we come 
 thus upon this picture of Hector's parting 
 with Andromache, we are impressed chiefly 
 with the fact that it is human life in outline. 
 Here are great facts of human experience,
 
 14 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 and they are so told that not one of them 
 requires a word of explanation to make it 
 intelligible to a child. The child, we are 
 reminded in a later philosophy, is father of 
 the man, and Astyanax is a miniature Hec- 
 tor ; for we have only to go forward a few 
 pages to find Hector, when brought face 
 to face with Ajax, confessing to a terrible 
 thumping of fear in his breast. 
 
 There is one figure in early Greek domes- 
 tic life which has frequent recognition in lit- 
 erature. It helps in our study of this sub- 
 ject to find the nurse so conspicuous ; in the 
 passage last quoted she is given an epithet 
 which is reserved for goddesses and noble 
 women. The definite regard paid to one so 
 identified with childhood is in accord with 
 the open acceptance of the physical aspect 
 of human nature which is at the basis of the 
 Homeric poems. The frankness with which 
 the elemental conditions of life are made to 
 serve the poet's purpose, so that eating and 
 drinking, sleeping and fighting, weeping and 
 laughing, running and dancing, are familiar 
 incidents of the poem, finds a place for the 
 nurse and the house-dog. Few incidents in 
 the Odyssey are better remembered by its 
 readers than the recognition of the travel-
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 15 
 
 worn Odysseus by the old watch-dog, and 
 by the nurse who washes the hero's feet and 
 discovers the scar of the wound made by the 
 boar's tusk when the man before her was a 
 youth. 
 
 The child, in the Homeric conception, was 
 a little human creature uninvested with any 
 mystery, a part of that society which had it- 
 self scarcely passed beyond the bounds of 
 childhood. As the horizon which limited 
 early Greece was a narrow one, and the 
 world in which the heroes moved was sur- 
 rounded by a vast terra incognita^ so hu- 
 man life, in its Homeric acceptance, was one 
 of simple forms ; that which lay beyond tan- 
 gible and visible experience was rarely vis- 
 ited, and was peopled with shapes which 
 brought a childish fright.) There was, in a 
 word, nothing in the development of man's 
 nature, as recorded by Homer, which would 
 make him look with questioning toward his 
 child. He regarded the world about him 
 with scarcely more mature thought than did 
 the infant whom he tossed in the air, and, 
 until life should be apprehended in its more 
 complex relations, he was not likely to see 
 in his child anything more than an epitome 
 of his own little round. The contrast be-
 
 16 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 tween cliildhood and manhood was too faint 
 to serve much of a purpose in art. 
 
 The difference between Homer and the 
 tragedians is at once perceived to be the 
 difference between a boy's thought and a 
 man's thought. The colonial growth, the 
 Persian war, the political development, the 
 commerce with other peoples, were witnesses 
 to a more complex life and the quick causes 
 of a profounder apprehension of human 
 existence. It happens that we have in the 
 CEdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles an incident 
 wliich offers a suggestive comparison with 
 the simple picture of the parting of Hector 
 and Andromache. In the earlier poem, the 
 hero, expecting the fortimes of war, disdains 
 all suggestions of prudence, and speaks as a 
 brave man must, who sets honor above ease, 
 and counts the cost of sacrifice only to stir 
 himself to greater courage and resolution. 
 He asks that his child may take his place in 
 time, and he dries his wife's tears with the 
 simple words that no man can separate him 
 from her, that fate alone can intervene ; in 
 Chapman's nervous rendering : — 
 
 " Afflict me not, dear wife, 
 With these vain griefs. He doth not live that can 
 disjoin my life
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 17 
 
 And this firm bosom but my fate ; and fate, whose 
 
 wings can fly ? 
 Noble, ignoble, fate controls. Once bom, the best 
 
 must die." 
 
 Here, the impending disaster to Troy, 
 with the inclusion of Hector's fortune, 
 appears as one fact out of many, an incident 
 in life, bringing other incidents in its train, 
 yet scarcely more ethical in its relations 
 than if it followed from the throw of dice. 
 In the CEdipus, when the king, overwhelmed 
 by his fate, in the supreme hour of his 
 anguish takes vengeance upon his eyes, there 
 follows a passage of surpassing pathos. To 
 the mad violence has succeeded a moment of 
 tender grief, and the unhappy CEdipus 
 stretches out his arms for his children, that 
 he may bid them farewell. His own terrible 
 fate is dimmed in his thought by the suffer- 
 ing which the inevitable curse of the house 
 is to bring into their lives. He reflects ; he 
 dismisses his sons, — they, at least, can 
 fisfht their battles in the world ; he turns to 
 his defenseless little daughters, and pours 
 out for them the tears of a stricken fatlier. 
 The not-to-be-questioned fate of Homer, an 
 inexplicable incident of life, which men 
 must set aside from calculation and thought
 
 18 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 because it is inexplicable, has become in 
 Sophocles a terrible mystery, connecting 
 itself with man's conduct, even when that is 
 unwittingly in violation of divine decree, and 
 following him with such unrelenting vigi- 
 lance that death cannot be counted the end 
 of perilous life. The child, in the supreme 
 moment of Hector's destiny, is to him the 
 restoration of order, the replacement of his 
 loss ; the children, in the supreme moment 
 of the destiny of CEdipus, are to him only 
 the means of prolonging and rendering more 
 murky the darkness which has fallen upon 
 him. Hector, looking upon Astyanax, sees 
 the world rolling on, sunlight chasing 
 shadow, repeating the life he has known; 
 OEdipus, looking upon Antigone and Ismene, 
 sees new disclosures of the possibilities of 
 a dread power under which the world is 
 abiding. 
 
 In taking one step more from Sophocles 
 to Euripides, there is food for thought in a 
 new treatment of childhood. Whatever view 
 one may choose to take of Euripides and his 
 art in its relation to the heroic tragedy, there 
 can be no question as to the nearness in 
 which Euripides stands to the characters 
 of his dramas, and this nearness is shown
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 19 
 
 in nothing more than in the use which he 
 makes of domestic life. With him, children 
 are the necessary illustrations of humanity. 
 Thus, in the Medea, when Medea is plead- 
 ing with Creon for a respite of a day only 
 from banishment, the argument which pre- 
 vails is that which rests on pity for her 
 little ones, and in the very centre of Me- 
 dea's vengeance is that passion for her chil- 
 dren which bids her slay them rather than 
 leave them 
 
 " Among their unfriends, to be trampled on." 
 
 Again, in Alkestis, the last words of the 
 heroine before she goes to her sacrifice are 
 a demand of Admetus that the integrity of 
 their home shall be preserved, and no step- 
 dame take her place with the children. 
 Both Alkestis and Admetus, in that wonder- 
 ful scene, are imaged to the eye as part of a 
 group, and, though the children themselves 
 do not speak, the words and the very ges- 
 tures are directed toward them. 
 
 Alkestis. My chUdren, ye have heard your father's 
 pledge 
 Never to set a step-dame over you, 
 Or thrust me from the allegiance of his heart. 
 
 Admetus. What now I say shall never be unsaid. 
 
 Alkestis. Then here our children I entrust to thee.
 
 20 
 
 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 lost. 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 
 And I receive them as the gage of love. 
 Be thou a mother to them in my place. 
 Need were, when such a mother has been 
 
 Children, I leave you when I fain would live. 
 Alas ! what shall I do, bereft of thee? 
 Time will assuage thy grief : the dead are 
 nought. 
 Admetus. Take, take me with thee to the underworld. 
 It is enough that I must die for thee. 
 O Heaven ! of what a partner I am reft ! 
 My eyes grow dim and the long sleep comes 
 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 on. 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 Alkestis. 
 Admetus. 
 Chorus. 
 
 I too am lost if thou dost leave me, wife. 
 Think of me as of one that is no more. 
 Lift up thy face, quit not thy children dear. 
 Not willingly ; but, children, fare ye well. 
 Oh, look upon them, look ! 
 
 My end is come. 
 Oh, leave ns not. 
 
 Farewell. 
 
 I am undone. 
 Gone, gone ; thy wife, Admetus, is no more.^ 
 
 A fragment of Danae puts into the mouth 
 of Danae herself apparently lines which send 
 one naturally to Simonides : — 
 
 " He, leaping to my arms and in my bosom, 
 Might haply sport, and with a crowd of kisses 
 Might win my soul forth ; for there is no greater 
 Love-charm than close companionship, my father." ^ 
 
 It cannot have escaped notice how large a 
 
 1 Goldwin Smith's translation. 
 
 ^ John Addington Symonds's translation.
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 21 
 
 part is played by children in the spectacular 
 appointments of the Greek drama. Those 
 symbolic processions, those groups of human 
 life, those scenes of human passion, are ren- 
 dered more complete by the silent presence 
 of children. They serve in tlie temples; 
 their eyes are quick to catch the coming 
 of the messenger ; they sujffer dumbly in the 
 fate that pulls down royal houses and top- 
 ples the pillars of ancestral palaces. It 
 was impossible that it should be otherwise. 
 The Greek mind, which found expression in 
 tragic art, was ojipressed by the problems, 
 not alone of individual fate, but of the subtle 
 relations of human life. The serpents wind- 
 ing about Laokobn entwined in their folds 
 the shrinking youths, and the father's an- 
 guish was for the destiny which would not 
 let him suffer alone. Yet there is scarcely 
 a child's voice to be heard in the whole 
 range of Greek poetic art. The conception 
 is universally of the child, not as acting, far 
 less as speaking, but as a passive member of 
 the social order. It is not its individual life 
 so much as its related life which is contem- 
 plated. 
 
 We are related to the Greeks not only 
 through the higher forms of literature, but
 
 22 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 through the political thought which had 
 with them both historical development and 
 speculative representation. It comes thus 
 within the range of our inquiry to ask what 
 recognition of childhood there was in writ- 
 ings which sought to give an artistic form 
 to political thought. There is a frequent 
 recurrence by Plato to the subject of child- 
 hood in the state, and we may see in his 
 presentation not only the germinal relation 
 which childhood bears, so that education be- 
 comes necessarily one of the significant func- 
 tions of government, but also what may not 
 unfairly be called a reflection of divinity. 
 
 The education which in the ideal state is 
 to be given to children is represented by 
 him, indeed, as the evolution from the sensa- 
 tions of pleasure and pain to the perception 
 of virtue and vice. "Pleasure and pain," 
 he says,^ "I maintain to be the first per- 
 ceptions of children, and I say that they are 
 the forms under which virtue and vice are 
 originally present to them. As to wisdom 
 and true and fixed opinions, happy is the 
 man who acquires them, even when declin- 
 ing in years; and he who possesses them, 
 
 ^ Laws, ii. 653. In this and subsequent passages Jow- 
 ett's translation is used.
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 23 
 
 and the blessings which are contained in 
 them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by- 
 education that training which is given by 
 suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue 
 in children ; when pleasure and friendship 
 and pain and hatred are rightly implanted 
 in souls not yet capable of understanding 
 the nature of them, and who find them, 
 after they have attained reason, to be in 
 harmony with her. This harmony of the 
 soul, when perfected, is virtue ; but the 
 particular training in respect of pleasure 
 and pain which leads you always to hate 
 what you ought to hate, and love what you 
 ought to love, from the beginning to the 
 end, may be separated off, and, in my view, 
 will be rightly called education." 
 
 In the Kepublic, Plato theorizes at great 
 length upon a possible selection and train- 
 ing of children, which rests for its basis 
 upon a too pronounced physical assumption, 
 so that one in reading certain passages might 
 easily fancy that he was considering the 
 production of a superior breed of colts, and 
 that the soid was the product of material 
 forces only ; but the fifth book, which con- 
 tains these audacious specidations, may fairly 
 be taken in the spirit in which Proudhon is
 
 24 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 said to have thrown out some of his extrava- 
 gant assertions, — he expected to be beaten 
 down in his price. 
 
 There are other passages, especially in 
 the Laws, in reading which one is struck by 
 a certain reverence for childhood, as that 
 interesting one where caution is given 
 against disturbing the uniformity of chil- 
 dren's plays on account of their connection 
 with the life of the state. The modern 
 theories of the Kindergarten find a notable 
 support in Plato's reasoning : ." I say that 
 in states generally no one has observed that 
 the plays of childhood have a great deal to 
 do with the permanence or want of perma- 
 nence in legislation. For when plays are 
 ordered with a view to children having the 
 same plays and amusing themselves after 
 the same manner and finding delight in the 
 same playthings, the more solemn institu- 
 tions of the state are allowed to remain un- 
 disturbed. Whereas, if sports are disturbed 
 and innovations are made in them, and they 
 constantly change, and the young never 
 speak of their having the same likings or 
 the same established notions of good and 
 bad taste, either in the bearing of their 
 bodies or in their dress, but he who devises
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 25 
 
 something new and out of the way in figures 
 and colors and the like is held in special 
 honor, we may truly say that no greater evil 
 can happen in a state ; for he who changes 
 the sports is secretly changing the manners 
 of the young, and making the old to be dis- 
 honored among them, and the new to be 
 honored. And I affirm that there is no- 
 thing which is a greater injury to all states 
 than saying or thinking thus." ^ 
 
 It is, however, most germane to our pur- 
 pose to cite a striking passage from the 
 Laws, in which Plato most distinctly recog- 
 nizes the power resident in childhood to as- 
 similate the purest expression of truth. The 
 Athenian, in the dialogue, is speaking, and 
 says : " The next suggestion which I have 
 to offer is that all our three choruses [that 
 is, choruses representing the three epochs 
 of life] shall sing to the young and tender 
 souls of children, reciting in their strains all 
 the noble thoughts of which we have already 
 spoken, or are about to speak ; and the sum 
 of them shall be that the life which is by the 
 gods deemed to be the happiest is the holiest, 
 and we shall affirm this to be a most certain 
 truth ; and the minds of our young disciples 
 1 Laws, vii. 797.
 
 26 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 will be more likely to receive these words of 
 ours than any others which we might ad- 
 dress to them. . . . 
 
 " First will enter, in their natural order, 
 the sacred choir, composed of children, which 
 is to sing lustily the heaven-taught lay to the 
 whole city. Next will follow the chorus of 
 young men under the age of thirty, who will 
 call upon the God Paean to testify to the 
 truth of their words, and will pray to him to 
 be gracious to the youth and to turn their 
 hearts. Thirdly, the choir of elder men, who 
 are from thirty to sixty years of age, will 
 also sing. There remain those who are too 
 old to sing, and they will tell stories illus- 
 trating the same virtues, as with the voice 
 of an oracle." ^ 
 
 Plato used human society as material from 
 which to construct an organization artisti- 
 cally perfect and representing political order, 
 just as Pheidias or Praxiteles used clay as 
 a material from which to construct the hu- 
 man being artistically perfect and represent- 
 ing the soul of man. With this fine organ- 
 ism of the ideal state Plato incorporated his 
 conception of childhood in its two relations 
 of singing and being sung to. He thought 
 ^ Laws, ii. 664.
 
 IN GREEK LITEBATURE 27 
 
 of the child as a member of the three-fold 
 chorus of life : and when he set these choirs 
 hymning the divine strain, he made the re- 
 cipients of the revelation to be themselves 
 children, the forming elements of the grow- 
 ing, organic state. Certainly it is a wide arc 
 which is spanned by these three great repre- 
 sentatives of Greek art, and in passing from 
 Homer to Sophocles, and from Sophocles to 
 Plato, we are not merely considering the 
 epic, the tragic, and the philosophic treat- 
 ment of childhood in literatm:"e ; we are dis- 
 covering the development of the conception 
 of childhood in a nation which has commu- 
 nicated to history the eidolon of the fairest 
 humanity. It is scarcely too much to speak 
 of it as the evolution of a soul, and to find, 
 as one so often finds in his study of Greece, 
 the outline of the course of the world's 
 thought. 
 
 The old, formal view of antiquity, which 
 once placed Grecian life almost beyond the 
 pale of our human sympathy, and made 
 the men and women cold marble figures 
 in our imagination, has given place to a 
 warmer regard. Through literary reproduc- 
 tion, which paraphrases Greek life in the 
 dramatic art of Browning and Fitzgerald,
 
 28 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 gives us Spencerian versions of Homer, or, 
 better still, the healthy childlike recital in 
 Mr. Palmer's version of the Odyssey, and 
 enables us to sit down after dinner with 
 Plato, Mr. Jowett being an idiomatic inter- 
 preter ; through the discoveries of Schlie- 
 mann and others, by which the mythic and 
 heroic ages of Greece are made almost 
 grotesquely familiar, — we are coming to 
 read Grecian history, in Niebuhr's felicitous 
 phrase, as if it really happened, and to lay 
 aside our artificial and distant ways of be- 
 coming familiar with Greek life. Yet the 
 means which have led to this modern atti- 
 tude toward classic antiquity are themselves 
 the product of modern life ; the secrets of 
 Greek life are more open to us now because 
 our own life has become freer, more hospi- 
 table, and more catholic. It is a delight to 
 us to turn from the marble of Pheidias to 
 the terra cotta of the unknown modelers of 
 the Tanagra figurines, while these homelike, 
 domestic images serve as interpreters, also, 
 of the larger, nobler designs. So we have 
 recourse to those fragments of the Greek 
 Anthology which give us glimpses of Greek 
 interiors, and by means of them we find a 
 side-light thrown upon the more majestic 
 expressions of poetic and dramatic art.
 
 IN GREEK LITERATURE 29 
 
 The Anthology gathers for us the epi- 
 grams, epitaphs, proverbs, fables, and little 
 odds and ends which have been saved from 
 the ruins of literature, and in turning its 
 leaves one is impressed by the large number 
 of references to childhood. It is as when, 
 rambling through the streets of the uncov- 
 ered Pompeii, one comes upon the playthings 
 of children dead nigh two thousand years. 
 Here are tender memorials of lost babes in 
 inscriptions upon forgotten tombs, and la- 
 ments of fathers and mothers for the dark- 
 ness which has come upon their dwellings. 
 We seem to hear the prattle of infancy and 
 the mother's lullaby. The Greeks, as we, 
 covered their loss with an instinctive trust in 
 some better fortune in store for the child, 
 and hushed their skepticism with the song 
 of hope and the remembrance of stories 
 which they had come in colder hours to dis- 
 believe. Here, for example, is an anonymous 
 elegy : — 
 
 " Thou hast not, O rider Pluto, with pious 
 intent, stolen for thy underground world a 
 girl of five years, admired by all. For thou 
 hast cut, as it were, from the root, a sweet- 
 scented rose in the season of a commencing' 
 spring, before it had completed its proper
 
 30 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 time. But come, Alexander and Philtatus ; 
 do not any longer weep and pour forth lam- 
 entations for the regretted girl. For she 
 had, yes, she had a rosy face which meant 
 that she should remain in the immortal dwell- 
 ings of the sky. Trust, then, to stories of 
 old. For it was not Death, but the Naiads, 
 who stole the good girl as once they stole 
 Hylas." 1 
 
 Perhaps the most celebrated of these ten- 
 der domestic passages is to be found in the 
 oft -quoted lines from Simonides, where 
 Danae sings over the boy Perseus : — 
 
 " When in the ark of curious workmanship 
 The winds and swaying waters fearfully 
 Were rocking her, with streaming eyes, around 
 Her boy the mother threw her arms and said : 
 
 " ' O darling, I am very miserable ; 
 But thou art cosy-warm and sound asleep 
 In this thy dull, close-cabin'd prison-house, 
 Stretched at full ease in the dark, ebon gloom. 
 Over thy head of long and tangled hair 
 The wave is rolling ; but thou heedest not ; 
 . Nor heedest thou the noises of the winds. 
 Wrapt in thy purple cloak, sweet pretty one. 
 
 " ' But if this fearful place had fear for thee, 
 Those little ears would listen to my words ; 
 But sleep on, baby, and let the sea-waves sleep, 
 
 1 Epigrammata Despota, DCCXI.
 
 IN ROMAN LITERATURE 31 
 
 And sleep our own immeasurable woes. 
 
 O father Zeus, I pray some change may come ; 
 
 But, father, if my words are over-bold. 
 
 Have pity, and for the child's sake pardon me.' " ^ 
 
 II 
 
 As before we stopped in front of the 
 charming group which Homer gives us in 
 the parting of Hector and Andromache, 
 with the child Astyanax set in the midst, so 
 in taking the poet who occupies the chief 
 place in Latin literature we find a significant 
 contrast. The picture of ^neas bearing 
 upon his shoulders the aged Anchises and 
 leading by the hand the yoimg Ascanius is 
 a distinct Roman picture. The two poems 
 move through somewhat parallel cycles, and 
 have adventures which are common to both ; 
 but the figure of Odysseus is essentially a 
 single figure, and his wanderings may easily 
 be taken to typify the excursions of the 
 human soul, ^neas, on the other hand, 
 seems always the centre of a family gi'oup, 
 and his journeyings always appear to be 
 movements toward a final city and nation. 
 The Greek idea of individuality and the 
 Roman of relationship have signal illustra- 
 
 ^ D'Arcy W. Thompson, in his Ancient Leaves.
 
 32 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 tion in these poems. Throughout the ^Eneid 
 the figure of Ascanius is an important one. 
 There is a nice disclosure of growth in per- 
 sonality, and one is aware that the grand- 
 son is coming forward into liis place as a 
 member of the family, to be thereafter rep- 
 resentative. The poet never loses sight of 
 the boy's future. Homer, in his shield of 
 Achilles, that microcosm of human life, for- 
 gets to make room for children. Virgil, in 
 his prophetic shield, shows the long triumphs 
 from Ascanius down, and casts a light upon 
 the cave wherein the twin boys were suckled 
 by the wolf. One of the most interesting 
 episodes in the ^neid is the childhood of 
 Camilla, in which the warrior maid's nature 
 is carried back and reproduced in diminu- 
 tive form. The evolutions of the boys in 
 the fifth book, while full of boyish life, 
 come rather under the form of mimic sol- 
 diery than of spontaneous youth. In one of 
 the Eclogues, Virgil has a graceful sugges- 
 tion of the stature of a child by its ability to 
 reach only the lowest branches of a tree. 
 
 Childhood, in Roman literature, is not 
 contemplated as a fine revelation of nature. 
 In the grosser conception, children are reck- 
 oned as scarcely more than cubs ; but with
 
 IN ROMAN LITERATURE 33 
 
 the strong hold which the family idea had 
 upon the Roman mind, it was impossible 
 that in the refinement which came gradually 
 upon life childhood should not play a part 
 of its own in poetry, and come to represent 
 the more spiritual side of the family life. 
 Thus Catullus, in one of his nuptial odes, 
 has a charming picture of infancy awaking 
 into consciousness and affection : — 
 
 " Soon my eyes shall see, mayhap, 
 Yoiiug Torquatus on the lap 
 Of his mother, as he stands 
 Stretching out his tiny hands, 
 And his little lips the while 
 Half open on his father's smile. 
 
 " And oh ! may he in all he like 
 Manlius, his sire, and strike 
 Strangers when the boy they meet 
 As his father's counterfeit, 
 And his face the index be 
 Of his mother's chastity." ^ 
 
 The epitaphs and the elegies of the Greek 
 Anthology have their counterpart in Latin. 
 Mr. Thompson has tried his hand at a pas- 
 sage from Statins : ^ — 
 
 ON TIIE DEATH OF A CHH^D. 
 
 Shall I not mourn thee, darling boy ? with whom, 
 
 Childless I missed not children of my own ; 
 
 I, who first caught and pressed thee to my breast, 
 
 ^ Theodore Martin's translation. 
 2 Silvce, V. 5, 79-87.
 
 34 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 And called thee mine, and taught thee sounds and words, 
 
 And solved the riddle of thy murmurings, 
 
 And stoop'd to catch thee creeping on the ground, 
 
 And propp'd thy steps, and ever had my lap 
 
 Ready, if drowsy were those little eyes. 
 
 To rock them with a lullaby to sleep ; 
 
 Thy first word was my name, thy fun my smile, 
 
 And not a joy of thine but came from me. 
 
 There is, too, that epitaph of Martial on 
 the little girl Erotion, closing with the lines 
 which may possibly have been in Gray's 
 mind when he wrote the discarded verse of 
 his Elegy, Englished thus : — 
 
 " Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth 
 Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free ; 
 Press lightly on her form, dear Mother Earth, 
 Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee." ^ 
 
 In the literature which sounds the deeper 
 waters of life, we find references to child- 
 hood ; but the child rarely, if ever, draws 
 the thought outside of the confines of this 
 world. As near an approach as any to a per- 
 ception of the mystery of childhood is in a 
 passage in Lucretius, where the poet looks 
 down with compassion upon the new-born 
 infant as one of the mysteries of nature: 
 " Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast 
 ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the 
 
 ^ Contributors' Club, Atlantic Monthly, Jime, 1881.
 
 IN ROMAN LITERATURE 35 
 
 ground, speecliless, in need of every aid to 
 life when first nature has cast him forth by 
 great throes from his mother's womb, and he 
 fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits 
 one whose doom it is to pass through so 
 much misery in life." ^ Lucretius displayed 
 a profound reverence for human affection. 
 Scattered through his great poem are fine 
 lines in which childhood appears. " Soon," 
 he says, in one mournful passage, — " soon 
 shall thy home receive thee no more with 
 glad welcome, nor thy dear children run to 
 snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with 
 silent gladness." ^ 
 
 Juvenal, with the thought of youth as the 
 possible restoration of a sinking world, utters 
 a cry, which has often been taken up by 
 sensualists even, when he injects into his 
 pitiless satire the solemn words, " the great- 
 est reverence is due to the boy." ^ 
 
 Any survey of ancient Greek and Roman 
 life would be incomplete which left out of 
 view the supernatural element. We need 
 not inquire whether there was a conscious 
 
 1 De Rerum Natura, V. 222-227, cited in Sellar's The 
 Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 390. 
 
 2 Ibid. III. 894-^96. Sellar, p. 304. 
 8 Satire xiv. 47«
 
 36 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 materialization of spiritual forces, or an 
 idealization of physical phenomena. We 
 have simply to do with certain shapes and 
 figures which dwelt in the mind and formed 
 a part of its furniture ; coming and going 
 like shadows, yet like shadows confessing a 
 forming substance ; embodying belief and 
 symbolizing moods. In that overarching 
 and surrounding world, peopled by the 
 countless personages of Greek and Roman 
 supernaturalism, we may discover, if we will, 
 a vague, distorted, yet sometimes transcen- 
 dent reflection of the life which men and 
 women were living upon the more palpable 
 and tangible earth. 
 
 What, then, has the childhood of the gods 
 to tell us ? We have the playful incident 
 of Hermes, or Mercurius, getting out of his 
 cradle to steal the oxen of Admetos, and the 
 similar one of Herakles strangling the snakes 
 that attacked him just after his birth ; but 
 these are simply stories intended to carry 
 back into childhood the strength of the one 
 and the cunning of the other. It is more to 
 our purpose to note the presence in the Pan- 
 theon of the child who remains always a 
 child, and is known to us familiarly as Eros, 
 or Cupid, or Amor. It is true that the myth
 
 IN ROMAN LITERATURE 37 
 
 includes the union of Cupid and Psyche ; 
 nevertheless, the prevailing conception is of 
 a boy, winged, armed with bow and arrows, 
 the son and messenger of Venus. It may 
 be said that the myth gradually adapted 
 itself to this form, which is not especially 
 apparent in the earlier stories. The figure 
 of Love, as thus presented, has been more 
 completely adopted into modern poetry than 
 any other in the old mythology, and it can- 
 not be said that its characteristics have been 
 materially altered. It is doubtful whether 
 the ancient idea was more simple than the 
 same when reproduced in Thorwaldsen's 
 scidpture, or in Ben Jonson's Venus' Run- 
 away. The central conception is essentially 
 an unmoral one ; it knows not right or 
 wrong, good or evil ; the mischief-making is 
 capricious, and not malicious. There is the 
 idea only of delight, of an innocence which 
 is untutored, of a will which is the wind's 
 will. It would seem as if, in fastening upon 
 childhood as the embodiment of love, the 
 ancients, as weU as their modern heirs, were 
 bent upon ridding life of conscience and 
 fate, — upon making love to have neither 
 memory nor foresight, but only the joy of 
 the moment. This sporting child was a
 
 38 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 refuge, in their minds, from the ills of life, 
 a residence of the one central joy of the 
 world. There is an infinite pathos in the 
 erection of childhood into a temple for the 
 worship of Love. There was, indeed, in the 
 reception of this myth, a wide range from 
 purity to grossness, as the word " love " itself 
 has to do service along an arc which sub- 
 tends heaven and hell ; but when we distill 
 the poetry and art which gather about the 
 myth of Cupid, the essence will be found in 
 this conception of love as a child, — a con- 
 ception never wholly lost, even when the 
 child was robbed of the purity which we rec- 
 ognize as its ideal property. It should be 
 noted, also, that the Romans laid hold of 
 this idea more eagerly than did the Greeks ; 
 for the child itself, though more artistically 
 set forth in Greek literature, appears as a 
 more vital force in Roman literature.^ 
 
 ^ A thoughtful writer in The Spectator, 3 September, 
 1887, notes the absence of representations of childhood 
 in ancient art and literature, and the following number 
 of the journal contains a note of protest from Mr. Alfred 
 Austin, in which he says pertinently : " Is it not the foi- 
 ble of modern art, if I may use a homely expression, to 
 make a fuss over what it feels, or wants others to feel, 
 whereas an older and a nobler art, which is by no means 
 extinct among us, prefers to indicate emotion rather than 
 to dwell on it ? "
 
 Ill 
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERAITTRE 
 
 The literature of Greece and Rome is a 
 possession of the modern world. For the 
 most part it has been taken as an indepen- 
 dent creation, studied indeed with reference 
 to language as the vehicle of thought, but 
 after all chiefly as an art. It is within a 
 comparatively recent time that the concep- 
 tion of an historical study of literature has 
 been prominent, and that men have gone to 
 Greek and Roman poetry with an eager 
 passion for the discovery of ancient life. 
 The result of these new methods has been 
 to humanize our conception of the literature 
 under examination. 
 
 Singularly enough, while the modern world 
 has been influenced by the classic world 
 chiefly through its language, literature, and 
 institutions, the third great stream of in- 
 fluence which has issued from ancient 
 sources has been one in which literature as 
 such has been almost subordinated to the
 
 40 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 religious and ethical ideas of which it was 
 the vehicle; even the strong institutional 
 forces inherent in it have had only excep- 
 tional attention. There was a time, indeed, 
 when the history of the Jews, as contained 
 in the books of the Old Testament, was iso- 
 lated from the history of mankind and 
 treated in an artificial manner, at its best 
 made to illustrate conduct, somewhat as 
 Latin literature was made to exemplify 
 syntax. The old distinction of sacred and 
 profane history did much to obscure the 
 human element in what was called sacred 
 history, and to blot out the divine element 
 in what was called profane history. There 
 are many who can remember the impression 
 made upon their minds when they learned 
 for the first time of the contemporaneousness 
 of events in Jewish and Grecian history ; and 
 it is not impossible that some can even recall 
 a period in their lives when Bible people 
 and the Bible lands were almost as distinct 
 and separate in their conception as if they 
 belonged to another planet. 
 
 Nevertheless, the reality of Old Testament 
 history, while suffering from lack of propor- 
 tion in relation to other parts of human his- 
 tory, has been impressed upon modern civil-
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 41 
 
 ization tlirough its close identification with 
 the religious life. The inheritance of these 
 scriptures of the ancient Hebrew has been 
 so complete that the modern Jew is regarded 
 almost as a pretender when he sets up a 
 claim to special possession. We jostle him 
 oixt of the way, and appropriate his national 
 documents as the old title-deeds of Chris- 
 tianity. There is, indeed, an historic truth 
 involved in this ; but, however we may regard 
 it, we are brought back to the significant 
 fact that along with the Greek and the Ro- 
 man influence upon modern life has been 
 the mighty force of Hebraism. The Greek 
 has impressed himself upon our modes and 
 processes of thought, the Roman upon our 
 organization, the Hebrew upon our religious 
 and social life.^ 
 
 It is certain that the Bible has been a 
 storehouse from which have been drawn 
 illustrations of life and character, and that 
 these have had an authority beyond any- 
 thing in classic history and hterature. It 
 has been the book from which youth with us 
 has drawn its conceptions of life outside of 
 
 * See an interesting statement of this Biblical force in 
 the preface to Matthew Arnold's The Great Prophecy of 
 Israelis Restoration, London, 1872.
 
 42 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 the limited circle of human experience ; and 
 the geographical, historical, and archaeologi- 
 cal apparatus employed to illustrate it has 
 been far more considerable than any like 
 apparatus in classical study. The Bible has 
 been the university to the person of ordinary 
 culture ; it has brought into his life a for- 
 eign element which Greece and Rome have 
 been powerless to present ; and though the 
 images of this remote foreign life often 
 have been distorted, and strangely mingled 
 with familiar notions, there can be no doubt 
 that the mind has been enlarged by this 
 extension of its interests and knowledge. 
 
 It is worth while, therefore, to ask what 
 conceptions of childhood are discoverable in 
 the Old Testament literature. The actual 
 appearances of children in the narrative 
 portions are not frequent. We have the 
 incident of the exposure of Moses as a babe 
 in the bulrushes ; the sickness and death of 
 Bathsheba's child, with the pathetic story 
 of the erring father's fasting and prayer ; 
 the expulsion of Ishmael ; the childhood 
 of Samuel in the temple ; the striking nar- 
 rative of the restoration of the son of the 
 widow of Zarephath by Elijah ; and the still 
 more graphic and picturesque description
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 43 
 
 of the bringing back to life by Elisha of 
 the child who had been born at his inter- 
 cession to the Shunamite, and had been 
 sun struck when in the field with his father. 
 Then there is the abrupt and hard to be 
 explained narrative of the jeering boys who 
 followed the prophet Elisha with derisive 
 cries, as they saw how different he was in 
 external appearance from the rugged and 
 awe-inspiring Elijah. Whatever may be 
 the interpretation of the fearful retribution 
 which befell those rude boys, and the indica- 
 tion which was shown of the majesty of the 
 prophetic office, it is clear that the Jew of 
 that day would not have felt any dispropor- 
 tion between the guilt of the boys and their 
 dire and speedy punishment ; he wovdd have 
 been impressed by the sanctity of the pro- 
 phet, and the swiftness of the divine dem- 
 onstration. Life and death were nothing 
 before the integrity of the divine ideal, and 
 the complete subordination of children to 
 the will of their parents accustomed the 
 mind to an easy assent to the exhibition of 
 what seems to us almost arbitrary will. 
 
 No attentive reader of the Old Testament 
 has failed to remark the prominence given 
 to the preservation of the family succession,
 
 44 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 and to the birth of male children. That 
 laugh of Sarah — at first of scorn, then of 
 triumph — sounds out from the early records 
 with a strange, prophetic voice ; and one 
 reads the thirtieth chapter of the book of 
 Genesis with a sense of the wild, passionate 
 rivalry of the two wives of Jacob, as they 
 bring forth, one after another, the twelve 
 sons of the patriarch. The burst of praise 
 also from Hannah, when she was freed from 
 her bitter shame and had brought forth her 
 son Samuel, has its echo through history 
 and psalm and prophecy until it issues in 
 the clear, bell-like tones of the Magnificat, 
 thenceforward to be the hymn of triumph of 
 the Christian church. The voice of God, 
 as it uttered itself in commandment and 
 prophetic warning, was for children and 
 children's children to the latest generation. 
 It is not the person so much as the family 
 that is addressed, and the strongest warn- 
 ings, the brightest promises to the fathers, 
 are through the children. The prophet Ro- 
 sea could use no more terrible word to the 
 people than when, speaking as the mouth- 
 piece of God, he says : " Seeing thou hast 
 forgotten the law of thy God, I will also 
 forget thy children ; " ^ and Zechariah, in- 
 ^ Uosea iv. 6.
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 45 
 
 spiriting tlie people, declares : " They shall 
 remember me in far countries; and they 
 shall live with their children." ^ The prom- 
 ise of the golden age of peace and pros- 
 perity has its climax in the innocence of 
 childhood. " There shall yet old men and 
 old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, 
 and every man with his staff in his hand for 
 very age. And the streets of the city shall 
 be full of boys and girls playing in the 
 streets thereof ; " ^ while the lofty antici- 
 pation of Isaiah, in words which still serve 
 as symbols of hopeful humanity, reaches its 
 height in the prediction of a profound peace 
 among the very brutes, when the wolf and 
 the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf, 
 the young lion, and the fatling shall not only 
 lay aside their mutual hate and fear, but 
 shall be obedient to the tender voice and 
 gentle hand of a little child, and even the 
 noxious reptiles shall be playmates for the 
 infant.^ In the Greek fable, Hercides in 
 liis cradle strangled the snakes by his might ; 
 in the Jewish picture, the child enters fear- 
 lessly the very dens of the asp and the 
 adder, secure under the reign of a perfect 
 righteousness. 
 
 1 Zech. X. 9. 2 Zech. viii. 4. 5. « Isa. xi. 6-8.
 
 46 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Milton, in his Ode on the Morning of 
 Christ's Nativity, has pointed out this par- 
 allel : — 
 
 " He feela from Judah's land 
 The dreaded infant's hand, 
 
 The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyno ; 
 Nor all the gods beside 
 Longer dare abide, 
 
 Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine ; 
 Our babe, to show his Godhead true, 
 Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew." 
 
 To the Jew, childhood was the sign of ful- 
 fillment of glorious promises. The burden 
 of psalm and prophecy was of a golden age 
 to come, not of one that was in the dim past. 
 A nation is kept alive, not by memory, but 
 by hope. The God of Abraham and of Isaac 
 and of Jacob was the God of a procession of 
 generations, a God of sons and of sons' sons ; 
 and when we read, in the last words of the 
 last canonical book of the Old Testament, 
 that " he shall turn the heart of the fathers 
 to the children, and the heart of the chil- 
 dren to their fathers," ^ we are prepared for 
 the opening, four centuries later, of the last 
 chapter in the ancient history of this people. 
 In the adoration there of the child we seem 
 to see the concentration of Jewish hope 
 
 1 Malachi iv. 6.
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 47 
 
 which had for centuries found expression in 
 numberless ways. The Magnificat of Mary 
 is the song of Hannah, purified and enno- 
 bled by generations of deferred hope, and in 
 all the joy and prophecy of the shepherds, 
 of Simeon and of Anna, we listen to strains 
 which have a familiar sound. It is indeed 
 the expectation of what this child will be 
 and do which moves the pious souls about it, 
 but there is a direct veneration of the babe 
 as containing the hope of the people. In 
 this supreme moment of the Jewish nation, 
 age bows itself reverently before childhood, 
 and we are able by the light which the event 
 throws backward to perceive more clearly 
 how great was the power of childhood, 
 through all the earlier periods, in its influ- 
 ence upon the imagination and reason. We 
 may fairly contend that the apprehension of 
 the sanctity of childhood was more positive 
 with the Jew than with either the Greek or 
 the Roman. 
 
 It remains, however, that this third great 
 stream of humanity passes out, in the New 
 Testament, from its Hebraic limitations, and 
 we are unable, except by a special ejffort, to 
 think of it as Jewish at all. The Gospels 
 transcend national and local and temporal
 
 48 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 limits, and we find ourselves, when consider- 
 ing them, reading the beginnings of modern, 
 not the close of Jewish history. The inci- 
 dents lying along the margin of the Gospels 
 and relating to the birth of the Christ do, 
 as we have seen, connect themselves with the 
 earlier national development, but the strong 
 light which comes at the dawn of Christian- 
 ity inevitably draws the mind forward to the 
 new day. 
 
 The evansrelists record no incidents of the 
 childhood of Jesus which separate it from 
 the childhood of other of the children of 
 men. The flight into Egypt is the flight 
 of parents with a child ; the presence of the 
 boy in the temple is marked by no abnormal 
 sign, for it is a distorted imagination which 
 has given the unbiblical title to the scene, — 
 Christ disputing with the Doctors, or Christ 
 teaching in the Temple. But as the narra- 
 tive of the Saviour's ministry proceeds, we 
 are reminded again and again of the pres- 
 ence of children in the multitudes that flocked 
 about him. The signs and wonders which 
 he wrought were more than once through 
 the lives of the young, and the suifering 
 and disease of humanity which form the 
 background in the Gospels upon which we
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 49 
 
 see sketched in lines of light the outline of 
 the redeeming Son of Man are shown in the 
 persons of children, while the deeper life of 
 humanity is disclosed in the tenderness of 
 parents. It is in the Gospels that we have 
 those vignettes of human life, — the healing 
 of the daughter of Jairus, the delivery of the 
 boy possessed with devils, that striking an- 
 tithesis to the transfiguration which Ra- 
 phael's genius has served to fix in the mind, 
 the healing of the nobleman's son, and the 
 blessing of children brought to the Master 
 by their fond mothers. Most notable, too, 
 is the scene of the final entry into Jerusa- 
 lem, when the Saviour appeared to accept 
 from children the tribute which he shunned 
 when it came from their elders. 
 
 Here, as in other cases, we ask what was 
 the attitude of the Saviour toward children, 
 since the literature of the New Testament is 
 so confessedly a revelation of life and char- 
 acter that we instinctively refuse to treat it 
 otherwise. In vain do we listen to those 
 who point out the ethical beauty of the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, or the pathos of this or 
 that incident ; our minds break through all 
 considerations of style and form, to seize 
 upon the facts and truths in their relation to
 
 50 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 life. We do not ask, what is the representa- 
 tion of childhood to be found in the writings 
 of certain Jews known as Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke, and John ; we ask, what is there be- 
 tween children and the central figure dis- 
 closed in those writings. We ask purposely, 
 for, when we leave behind this ancient world, 
 we enter upon the examination of literature 
 and art which are never beyond the horizon 
 lying under the rays of the Sun of Right- 
 eousness. The attitude which Christ took 
 toward children must contain the explana- 
 tion of the attitude which Christianity takes 
 toward the same, for the literature and art 
 of Christendom become the exponents of 
 the conception had of the Christ. 
 
 There are two or three significant words 
 and acts which leave us in no doubt as to 
 the general aspect which childhood wore to 
 Jesus Christ. In the conversation which he 
 held with the intellectual Nicodemus, he 
 asserted the necessity of a new birth for 
 mankind ; in the rite of baptism he symbol- 
 ized the same truth ; he expanded this word 
 again, accompanying it by a symbolic act, 
 when he placed a child in the midst of his 
 disciples and bade them begin life over 
 again ; he illustrated the truth by an acted
 
 IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 51 
 
 parable, when he called little children to 
 him with the words, " Of such is the king- 
 dom of heaven ; " he turned from the hard, 
 skeptical men of that generation with the 
 words of profound relief : " I thank thee, 
 O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that 
 thou hast hid these things from the wise 
 and prudent, and hast revealed them unto 
 babes ; " he symbolized the charity of life 
 in the gift of a cup of cold water to a child. 
 The eyes of this Jesus, the Saviour of 
 men, were ever upon the new heavens and 
 the new earth. The kingdom of heaven 
 was the burden of his announcement ; the 
 new life which was to come to men shone 
 most plainly in the persons of young chil- 
 dren. Not only were the babes whom he 
 saw and blessed to partake of the first 
 entrance into the kingdom of the spirit, but 
 childhood possessed in his sight the potency 
 of the new world ; it was under the protec- 
 tion of a father and mother ; it was fearless 
 and trusting ; it was unconscious of self ; it 
 lived and did not think about living. The 
 words of prophets and psalmists had again 
 and again found in the throes of a woman 
 in labor a symbol of the struggle of human- 
 ity for a new generation. By a bold and
 
 52 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 profound figure it was said of tlie great cen- 
 tral person of humanity : " He shall see of 
 the travail of his soul and be satisfied." A 
 foregleam of that satisfaction is found in 
 his face as he gazes upon the children who 
 are brought to him. There is sorrow as 
 he gazes upon the world, and his face is 
 set toward Jerusalem ; there is a calm joy- 
 as he places a child before him and sees in 
 his young innocence the promise of the 
 kingdom of heaven ; there is triumph in 
 his voice as he rebukes the men who 
 woidd fain shut the mouths of the shouting 
 children that run before him. 
 
 The pregnant words which Jesus Christ 
 used regarding childhood, the new birth, 
 and the kingdom of heaven become indica- 
 tive of the great movements in life and liter- 
 ature and art from that day to this. The 
 successive gestations of history have their 
 tokens in some specific regard of childhood. 
 There have been three such periods, so 
 mighty that they mark each the beginning 
 of a new heaven and a new earth. The first 
 was the genesis of the Christian church ; 
 the second was the Renaissance; the third 
 had its great sign in the French Revolution.
 
 IV 
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The parabolic expression, " Destroy this 
 temple, and in three days I will raise it up," 
 has been applied with force to the destruc- 
 tion of Judaism, and the reconstruction 
 upon its ruins of a living Christianity. It 
 may be aj)plied with equal justice, though 
 in more recondite sense, to the death of the 
 old literature and art, and the resurrection 
 of the beautiful creations of the human 
 mind in new form. The three days were 
 more than a thousand years, and during 
 that long sleep what had become of those 
 indestructible forces of imagination and rea- 
 son which combine in literature and art? 
 Roughly speaking, they were disjoined, and 
 only when reunited did they again assert 
 themselves in living form. The power 
 which kept each in abeyance was structural 
 Christianity, and only when that began to 
 be burst asunder by the vital force inherent 
 in spiritual Clu'istianity was there opportu-
 
 54 CHILDHOOD IN LITEBATURE 
 
 nity for the free union of the imagination 
 and reason. As the Jewish temple could 
 no longer inclose divinity, but was thrust 
 apart by the expansive power of the Chris- 
 tianity which was fostered within it, so the 
 Christian church, viewed as an institution 
 which aimed at an inclosure of humanity, 
 was in its turn disrupted by the silent 
 growth of the human spirit which had fed 
 within its walls upon the divine life. After 
 the birth of Christianity the parallel con- 
 tinuity of the old world was broken. The 
 Greek, the Roman, and the Hebrew no 
 longer carried forward their separate move- 
 ments. Christianity, professing to annul 
 these forces, had taken their place in history. 
 Again, at the Renaissance, it was found 
 that the three great streams of human 
 thought had been flowing underground; 
 they reissued to the light in a generous 
 flood, each combining with the others. 
 
 It was during this long period of apparent 
 inaction in literature and art that the ima- 
 gination, dissevered from reason, was in a 
 state of abnormal activity. The compression 
 of its field caused the faculty to find expres- 
 sion through forms which were very closely 
 connected with the dominant sphere of
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 55 
 
 human life. Before religious art and eccle- 
 siastical architecture had become the abun- 
 dant expression of Christian imagination, 
 there was generated a great mass of legend 
 and fable, which only by degrees became 
 formally embodied in literature or perpet- 
 uated in art and symbol. The imaginative 
 faculty had given it, for material in which 
 to work the new life, the soul of man as 
 distinctly related to God. An ethical prin- 
 ciple lay at the foundation of Christianity, 
 and the imagination, stimulated by faith, 
 built with materials drawn from ethical life. 
 The germinal truth of Christianity, that 
 God had manifested himself to men in the 
 person of Jesus Christ, however it might be 
 obscured or misunderstood, was the efficient 
 cause of the operations of the Christian 
 imagination. This faculty set before itseK 
 the perfect man, and in that conceived not 
 the physical and intellectual man of the 
 Greek conception, nor the Caesar of the 
 Roman ideal, nor even the moral man of 
 the Jewish light, but a man whose perfection 
 was the counterpart of the perfection of 
 God and its great exemplar, the man Jesus 
 Christ. In his life the central idea of ser- 
 vice, of victory through suffering and humil-
 
 56 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 iation, of self-surrender, and of union with 
 God was perceived with greater or less 
 clearness, and this idea was admnbrated in 
 that vast gallery of saints constructed by 
 Christianity in its ceaseless endeavor to 
 reproduce the perfect type. Through all 
 the extravagance and chaotic confusion of 
 the legendary lore of the mediaeval church, 
 one may discover the perpetually recurring 
 notes of the perfect life. The beatitudes — 
 those spiritual witnesses of the redeemed 
 human character — are ever floating before 
 the early imagination, and offering the stand- 
 ards by which it measures its creations. 
 It was by no fortuitous suggestion, but by a 
 profound sense of fitness, that the church 
 made the gospel of All Saints' Day to con- 
 sist of those sentences which pronounce the 
 blessedness of the poor in spirit, the meek, 
 and the persecuted for righteousness' sake; 
 while the epistle for the same day is the 
 roll-call of the saints who are to sit on the 
 thrones of the twelve tribes, and of the lawh 
 titudes who have overcome the world. 
 
 It is not strange, therefore, that the im- 
 agination, busying itself about the spiritual 
 life of man, should have dwelt with special 
 emphasis upon those signs of the new life
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 57 
 
 brought to light in the Gospels, which 
 seemed to contain the promise of perfection. 
 It seized upon baj)tism as witnessing to a 
 receneration : it traced the lives of saints 
 back to a childhood which began with bap- 
 tism ; it invested the weak things of the 
 world with a mighty power; and, keeping 
 before it the pattern of the Head of the 
 church, it traced in the early life of the Sa- 
 viour powers which confounded the common 
 wisdom of men. It dwelt with fondness 
 upon the adoration of the Magi, as witness- 
 ing to the supremacy of the infant Redeemer ; 
 and, occupied as it was with the idea of a 
 suffering Saviour, it carried the cross back 
 to the cradle, and found in the Massacre of 
 the Innocents the type of a substitution and 
 vicarious sacrifice. 
 
 The simple annals of the Gospels shine 
 with great beauty when confronted by the in- 
 genuity and curious adornment of the legends 
 included in the so-called Apocryphal Gos- 
 pels. Yet these legends illustrate the eager- 
 ness of the early Christian world to invest 
 the person of Jesus with every possible charm 
 and power ; and since the weakness of in- 
 fancy and childhood offers the strongest con- 
 trast to works of thamnaturgy, this period is
 
 68 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 very fully elaborated. A reason may also be 
 found in the silence of the evangelists, which 
 needed to be broken by the curious. Thus, 
 when, in the flight into Egypt, the Holy 
 Family was made to seek rest in a cave, there 
 suddenly came out many dragons ; and the 
 children who were with the family, when they 
 saw the dragons, cried out in great terror. 
 
 " Then Jesus," says the narrative, " went 
 down from the bosom of his mother, and 
 stood on his feet before the dragons ; and 
 they adored Jesus, and thereafter retired. 
 . . . And the young child Jesus, walking 
 before them, commanded them to hurt no 
 man. But Mary and Joseph were very much 
 afraid lest the child should be hurt by the 
 dragons. And Jesus said to them ; ' Do not 
 be afraid, and do not consider me to be a 
 little child ; for I am and always have been 
 perfect, and all the beasts of the field must 
 needs be tame before me.' Lions and pan- 
 thers adored him likewise, and accompanied 
 them in the desert. Wherever Joseph and 
 the blessed Mary went, these went before 
 them, showing them the way and bowing 
 their heads, and showing their submission by 
 wagging their tails ; they adored him with 
 great reverence. Now at first, when Mary
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 69 
 
 saw the lions and the panthers, and various 
 kinds of wild beasts coming about thqm, she 
 was very much afraid. But the infant Jesus 
 looked into her face with a joyful counte- 
 nance, and said : ' Be not afraid, mother ; for 
 they come not to do thee harm, but they 
 make haste to serve both thee and me.' 
 With these words he drove all fear from 
 her heart. And the lions kept walking with 
 them, and with the oxen and the asses and 
 the beasts of burden which carried their 
 baggage, and did not hurt a single one of 
 them ; but they were tame among the sheep 
 and the rams which they had brought with 
 them from Judaea, and which they had with 
 them. They walked among wolves and feared 
 nothing, and no one of them was hurt by 
 another." ^ 
 
 So, too, when Mary looked helplessly up 
 at the fruit of a palm-tree hanging far out 
 of her reach, the child Jesus, " with a joyful 
 countenance, reposing in the bosom of his 
 mother, said to the palm, ' O tree, bend thy 
 branches, and refresh my mother with thy 
 fruit.' And immediately at these words the 
 
 ^ This and the other passages from the Apocryphal 
 Gospels here cited are in the translation by Alexander 
 Walker.
 
 60 CUILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 palm bent its top down to the very feet of 
 the blessed Mary ; and they gathered from 
 its fruit, with which they were all refreshed. 
 And after they had gathered all its fruit, it 
 remained bent down, waiting the order to 
 rise from him who had commanded it to stoop. 
 Then Jesus said to it, ' Raise thyself, O palm- 
 tree, and be strong, and be the companion 
 of my trees which are in the paradise of my 
 Father ; and open from thy roots a vein of 
 water which has been hid in the earth, and 
 let the waters flow, so that we may be satis- 
 fied from thee.' And it rose up immediately, 
 and at its root there began to come forth a 
 spring of water, exceedingly clear and cool 
 and sparkling. And when they saw the 
 spring of water they rejoiced with great joy, 
 and were satisfied, themselves and all their 
 cattle and their beasts. Wherefore they 
 gave thanks to God." 
 
 The legends which relate to the boyhood 
 of Jesus carry back with a violent or con- 
 fused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus 
 he is represented more than once as willing 
 the death of a playmate, and then contemptu- 
 ously bringing him to life again. A favor- 
 ite story grossly misconceives the incident 
 of Christ with the Doctors in the temple, and
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 61 
 
 makes him turn his schoolmaster into ridi- 
 cule. There are other stories, the incidents 
 of which are not reflections of anything in 
 the Gospels, but are used to illustrate in a 
 childish way the wonder-working power of 
 the boy. Here is one which curiously min- 
 gles the miraculous power with the Saviour's 
 doctrine of the Sabbath : — 
 
 " And it came to pass, after these things, 
 that in the sight of all Jesus took clay from 
 the pools which he had made, and of it made 
 twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath 
 when Jesus did this, and there were very 
 many children with him. When, therefore, 
 one of the Jews had seen him doing this, he 
 said to Joseph,. ' Joseph, dost thou not see 
 the child Jesus working on the Sabbath at 
 what it is not lawful for him to do? For 
 he has made twelve sparrows of clay.' And 
 when Joseph heard this, he reproved him, 
 saying, ' Wherefore doest thou on the Sab- 
 bath such things as are not lawful for us to 
 do?' And when Jesus heard Joseph he 
 struck his hands together, and said to his 
 sparrows, ' Fly ! ' and at the voice of his 
 command they began to fly. And in the 
 sight and hearing of all that stood by he said 
 to the birds, ' Go and fly thi-ough the earth,
 
 62 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 and through all the world, and live.' And 
 when those that were there saw such mira- 
 cles they were filled with great astonish- 
 ment." 
 
 It is interesting to note how many of these 
 stories connect the child with animals. The 
 passage in Isaiah which prophesied the 
 great peace in the figure of a child leading 
 wild beasts had something to do with this ; 
 so had the birth of Jesus in a manger, and 
 the incident of the entry into Jerusalem: 
 but I suspect that the imagination scarcely 
 needed to hunt very far or very curiously 
 for suggestions, since the world over child- 
 hood has been associated with brute life, 
 and the writers of the Apocryphal Gospels 
 had only to make these animals savage when 
 they would illustrate the potency of the 
 childhood of Jesus. 
 
 " There is a road going out of Jericho," 
 says the Pseudo-gospel of Matthew, "and 
 leading to the river Jordan, to the place 
 where the children of Israel crossed; and 
 there the ark of the covenant is said to have 
 rested. And Jesus was eight years old, 
 and he went out of Jericho and went towards 
 the Jordan. And there was beside the 
 road, near the banks of the Jordan, a cave,
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 63 
 
 where a lioness was nursing her cubs ; and 
 no one was safe who walked that way. 
 Jesus, then, coming from Jericho, and know- 
 ing that in that cave the lioness had brought 
 forth her young, went into it in the sight 
 of all. And when the lions saw Jesus they 
 ran to meet him, and adored him. And 
 Jesus was sitting in the cavern, and the 
 lion's cubs ran hither and thither round his 
 feet, fawning upon him and sporting. And 
 the older lions, with their heads bowed 
 down, stood at a distance and adored him, 
 and fawned upon him with their tails. 
 Then the people, who were standing afar 
 off, not seeing Jesus, said, ' Unless he or his 
 parents had committed grievous sins, he 
 would not of his own accord have offered 
 himself up to the lions.' And when the 
 people were thus reflecting within them- 
 selves, and were lying under gi-eat sorrow, 
 behold, on a sudden, in the sight of the 
 people, Jesus came out of the cave, and the 
 lions went before him, and the lion's cubs 
 played with each other before his feet. 
 And the parents of Jesus stood afar off, 
 with their heads bowed down, and watched ; 
 likewise, also, the people stood at a distance, 
 on account of the lions; for they did not
 
 64 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 dare to come close to them. Then Jesus 
 began to say to the people, ' How much bet- 
 ter are the beasts than you, seeing that they 
 recognize their Lord and glorify him ; while 
 you men, who have been made after the 
 image and likeness of God, do not know 
 him ! Beasts know me, and are tame ; men 
 see me, and do not acknowledge me.' " 
 
 To the mind of these early Christians the 
 life of Jesus was compounded of holiness 
 and supernatural power ; so far as they dis- 
 tinguished these, the holiness was the cause 
 of the power, and hence, when the imagina- 
 tion fashioned saints out of men and women, 
 it followed the same course which it had 
 taken with the Master. The childhood of 
 the saints was an anticipation of maturer 
 virtues and powers, rather than a manifesta- 
 tion of ingenuous innocence. There was a 
 tendency to explain exceptional qualities in 
 lives by extending them backward into 
 youth, thereby gaining for them an apparent 
 corroboration. The instances of this in the 
 legends are frequent. Mothers, like the 
 Virgin Mary, have premonitions that their 
 children are to be in some special manner 
 children of God, and the characteristics of 
 later life are foreshadowed at birth. The
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY G5 
 
 Virffin herself was thus dealt with. The 
 strong human feeling which subsequently, 
 when the tenderness of Chi-ist had been pet- 
 rified into judgment, interposed the Virgin 
 as mediator, found gratification in surround- 
 ing Mary's infancy and childhood with a 
 supernatural grace and power, the incidents 
 in some cases being faint reflections of inci- 
 dents in the life of her son ; as when we are 
 told that Joachim and Anna carried Mary, 
 then three years old, to place her among the 
 virgins in the temple of God. " And when 
 she was put down before the doors of the 
 temple, she went up the fifteen steps so 
 swiftly that she did not look back at all ; 
 nor did she, as children are wont to do, seek 
 for her parents. Whereupon her parents, 
 each of them anxiously seeking for the child, 
 were both alike astonished until they found 
 her in the temple, and the priests of the 
 temple themselves wondered." 
 
 In like manner a halo of light played 
 about S. Catherine's head when she was 
 born. The year of the birth of S. Elizabeth 
 of Hungary was full of blessings to her coun- 
 try ; the first words she uttered were those 
 of prayer, and when three years old she gave 
 signs of the charity which marked her life
 
 66 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 by giving her toys and garments to those 
 less fortunate than herself. A pretty story 
 is told of her betrothal to Prince Louis of 
 Thuringia. Herman of Thuringia sent an 
 embassy to the king of Hungary, desiring 
 the little Elizabeth, then only four years 
 old, for his son ; and the maiden accompa- 
 nied the embassy, carrying with her a silver 
 cradle and silver bath, which her father had 
 given her. She was betrothed to Louis, and 
 the little pair played happily together in the 
 same cradle. S. Genevieve of Paris was 
 a maiden of seven, who tended a flock of 
 sheep at the village of Narterre. Hither 
 came S. Germain, and when the inhabitants 
 were assembled to receive his benediction 
 his eyes rested on the little shepherdess, and 
 seeing her saintliness he set her apart as a 
 bride of Christ. S. Gregory Nazianzen had 
 a dream when he was a boy. In which two 
 heavenly virgins of celestial beauty visited 
 him : they were Chastity and Temperance, 
 and so captivating was their presence, so 
 winning were their words, that he awoke to 
 take perpetual vows of continence. S. John 
 Chrysostom was a dull boy at school, and so 
 disturbed was he by the ridicule of his fel- 
 lows that he went into a church to pray to
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 67 
 
 the Virgin for help. A voice came from the 
 image : " Kiss me on the mouth, and thou 
 shalt be endowed with all learning." He 
 did this, and when he returned to his school- 
 fellows they saw a golden circle about his 
 mouth, and his eloquence and brilliancy as- 
 tounded them. Martyrdom was the portion 
 of these saintly children as well as of their 
 elders. The story is told of Hilarion, one 
 of the four children of Saturninus the priest, 
 that when the proconsul of Carthage thought 
 to have no difficulty in dealing with one of 
 tender age, the child resisted all cajolings 
 and threats. " I am a Christian," said the 
 little fellow. " I have been at the collect 
 [that is, assisted as an acolyte], and it was 
 of my own voluntary choice, without any 
 compulsion." Thereupon the proconsul, who 
 was probably a father, threatened him, as 
 the story runs, "with those little punish- 
 ments with which children are accustomed 
 to be chastised," but the child only laughed 
 at the idea of giving up his faith for fear of 
 a whipping. " I will cut off your nose and 
 ears ! " shouted the exasperated inquisitor. 
 " You may do it, but I shall be a Christian 
 stiU," replied the undaunted boy ; and when 
 he was ordered off to prison with the rest,
 
 68 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATUBE 
 
 he was heard to pipe forth, " God be 
 thanked," and so was led away. 
 
 These random incidents are, for the most 
 part, mainly anticipatory of mature experi- 
 ence. They can be matched with the details 
 of Protestant hagiology as recorded in a 
 class of books more common forty years ago 
 than now. It is their remoteness that lends 
 a certain grace and charm to them. The 
 life of a little Christian in the fourth cen- 
 tury is invested with an attraction which is 
 wanting in the circumstance of some juvenile 
 saint living in the midst of indifferent scoff- 
 ers of the early part of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Occasionally, however, the legends inclose 
 the saintly attributes in some bit of romance, 
 or betray a simple, ingenuous sympathy with 
 childish nature. The legend of S. Kenelm 
 has a faint suspicion of kinship with the 
 story of the babes in the wood. King Ken- 
 wulf of Wessex died, and left two daugh- 
 ters, Cwendrida and Burgenilda, and a son 
 of seven years, named Kenelm. The elder 
 of the daughters wished the child out of the 
 way, that she might reign ; so she gave 
 money to Askbert, his guardian, the wicked 
 uncle of the story, and bade him privily slay
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 69 
 
 the boy. So Askbert took Kenehn into a 
 wood, as if for a hunt, and by and by the 
 child, tired with the heat, fell asleep under 
 the shade of a tree. Askbert, seeing his 
 time had come, set to work to dig a grave, 
 that all might be in readiness ; but Kenelm 
 woke, and said, " It is in vain that you think 
 to kill me here. I shall be slain in another 
 spot. In token whereof, see this rod blos- 
 som ; " and so saying, he stuck a stick into 
 the ground, and it instantly took root and 
 began to flower. In after days it was a 
 great ash-tree, known as S. Kenelm's ash. 
 Then Askbert took the little king to another 
 spot, and the child, now wide awake, began 
 to sing the Te Deum. When he came to the 
 verse, " The noble army of martyrs praise 
 Thee," Askbert cut off his head, and then 
 buried him in the wood. Just as he did 
 this, a white dove flew into the church of S. 
 Peter in Rome, and laid on the high altar a 
 letter, which it bore in its beak. The letter 
 was in English, and it was some time before 
 any one could be found who could read it. 
 Then it was discovered that Kenelm had 
 been killed and his body hidden away. The 
 Pope thereupon wrote letters into England 
 telling of this sorry affair, and men went
 
 70 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 forth to find the body of the little king. 
 They were led by a pillar of light, which 
 stood over the place where the body lay. 
 So they bore it off and buried it ; but they 
 built a chapel over the spot where they had 
 found the body, which is known as S. Ken- 
 elm's chapel to this day. There the chapel 
 stands near Hales Owen ; how else did it 
 get its name ? and as Mr. Freeman sagely 
 remarks, " It is hard to see what should 
 have made anybody invent such a tale, if 
 nothing of the kind had ever happened." 
 
 Another of the stories which has a half 
 fairy-tale character is that of the martyrdom 
 of the little S. Christina, who was shut up in 
 a high tower by her father, and bidden spend 
 her time before gold and silver gods ; his pri- 
 vate purpose being to keep her out of the 
 way of troublesome lovers. Christina tired 
 of her divine playthings, and in spite of her 
 father's indidgence, since he obligingly took 
 away all the images but three, would have 
 nothing to do with false gods. She was vis- 
 ited by angels and instructed in Christianity. 
 She combined courage in her new faith with 
 a fine spirit of adventure ; for she is repre- 
 sented as smashing the idols, letting herself 
 down by a rope from her tower-prison, dis«
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 71 
 
 tributing the fragments of the idols among 
 the poor, and clambering up again before 
 morning. Her martyrdom showed various 
 ingenious inventions of torture, but the odd 
 part of the story is the manner in which the 
 gold and silver idols always suggest a girl's 
 playthings. We are told that when she was 
 taken into the temple of Apollo she bade 
 the idol step down and walk about the tem- 
 ple until she sent it back to its place. Then.^ 
 proceeds the story gravely, she was put in a 
 cradle filled with boiling pitch and oil, and 
 four soldiers were set to rocking her. 
 
 In these and similar stories which abound 
 in the Acta Sanctorum, the simple attributes 
 of childish nature rarely shine through the 
 more formal covering of churclily investiture. 
 Nature could not always be expelled, but 
 the imagination, busy with the construction 
 of the ideal Christian life, was more con- 
 cerned, as time went on, to make that con- 
 form to an ecclesiastical standard. It is 
 pathetic to see the occasional struggle of 
 poor humanity to break through the meshes 
 in which it was entangled. The life of S. 
 Francis of Assisi is full of incidents which 
 illustrate this. His familiar intercourse 
 with birds and beasts was but one of the
 
 72 CHILDHOOD' IN LITERATURE 
 
 signs of an effort to escape from the cage in 
 which he was an unconscious prisoner. One 
 night, we are told, he rose suddenly from 
 the earthen floor which made his bed, and 
 rushed out into the open air. A brother 
 monk, who was praying in his cell, looked 
 through his window and saw S. Francis, 
 under the light of the moon, fashion seven 
 little figures of snow. " Here is thy wife," 
 he said to himseK ; " these four are thy sons 
 and daughters; the other two are thy ser- 
 vant and handmaid : and for all these thou 
 art bound to provide. Make haste, then, 
 and provide clothing for them, lest they 
 perish with cold. But if the care of so 
 many trouble thee, be thou careful to serve 
 the Lord alone." The injunction to give up 
 father and mother and family for the Lord's 
 sake, when obeyed by one so tremulously 
 alive to human sympathy as was S. Francis, 
 had in it a power suddenly to disclose the 
 depths of the human soul ; nor can it be 
 doubted that those who, like S. Francis, 
 were eagerly thrusting aside everything 
 which seemed to stand between them and 
 the realization of the divine life paid heed 
 to the significant words of the Lord which 
 made a child the symbol of that life. In
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 73 
 
 practical dealing with the evils of the world 
 the early church never lost sight of children. 
 Orphans, especially the orphans of martyrs, 
 were a sacred charge, and when monasteries 
 arose and became, at least in the West, 
 centres of civilization, they were refuges for 
 foundlings as well as schools for the yoimg. 
 It is one of the distinct signs of the higher 
 life which Christianity was slowly bringing 
 into the world that the church adopted and 
 protected children as children, for their own 
 sakes. Foundlings had before been nur- 
 tured for the sake of profit, and we can 
 easily do poor human nature the justice to 
 believe in instances where pity and love had 
 their honest sway ; but it certainly was left 
 to the church to incorporate in its very con- 
 stitution that care of helpless childhood 
 which springs from a profound sense of the 
 dignity of life, and a growing conviction of 
 the rights which pertain to personality. 
 
 For the history of Christianity is in the 
 development of personality, and childhood 
 has, from the beginning, come under the 
 influence of a power which has been at work 
 lifting the world into a recognition of its 
 relation to God. It was impossible that the 
 few significant words spoken by Christ
 
 74 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 should be forgotten ; nevertheless, they do 
 not seem to have impressed themselves upon 
 the consciousness of men. At least it may 
 be said that in the growth of Latin Chris- 
 tianity they do not come forward specifically 
 as furnishing the ground and reason for a 
 regard for childhood. The work to be done 
 by the Latin church was largely one of 
 organizing human society under an anthro- 
 pomorphic conception of God. It gave a 
 certain fixed objectivity to God, placed him 
 at a distance from the world, and made the 
 approach to him to be by a succession of 
 intermediary agents. Nevertheless, the hier- 
 archy which resulted rested upon ethical 
 foundations. The whole grand scheme did, 
 in effect, rivet and fix the sense of personal 
 responsibility and personal integrity. It 
 made each man and woman aware of his and 
 her relation to law in the person of its min- 
 isters, and this law was a law which reached 
 to the thoughts of the heart. 
 
 The system, as such, had little to do with 
 childhood. It waited for its close, but it 
 pushed back its influence over the line of 
 adolescence, making as early as might be 
 the day when the child should come into 
 conscious relation with the church. Through
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 75 
 
 the family, however, it powerfully affected 
 the condition of childhood, for by its laws 
 and its ritual it was giving religious sanction 
 to the family, even while it was gradually 
 divorcing itself from humanity under plea 
 of a sanctity which was more than human. 
 Its conception of a religious devotedness 
 which was too good for this world, whereby 
 contempt of the body was put in place of 
 redemption of the body, and celibacy made 
 more honorable than marriage, undermined 
 its hold upon the world, which it sought to 
 govern and to furnish with ideals. 
 
 Inasmuch as this great system dealt with 
 persons in relations which could be exactly 
 defined and formulated, it would be idle to 
 seek in the literature which reflects it for 
 any considerable representation of that pe- 
 riod of hvunan life in which the forms are as 
 yet undetermined. Nevertheless, childhood 
 exercises even here its subtle power of recall- 
 ing men to elemental truths. Dante was 
 the prophet of a spiritual Rome, which he 
 saw in his vision outlined against the back- 
 ground of the existing hierarchy. It woidd 
 be in vain to search through the Divine 
 Comedy for many references to childhood. 
 As he says himself in the Inferno, —
 
 76 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 " For this is not a sportive enterprise 
 
 To speak the universe's lowest hold, 
 Nor suits a tongue that Pa and Mammy cries." ^ 
 
 And the only picture of childhood in that 
 vision is the melancholy one of the horrid 
 sufferings of Count Ugolino and his chil- 
 dren in the Tower of Hunger. In the Par- 
 adiso there are two passages of interest. 
 Near the close of the twenty-seventh canto, 
 Beatrice, breaking forth into a rapt utter- 
 ance of the divine all in all, suddenly checks 
 herself as she remembers how the curse of 
 covetousness shuts men out from entrance 
 into the full circle of divine movement, and 
 then, with a swift and melancholy survey of 
 the changes in human life, cries bitterly : — 
 
 " Faith, Art, and Innocence are found alone 
 With little children ; then they scatter fast 
 
 Before the down across the cheek have grown. 
 
 There is that lispeth, and doth learn to fast. 
 Who afterward, with tongue untied from May 
 
 To April, down his throat all meats wUl cast. 
 
 There is that, lisping, loveth to obey 
 
 His mother, and he '11 wish her in the tomb, 
 
 When sentences unbroken he can say." 
 
 Again, in the thirty-second canto, S. Ber- 
 nard is pointing out the circles of the Rose, 
 and after denoting the degrees of saints 
 before Christ and after, proceeds : — 
 
 ^ Canto xxxii. 7-9, Cayley's translation.
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 77 
 
 " And from the seats, in midway rank, that knit 
 
 These double files, and downwards, thou wilt find 
 
 That none do for their own deserving sit, 
 
 But for another's under terms assigned ; 
 For every one of these hath been set free 
 
 Ere truly self-determined was the mind. 
 
 This by the childish features wilt thou see. 
 If well thou scan them, and if well thou list 
 
 Wilt hear it by the childlike symphony." 
 
 Dante is perplexed by the difference even 
 in these innocent babes, but S. Bernard 
 reminds him that there is difference in en- 
 dowment, but that all are subject to the 
 divine all-embracing law : — 
 
 " And therefore these, who took such hasty flight. 
 Into the true life not without a cause 
 Are entered so, these more, and those less, bright," — 
 
 an interpretation of the vision which is 
 really less scholastic than suggested by the 
 deeper insight of the poetic mind. 
 
 The most significant passage, however, is 
 foimd in the famous words at the beginning 
 of the Vita Nuova, which fix Dante's first 
 sight of Beatrice when he was nine years old. 
 "And since," he closes, "to dwell upon the 
 passions and actions of such early youth 
 seems like telling an idle tale, I will leave 
 them, and, passing over many things which 
 might be drawn from the original where
 
 78 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 these lie hidden, I will come to those words 
 which are written in my memory under 
 larger paragraphs." ^ In these last words 
 is apparent Dante's own judgment upon the 
 worth of his recollections of childhood : one 
 page only in that book of his memory he 
 deems worthy of regard, — the page upon 
 which fell the image of Beatrice. It will be 
 said with truth that the childhood of Dante 
 and Beatrice is in reality the beginning of 
 maturity, for it is coimted only as the initia- 
 tion of a noble passion. The time, indeed, 
 had not yet come in the history of human 
 life when the recollection of that which is 
 most distinctive of childhood forms the basis 
 of speculation and philosophic dream. 
 
 The absence of childhood from the visions 
 of Dante is a negative witness to the absence 
 from the world, in the age prior to the Re- 
 naissance, of hope and of simple faith and 
 innocence. Dante's faint recognition of these 
 qualities throws them back into a quickly 
 forgotten and outgrown childhood. The lisp- 
 ing child becomes the greedy worldling, the 
 cruel and unloving man, and the tyranny of 
 an empire of souls is hinted at in the justifi- 
 cation by the poet of the presence of inno- 
 ^ C E. Norton's translation.
 
 IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 79 
 
 cent babes in Paradise ; they are there by 
 the interposition of a sacrificial act. The 
 poet argues to still the doubts of men at find- 
 ing these children in Paradise. It would 
 almost seem as if the words had been forgot- 
 ten which characterized heaven through the 
 very image of childhood. 
 
 Indeed, it is not to be wondered at that 
 childhood was little regarded by an age 
 which found its chief interest in a thought 
 of death. " Even the gay and licentious 
 Boccaccio," we are reminded by Mr. Pater, 
 " gives a keener edge to his stories by put- 
 ting them in the mouths of a party of people 
 who had taken refuge from the plague in 
 a country house." ^ The great Florentine 
 work was executed under this dominant 
 thought ; nevertheless, an art which is 
 largely concerned about tombs and sepul- 
 chral monuments implies an overweening 
 pride in life and a weightier sense of the 
 years of earth. The theology which had fur- 
 nished the panoply within which the human 
 soul was fighting its battle emphasized the 
 idea of time, and made eternity itself a pro- 
 longation of human conditions. The imag- 
 ination, at work upon a futm-e, constructed 
 
 ^ Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 84.
 
 80 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 it out of the hard materials of the present, 
 and was always looking for some substantial 
 bridge which should connect the two worlds ; 
 seeing decay and change here, it transferred 
 empires and powers to the other side of the 
 gulf, and sought to reerect them upon an 
 everlasting basis. 
 
 Such thought had little in common with 
 the hope, the fearlessness, the faith, of child- 
 hood, and thus childhood as an image had 
 largely faded out of art and literature. One 
 only great exception there was, ' — the repre- 
 sentation in art of the child Jesus ; and in 
 the successive phases of this representation 
 may be read a remarkable history of the 
 human soul.
 
 IN MEDIEVAL AET 
 
 The power of Christianity lies in its 
 prophecy of universality, and the most sig- 
 nificant note of this power is in its compre- 
 hension of the poor and the weak, not 
 merely as the objects of a benediction pro- 
 ceeding from some external society, but as 
 themselves constituent members of that 
 society, sharing in all its rights and fulfill- 
 ing its functions. When the last great 
 prophet of Israel and forerunner of Judaic 
 Christianity sent to inquire what evidence 
 Jesus of Nazareth covdd give that he was 
 the Christ, the answer which came back had 
 the conclusive words, " To the poor the gos- 
 pel is preached." The same Jesus, when he 
 would give his immediate followers the com- 
 pletest tj'pe of the kingdom which was to 
 prevail throughout the world, took a child, 
 and set him in the midst of them. There 
 is no hardly gained position in the devel- 
 opment of human society wliich may not
 
 82 CHILDHOOD IN ABT 
 
 find its genetic idea in some word or act of 
 the Son of Man, and the proem to the great 
 song of an expectant democracy is in the 
 brief hour of the first Christian society, 
 which held all things in common. 
 
 The sketch of a regenerated human so- 
 ciety, contained in the New Testament, has 
 been long in filling out, and the day which 
 the first generation of Christians thought so 
 near at hand has thus far had only a succes- 
 sion of proleptic appearances ; but from the 
 first the note of the power of Christianity, 
 which lies in the recognition of poverty and 
 weakness, has never been wanting, and has 
 been most loudly struck in the great epochs 
 of Christian revival. In the strusrg-le after 
 purity of associated life, which had its wit- 
 ness in the orders of the church, poverty 
 was accepted as a necessary condition, and 
 the constructive genius of the human mind, 
 dealing with the realities of Christian faith, 
 rose to its highest point in presenting, not 
 the maturity, but the infancy of Jesus 
 Christ. Each age offers its contribution to 
 the perfection of the Christian ideal, and 
 while, in the centuries lying on either side 
 of the Renaissance, the church as an ecclesi- 
 astical system was enforcing the dogma of
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 83 
 
 mediatorial sacrifice as sometliing outside of 
 humanity, the spirit of God, in the person 
 of great painters, was drawing the thoughts 
 of men to the redemption of the world, 
 which lies in the most sacred of human rela- 
 tions. The great efflorescence of art, which 
 we recognize as the gift of these centuries, 
 has left as its most distinctive memorial the 
 type of Christianity expressed in the Ma- 
 donna. 
 
 In the Holy Family the child is the essen- 
 tial figure. In the earliest examples of the 
 mother and child, both Mary and Jesus are 
 conceived as symbols of religious faith, and 
 the attitude of the child is unchildlike, being 
 that of a dispenser of blessings with uplifted 
 hand. The group is not distinctly of the 
 mother and child, but of the Virgin and the 
 Saviour, the Saviour being represented as 
 a child in order to indicate the ground of 
 the adoration paid to the Virgin. They 
 stand before one as possessed of coordinate 
 dignity. It is a curious and suggestive fact 
 that the Byzantine type of the Madonna, 
 which rarely departed much from this sym- 
 bolic treatment, has continued to be the
 
 84 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 preference of those whose conceptions of the 
 religious life are most closely identified with 
 a remote sacramentarianism. The Italian 
 lemonade-seller has a Byzantine Madonna 
 in his booth ; the Belgian churches aboimd. 
 in so-called sacred pictures ; the Russian 
 merchant salutes an icon of the same type ; 
 and the ritualistic enthusiast of the Angli- 
 can revival modifies his aesthetic views by 
 his religious sympathy, and stops short in 
 his admiration with Cimabue and Giotto. 
 
 In the development of the Madonna from 
 its first form as a rigid symbol to its latest 
 as a realistic representation of motherhood, 
 we are aware of a change in the minds of 
 the people who worship before the altars 
 where the pictures are placed, and in the 
 minds of the painters who produce the 
 almost endless variations on this theme. 
 The worshipper, dispossessed of a belief in 
 the fatherhood of God, came to take refuge 
 in the motherhood of Mary. Formally 
 taught the wrath of God, he foimd in the 
 familiar relation of mother and child the 
 most complete type vouchsafed to him of 
 that love which the church by many infor- 
 mal ways bade him believe lay somewhere 
 in the divine life.
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 85 
 
 Be this as it may, the treatment of the 
 subject in a domestic and historical form 
 followed the treatment in a religious and 
 ecclesiological mode. In the earlier repre- 
 sentations of the Madonna there was a two- 
 fold thought exhibited. The mother was 
 the queen of heaven, and she derived her 
 dignity from the child on her knee. Hence 
 she is sometimes shown adoring the child, 
 and the child looks up into the mother's 
 face with his finger on his lip, expressive of 
 the utterance, I am the Word. This adora- 
 tion of the child by the mother was, however, 
 but a transient phase : the increasing wor- 
 ship paid to the Virgin forbade that she 
 should be so subordinated ; and in the grad- 
 ual expansion of the theme, by which saints 
 and martyrs and angels were grouped in at- 
 tendant ministry, more and more importance 
 was attached to the person of the Virgin. 
 The child looks up in wonder and affec- 
 tionate admiration. He caresses her, and 
 offers her a child's love mingled with a 
 divine being's calm self-content. 
 
 For throughout the whole period of the 
 religious presentation of the Madonna, even 
 when the ISIadonna herself is conspicuously 
 the occasion of the picture, we may observe
 
 86 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 the influence of the child, — an influence 
 sometimes subtle, sometimes open and mani- 
 fest. It is not enough to say that this child 
 is Jesus, as it is not enough to say that the 
 mother is the Virgin Mary. The divine 
 child is the sign of an ever-present child- 
 hood in humanity ; the divine mother the 
 sign of a love which the religion of Chris- 
 tianity never wholly forgot. The common 
 imagination was perpetually seeking to re- 
 lieve Mary and Jesus of all attributes which 
 interfered with the central and inhering re- 
 lation of mother and child : through this 
 type of love the mind apprehended the gos- 
 pel of Christianity as in no other way. 
 
 Indeed, this apotheosis of childhood and 
 maternity is at the core of the religion of 
 hope which was inclosed in the husk of 
 mediaeval Christianity, and it was made the 
 theme of many variations. Before it had 
 ceased to be a symbol of worship, it was of- 
 fering a nucleus for the expression of a more 
 varied human hope and interest. The Holy 
 Family in the hands of painters and sculp- 
 tors, and the humbler class of designers 
 which sprang into notice with the intro- 
 duction of printing and engraving, becomes 
 more and more emblematic of a pure and
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 87 
 
 happy domestic group. Joseph is more fre- 
 quently introduced, and John Baptist ap- 
 pears as a playmate of the child Jesus ; 
 sometimes they are seen walking in compan- 
 ionship. Certain incidents in later life are 
 symbolically prefigured in the realistic treat- 
 ment of homely scenes, as in the Madonna 
 by Giulio Romano, where the child stands 
 in a basin, while the young S. John pours 
 water upon him, Mary washes him, S. Eliz- 
 abeth stands by holding a towel, and S. 
 Joseph watches the scene, — an evident pre- 
 figurement of the baptism in the Jordan. 
 Or again, Mary, seated, holds the infant 
 Christ between her knees ; Elizabeth leans 
 over the back of the chair ; Joseph rests 
 on his staff behind the Virgin ; the little 
 S. John and an angel present grapes, while 
 four other angels are gathering and bring- 
 ing them. By such a scene Ippolito An- 
 dreasi would remind people that Jesus is 
 the true vine. 
 
 II 
 
 The recojmition of childhood as the heart 
 of the family is discoverable even more em- 
 phatically in the art of the northern peo- 
 ple, among whom domestic life always had
 
 88 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 greater respect. It may seem a trivial rea- 
 son, but I suspect nature holds the family 
 more closely together in cold countries, 
 wliich compel much indoor and fireside life, 
 than in lands which tempt to vagrancy. At 
 any rate, the fact remains that the Germanic 
 peoples have been home-cultivating. It did 
 not need the Roman Tacitus to find this out, 
 but his testimony helps us to believe that 
 the disposition was a radical one, which 
 Christianity reinforced rather than im- 
 planted. Lord Lindsay makes the pregnant 
 observation, " Our Saviour's benediction of 
 the little children as a subject [is] from 
 first to last Teutonic, — I scarcely recollect 
 a single Italian instance of it ; " ^ and in the 
 revival of religious art, at which Overbeck 
 and Cornelius assisted, this and similar sub- 
 jects, by their frequency, mark a differen- 
 tiation from art south of the Alps, whose 
 traditions, nevertheless, the German school 
 was consciously following. 
 
 Although of a period subsequent to the 
 Renaissance, an excellent illustration of the 
 religious representation of the childhood of 
 Jesus in northern art is contained in a series 
 of twelve prints executed in the Netherlands, 
 
 ^ Sketches of the History of Christian Art, iii. 270.
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 89 
 
 and described in detail by Mrs. Jameson.^ 
 The series is entitled The Infancy of our 
 Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and 
 the title-page is surroimded by a border 
 composed of musical instrimients, spinning- 
 wheels, distaffs, and other implements of 
 female industry, intermixed with all kinds 
 of masons' and carpenters' tools. In the first 
 of the prints, the figure of Christ is seen in 
 a glory, surrounded by cherubim. In the 
 second, the Virgin is seated on the hill of 
 Sion ; the infant in her lap, with outspread 
 arms, looks up to a choir of angels, and is 
 singing with them. In the third, Jesus slum- 
 bering in his cradle is rocked by two angels, 
 while Mary sits by, engaged in needlework. 
 Beneath is a lullaby in Latin which has 
 been translated : — 
 
 " Sleep, sweet babe I my cares beguiling, 
 Mother sits beside thee, smiling, 
 
 Sleep my darling, tenderly ! 
 K thou sleep not, mother moumeth 
 Singing as her wheel she tumeth, 
 
 Come soft slumber, balmily ! " 
 
 The fourth shows the interior of a carpen- 
 ter's shop : Joseph is plying his work, while 
 Joachim stands near him ; the Virgin is 
 measuring linen, and S. Anna looks on ; 
 ^ Legends of the Madonna, Part lU.
 
 90 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 two angels are at play with the infant Christ, 
 who is blowing soap-bubbles. In the fifth 
 picture, Mary prepares the family meal, 
 while Joseph is in the background chopping 
 wood ; more in front, Jesus sweeps together 
 the chips, and two angels gather them. In 
 the sixth, Mary is seen reeling off a skein of 
 thread ; Joseph is squaring a plank ; Jesus 
 is picking up chips, again assisted by two 
 angels. The seventh shows Mary seated at 
 her spinning-wheel ; Joseph, aided by Jesus, 
 is sawing through a large beam, the two 
 angels standing by. The eighth is some- 
 what similar : Mary holds her distaff, while 
 Joseph saws a beam on which Jesus stands, 
 and the two angels help in the work. In 
 the ninth print, Joseph is busy building the 
 framework of a house, assisted by one of 
 the angels ; Jesus is boring with a large 
 gimlet, the other angel helping him ; and 
 Mary winds thread. In the next, Joseph is 
 at work roofing the house ; Jesus, in com- 
 pany with the angels, carries a beam up the 
 ladder ; while below, in front, Mary is card- 
 ing wool or flax. The eleventh transfers 
 the work, with an apparent adaptation to 
 Holland, to the building of a boat, where 
 Joseph is helped by Jesus, who holds a ham-
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 91 
 
 mer and chisel, still attended by the angels ; 
 the Virgin is knitting a stocking, and the 
 newly built house is seen in the background. 
 In the last of the series, Joseph is erecting 
 a fence round a garden ; Jesus, with the 
 help of the angels, is fastening the palings 
 together ; while Mary is weaving garlands 
 of roses. 
 
 Here is a reproduction of the childhood 
 of the Saviour in the terms of a homely 
 Netherland family life, the naturalistic treat- 
 ment diversified by the use of angelic ma- 
 chinery. The prints were a part of the ap- 
 paratus used by the priests in educating the 
 people. However such instruction may have 
 fallen short of the highest truths of Chris- 
 tianity, its recognition of the simple duties 
 of life and its enforcement of these by the 
 example of the Son of Man make us slow to 
 regard such interposition of the church as 
 remote from the spirit of Christ. If, as is 
 quite possible, these prints were employed 
 by the Jesuits, then their significance be- 
 comes doubly noticeable. In that vigorous 
 attempt by Loyola and his order to main- 
 tain an organic Christian unity against the 
 apparent disruption of Christianity, such a 
 mode as this would find a place as serving
 
 92 CHILDHOOD IN ART- 
 
 to emphasize that connection between the 
 church and the family which the Jesuits in- 
 stinctively felt to be essential to the suprem- 
 acy of the former. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Whatever light the treatment of the Ma- 
 donna subject may throw upon the ages in 
 which it is uppermost in men's thoughts, 
 the common judgment is sound which looks 
 for the most significance in the works of 
 Kaphael. Even those who turn severely 
 away from him, and seek for purer art in 
 his predecessors, must needs use his name 
 as one of epochal consequence. So many 
 forces of the age meet in Raphael, who was 
 peculiarly open to influences, that no other 
 painter can so well be chosen as an expo- 
 nent of the idea of the time ; and as one 
 passes in review the successive Madonnas, 
 one may not only detect the influence of 
 Perugino, of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, 
 and other masters, but may see the ripen- 
 ing of a mind, upon which fell the spirit 
 of the age, busy with other things than 
 painting. 
 
 Of the early Madonnas of Raphael, it is
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 93 
 
 noticeable how many present the Virgin 
 engaged in reading a book, while the child 
 is occupied in other ways, sometimes even 
 seeking to interrupt the mother and disen- 
 gage her attention. Thus in one in the 
 Berlin museum, which is formal, though 
 unaffected, Mary reads a book, while the 
 child plays with a goldfinch ; in the Ma- 
 donna in the Casa Connestabile, at Perugia, 
 the child plays with the leaves of the book ; 
 in the Madonna del Cardellino, the little S. 
 John presents a goldfinch to Jesus, and the 
 mother looks away from her book to observe 
 the children; in that at Berlin, which is 
 from the Casa Colonna, the child is held on 
 the mother's knee in a somewhat struggling 
 attitude, and has his left hand upon the top 
 of her dress, near her neck, his right upon 
 her shoulder, while the mother, with a look 
 of maternal tenderness, holds the book aside. 
 In the middle period of Raphael's work this 
 motive appears once at least in the St. 
 Petersburg Madonna, which is a quiet land- 
 scape-scene, where the child is in the Ma- 
 donna's lap : she holds a book, which she 
 has just been reading ; the little S. John 
 kneels before his divine companion with 
 mfantine grace, and offers him a cross,
 
 94 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 which he receives with a look of tender 
 love ; the Madonna's eyes are directed to 
 the prophetic play of the children with a 
 deep, earnest expression. 
 
 The use of the book is presumably to 
 denote the Madonna's piety; and in the 
 earlier pictures she is not only the object of 
 adoration to the worshipper, who sees her in 
 her earthly form, yet endowed with sinless 
 grace, but the object also of interest to the 
 child, who sees in her the mother. This 
 reciprocal relation of mother and child is 
 sometimes expressed with great force, as in 
 the Madonna della Casa Tempi, in the Pin- 
 acothek at Munich, where the Virgin, who 
 is standing, tenderly presses the child's head 
 against her face, while he appears to whis- 
 per words of endearment. In these and 
 other of the earlier Madonnas of Raphael, 
 there is an enthusiasm, and a dreamy senti- 
 ment which seems to seek expression chiefly 
 through the representation of holy woman- 
 hood, the child being a part of the interpre- 
 tation of the mother. The mystic solemnity 
 of the subject is relieved by a lightness of 
 touch, which was the irrepressible assertion 
 of a strong human feeling. 
 
 Later, in what is called his middle period,
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 95 
 
 a cheerfulness and happy contemplation of 
 life pervade Raphael's work, as in the 
 Bridgewater Madonna, where the child, 
 stretched in the mother's lap, looks up with 
 a graceful and lively action, and fixes his 
 eyes upon her in deep thought, while she 
 looks back with maternal, reverent joy. 
 The Madonna of the Chair illustrates the 
 same general sentiment, where the mother 
 appears as a beautiful and blooming woman, 
 looking out of the picture in the tranquil 
 enjoyment of motherly love ; the child, full 
 and strong in form, leans upon her bosom 
 in a child's careless attitude, the picture of 
 trust and content. 
 
 The works of Raphael's third period, and 
 those executed by his pupils in a spirit and 
 with a touch which leave them sometimes 
 hardly distinguishable from the master's, 
 show a profounder penetration of life, and 
 at the same time a firmer, more reasonable 
 apprehension of the divinity which lies in- 
 closed in the subject. Mary is now some- 
 thing more than a young man's dream of 
 virginal purity and maternal tenderness, — 
 she is also the blessed among women ; the 
 infant Christ is not only the innocent, play- 
 ful child, but the proi)hetic soul, conscious
 
 96 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 of his divinity and his destiny. These char- 
 acteristics pervade both the treatment which 
 regards them as historic personages and that 
 which invests them with adorable attributes 
 as having their throne in heaven. The 
 Holy Family is interpreted in a large, 
 serious, and dignified manner, and in the 
 exalted, worshipped Madonna there is a like 
 vision o£ things eternal seen through the 
 human form. 
 
 To illustrate this an example may be 
 taken of each class. The Madonna del Pas- 
 segio, in the Bridgewater gallery, is a well- 
 known composition, which represents the Ma- 
 donna and child walking through a field ; 
 Joseph is in advance, and has turned to look 
 for the others. They have been stopped 
 by the infant S. John Baptist, clad in a 
 rough skin, who presses eagerly forward to 
 kiss Jesus. The mother places a restrain- 
 ing hand upon the shoulders of S. John, 
 and half withdraws the child Jesus from his 
 embrace. A classic grace marks Jesus, who 
 looks steadfastly into the eyes of the impas- 
 sioned John. The three figures in the prin- 
 cipal group are conceived in a noble manner : 
 S. John, prophesying in his face the discov- 
 ery of the Lamb of God ; Mary, looking
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 97 
 
 down with a sweet gravity which marks the 
 holy children, and would separate Jesus as 
 
 somethinor more than human from too close 
 
 o 
 
 fellowship with John ; Jesus himself, a pic- 
 ture of glorious chiklhood, with a far-reach- 
 ing look in his eye, as he gently thrusts 
 back the mother with one hand, and with 
 the other lays hold of the cross which John 
 bears. 
 
 On the other hand, an example of the 
 treatment of the adorable Madonna is that 
 of San Sisto, in the Dresden gallery. It 
 is not necessary to dwell on the details of 
 a picture which rises at once to every one's 
 mind. The circumstance of innumerable 
 angels' heads, of the attendant S. Sixtus 
 and S. Barbara, the sweep of cloud and 
 drapery, the suggestion of dej)ths below and 
 of heights above, of heaven itself listening 
 at the Madonna's feet, — all these translate 
 the mother and babe with ineffable sweet- 
 ness and dignity into a heavenly place, and 
 make them the centre of the spiritual uni- 
 verse. Yet in all this Raphael has rested 
 his art in no elaborate use of celestial 
 machinery. He has taken the simple, ele- 
 mental relation, and invested it with its eter- 
 nal properties. He gives not a supernatural
 
 98 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 and transcendent mother and child, but a 
 glorified humanity. Therefore it is that 
 this picture, and with it the other great Ma- 
 donnas of Raphael, may be taken entirely 
 away from altar and sanctuary, and placed 
 in the shrine of the household. The univer- 
 sality of the appeal is seen in the unhesitat- 
 ing adoption of the Sistine Madonna as an 
 expression of religious art by those who are 
 even antagonistic to the church which called 
 it forth. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The concentration of Raphael's genius to 
 so large an extent upon the subject of the 
 Madonna was not a mere accident of the 
 time, nor, when classic forms were renewing 
 their power, was it a solecism. The spirit 
 of the Renaissance entered profoundly into 
 Raphael's work, and determined powerfidly 
 the direction which it took. When he was 
 engaged upon purely classic themes, it is 
 interesting to see how frequently he turned 
 to the forms of children. His decorative 
 work is rich with the suggestion which they 
 bring. One may observe the graceful fig- 
 ures issuing from the midst of flower and 
 leaf ; above all, one may note how repeat-
 
 IN MEDIAEVAL ART 99 
 
 edly he presents the myth of Amor, and 
 recurs to the Amorini, types of childhood 
 under a purely naturalistic conception. 
 
 The child Jesus and the child Amor 
 appear side by side in the creations of 
 Raphael's genius. In the great Renaissance, 
 of which he was so consummate an expo- 
 nent, the ancient classic world and the Chris- 
 tian met in these two types of childhood: 
 the one a childhood of the air, unmixed 
 with good or evil ; the other a childhood of 
 heaven and earth, proleptic of earthly con- 
 flict, proleptic also of heavenly triumph. 
 The coincidence is not of chance. The new 
 world into which men were looking was not, 
 as some thought, to be in the submersion of 
 Christianity and a return to Paganism, nor, 
 as others, in a stern asceticism, which should 
 render Christianity an exclusive church, 
 standing aloof from the world as from a 
 thing wholly evil. There was to be room for 
 truth and love to dwell together, and the 
 symbol of this union was the child. Ra- 
 phael's Christ child drew into its features a 
 classic loveliness ; his Amor took on a Christ- 
 like purity and truthfulness. 
 
 Leslie, in his Handbook for Young Paint- 
 ers, makes a very sensible reflection upon
 
 100 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 Raphael's children, as distinguished from the 
 unchildlike children o£ Francia, for exam- 
 ple. " A fault of many painters," he says, 
 " in their representations of childhood is, 
 that they make it taking an interest in what 
 can only concern more advanced periods of 
 life. But Raphael's children, unless the sub- 
 ject requires it should be otherwise, are as 
 we see them generally in nature, wholly un- 
 concerned with the incidents that occupy the 
 attention of their elders. Thus the boy, in 
 the cartoon of the Beautiful Gate, pulls the 
 girdle of his grandfather, who is entirely 
 absorbed in what S. Peter is saying to the 
 cripple. The child, impatient of delay, wants 
 the old man to move on. In the Sacrifice at 
 Lystra, also, the two beautiful boys placed 
 at the altar, to officiate at the ceremony, are 
 too young to comprehend the meaning of 
 what is going on about them. One is 
 engTossed with the pipes on which he is 
 playing, and the attention of the other is at- 
 tracted by a ram brought for sacrifice. The 
 quiet simplicity of these sweet children has 
 an indescribably charming effect in this pic- 
 ture, where every other figure is imder the 
 influence of an excitement they alone do 
 not partake in. Children, in the works of
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 101 
 
 inferior painters, are often nothing else than 
 little actors ; but what I have noticed of Ra- 
 phael's children is true, in many instances, 
 of the children in the pictures of Rembrandt, 
 Jan Steen, Hogarth, and other great paint- 
 ers, who, like Raphael, looked to nature for 
 their incidents," 
 
 There was one artist of this time who 
 looked to nature not merely for the inci- 
 dents of childhood, but for the soul of child- 
 hood itself. It is impossible to regard the 
 work of Luca della Robbia, especially in 
 that ware which receives his name, without 
 perceiving that here was a man who saw 
 children and rejoiced in their young lives 
 with a simple, ingenuous delight. The very 
 spirit which led this artist to seek for expres- 
 sion in homely forms of material, to domes- 
 ticate art, as it were, was one which woiild 
 make him quick to seize upon, not the inci- 
 dents alone, but the graces, of childhood. 
 Nor is it straining a point to say that the 
 purity of his color was one with the purity 
 of this sympathy with childhood. The Re- 
 naissance as a witness to a new occupation 
 of the world by humanity finds its finest 
 expression in the hope which springs in the 
 lovely figures of Luca della Robbia.
 
 102 CHILDHOOD IN ART 
 
 It is significant of this Renaissance — it 
 is significant, I think we shall find, of every 
 great new birth in the world — that it turns 
 its face toward childhood, and looks into 
 that image for the profoundest realization 
 of its hopes and dreams. In the attitude of 
 men toward childhood we may discover the 
 near or far realization of that supreme hope 
 and confidence with which the great head 
 of the human family saw, in the vision of a 
 child, the new heaven and the new earth. 
 It was when his disciples were reasoning 
 among themselves which of them should be 
 the greatest that Jesus took a child, and set 
 him by him, and said unto them, " Whoso- 
 ever shall receive this child in my name re- 
 ceiveth me." The reception of the Christ 
 by men, from that day to this, has been 
 marked by successive throes of humanity, 
 and in each great movement there has been 
 a new apprehension of childhood, a new 
 recognition of the meaning involved in the 
 pregnant words of the Saviour. Such a rec- 
 ognition lies in the children of Raphael and 
 of Luca della Robbia. There may have been 
 no express intimation on their part of the 
 connection between their works and the
 
 IN MEDIEVAL ART 103 
 
 great prophecy, but it is often for later gen- 
 erations to read more clearly the presence of 
 a thought by means of light thrown back 
 upon it. The course of Clmstianity since 
 the Renaissance supplies such a light.
 
 VI 
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND ART 
 
 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 congre- 
 gate. How could there be any conspicuous 
 absence, except under conditions which ne- 
 cessarily 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 devel- 
 opment 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
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 105 
 
 mistake often in our regard of historical 
 sequence, looking at all past periods simply 
 and exclusively with refereiice 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 miseen, — 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'lh^ child in it. 
 There are certain elemental facts and truths 
 of which old and new canno't be predicated. 
 The vision of helpless childhood is no mod- 
 ern discovery ; it is no aiUHent 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 for- 
 mer. 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 hiunan history ; even so great a 
 change as the advent of Cl^istianity could 
 not interfere with the normal expression of 
 elemental facts in life.
 
 106 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 liter- 
 ature 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 liter- 
 ature and art. 
 
 A recollection of baUad literature, with- 
 out 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, —
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 107 
 
 '* ' What wish leav'at thou thy step-mother 
 Little daughter dear ? ' 
 ' Of hell the bitter sorrow 
 Sweet step-mother mine 
 For ah, ah ! I am so ill, ah I ' 
 
 " ' What wish leav'st thou thy old nurse 
 Little daughter dear ? ' 
 ' For her I wish the same pangs / 
 Sweet step-mother mine 
 For ah, ah ! I am so ill, ah ! '" 
 
 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 : — 
 
 " Then Lamkin 's ta'en a sharp knife 
 That hang down by his gaire, 
 And he has gi'en the bonny babe : 
 A deep wound and a sair. 
 
 " Then Lamkin he rocked, 
 
 And the f ause nourice sang 
 Till frae Ukae bore o' the cradle 
 The red blood outsprang. 
 
 " Then out it spak the ladie 
 
 As she stood on the stair, 
 ' What ails my bairn, nourice. 
 
 That he 's greeting sae sair ?
 
 108 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 " ' still my bairn, nonrice 
 
 O still him wi' the pap ! ' 
 ' He winna still, lady. 
 For this nor for that.' 
 
 *' * O still my bairn, nouriee ; 
 
 O still him wi' the wand 1 ' 
 * He winna still, lady, 
 
 For a' his father's land.' 
 
 " ' O still my bairn, nouriee, 
 
 Oh still him wi' the bell ! ' 
 ' He winna still, lady, 
 
 Till ye come down yoursel.' 
 
 *' O the firsten step she steppit, 
 She steppit on a stane ; 
 But the neisten step she steppit, 
 She met him, Lamkin." 
 
 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 pite- 
 ous tale. The story of Hugh of Lincoln — 
 that in the reign of Henry IH., the Jews of
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 109 
 
 Lincoln stole a boy of eight years, named 
 Hugh, tortured and crucified him — was re- 
 ceived 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 ex- 
 quisite pathos, lingering upon the childish 
 ways of Hugh, and pre])aring 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 shoidd be especially impressed by 
 the piety of this " litel clergeoun," or chor- 
 ister boy : — 
 
 " A litel clergeoun, seven yeer of age, 
 That day by day to scole was his wone ; 
 And eek also, whereas he saugh thymage 
 Of Cristes mooder, he hadde in usage, 
 As hym was taught, to knele adoun and seye 
 His Ave Marie, as he goth by the weye." 
 
 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 thiough the Jews' 
 quarter : —
 
 110 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 ' ' As I have seyd, tliurgh-out the Jewerie 
 This litel child, as he cam to and fro, 
 Ful murily wolde he synge and crie 
 O Alma redemptoris evere-mo 
 The swetnesse hath his herte perced so 
 Of Cristes mooder, that to hire to preye 
 He kan nat stynte of syng^yng by the weye." 
 
 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. 
 
 " Her litel child lay wepying in hir arm, 
 And knelynge, pitously to hym she seyde, 
 
 ' Pees litel sone, I wol do thee noon harm ! ' 
 With that hir kerchief of hir heed she breyde, 
 And over hise litel eyen she it leyde. 
 And in hir arm she lulleth it ful f aste 
 And in-to hevene hire eyen up she caste." 
 
 Then she commits herself and her child to 
 Mary by the love of Mary's child.
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 111 
 
 *' And up she rist, and walketh doun the stronde 
 Toward the ship, — hir f olweth al the prees, — 
 And evere she preyeth hire child to hold his pees." 
 
 Again, in the Clerk's tale of Patient Gri- 
 selda, tlie effect of the story is greatly height- 
 ened by the narrative of the successive part- 
 ings of the mother with her child ; and the 
 climax is reached in the burst of gladness 
 and pent-up feeling which overtakes Gri- 
 selda at the restoration of her son and daugh- 
 ter. It is noticeable that in these and other V 
 instances childhood appears chiefly as an I 
 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 redemp- 
 tion which it has been undergoing in the 
 slow process of its submission to the spirit 
 of Christ. We say the English race, with- 
 out stopping to make nice distinctions be- 
 tween the elements which existed at the time 
 of the Great Charter, just as we may prop- 
 erly speak of the American people of the 
 time of the Constitution. 
 
 This character is marked by a brutality, a 
 murderous spirit, which lies scarcely con- 
 cealed, to-day, in the temper of every Eng- 
 lish crowd, and has left its mark on litera-
 
 112 QHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 ture from the ballads to Oliver Twist. This 
 brutal instinct, this rude, savage, northern 
 spirit, is discovered in conflict with the dis- 
 arming 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 spir- 
 itual life. More comprehensively, English 
 literature affords the most complete means 
 of measuring the advance of England in hu- 
 manity. 
 
 It belongs to the nature of this deep con- 
 flict that there should appear from time to 
 time the finest exemplars of the ideals formed 
 by the divine spirit, side by side with exhi- 
 bitions of the most willfid baseness. Eng- 
 lish literature abounds in these contrasts ; it 
 is still more expressive of tides of spiritual 
 life, the elevation of thought and imagina- 
 tion succeeded by almost groveling animal- 
 ism. 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.
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 113 
 
 It is not strange, therefore, that the earli- 
 est 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 Ma- 
 donna 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 fun- 
 damental 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
 
 114 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 great master of English speech. It is the 
 fashion of every age to write its characteris- 
 tics 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 Christen- 
 dom into a prof ounder 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 hmnan character 
 is traversed, sin traced to its lurking-place, 
 and the old dragon of unrighteousness set 
 upon furiously, there is a conspicuous inci- 
 dent 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 re- 
 paired and revenged. Thus a dragon oc- 
 casions 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 hus- 
 band's death, and plunges her babe's inno-
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 115 
 
 cent hands into her own bloody breast for a 
 witness. Sir Guyon and the Palmer, stand- 
 ing 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 wa- 
 ter 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 ineradica- 
 ble nature of sin is one of them. To Spen- 
 ser, vexed with problems of life, that concep- 
 tion 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 inher- 
 ited 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.
 
 116 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 But the Elizabethan era had its share of 
 light-heartedness. The songs of the drama- 
 tists 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 uncov- 
 ered glory of Greece and Kome. It was the 
 time of the great translations of Phaer, 
 Golding, North, and Chapman ; and as those 
 translations are bold appropriations of anti- 
 quity, not timid attempts at satisfying the 
 requisitions of scholarship, so the figures of 
 the old mythology are used freely and ingen- 
 uously ; they are naturalized in English 
 verse far more positively than afterwards in 
 the elegantia of the Queen Anne and Geor- 
 gian periods. Ben Jonson's Venus' Runa- 
 way 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 aU litera- 
 ture, 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,
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 117 
 
 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 Gas- 
 coigne, 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 Rob- 
 ert Greene in his Menaphon, where Se- 
 phestia puts into her lullaby the story of 
 her parting with the child's father : — 
 
 " Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, 
 Wlien thou art old, there 's grief enough for thee. 
 
 The wanton smiled, father wept. 
 
 Mother cried, bahy leapt, 
 
 More thou crowed, more he cried, 
 
 Nature could not sorrow hide ; 
 
 He must go, he must kiss 
 
 Child and mother, bahy bless ; 
 
 For he left his pretty boy. 
 
 Father's sorrow, father's joy. 
 Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee. 
 When thou art old, there 's grief enough for thee." 
 
 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
 
 118 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 ca- 
 pable of acting to the stature of young girls. 
 More than this, boys and girls are not them- 
 selves 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 peo- 
 ple 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 read- 
 ily 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 vol- 
 uble grandmother has been rather excitedly 
 talking about Coriolanus treading on his 
 mother's womb, that brought him into the 
 world. Virgilia strikes in, —
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 119 
 
 " Ay, and mine 
 That brought you forth this boy, to keep your name 
 Living to time." 
 
 Whereupon young Marcius, with delicious 
 boyish brag and chivalry : — 
 
 " A' shall not tread on me ; 
 I '11 run away till I am bigger, but then I '11 fight." 
 
 In the same play there is a description of 
 the boy which tallies exactly with the single 
 appearance which he makes in person. Va- 
 leria drops in upon the mother and grand- 
 mother 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 '11 swear, 't is 
 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 't was, he did so set his teeth and tear it ; O, I 
 warrant, how he mammocked it 1 
 
 " Vol. One on 's father's moods. 
 
 " Val. Indeed, la, 't is 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
 
 120 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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, — 
 
 " I '11 go with thee 
 And find the inheritance of this poor child, 
 His little kingdom of a forced g^ave." 
 
 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 prince- 
 dom could not save him. 
 
 In that ghastly play of Titus Andronicus, 
 which melts at last into unavailins: 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 : — 
 
 " Come hither, boy ; come, come, and learn of lis 
 To melt in showers : thy grandsire loved thee well : 
 Many a matter hath he told to thee. 
 Meet and agreeing with thine infancy ;
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 121 
 
 In that respect, then, like a loving child, 
 
 Shed yet some small drops from thy tender spring, 
 
 Because kind nature doth require it so.' ' 
 
 The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is 
 in nothing figured more acutely than when 
 the woman and mother is made to say, — 
 
 " I have given suck, and know 
 How tender 't ia to love the habe that mUks me. 
 I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
 Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums 
 And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you 
 Have done to this." 
 
 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, — 
 
 " He has no children ! " 
 
 and then surges back to his own pitiful 
 state, transformed for a moment into an in- 
 furiated creature, all instinct, from which a 
 hell-kite has stolen his mate and pretty brood.
 
 122 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 pas- 
 sion. 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 pa- 
 thos spoken over the imloving Jerusalem ; 
 there was the voice of a nature into which 
 was gathered all the father's and the mo- 
 ther'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 mur- 
 derers, Dighton and Forrest, as related in 
 that short, sharp, dramatic accoimt which 
 Tyrrel gives : — 
 
 " Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn 
 . . To do this ruthless piece of butchery,
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 123 
 
 Although they were flesh' d villains, bloody dogs, 
 Melting with tenderness and kind compassion 
 Wept like two children in. their deaths' sad stories. 
 'Lo, thus,' quoth Dighton, 'lay those tender babes: ' 
 ' Thus, thus,' quoth Forrest, ' girdling one another 
 Within their innocent alabaster arms : 
 Their lips were four red roses on a stalk. 
 Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other. 
 A book of prayers on their pillow lay ; 
 Which once,' quoth Forrest, 'almost changed my 
 
 mind ; 
 But ! the devil ' — there the villain stopp'd ; 
 WTiilst Dighton thus told on : ' We smothered 
 The most replenished sweet work of nature. 
 That from the prime creation e'er she framed.' 
 Thus both are gone with conscience and remorse ; 
 They could not speak." 
 
 The glances at infancy, though infrequent, 
 are touched with strong human feeling. 
 JEgeon, narrating the strange adventures of 
 his shipwreck, tells of the 
 
 " Piteous plainings of the pretty babes 
 That mourned for fashion, ignorant what to fear ; " 
 
 and scattered throughout the plays are pas- 
 sages and lines which touch lightly or signifi- 
 cantly the realm of childhood : as, — 
 
 " Pity like a naked, new-bom babe ; " 
 
 " 'T is the eye of childhood 
 That fears a painted devil," 
 
 in Macbeth ;
 
 124 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 " Love is like a child 
 That longs for every thing that he can come by ; " 
 
 " How wayward is this /oolish love 
 That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse, 
 And presently all humble kiss the rod," 
 
 in Two Gentlemen of Verona ; 
 
 " Those that do teach young babes 
 Do it with gentle means and easy tasks," 
 
 says Desdemona ; and Cleopatra, when the 
 
 poisonous asp is planting its fangs, says with 
 
 saddest irony, — 
 
 "Peace! peace! 
 Dost thou not see my baby at my breast 
 That sucks the nurse asleep ? ' ' 
 
 There is a charming illustration of the 
 blending of the classic myth of Amor with 
 actual childhood in these lines of A Mid- 
 summer-Night's Dream, where Helena says, 
 
 " Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind ; 
 And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind : 
 Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste : 
 Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste : 
 And therefore is Love said to be a child. 
 Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. 
 As waggish boys in games themselves forswear, 
 So the boy Love is perjured everywhere." 
 
 In the noonday musing of Jaques, when 
 the summer sky himg over the greenwood, 
 and he fell to thinking of the roimd world
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 125 
 
 and all that dwell therein, the Seven Ages of 
 Man passed in procession before him : — 
 
 " At first the infant 
 Milling and puking in the nurse's arms. 
 And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel 
 And shining morning face, creeping like snail 
 Unwillingly to school," 
 
 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 woidd have associated, not with chil- 
 dren, 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
 
 126 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 de- 
 light in the society of a child, when a person 
 of intellect far more matured, but inferior 
 to his own, would be simply insufferable." ^ 
 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 boy- 
 hood, 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 domes- 
 tic side of life in Shakespeare's art. Shake- 
 speare's world was an out-of-doors, public 
 world, and his men, women, and lovers car- 
 ried on their lives with no denser conceal- 
 ment than a wood or an arras could afford. 
 
 ^ On Reading Shakespeare Through. The [London] 
 Spectator, August 26, 1882.
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 121 
 
 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 treat- 
 ment from that employed in the great pro- 
 cession of Madonnas ! 
 
 " Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein 
 AfEord a present to the Infant God ? " 
 
 The Infant God ! — that is Milton's atti- 
 tude, 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 sportive- 
 ness 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 virgin-
 
 128 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 ity 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 soiU to God. Hence child- 
 hood was a time of probation and suspense. 
 It was wrong, to begin with, and was re- 
 pressed 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 fol- 
 lowed 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 pos- 
 sible, 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
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 129 
 
 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 move- 
 ment was one conservative of family rela- 
 tions, 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
 
 130 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 per- 
 sons. 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 chil- 
 dren, who return commendably correct an- 
 swers. But Matthew, the oldest boy, falls 
 sick of the gripes ; and when the physi- 
 cian asks Christiana what he has been eat- 
 ing lately, she is as ignorant as any mother 
 can be. 
 
 " Then said Samuel," who Is as communi- 
 cative as most younger brothers, " ' Mother,
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 131 
 
 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 or- 
 chard 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, " physi- 
 cians give strange medicines to their pa- 
 tients." " 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 
 haK a quarter of a pint of Tears of Repent- 
 ance. 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,
 
 ■J 
 
 132 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 Mat- 
 thew,' said she, ' this Portipn 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 j^urge, 
 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 cor- 
 rective of a too stern and formal apprehen- 
 sion of social Puritanism, and in the story 
 are exhibited the natural charms and graces 
 which not only coidd not be expelled by a 
 stern creed, but were essentially connected 
 with the lofty ideals which made Pui'itanism
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 138 
 
 a miglity force in history. Bunyaii 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 Pu- 
 ritan conception of childliood. 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 Mes- 
 siah 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 pro- 
 longation 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 epi- 
 grammatic snap, are the most perfect sym- 
 bols of the English mind of that period. 
 When in the Messiah we read, —
 
 134 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 " Rapt into future times the bard begun, 
 A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a son! 
 
 Swift fly the years and rise the expected mom t 
 O spring to light, auspicious babe, be born ! " 
 
 we remember Milton's Infant God. The 
 two poets touch, with a like faintness, the 
 childhood of Jesus, but the one through awe 
 and grandeur of contemplation, the other 
 through the polite indifference of a man of 
 the world. Or take Pope's mundane philos- 
 ophy, as exhibited most elaborately in his 
 Essay on Man, and set it beside Shake- 
 speare's Seven Ages of Man : — 
 
 " Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law 
 Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw : 
 Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, 
 A little louder, but as empty quite : 
 Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage. 
 And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age : 
 Pleased with this bauble still, as that before ; 
 TiU tired he sleeps and life's poor play is o'er." 
 
 This is the only passage in the Essay hinting 
 at childhood, and suffices to indicate how 
 entirely insignificant in the eyes of the phi- 
 losophy underlying Pope and his school was 
 the whole thought of childhood. The pas- 
 sage, while not perhaps consciously imitative 
 of Shakespeare, suggests comparison, and
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 135 
 
 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 con- 
 stantly into the freer domain of the novelist 
 who is a critic of life, and when he wovdd 
 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 pa^vns which are moved about to 
 protect the queen ; they are genuine figures, 
 their prattle is natural, and they are con- 
 stantly illustrating in the most innocent 
 fashion the steadfastness of Amelia. 
 
 It is significant that Gray, ^vith his deli- 
 cate taste and fine classical scholarship, 
 when he composed his Elegy used first
 
 136 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 the names of eminent Romans when he 
 
 wrote : — 
 
 " Some village Cato, who with dauntless breast 
 The little tyrant of the fields withstood ; 
 Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest, 
 Some Csesar, guiltless of his country's blood." 
 
 He changed these names for those of Eng- 
 lish heroes, and in doing so broke away from 
 traditions which still had a strong hold in 
 literature. It is a pity that for a reason 
 which hardly convinces us he should have 
 thought best to omit the charming stanza, — 
 
 " There, scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 
 By hands unseen are showers of violets found : 
 The Red-breast loves to build and warble there, 
 And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 
 
 When Gray wrote this he doubtless had in 
 mind the ballad of the Children in the 
 Wood. In the succession of English pic- 
 tures which he does give is that lovely one, — 
 
 " For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, 
 Or busy housewife ply her evening's care ; 
 No children run to lisp their sire's return. 
 
 Or climb his knees the evening kiss to share." 
 
 In his poem On a Distant Prospect of 
 Eton College he has lines which are instinct 
 with a feeling for childhood and youth. 
 There is, it is true, a touch of artificiality
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 137 
 
 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 svibservience 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 genera- 
 tion more was to burst from many lips. The 
 sweetness which trembles in the Deserted 
 Village finds easy expression in forms and 
 images which call up childhood to memory, 
 as in those lines, — 
 
 "The playful children just let loose from school," 
 
 " E'en children followed with endearing wile, 
 And plucked his go^vn, to share the good man's 
 smile," — 
 
 and in the quaint picture of the village 
 school. 
 
 It is in the Vicar of Wakefield, however, 
 that one finds the freest play of fancy about 
 childish figures. Goldsmith says of his hero 
 that " he unites in himself the three greatest 
 characters upon earth, — he is a priest, a
 
 138 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 plum- 
 met 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 exulta- 
 tion when I saw my little ones about me ; " 
 and from time to time in the tale, the 
 youngest children, Dick and Bill, trot for- 
 ward in an entirely natural manner. They 
 show an engaging fondness for Mr. Thorn-
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 139 
 
 hill. " 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 charm- 
 ing 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 babe^ 
 within, who were just awaked by the fire^ 
 and nothing could have stopped me, 
 ' Where, where are my children ? ' cried I^
 
 140 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 rushing through the flames, and bursting the 
 door of the chamber in which they were con- 
 fined. ' 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 trans- 
 ports, 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 gentle- 
 ness of Cowper, combined with a poetic sen- 
 sibility, found expression in simple themes. 
 His life, led in a pastoral country, and occu< 
 pied with trivial pleasm-es, offered him prim- 
 itive material, and he sang of hares, and 
 goldfish, and children. His Tirocinium, or
 
 IN ENGLISH ART 141 
 
 a Review of Schools, though having a didac- 
 tic intention, lias some charming bits of 
 descriptive writing, as in the familiar lines 
 which describe the sport of 
 
 "The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot." 
 
 The description melts, as do so many of Cow- 
 per'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 Eng- 
 land had its premonitions in literature. It 
 had them also in art. In this jDeriod ap- 
 peared Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gains- 
 borough : the one preeminently 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
 
 142 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 democracy of art we know no distinction be- 
 tween 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 na- 
 ture itself is in slumber, the timidity of the 
 Strawberry Girl, the wildness of the Gypsy 
 Boy, the shy grace of Pickaback, the delight- 
 ful wonder of Master Bunbury, the sweet 
 simplicity and innocence in the pictures so 
 named, and the spiritual yet human bpauty 
 of the Angels' heads. Reynolds studied the 
 work of the mediaeval painters, but he came 
 back to England and painted English chil- 
 dren. Goldsmith's Vicar, Cowper's Lines 
 on his mother's portrait, and Reynold's chil- 
 dren bring us close to the heart of our sub- 
 ject. 
 
 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 ex- 
 press the fact, clear it is to us that the close
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 143 
 
 of the last century marks a great epoch in 
 the history of Christendom, and the far- 
 ther we withdraw from the events which 
 gather about our own birth as an organized 
 nation, and those which effected such enor- 
 mous 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 begin- 
 nings then. There was indeed a great awak- 
 ening, 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 asso- 
 ciated with it. Then appeared the portent 
 of Democracy, and the struggle of human- 
 ity 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 philos- 
 ophy 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
 
 144 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 renaissance may be measured by tlie form 
 which this recognition takes. At the birth 
 of Christianity the pregnant sentences, " Ex- 
 cept 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 medi- 
 aevalism 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 par- 
 doned, 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
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 145 
 
 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 an- 
 gels 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 pre- 
 sented 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 sit- 
 uations from common life, and to relate or 
 describe them throughout, as far as was pos- 
 sible, 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 vmusual aspect ; and fur-
 
 146 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 ther, 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 re- 
 straint, and speak a plainer and more em- 
 phatic 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 conununicated ; 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
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 147 
 
 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 Pref- 
 ace, 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 philo- 
 sophic accoimt, 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 child- 
 hood 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 humble- 
 ness, 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
 
 148 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Quillinan." What is the motive of a poem 
 which excited such derision that the poet in 
 a moment of alarm withdrew it from publi- 
 cation, 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 tat- 
 tered cloak had become caught in the wheel 
 and irretrievably ruined. The poet makes 
 no attempt to dignify this grief ; the inci- 
 dent 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 Words- 
 worth's poems ; and yet, such is the differ- 
 ence in the audience to-day from what it was 
 in Wordsworth's time that Alice Fell ap- 
 pears as a matter of course in all the anthol- 
 ogies for children, and is read by men and 
 women with positive sympathy, with a ten- 
 derness for the forlorn little girl, and with- 
 out a question as to the poem's right of ex- 
 istence. 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,
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 149 
 
 and has an appeal to more catholic sensibil- 
 ity: 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 bridore throuo;h 
 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 discov- 
 ered, as no one before had done, the element 
 of solitude in chikUiood, and invested it with 
 a fine spiritual, ethereal quality, quite devoid 
 of any ethical property, — a subtle commu- 
 nity 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 him- 
 self, — 
 
 " As homeward through the lane I went with lazy feet, 
 This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat ; 
 And it seemed, as I retraced the hallad line by line, 
 Tliat but half of it was hers, and one half of it was 
 
 mine. 
 Again and once again did I repeat the song ; 
 Nay, said I, more than half to the damsel must belong,
 
 150 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 For she looked with such a look and she spake with 
 
 such a tone 
 That I almost received her heart into my own." 
 
 His second thought was best : more than 
 half did belong to the child, for he himself 
 was but the wise interpreter. 
 
 Wordsworth's incidents of childhood are 
 sometimes given a purely objective charac- 
 ter, as in Rural Architecture, The Anecdote 
 for Fathers, The Idle Shepherd Boys ; but 
 more often childhood is to him the occasion 
 and suggestion of the deeper thought of life. 
 A kitten, playing with falling leaves before 
 the poet and his child Dora, leads him on 
 by exquisite movement to the thought of his 
 own decay of life. But what impresses us 
 most is the twofold conception of childhood 
 as a part of nature, and as containing within 
 itself not only the germ of human life, but 
 the echo of the divine. There are poems of 
 surpassing beauty which so blend the child 
 and nature that we might almost fancy, as 
 we look upon the poetical landscape, that we 
 are mistaking children for bushes, or bushes 
 for children. Such is that one beginning 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower," 
 
 and 
 
 " Wisdom and Spirit of the universe I "
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 151 
 
 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 sug- 
 gestions from his own children and from 
 those whom he saw in his walks, it is re- 
 markable how little he regards children in 
 their relation to parents in comparison of 
 their individual and isolated existence. Be- 
 fore 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 child- 
 hood. He did this and gave it expression in 
 artistic form in some of the poems already 
 named ; he did it methodically and with phi- 
 losophic 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, —
 
 152 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 " Was it for this 
 That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved 
 To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, 
 And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, 
 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice 
 That flowed along my dreams ? For this, didst thou, 
 O Derwent ! winding among grassy holms 
 Where I was looking on, a babe in arms, 
 Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts 
 To more than infant softness, giving me 
 Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind 
 A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm 
 That Nature breathes among the hills and groves." 
 
 Still more minutely does lie disclose the con- 
 sciousness of childhood in his record of the 
 mind of the Wanderer in The Excursion, in 
 the lines beginning : — 
 
 " From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak 
 In summer tended cattle on the hills." 
 
 It may be said that in all this Words- 
 worth is simply rehearsing and expanding 
 an exceptional experience ; that his recollec- 
 tion 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 uni- 
 versal and common to the period of child- 
 hood. Again and again in descriptive poem, 
 in direct address, in indirect allusion, he so
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 153 
 
 uses this knowledge as to forbid us to re- 
 gard it as peculiar and exceptional in his 
 own view ; and a poet's attestation to a uni- 
 versal 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, suffer- 
 ings, 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 inno- 
 cence of childhood, the infantile grace, which 
 holds him, but a certain childish possession, 
 in which he sees a spiritual presence ob- 
 scured in conscious youth. Landor in one 
 of his Imaginary Conversations stoutly as- 
 serts 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." ^ 
 
 In all this again, in this echo of the 
 divine which Wordsworth hears in the voice 
 
 1 Epicurus, Leontion, arid Ternissa. 
 
 \
 
 154 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 of childhood, there is reference, psychologi- 
 cally, to his own personal experience. Yet 
 why should we treat that as riiled out of evi- 
 dence, 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 testi- 
 mony of those whose eyes lack the wondrous 
 power of seeing? In the preface to his ode, 
 Intimations of Immortality from the Recol- 
 lections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth 
 declares with great earnestness : — 
 
 "To the attentive and competent reader 
 the whole sufficiently explains itself ; but 
 there may be no harm in adverting here to 
 particular feelings or experiences of my own 
 mind, on which the structure of the poem 
 partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for 
 me in childhood than to admit the notion of 
 death as a state applicable to my own being. 
 I have said elsewhere — 
 
 ' A simple child 
 That lightly draws its breath, 
 And feels its life in every limb, 
 What should it know of death ! ' 
 
 But it was not so much from feelings of ani- 
 mal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 155 
 
 a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit 
 within me. I used to brood over the stories 
 of Enoch and Elijah, and ahiiost 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 my- 
 self 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 fancifiU argument in behalf 
 of the philosophic heresy of a preexistent 
 state. In my judgment, Wordsworth's pref- 
 ace is somewhat misleading by its reference 
 to this theory, although he has furnished
 
 156 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 hints in the same preface of his more inte- 
 gral 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 reason- 
 ing with himself ; he sees him passing in 
 imagination out of childhood into age, yet 
 constantly recovering himself to fresh per- 
 ception of the immortality which transcends 
 earthly life. It is visible childhood ^\^th its 
 intimation of immortality wliich 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 immortal- 
 ity the time conception; they conceive the 
 poet to be hinting of an indefinite time ante- 
 datino- the child's birth, an indefinite time 
 extending beyond the man's death, whereas 
 Wordsworth's conception of immortality 
 rests in the indestructibility of sj)irit by any 
 temporal or earthly conditions, — an inde- 
 structibility which even implies an absence 
 of beginning as well as of ending. 
 
 " Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 157 
 
 he declares. It is the investment of this 
 visible life by an unseen, imfelt, 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 pene- 
 trates the soul, yet it is there and recurs in 
 sudden moments. 
 
 " Hence in a season of calm weather, 
 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 
 Which brought us hither, 
 
 Can in a moment travel thither. 
 And see the Children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 
 
 In thus connecting childhood with the 
 highest hope of the human race, Words- 
 worth 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 in- 
 closing 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
 
 158 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 of the subject of childhoocl. 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 sub- 
 tlety, 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. Never- 
 theless, 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 accoimt of his recollections of in- 
 fancy, 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 com- 
 
 \
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 159 
 
 pelled, 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 
 residts to a comparison with known opera- 
 tions of the human mind. Above all, it 
 should be borne in mind that a distinction 
 clearly exists between a child's conscious- 
 ness and its power of expression. De Quin- 
 cey 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 blos- 
 soms and expands to his own consciousness 
 in mature life must have preexisted in germ 
 during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, 
 
 <r
 
 160 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATUBE 
 
 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 mys- 
 terious to him ; in me, the interpretation and 
 the comment." 
 
 Assuredly this is reasonable, and since 
 we are looking for the recognition of child- 
 hood 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 Afaiction 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 Quin- 
 cey, 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 na- 
 tional church, God holds communion undis- 
 turbed with children. Solitude, though 
 silent as light, is like light the mightiest of
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE IGl 
 
 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 ap- 
 palls or fascinates a child's heart, is but the 
 echo of a far deeper solitude, through which 
 already he has passed, and of another soli- 
 tude, 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, brins^inor 
 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 no- 
 thing, but for a Christian child it has be- 
 come the power of God and the mystery of 
 God. O mighty and essential solitude, that
 
 162 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 wast and art and art to be ! thou, kin- 
 dling under the touch .of Christian revela- 
 tions, 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 chap- 
 ter 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 re- 
 actionary 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 politi- 
 cal faith that lay behind the outburst of the 
 French Revolution. The discovery of this 
 new continent of childhood by such explor- 
 ers 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
 
 IN ENGLISH ART 163 
 
 period ushered in by the French Revolu- 
 tion 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 do- 
 main, the world of literature and art sud- 
 denly 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
 
 164 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 en- 
 gaged in his solitary voyage of discovery to 
 the little known shores of childhood. They 
 have, to be sure, the teasing property of par- 
 ables, and it would be hard to render them 
 into the unmistakable language of the un- 
 derstanding ; but they could be set to music, 
 and like the Duke we exclaim : — 
 
 " That strain again ! it had a dying fall." 
 
 It must always be borne in mind that 
 Blake's contribution to the literature of 
 childhood is through highly idealized forms. 
 It is spiritual or angelic childhood which 
 floats before his eyes, so that the little
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1G5 
 
 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 erup- 
 tion 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. Words- 
 worth's poems set the seal upon this recog- 
 nition. Dickens's novels naturalized the 
 poor in literature, and, as in the case of 
 Wordsworth, poverty and childliood went 
 hand in hand. 
 
 Dickens, however, though he made a dis- 
 tinct addition to the literature of childhood, 
 rather registered a presence already acknow- 
 ledged than acted as a prophet of childhood. 
 The great beneficent and humanitarian
 
 166 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 movement of the century was well under 
 way, and had already found abundant ex- 
 pression 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 mul- 
 titude of the creations of Dickens, which at 
 once rise to mind, — Paul Dombey, Little 
 Nell, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, David Cop- 
 pei-field in his earliest days, and the Mar- 
 chioness. 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
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 167 
 
 which had served him so well in his larger 
 portraiture ; he seized upon the significant 
 feature and emphasized it until it became 
 the immistakable mark of the person. 
 Childhood suggests weakness, and weakness 
 is more apparent when there is a foil of 
 mental prematurity; ^o he invented the 
 hydrocephalic Paul Dombey. It suggests 
 tenderness ; he appealed to an unhesitating 
 sympathy and drew for us Little Nell, inten- 
 sifying her nature by bringing her into con- 
 trast and subtle companionship with her 
 imbecile grandfather. It is the defect of 
 Dickens that by such characters he displayed 
 his skiU 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 con- 
 simaptive for an illustration of extreme re- 
 finement. 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 humani- 
 tarianism and of Dickens, its great expo- 
 nent, that it regards death as the great fact
 
 168 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 imperish- 
 ability 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 man- 
 ner the early life of Dickens discloses some- 
 thing of a nature which reappears afterward
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 169 
 
 in his pictures of childhood. A wounded 
 sensibility is unquestionably the pathetic 
 history of many, and Dickens has contrib- 
 uted to the natural history of childhood a 
 distinct account of this feature. 
 
 The first appearance of a new form in lit- 
 erature produces an impression which can 
 never be repeated. However fresldy 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 hard- 
 ened 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 mul- 
 titude 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 jJersonm of literatiu*e.
 
 170 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 For, wlien all is said of Dickens's work, 
 taken only as the product of a mind sin- 
 gularly 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 at- 
 tendant upon novelty was over, writers of all 
 sorts were busy modeling these small figures. 
 
 The child once introduced into literature, 
 U' 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 
 
 /
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 171 
 
 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 Words- 
 worth 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 meet- 
 ing 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 them- 
 selves. I called attention briefly, at the be- 
 ginning of this study, to the interesting fact 
 that there was a correlation in time, at least, 
 between childhood in literature and a litera- 
 ture 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, with- 
 out much thought of art, have been busy 
 over the same figures for other purposes.
 
 172 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 Gold- 
 smith'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 chil- 
 dren were distinctly recognized as the occa- 
 sion of formal literature, when authors and 
 publishers began to heed a new public. It 
 was imjjossible that there shoidd be this dis- 
 covery 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 Words- 
 worth, Lamb, De Quincey, and Blake wei'e 
 idealizing childhood, and seeing in it artistic 
 possibilities, there flourished a school of
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 173 
 
 writing for the young which also dealt with 
 childhood, but with a sturdy realism. This 
 school had its representatives in Mrs. Bar- 
 bauld, Mr. Day, the Aikens, Maria Edge- 
 worth, Ann and Jane Taylor, and holds a 
 place still with Evenings at Home, The Par- 
 ent's Assistant, Hymns in Prose for Chil- 
 dren, Hymns for Infant Minds, Frank, and 
 Sandford and Merton. The characteristics 
 of this literature are simple, and will be re- 
 called by many who dwell with an affection- 
 ate 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 ap- 
 pealed 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 con- 
 tained 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.
 
 174 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Yet, the earlier works, though now some- 
 what 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 yoimg, and 
 by those who were accustomed to watch the 
 unfolding of childish nature. If they re- 
 flected a somewhat formal relation between 
 the old and the young, it must be remem- 
 bered 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 some- 
 what 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 por- 
 trayed. Yet we cannot help being struck 
 by the contrast between the sublimated 
 philosophy of Wordsworth and tlie pro- 
 saic 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
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 175 
 
 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 unobser- 
 vant 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 calm- 
 ness to keep her ignorant of their real 
 thoughts. 
 
 How real literature looked upon the dusty
 
 176 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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 " ple- 
 onasm 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 shop- 
 man 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 
 beautifid interest in wild tales which made 
 the child a man, while all the time he sus- 
 pected 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 ami
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 177 
 
 old wives' fables in childhood, you had been 
 crammed with geography and natural his- 
 tory ! 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 inter- 
 est 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 educar 
 tive 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, of- 
 tener 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 cyclopaedias and conuuentaries ;
 
 178 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 it includes histories, travels, poems, works 
 in science, theological treatises. It is a dis- 
 tinct principality o£ the Kingdom of Letters. 
 It is idle to complain of the present abun- 
 dance 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 possi- 
 ble 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 recog- 
 nizable in the higher than in the lower 
 forms of literature. It is still more clear in
 
 IN ENGLISH ART 179 
 
 pictorial art. Art is by its nature more 
 closely representative of childhood than lit- 
 erature can be, and Gainsborough and Rey- 
 nolds 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 
 pleasui-e, such as the domestic sense, the 
 pride of family, the ease of procuring uncon- 
 scious models. No one can visit an Ens^lish 
 exliibition 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 some- 
 times wonder why this should be the case in 
 England, when in America, the paradise of 
 children, there is a conspicuous absence of 
 these subjects from galleries.
 
 VII 
 
 IN FRENCH AND GERMAN LITERATURE 
 
 French literature before the Revolution 
 was more barren of reference to childhood 
 than was English literature. Especially is 
 this true of the eighteenth century, with its 
 superficial disbelief and its bitter protest 
 against superstition, under which term was 
 comprehended the supernatural as well as 
 the preternatural. There were exceptions, 
 as in the case of F^nelon, and the constitu- 
 tional sentiment of the French was easily 
 moved by the appeal of dependent childhood. 
 In Rousseau one may read how it is possible 
 to weep over children, and yet leave one's 
 own to the cold mercy of a foundling 
 asylum. It is in Rousseau's disciple, how- 
 ever, Bernardin de St. Pierre, that we find 
 the most artistic expression of pure senti- 
 mentalism, and the story of Paul and Vir- 
 ginia is an effort at representing a world 
 where childhood, in its innocence, is con-
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 181 
 
 ceived of as the symbol of ideal human life. 
 St. Pierre thouscht of cliildhood and nature 
 as possessed of strong negative virtues ; they 
 were uncontaminated, they were unsophis- 
 ticated. To escape from an evil world, 
 he fled in imagination to an island of the 
 tropics, where all that life required was 
 readily furnished by lavish nature. He 
 makes his family to consist chiefly of women 
 and children. The masculine element is 
 avoided as something disturbing, and except 
 for the harmless old man who acts as chorus, 
 it is discovered first as a rude, barbaric, and 
 cruel force in the person of the governor of 
 the island, who has no faith in Madame de 
 la Tour, and in the person of the planter at 
 the Black River, who has been an inhuman 
 master to his slave. 
 
 The childhood of Paul and Virginia is 
 made to have a pastoral, idyllic character. 
 Their sorrows and misfortunes come wholly 
 from evils which lie beyond their control. 
 St. Pierre brought back a golden age by 
 ignoring the existence of evil in the heart of 
 man ; he conceived it possible to construct 
 an ideal world by what was vaguely ex- 
 pressed in the words " a return to nature." 
 As he reflects in the story : " Their theology
 
 182 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 consisted in sentiment like that of nature ; 
 and their morality in action like that of the 
 gospel. Those families had no particular 
 days devoted to pleasure, and others to sad- 
 ness. Every day was to them a holiday, and 
 all which surrounded them one holy temple, 
 where they forever adored an Infinite Intel- 
 ligence, almighty and the friend of human- 
 kind. A sentiment of confidence in his 
 supreme power filled their minds with con- 
 solation for the past, with fortitude for 
 the present, and with hope for the future. 
 Behold how these women, compelled by mis- 
 fortune to return to a state of nature, had 
 unfolded in their own bosoms, and in those 
 of their children, the feelings which nature 
 gives us, our best support under evil! " 
 
 However we may discover the limitations 
 of the sentimental philosophy, and its inad- 
 equacy when brought face to face with evil 
 in life, there is a surface agreement with 
 Christianity in this instinctive turning to 
 childhood as the hope of the world. Yet 
 the difference is radical. The child, in the 
 Christian conception, holds the promise of 
 things to come ; in the conception of French 
 sentiment of the Rousseau and St. Pierre 
 type, the child is a refuge from present evil,
 
 IN FRENCU LITERATURE 183 
 
 a mournful reminiscence of a lost Paradise. 
 If only we could keep it a child ! is the cry 
 of this school, — keep it from knowing this 
 wicked, unhappy world ! But alas I there 
 are separations and shipwrecks. Virginia 
 is washed ashore by the cruel waves. Paul, 
 bereft of reason, dies, and is buried in the 
 same grave. The two, growing like plants 
 in nature, are stricken down by the mysteri- 
 ous, fateful powers of nature. 
 
 The contrast between this unreal recourse 
 to nature and the strong yet subtle return 
 which characterizes Wordsworth and his 
 school is probably more apparent to the 
 English and American mind than to the 
 French. Yet a reasonable comparison be- 
 trays the fatal weakness of the one in that 
 it leaves out of view whatever in nature dis- 
 turbs a smooth, summer-day world. When 
 St. Pierre talks of a return to nature, he 
 does not mean the jungle anel the pestiferous 
 swamp ; he regards these as left behind in 
 Paris. Yet the conclusion of his story is 
 the confession wrung from faithful art that 
 Nature is after all but a stepmother to 
 humanity. 
 
 In the great romantic movement which 
 revolutionized French literature, an immense
 
 184 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 impetus was given to the mind, and litera- 
 ture thenceforth reflected a wider range of 
 thought and feeling. In few respects does 
 this appear more significantly than in the 
 treatment of childhood. There is a robust- 
 ness about the sentiment which separates it 
 from the earlier regard of such writers as we 
 have named. Lamartine, who certainly was 
 not devoid of sentiment, passes by his own 
 earliest childhood in Les Confidences with 
 indifference. " I shall not," he says, " fol- 
 low the example of J. J. Rousseau in his 
 Confessions. I shall not relate to you the 
 trifling events of my early childhood. Man 
 only dates from the commencement of feeling 
 and thought ; until the man is a being, he 
 is not even a child. . . . Let us leave, then, 
 the cradle to the nurses, and our first smiles, 
 our first tears, and our first lisping accents 
 to the ecstasies of om* mothers. I do not 
 wish to inflict on you any but my earliest 
 recollections, embellished by the light of 
 reason." He gives, accordingly, two scenes 
 of his childhood : one an interior, where his 
 father reads aloud to his mother from 
 Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered ; the other an 
 outdoor scene, where he engages in the 
 rural sports of the neighborhood. Each
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 185 
 
 picture is delightfully drawn, with minute 
 detail, with poetic touch, with affectionate 
 recollection. Encouraged, apparently, by 
 the warmth which this memory has inspired, 
 Lamartine continues to dwell upon the 
 images of his childhood, especially as it has 
 to do with the thought of his mother. He 
 paints the simple garden attached to his 
 father's home, and resting a moment re- 
 flects : — 
 
 " Yes, that is indeed all, and yet that is 
 what sufficed during so many years for the 
 gratification, for the reveries, for the sweet 
 leisures, and for the as sweet labors of a 
 father, a mother, and eight children I Such 
 is what still suffices, even at the present day, 
 for the nourishment of these recollections. 
 Such is the Eden of their childhood, where 
 their most serene thoughts take refuge when 
 they wish to receive a little of that dew of 
 the morning life, a little of that beaming 
 light of early dawn, which shines pure and 
 radiant for man only amid the scenes of his 
 birth. There is not a tree, there is not a 
 carnation, there is not a mossy stone of this 
 garden, which is not entwined in their soul 
 as if it formed part of it. This nook of 
 earth seems to us immense, such a host of
 
 186 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 objects and of recollections does it contain 
 for us in so narrow a space." 
 
 The fullness with which Lamartine treats 
 the recollection of his youth partakes of the 
 general spirit of French memoirs, — a spirit, 
 to speak roughly, which regards persons 
 rather than institutions, — but indicates also 
 something of the new spirit which informed 
 literature when it elevated childhood into a 
 place of real dignity. There are passages, 
 indeed, which have a special significance as 
 intimating a consciousness of the deeper re- 
 lations of childhood. Michelet, for instance, 
 in his philosophy of the unfolding of 
 woman's life, recognizes the characteristics 
 of maidenhood as anticipatory of maturity, 
 and does it with so serious a contemplation 
 that we forget to smile when we discover 
 him profoundly observant of those instincts 
 of maternity which are shown in the care of 
 a child for its doll. 
 
 This attitude toward the child is observ- 
 able in the masters of modern French liter- 
 ature. However far they may be removed 
 from any mere domestic regard of the sub- 
 ject, they apprehend the peculiar sacredness 
 attaching to children. Alfred de Musset, 
 for example, though by no means a poet of
 
 IN FRENCH LITERATURE 187 
 
 the family, can never speak of children 
 without emotion. Not to multiply in- 
 stances, it is enough to take the great poet 
 of the period. Victor Hugo deserves, it has 
 been said, to be called the poet of infancy, 
 not only for the reason that he has written 
 of the young freely, but has in his Les 
 Enfants, Livre des Meres, written for them. 
 It is to be observed that the suggestion 
 comes, with Hugo, chiefly from the children 
 of his family ; from his brother Eugene, 
 who died an early death ; from his daughter, 
 whom he mourns in tender verse ; and from 
 his gi'andchildren. One feels the sincerity 
 of a great poet when he draws the inspira- 
 tion for such themes from his own familiar 
 kind. 
 
 It may be said in general of the contribu- 
 tion made to this literature by the French 
 that it partakes of those qualities of light- 
 ness and grace which mark the greater liter- 
 ature ; that the image of childhood is a joy- 
 ous, innocent one, and satisfies the eye that 
 looks for beauty and delicacy. Sentiment 
 predominates, but it is a sentiment that 
 makes little draught upon thought. There 
 is a disposition now to regard children as 
 dolls and playthings, the amusement of the
 
 188 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 hour ; now to make them the object of an 
 attitudinizing sentiment, which is practically 
 wasted unless there be some one at hand to 
 applaud it. 
 
 n 
 
 When we pass from France to Germany 
 we are aware that, however we may use the 
 same terms, and recognize the existence of 
 sentiment as a strong element in the litera- 
 ture of both countries, there is a radical dif- 
 ference in tone. It is not merely that French 
 i sentiment is graceful and German sentiment 
 I clumsy : the grace of the one connects itseK 
 I with a fine art, — we feel an instinctive good 
 taste in its expression ; in the other, the awk- 
 wardness, the obtrusiveness, seem to be the 
 issue of an excess of natural and homely feel- 
 ing. It would be too much to say that French 
 sentiment is insincere and German sentiment 
 impleasantly sincere ; that the one is assumed 
 and the other uncalculating, — we cannot 
 thus dismiss elementary feeling in two great 
 peoples. But an Englishman or American, 
 to whom, in his reserve, the sentiment of 
 either nation is apt to be a little oppressive, 
 is very likely to smile at the French and feel 
 uncomfortable in the presence of the Ger-
 
 IN GERMAN LITERATURE 189 
 
 man ; to regard the French feeling as a tem- 
 porary mood, the German as a permanent 
 state. 
 
 Be this as it may, it is true that the 
 German feeling with regard to childhood, 
 as it finds expression in life and literature, 
 revolves very closely about the child in its 
 home, not the child as a charming object in 
 nature. Childhood, in German literature, is 
 conceived very generally in its purely domes- 
 tic relations, and is so positive an element 
 as to have attracted the attention of other 
 nations, and even to have given rise to a 
 petty cult. Coleridge, writing from Ger- 
 many in 1799, reports to his English readers, 
 as something strange to himself, and of local 
 significance only, the custom of Christmas 
 gifts from parents to children and from chil- 
 dren to parents. He is especially struck with 
 the custom of representing these presents as 
 coming from Jesus Christ. 
 
 The whole structure of Santa Claus and 
 Kriss Kringle, the Christ Child and Pelzni- 
 chel, with the attendant ceremonies of the 
 Christmas tree, is built into the child life of 
 Germany and the Low Countries ; and it is 
 by the energj'^ of this childish miracle that it 
 has passed over into English, and especially
 
 190 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 into American life. All this warmth of do- 
 mestic feeling is by no means a modern dis- 
 covery. It is a prime characteristic of the 
 Germanic people, and one strong reason for 
 the ascendency of Lutheranism may be foimd 
 in the singular exposition of the German 
 character which Luther presented. He was 
 not merely a man of the peojDle ; through his 
 life and writings and organizing facidty he 
 impressed himself positively on the German 
 national charactei*, not turning it aside, but 
 deepening the channels in which it ran. 
 Certain it is that the luxuriance of his 
 nature was almost riotous on the side of 
 family life. " The leader of the age," says 
 Canon Mozley, " and the adviser of princes, 
 affecting no station and courting no great 
 men, was externally one of the common 
 crowd, and the plainest of it. In domestic 
 life the same heart and nature appear. There 
 he overflows with affection, warmth, tender- 
 ness ; with all the amiable banter of the hus- 
 band, and all the sweet arts and pretty non- 
 sense of a father among his little children. 
 Whether he is joking, lecturing his ' rib 
 Catharine,' his 'gracious dame Catharine,' 
 or writing a description of fairyland and 
 horses with silver saddles to his ' vora-
 
 IN GERMAN LITERATURE 191 
 
 cious, bibacious, loquacious,' little John ; or 
 whether he is in the agony of grief over 
 the death-bed of his favorite daughter, Mag- 
 dalene, we see the same exuberant, tender 
 character." ^ 
 
 In this sketch of Luther we may read 
 some of the general characteristics of the 
 Germanic life, and we are ready, at the first 
 suggestion, to assent to the proposition that 
 the German people, judged by the appara- 
 tus of childhood, books, pictures, toys, and 
 schools, stands before other nations. The 
 material for the portraiture of childhood 
 has been abundant ; the social history, the 
 biographies, give constant intimations of the 
 fullness with wliich family life, inclosing 
 childhood, has been dwelt upon in the mind. 
 The autobiographies of poets and novelists 
 almost invariably give great attention to the 
 period of childhood. A very interesting 
 illustration of this may be found in the life 
 of liichter, who stands at the head of the 
 great Germans in his portrayal of childhood. 
 
 " Men who have a firm hold on nothing 
 else," says Richter in his brief autobiogra- 
 phy, " delight in deep, far-reaching recollec- 
 
 ^ Essays, Historical and Theological. By J. E. Moz- 
 ley, i. 430, 431.
 
 192 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 tion of their days of childhood, and in this 
 billowy existence they anchor on that, far 
 more than on the thought of later difficul- 
 ties. Perhaps for two reasons: that in this 
 retrospection they press nearer to the gate 
 of life guarded by spiritual existences ; and 
 secondly, that they hope, in the spiritual 
 power of an earlier consciousness, to make 
 themselves independent of the little, con- 
 temptible annoyances that surround human- 
 ity." He then recites an incident from his 
 second year, and continues : " This little 
 morning-star of earliest recollection stands 
 yet tolerably clear in its low horizon, but 
 growing paler as the daylight of life rises 
 higher. And now I remember only this 
 clearly, that in earlier life I remembered 
 everything clearly." 
 
 How clearly will be apparent to the reader 
 who follows Richter through the minute and 
 detailed narrative of his childish life, and in 
 his writings the images of this early life are 
 constantly reappearing under different forms. 
 Something is no doubt due to the early birth 
 in Richter of a self-consciousness, bred in 
 part by the solitude of his life. It may be 
 said with some assurance that the vividness 
 of early recollection has much to do with de-
 
 IN GERMAN LITERATURE 193 
 
 termlning the poet and novelist and essayist 
 in his choice of themes bearing directly 
 upon childhood. The childish experience of 
 Wordsworth, De Quincey, Dickens, Lamar- 
 tine, and Richter is clearly traceable in the 
 writings of these men. If they look into 
 their own hearts and write, the images 
 which they bring forth are so abundantly 
 of childhood that they cannot avoid making 
 use of them, especially since they retain rec- 
 ollections which demand the interpretation 
 of the maturer mind. That they should so 
 freely draw from this storehouse of childish 
 experience reflects also the temper of the 
 age for which they write. The fullness 
 with which the themes of childhood are 
 treated means not that a few men have 
 suddenly discovered the subject, but that 
 all are sensitive to these same impressions. 
 It is not, however, the vividness of recol- 
 lection alone, but the early birth of con- 
 sciousness, which will determine the treat- 
 ment of the subject. If one remember the 
 facts of his early years rather than how he 
 thought and felt about those facts, he will 
 be less inclined to dwell upon the facts af- 
 terward, or make use of them in his work. 
 They will have little significance to him. A
 
 194 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 distinction in this view is to be observed 
 between Richter'and Goethe. The autobi- 
 ographies of the two men reveal the different 
 impressions made upon them by their child- 
 hood. The facts which Goethe recalls are 
 but little associated with contemporaneous 
 reflection upon the facts, and they serve but 
 a trifling purpose in Goethe's art. The 
 facts which Richter recalls are imbedded in 
 a distinct conception regarding them, and 
 perform a very positive function in his art. 
 
 The character of Mignon may be dis- 
 missed from special consideration, for it is 
 clear that Goethe used Mignon's diminutive- 
 ness and implied youth only to heighten 
 the effect of her elfish and dwarfish nature. 
 The most considerable reference to child- 
 hood is perhaps in the Sorrows of Young 
 Werther, where the relations between Wer- 
 ther and Charlotte comprise a sketchy group 
 of children who act as foils or accompani- 
 ments to the pair. Werther discovers Char- 
 lotte, it will be remembered, cutting slices 
 of bread for her younger brothers and sis- 
 ters ; it is by this means that Goethe would 
 give a charm to the character, presenting 
 it in its homely, domestic setting. But his 
 purpose is also to intimate the exceeding
 
 IN GERMAN LITERATURE 195 
 
 sensibility of Werther, and he represents 
 him as taking a most affectionate interest 
 in the little children whom he sees on his 
 walks. I suspect, indeed, that Goethe in 
 this has distinctly borrowed from the Vicar 
 of Wakefield ; at any rate, the comparison 
 is easily suggested, and one brings away the 
 impression of Goldsmith's genuine feeling 
 and of Goethe's deliberate assumption of a 
 feeling for artistic purposes. Nevertheless, 
 Goethe makes very positive use of child- 
 hood in this novel, not only through the 
 figures of children, but also through the sen- 
 timent of childhood. 
 
 "Nothing on this earth, my dear Wil- 
 helm," says Werther, "affects my heart so 
 much as children. When I consider them ; 
 when I mark in the little creatures the seeds 
 of all those virtues and qualities which they 
 will one day find so indispensable ; when I 
 behold in the obstinate all the future firm- 
 ness and constancy of a noble character, in 
 the capricious that levity and gayety of tem- 
 per which will carry them lightly over the 
 dangers and troubles of life, their whole 
 nature simple and unpolluted, then I call to 
 mind the golden words of the Great Teacher 
 of mankind : ' Except ye become as little
 
 196 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 children.' And now, my friend, these chil- 
 dren, who are our equals, whom we ought to 
 consider as our models, we treat as subjects. 
 They are allowed no will of their own ! 
 And have we then none ourselves ? Whence 
 comes our exclusive right? Is it because 
 we are older and more experienced ? Great 
 God ! from the height of thy heaven, thou 
 beholdest great children and little children, 
 and no others ; and thy Son has long since 
 declared which afford the greatest pleasure. 
 But they believe in him, and hear him not, 
 — that too is an old story ; and they train 
 their children after their own image." 
 
 We must regard this as a somewhat dis- 
 torted application of the words of the gospel, 
 but it is interesting as denoting that Goethe 
 also, who stood so much in the centre of illu- 
 mination, had perceived the revealing light 
 to fall upon the heads of young children. 
 It is not, however, so much by his direct as 
 by his indirect influence that Goethe is con- 
 nected with our subject. If Luther was 
 both an exponent of German feeling and a 
 determining cause of its direction, Goethe 
 occupies a similar relation as an expression 
 of German intellectualism and a stimidator 
 of German thought. A hundred years after
 
 IN GERMAN LITERATURE 197 
 
 his birth, when measures were taking to cel- 
 ebrate the centenary by the establishment of 
 some educational foundation to bear his 
 name, the enthusiastic supporters of Froe- 
 bel sought to divert public interest into the 
 channel of this movement for the cultivation 
 of childhood." Froebel's philosophy has af- 
 fected modern educational systems even 
 where his method has not been scrupulously 
 followed. Its influence upon literature and 
 art can scarcely be traced, except so far as 
 it has tended to give direction and set limits 
 to the great body of books and pictures, 
 which, made for children, are also expository 
 and illustrative of the life of children. I 
 mention him simply as an additional illus- 
 tration of the grasp which the whole subject 
 of childhood has obtained in Germany ; it 
 has made itself felt in religion and politics ; 
 so revolutionary was Froebel's philosophy 
 held to be that his schools were suppressed 
 at one time by the government as tending 
 to subvert the state. This was not strange, 
 since Froebel's own view as to the education 
 of children was radical and comprehensive. 
 
 A child's life finds its chief expression 
 in play, and in play its social instincts are 
 developed. Now the kindergarten recog-
 
 198 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 nizes the fact that play is the child's busi- 
 ness, not his recreation, and undertakes to 
 guide and form the child through play. It 
 converts that which would otherwise be aim- 
 less or willful into creative, orderly, and gov- 
 erned action. Out of the play as governed 
 by the wise kindergartner grows a spirit of 
 courtesy, self-control, forbearance, unselfish- 
 ness. The whole force of the education is 
 directed toward a development of the child 
 which never forgets that he is a person in 
 harmonious relation to others. Commimity, 
 not competition, is the watchword of the 
 school. In this view the kindergarten has 
 its basis in the same law which lies at the 
 foundation of a free republic. Obedience, 
 as taught by the system of public schools, is 
 an obedience to rules ; it may be likened to 
 the obedience of the soldier, — a noble thing, 
 but not the highest form of human subjec- 
 tion of the will. Obedience as evolved in 
 the true kindergarten is a conscious obedi- 
 ence to law. The unity of life in the school, 
 with entire freedom of development in the 
 individual, is the aim of the kindergarten. 
 
 The enthusiasm which made itself felt in 
 France in the rise of the romantic school,
 
 IN GERMAN ART 199 
 
 with its expression chiefly through poetry, 
 the drama, and fiction, disclosed its power 
 likewise in Germany. There, however, other 
 channels offered a course for the new cur- 
 rent. The rise of the school of religious 
 painters, of which Overbeck and Cornelius 
 were eminent examples, was a distinct is- 
 sue of the movement of the times. It was 
 regarded as reactionary by some, but its re- 
 action was rather in form than in spirit. 
 It ran counter to a Philistinism which was 
 complacent and indifferent to spiritual life, 
 and it sought to embody its ideas in forms 
 which not only Philistinism but humanism 
 contemned, yet it was all the wiiile working 
 in the interest of a higher freedom. It is 
 noticeable, therefore, that this religious art, 
 in its choice of subjects, not only resorted 
 to the early ecclesiological type, but struck 
 out into a new path, choosing themes which 
 imply a subjective view of Christianity. 
 Thus, Overbeck's picture of Christ blessing 
 little children, a subject which is a favor- 
 ite one of modem religious art, is a distinct 
 recognition of modern sentiment. Here is 
 the relation borne by the Christ to little chil- 
 dren presented by a religious art, which, 
 however much it might seek to reinstate the
 
 200 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 old forms, could not help being affected by 
 tlie new life of Christianity. Overbeck went 
 to the early Florentines for his masters, but 
 he did not find this subject among their 
 works. He caught it from the new read- 
 ing of the old gospel.
 
 VIII 
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 
 
 As Overbeck and his school returned to 
 the religious art which preceded the Re- 
 naissance, so Thorwaldsen, like Canova and 
 lesser men, turned back to Greek art, and 
 was working contemporaneously with Over- 
 beck at Rome in a very different temper. 
 To him the central figure of Christianity 
 was not a child in its mother's arms, but a 
 strong, thoughtful man ; for childhood he 
 turned to the sportive conception of Amor, 
 which he embodied in a great variety of 
 forms. The myth appealed, aside from the 
 opportunity which it offered for the expres- 
 sion of sensuous beauty, to his northern love 
 of fairyland. His countryman, Andersen, 
 tells us how, when they were all seated in 
 the dusk, Thorwaldsen would come from his 
 work and beg for a fairy-tale. 
 
 It is Andersen himself who has made 
 the most unique contribution not only to the 
 literature which children read, but to that
 
 202 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 which is illustrative of childhood. He at- 
 tained his eminence sheerly by the exhibi- 
 tion of a power which resulted from his in- 
 formation by the spirit of childhood. He 
 was not only an interpreter of childhood ; he 
 was the first child who made a real contribu- 
 tion to literature. The work by which he is 
 best known is nothing more nor less than an 
 artistic creation of precisely the order which 
 is common among children. 
 
 It is customary to speak of his best 
 known short stories as fairy tales ; wonder- 
 stories is in some respects a more exact de- 
 scription, but the name has hardly a native 
 sound. Andersen himself classed his stories 
 under the two heads of historier and eventyr ; 
 the historier corresponds well enough with 
 its English mate, being the history of human 
 action, or, since it is a short history, the 
 story ; the eventyr, more nearly allied per- 
 haps to the German ahenteuer than to the 
 English adventure^ presumes an element of 
 strangeness causing wonder, while it does not 
 necessarily demand the machinery of the su- 
 pernatural. When we speak of fairy tales, 
 we have before our minds the existence, for 
 artistic purposes, of a spiritual world peo- 
 pled with beings that exercise themselves in
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 203 
 
 human affairs, and are endowed in the main 
 with human attributes, though possessed of 
 certain ethereal advantages, and generally 
 under orders from some superior power, 
 often dimly understood as fate ; the Italians, 
 indeed, call the fairy y^to. In a rough way 
 we include under the title of fairies all the 
 terrible and grotesque shapes as well, and 
 this world of spiritual beings is made to con- 
 sist of giants, ogres, brownies, pixies, nisses, 
 gnomes, elves, and whatever other creatures 
 have found in it a local habitation and name. 
 The fairy itself is generally represented as 
 very diminutive, the result, apparently, of 
 an attempted compromise between the im- 
 agination and the senses, by which the exist- 
 ence of fairies for certain purposes is con- 
 ceded on condition they shall be made so 
 small that the senses may be excused from 
 recognizing them. 
 
 The belief in fairies gave rise to the genu- 
 ine fairy tale, which is now an acknowledged 
 classic, and the gradual elimination of this 
 belief from the civilized mind has been at- 
 tended with some awkwardness. These 
 creations of fancy — if we must so dismiss 
 them — had secured a somewhat positive rec- 
 ognition in literature before it was finally
 
 204 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 discovered that they came out of the unseen 
 and therefore could have no life. Once re- 
 ceived into literature they could not well be 
 ignored, but the understanding, which ap- 
 pears to serve as special jjolice in such cases, 
 now has orders to admit no new-comers 
 unless they answer to one of three classes : 
 either they must be direct descendants of 
 the fairies of literature, having certain marks 
 about them to indicate their parentage, or 
 they must be teachers of morality thus dis- 
 guised, or they may be mere masqueraders ; 
 one thing is certain, they must spring from 
 no belief in fairy life, but be one and all re- 
 ferred to some sufficient cause, — a dream, 
 a moral lesson, a chemical experiment. But 
 it is found that literature has its own sym- 
 pathies, not always compassed by the mere 
 understanding, and the consequence is that 
 the sham fairies in the sham fairy tales 
 never really get into literature at all, but 
 disappear in limbo ; while every now and 
 then a genuine fairy, born of a genuine, 
 poetic belief, secures a place in spite of the 
 vio^ilance of the o^viard. 
 
 Perhaps nothing has done more to vulgar- 
 ize the fairy than its introduction upon the 
 stage ; the charm of the fairy tale is in its
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 205 
 
 divorce from human experience ; the charm 
 of the stage is in its realization, in miniature, 
 of human life. If the frog is heard to speak, 
 if the dog is turned before one's eyes into 
 a prince, by having cold water dashed over 
 it, the charm of the fairy tale has fled, and 
 m its place we have only the perplexing 
 pleasure of legerdemain. The effect of pro- 
 ducing these scenes upon the stage is to 
 bring them one step nearer to sensuous real- 
 ity, and one step further from imaginative 
 reality ; and since the real life of fairy is in 
 the imagination, a wrong is committed when 
 it is dragged from its shadowy hiding-place 
 and made to turn into ashes under the cal- 
 ciiim light of the understanding. 
 
 By a tacit agreement fairy tales have come 
 to be consigned to the nursery ; the old tools 
 of superstition have become the child's toys, 
 and when a wi-iter comes forward, now, 
 bringing new fairy tales, it is almost always 
 with an apology, not for trespassing upon 
 ground already occupied, but for indulging 
 in what is no longer belief, but make-belief. 
 " My story," he is apt to say, " is not true ; 
 we none of us believe it, and I shall give 
 you good evidence before I am done that 
 least of all do I believe it. I shall probably
 
 206 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 explain it by referring it to a strange dream, 
 or shall justify it by the excellent lesson it 
 is to teach. I adopt the fairy form as 
 suited to the imagination of children ; it is 
 a childish thing, and I am half ashamed, as 
 a grown person, to be found engaged in such 
 nonsense." Out of this way of regarding 
 fairy tales has come that peculiar monstros- 
 ity of the times, the scientific fairy tale, 
 which is nothing short of an insult to a 
 whole race of innocent beings. It may be 
 accepted as a foregone conclusion that with 
 a disbelief in fairies the genuine fairy tale 
 has died, and that it is better to content our- 
 selves with those stories which sprang from 
 actual belief, telling them over to successive 
 generations of children, than to seek to ex- 
 tend the literature by any ingenuity of mod- 
 ern skepticism. There they are, the fairy 
 tales without authorship, as imperishable as 
 nursery ditties ; scholarly collections of them 
 may be made, but they will have their true 
 preservation, not as specimens in a museum 
 of literary curiosities, but as children's toys. 
 Like the sleeping princess in the wood, the 
 fairy tale may be hedged about with bris- 
 tling notes and thickets of commentaries, 
 but the child will pass straight to the beauty,
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 207 
 
 and awaken for his own delight the old 
 charmed life. 
 
 It is worth noting, then, that just when 
 historical criticism, under the impulse of 
 the Grimms, was ordering and accounting 
 for these fragile creations, — a sure mark 
 that they were ceasing to exist as living forms 
 in literature, — Hans Christian Andersen 
 should have come forward as master in a 
 new order of stories, which may be regarded 
 as the true literary successor to the old order 
 of fairy tales, answering the demands of a 
 spirit which rejects the pale ghost of the 
 scientific or moral or jocular or pedantic 
 fairy tale. Andersen, indeed, has invented 
 fairy tales purely such, and has given form 
 and enduring substance to traditional stories 
 current in Scandinavia ; but it is not upon 
 such work that his real fame rests, and it is 
 certain that while he will be mentioned in 
 the biographical dictionaries as the writer 
 of novels, poems, romances, dramas, sketches 
 of travel, and an autobiography, he will be 
 known and read as the author of certain 
 short stories, of which the charm at first 
 glance seems to be in the sudden discovery 
 of life and humor in what are ordinarily 
 regarded as inanimate objects, or what are
 
 208 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 somewhat compassionately called dumb ani- 
 mals. When we have read and studied the 
 stories further, and perceived their ingenuity 
 and wit and humane philosophy, we can 
 after all give no better account of their 
 charm than just this, that they disclose the 
 possible or fancied parallel to human life 
 carried on by what our senses tell us has 
 no life, or our reason assures us has no ra- 
 tional power. 
 
 The life which Andersen sets before us is 
 in fact a dramatic representation upon an 
 imaginary stage, with puppets that are not 
 pulled by strings, but have their own mus- 
 cular and nervous economy. The life which 
 he displays is not a travesty of human life, 
 it is human life repeated in miniature under 
 conditions which give a charming and un- 
 expected variety. By some transmigration, 
 souls have passed into tin-soldiers, balls,* 
 tops, beetles, money-pigs, coins, shoes, leap- 
 frogs, matches, and even such attenuated in- 
 dividualities as darning-needles; and when, 
 informing these apparently dead or stupid 
 bodies, they begin to make manifestations, 
 it is always in perfect consistency with the 
 ordinary conditions of the bodies they oc- 
 cupy, though the several objects become by
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDEBSEN 209 
 
 this endowment of souls suddenly expanded 
 in their capacity. Perhaps in nothing is 
 Andersen's delicacy of artistic feeling better 
 shown than in the manner in which he deals 
 with his animated creations when they are 
 brought into direct relations with human be- 
 ings. The absurdity which the bald under- 
 standing perceives is dexterously suppressed 
 by a reduction of all tlie factors to one com- 
 mon term. For example, in his story of The 
 Leap-Frog, he tells how a flea, a grasshop- 
 per and a leaj^-f rog once wanted to see which 
 could jump highest, and invited the whole 
 world " and everybody else besides who chose 
 to come," to see the performance. The king 
 promised to give his daughter to the one 
 who jumped the highest, for it was stale fun 
 when there was no prize to jump for. Tlie 
 flea and the grasshopper came forward in 
 turn and i:)ut in their claims ; the leap-frog 
 also appeared, but was silent. The flea 
 jumped so high that nobody could see where 
 he went to, so they all asserted that he had 
 not jumped at all ; the grasshopper jumped 
 in the king's face, and was set down as an 
 ill-mannered thing ; the leap-fi-og, after reflec- 
 tion, leaped into the lap of the princess, and 
 thereupon the king said, ^ There is nothing
 
 210 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 above my daughter ; therefore to bound up 
 to her is the highest jump that can be made : 
 but for this, one must possess understanding, 
 and the leap-frog has shown that he has un- 
 derstanding. He is brave and intellectual." 
 "And so," the story declares, "he won the 
 princess." The barren absurdity of a leap- 
 frog marrying a princess is perhaps the first 
 thing that strikes the impartial reader of 
 this abstract, and there is very likely some- 
 thing offensive to him in the notion ; but in 
 the story itself this absurdity is so delight- 
 fully veiled by the succession of happy turns 
 in the characterization of the three jumpers, 
 as well as of the old king, the house-dog, and 
 the old councilor " who had had three orders 
 given him to make him hold his tongue," 
 that the final impression upon the mind is 
 that of a harmonizing of all the characters, 
 and the king, princess, and councilor can 
 scarcely be distinguished in kind from the 
 flea, grasshopper, leap-frog, and house-dog. 
 After that, the marriage of the leap-frog and 
 princess is quite a matter of course. 
 
 The use of speaking animals in story was 
 no discovery of Andersen's, and yet in the 
 distinction between his wonder-story and the 
 well-known fable lies an explanation of the
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 211 
 
 charm which attaches to his work. The end 
 of every fable is hcec fahiila docet, and it 
 was for this palpable end that the fable was 
 created. The lion, the fox, the mouse, the 
 dog, are in a very limited way true to the 
 accepted nature of the animals which they 
 represent, and their intercourse with each 
 other is governed by the ordinary rides of 
 animal life, but the actions and words are 
 distinctly illustrative of some morality. The 
 fable is an animated proverb. The animals 
 are made to act and speak in accordance 
 with some intended lesson, and have this for 
 the reason of their being. The lesson is 
 first ; the characters, created afterward, are, 
 for purposes of the teacher, disguised as ani- 
 mals ; very little of the animal appears, but 
 very much of the lesson. The art which 
 invented the fable was a modest handmaid 
 to morality. In Andersen's stories, how- 
 ever, the spring is not in the didactic but in 
 the imaginative. He sees the beetle in the 
 imperial stable stretching out his thin legs 
 to be shod with golden shoes like the em- 
 peror's favorite horse, and the personality of 
 the beetle determines the movement of the 
 story throughout ; egotism, pride at being 
 proud, jealousy, and unbounded self-conceit
 
 212 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 are the furniture of this beetle's soul, and 
 his adventures one by one disclose his char- 
 acter. Is there a lesson in all this? Pre- 
 cisely as there is a lesson in any picture of 
 human life where the same traits are 
 sketched. The beetle, after all his adven- 
 tures, some of them ignominious but none 
 expelling his self-conceit, finds himself again 
 in the emperor's stable, having solved the 
 problem why the emperor's horse had golden 
 shoes. " They were given to the horse on 
 my account," he says, and adds, " the world 
 is not so bad after all, but one must know 
 how to take things as they come." There 
 is in this and other of Andersen's stories a 
 singular shrewdness, as of a very keen ob- 
 server of life, singular because at first blush 
 the author seems to be a sentimentalist. 
 The satires, like The Emperor's New 
 Clothes and The Swiftest Runners, mark 
 this characteristic of shrewd observation 
 very cleverly. Perhaps, after all, we are 
 stating most simply the distinction between 
 his story and the fable when we say that 
 humor is a prominent element in the one 
 and absent in the other; and to say that 
 there is humor is to say that there is real 
 life.
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 213 
 
 It is frequently said that Andersen's 
 stories accomplish their purpose of amusing 
 children by being childish, yet it is impos- 
 sible for a mature person to read them with- 
 out detecting repeatedly the marks of expe- 
 rience. There is a subtle undercurrent of 
 wisdom that has nothing to do with child- 
 ishness, and the child who is entertained re- 
 turns to the same story afterward to find a 
 deeper significance than it was possible for 
 him to apprehend at the first reading. The 
 forms and the incident are in consonance 
 with childish experience, but the spirit 
 which moves through the story comes from 
 a mind that has seen and felt the analogue 
 of the story in some broader or coarser 
 form. The story of The Ugly Duckling is 
 an inimitable presentation of Andersen's 
 own tearful and finally triumphant life ; yet 
 no child who reads the story has its sym- 
 pathy for a moment withdrawn from the 
 duckling and transferred to a human being. 
 Andersen's nice sense of artistic limitations 
 saves him from making the older thought 
 obtrude itself upon the notice of children, 
 and his power of placing himself at the same 
 angle of vision with children is remarkably 
 sho^vn in one instance, where, in Little
 
 214 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Klaus and Big Klaus, death is treated as a 
 mere incident in the story, a surprise but 
 not a terror. 
 
 The naivete which is so conspicuous an 
 element in Andersen's stories was an ex- 
 pression of his own singularly artless nature. 
 He was a child all his life ; his was a con- 
 dition of almost arrested development. He 
 was obedient to the demands of his spiritual 
 nature, and these led him into a fresh field 
 of fancy and imagination. What separates r 
 him and gives him a distinct place in litera- ■ 
 ture is, as I have said, that he was the first j 
 child who had contributed to literature. His ' 
 very autobiogTaphy discloses at every turn 
 this controlling genius of childhood, and the 
 testimony of his friends confirms it. 
 
 Now that Andersen has told his stories, 
 it seems an easy thing to do, 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 inani- 
 mate have to things animate is constantly 
 forced upon us ; it remained for Andersen 
 to pursue the comparison further, and, let-
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDEBSEN 215 
 
 ting types loose from their antityjies, 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 mod- 
 ern 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
 
 216 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 old fairy tale finds its successor in this new 
 realistic wonder-story, just as the old ro- 
 mance gives place to the new novel. In both, 
 as in the corresponding development of poe- 
 try 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, appear- 
 ing 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 dis- 
 tinct and new form. It already has its imi- 
 tations, and people are said to write in the 
 vein of Andersen. Such work, and Ander- 
 sen'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 pre- 
 cisely the way in which a large body of cur- 
 rent 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 
 literatiu'e 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 
 himian race when he had nearer neighbors 
 and their offspring. Lowell has answered 
 the appeal which the death of children makes
 
 218 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 to the heart, but aside from his tender ele- 
 giac verses has scarcely dwelt on childhood 
 either in prose or verse. Holmes, with his 
 boyishness of temper, has caught occasion- 
 ally 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 mem- 
 ories 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 boy- 
 hood than with the boy's thoughts or feel-
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 219 
 
 ings. 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 volimies, 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 
 midtitudes 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. Chil- 
 dren are brought up on poetry to a consid- 
 erable 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.
 
 220 CHILDUOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 When one comes to consider the subjects of 
 Longfellow's poetry, one finds that the num- 
 ber 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 cir- 
 cumstance which called it out, and on which 
 the poet relies for holding the direct atten- 
 tion 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, Resigna- 
 tion, The Children's Hour, and A Shadow, 
 all in the minor key except The Cliildren'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.
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 221 
 
 One poem partly rests on a man's thought 
 of his own childhood, My Lost Youth ; The 
 Ilanfrino; 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 recog- 
 nition 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 ui)on 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 chil-
 
 222 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 dren ; there is nothing in it which belongs 
 to the reflection of chiklhood itself. Tenny- 
 son'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 mor- 
 bid 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 reputa- 
 ble work. As I turn its leaves, I come upon 
 a long ballad of The Dying Child, Long-fel- 
 low'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, mo- 
 ther?" 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 uncon- 
 scionably 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
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 223 
 
 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 smUed. 
 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."
 
 224 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 Here is a fantastic conception, extremely 
 puzzling to a healthy-minded child. Im- 
 agine 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 ex- 
 plain 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 inter- 
 preter 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. Words- 
 worth's poem is a plain, objective narrative, 
 which a child might hear and enjoy with 
 scarcely a notion of what was implied in it,
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 225 
 
 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 An- 
 dersen'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 
 throuo-h the natural correlation which exists 
 between childhood in literature and a litera- 
 ture for children. Let me get back to my 
 main topic by a similar path. The one au- 
 thor in America whose works yield the most 
 fruitful examples in illustration of oiu- sub- 
 ject is Ha\vthome, 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 pub- 
 lished in America during the past fifty 
 years, — and most of it is already crumbling
 
 226 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 in memory, — it requires no heroism to pre- 
 dict an immortality of fame for the little 
 books which Hawthorne wrote with so much 
 good nature and evident pleasure, Grandfa^ 
 ther's Chair and the Wonder Book, with its 
 companion, Tanglewood Tales. Mr. Park- 
 man 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 pic- 
 tm'e 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 de- 
 stroy 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 fur- 
 ther authority for the stories than Lem- 
 priere. 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
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 227 
 
 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 Ameri- 
 can soil, and all the labors of all the Coxes 
 will not succeed in supplanting them. More- 
 over, I venture to think that Hawthorne's 
 fame is more firmly fixed by means of the 
 Wonder Book. The presence of an audi- 
 ence 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 sun-
 
 228 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 shine which their presence brought. With 
 what bright and joyous playfulness he re- 
 peats the old stories, and with what a pater- 
 nal air he makes the tales yield their mor- 
 sels 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 want- 
 ino" 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 pas- 
 sion, perhaps a whipping, etc." Again, how 
 delicate is the hint conveyed in a passage 
 describing one of his solitary walks I " An- 
 other time I came suddenly on a small Cana-
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 229 
 
 dian boy, who was in a hollow place among 
 the ruined logs of an old causeway, pick- 
 ing raspberries, — lonely among bushes and 
 gorges, far up the wild valley ; and the lone- 
 lier seemed the little boy for the bright sun- 
 shine, that showed no one else in a ^vide 
 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 Medi- 
 terranean 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 me- 
 moirs of him and in his Note-Books, was un- 
 questionably a sign of that profound human- 
 ity which was the deep spring of his writ- 
 ings. 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
 
 230 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 otherwise only as all his nature found out- 
 let, — 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 un- 
 covered head. It is in the chapter entitled 
 Some Glimpses of English Poverty, and re- 
 lates how one of the party visiting an alms- 
 house — Hawthorne himself, as his wife has 
 since told us — was unexpectedly and most 
 unwillingly made the object of demonstra- 
 tive attention on the part of a poor, scrofu- 
 lous, repulsive waif of humanity. Nothing 
 that he had done had attracted the child, — 
 only what he was ; and so, moved by com- 
 passion, 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
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 231 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren 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 mar- 
 tyr 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 Daffydown- 
 dilly, 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
 
 232 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 with childhood is The Snow Image. In 
 that the half-conventional figures which 
 served to introduce the stories in the Won- 
 der 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 strain- 
 ing 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 unimpor- 
 tant part. It is Ned Higgins's cent which 
 does the mischief with Hepzibah, in The
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 233 
 
 House of the Seven Gables, transforming 
 her from a shrinking gentlewoman into an 
 igiioble 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 woidd 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 char- 
 acter 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 rides. In 
 giving her existence a great law had been 
 broken ; and the result was a being whose 
 elements were perhaps beautiful and bril- 
 liant, 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
 
 234 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 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, Ar- 
 thur, and Pearl stand together on the scaf- 
 fold, the supreme moment may fairly be said 
 to be that commemorated in the words, 
 " Pearl kissed his lips," 
 
 It is noteworthy, also, that when Haw- 
 thorne was struggling with fate, and, with 
 the consciousness of death stealing over him, 
 made ineffectual efforts to embody his pro- 
 foundest 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 grate- 
 ful 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 character- 
 ized, as I have pointed out, by a recognition 
 of personality in childhood as distinct from
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 235 
 
 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 iso- 
 lated, as disclosing a nature capable of inde- 
 pendent 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. 
 
 " The real virtues of one age," says Moz- 
 ley, " become the spurious ones of the next," 
 and it is hardly strange that the abnormal 
 development of this treatment of childhood 
 should be most apparent in the United 
 States, where individualism has had freest 
 play. The discovery appears to have been 
 made here that the child is not merely a per- 
 son, but a very free and independent person 
 indeed. The sixteenth amendment to the 
 constitution reads, " The rights and caprices 
 of children in the United States shall not be 
 denied or abridged on account of age, sex, 
 or formal condition of tutelage," and this 
 amendment has been recognized in litera- 
 ture, as in life, while waiting its legal adop- 
 tion. It has been recognized by the silence 
 of great literature, or by the kind of mention 
 which it has there received. I am si)eakiug
 
 236 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 of the literature which is now current rather 
 than of that which we agree to regard as stan- 
 dard American literature ; yet even in that I 
 think our study shows the sign of what was 
 to be. The only picture of childhood in the 
 poets drawn from real life is that of the 
 country boy, while all the other references 
 are to an ideal conception. Hawthorne, in 
 his isolation, wrote of a world which was 
 reconstructed out of elemental material, and 
 his insight as well as his marvelous sympathy 
 with childhood precluded him from using 
 diseased forms. But since the day of these 
 men, the literature which is most, represen- 
 tative of national life has been singularly 
 devoid of reference to childhood. One 
 notable exception emphasizes this silence. 
 Our keenest social satirist has not spared 
 the children. They are found in company 
 with the young American girl, and we feel 
 the sting of the lash which falls upon them. 
 Again the silence of art is noticeable. 
 There was so little art contemporaneous with 
 our greater literature, and the best of that 
 was so closely confined to landscape, that it 
 is all the more observable how meagre is the 
 show in our picture galleries of any history 
 of childhood. Now and then a portrait
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 237 
 
 appears, tlie child usually of the artist's 
 patron, but there is little sign that artists 
 seek in the life of children for subjects upon 
 which to expend thought and power. They 
 are not drawn to them, apparently, except 
 when they appear in some foreign guise as 
 beggars, where the picturesqueness of attire 
 offers the chief motive. 
 
 In illustration of this, I may be pardoned 
 if I mention my own experience when con- 
 ducting, a few years ago, an illustrated mag- 
 azine for young people. I did my best to 
 obtain pictures of child life from painters 
 who were not merely professional book-illus- 
 trators, and the only two that I succeeded 
 in securing were one by Mr. Lambdin, and 
 Mr. La Farge's design accompanying Brown- 
 ing's poem of The Pied Piper. On the 
 lower ground of illustrations of text, it was 
 only now and then that I was able to obtain 
 any simple, imaffected design, showing an 
 understanding of a child's figure and face. 
 It was commonly a young woman who was 
 most successful, and what her work gained 
 in genuineness it was apt to lose in correct- 
 ness of drawing. 
 
 I shall be told that matters have improved 
 since then, and shall be pointed to the cur-
 
 238 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 rent magazines of the same grade as the 
 Riverside. I am quite willing to concede 
 that the demand for work of this kind has 
 had the effect of stimulating designers, but 
 I maintain that the best illustrations in 
 these magazines are not those which directly 
 represent children. And when I say chil- 
 dren, I mean those in whom consciousness 
 is developed, not infants and toddlers, who 
 are often represented with as much clever- 
 ness as other small animals and pets. It is 
 more to the point that, while the introduc- 
 tion of processes and the substitution of 
 photography for direct drawing on the wood 
 have greatly enlarged the field from which 
 wood-cuts may be drawn, there is little, if 
 any, increase in the number of strong de- 
 signs illustrative of childhood. Formerly 
 the painter was deterred from contributing 
 designs by the slight mechanical difficulties 
 of drawing on boxwood. Unless he was in 
 the way of such work, he disliked laying his 
 brush down and taking up the pencil. Now 
 everything is done for him, and his painting 
 is translated by the engraver without the 
 necessity of any help from him. Yet how 
 rarely, with the magazines at hand to use 
 his paintings, does the painter voluntarily 
 seek such subjects !
 
 72V AMERICAN LITERARY ART 239 
 
 But if there is silence or scorn in great 
 literature, there is plenty of expression in 
 that minor literature which has sprung up, 
 apparently, in the interest of childhood. It 
 is here, in the books for young people, that 
 one may discover the most flagi-ant illustra- 
 tion of that spurious individuality in child- 
 hood which I have maintained to be conspic- 
 uous in our country. Any one who has 
 been compelled to make the acquaintance of 
 this literature must have observed how very 
 little parents and guardians figure in it, and 
 how completely children are separated from 
 their elders. The most popular books for 
 the young are those which represent boys 
 and girls as seeking their fortune, working 
 out their own schemes, driving railway 
 trains and steamboats it may be, managing 
 farms, or engaged in adventures which elicit 
 all their uncommon heroism. The same 
 tendency is exhibited in less exaggerated 
 form : children in the schoolroom, or at 
 play, forming clubs amongst themselves, 
 having their own views upon all conceivable 
 subjects, torturing the English language 
 without rebuke, opening correspondence 
 with newspapers and magazines, starting 
 newspapers and magazines of their own,
 
 240 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 organizing, setting up miniature society, — 
 this is the general spectacle to be observed 
 in books for young people, and the parent 
 or two, now and then visible, is as much in 
 the background as the child was in earlier 
 literature. 
 
 All this is more or less a reflection of 
 actual life, and as such has an unconscious 
 value. I would not press its significance 
 too far, but I think it points to a serious de- 
 fect in our society life. This very ephem- 
 eral literature is symptomatic of a condi- 
 tion of things, rather than causative. It has 
 not nearly so much influence on young life 
 as it is itself the natural concomitant of a 
 maladjustment of society, and the correc- 
 tive will be found only as a healthier social 
 condition is reached. The disintegration of 
 the family, through a feeble sense of the 
 sacredness of marriage, is an evil which is 
 not to be remedied by any specific of law or 
 literature, but so long as it goes on it inevi- 
 tably affects literature. 
 
 I venture to make two modest suggestions 
 toward the solution of these larger problems 
 into the discussion of which our subject has 
 led me. One is for those who are busy with 
 the production of books for young people.
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 241 
 
 Consider if it be not possible to report the 
 activity and comradery of the young in 
 closer and more generous association with 
 the life of their elders. The spectacle of a 
 healthy family life, in which children move 
 freely and joyously, is not so rare as to make 
 models hard to be found, and one would do 
 a great service to young America who should 
 bring back the wise mother and father into 
 juvenile literature. 
 
 Again, next to a purified and enriched 
 literature of this sort is a thorough subordi- 
 nation of it. The separation of a class of 
 books for the use of the young specifically is 
 not now to be avoided, but in the thought- 
 lessness with which it has been accepted as 
 the only literature for the young a great 
 wrong has been inflicted. The lean cattle 
 have devoured the fat. I have great faith 
 in the power of noble literature when 
 brought into simple contact with the child's 
 mind, always assuming that it is the litera- 
 ture which deals with elemental feeling, 
 thought, and action which is so presented. 
 I think the solution of the problem which 
 vexes us will be found not so much in the 
 writing of good books for children as in the 
 wise choice of those parts of the world's lit-
 
 242 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 erature which contain an appeal to the 
 child's nature and understanding. It is not 
 the books written expressly for children so 
 much as it is the books written out of minds 
 which have not lost their childhood that are 
 to form the body of literature which shall 
 be classic for the young. As Mr. Ruskin 
 rightly says, "The greatest books contain 
 food foi; all ages, and an intelligent and 
 rightly bred youth or girl ought to enjoy 
 much even in Plato by the time they are fif- 
 teen or sixteen." 
 
 It may fairly be asked how we shall per- 
 suade children to read classic literature. It 
 is a partial answer to say, Read it to them 
 yourself. If we woidd only consider the sub- 
 tle strengthening of ties which comes from 
 two people reading the same book together, 
 breathing at once its breath, -and each giving 
 the other unconsciously his interpretation of 
 it, it would be seen how in this simple habit 
 of reading aloud lies a power too fine for 
 analysis, yet stronger than iron in welding 
 souls together. To my thinking there is no 
 academy on earth equal to that found in 
 many homes of a mother reading to her 
 child. 
 
 There is, however, a vast organization in-
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 243 
 
 elusive of eliildhood to which we may justly 
 commit the task of familiarizing children 
 with great literature, and of giving them a 
 distaste for ignoble books. There is no 
 other time of life than that embraced by the 
 common-school course so fit for introduction 
 to the highest, finest literature of the world. 
 Our schools are too much given over to the 
 acquisition of knowledge. What they need 
 is to recognize the power which lies in en- 
 lightenment. In the susceptible period of 
 youth we must introduce through the me- 
 dium of literature the light which will give 
 the eye the precious power of seeing. But 
 look at the apparatus now in use. Look at 
 the reading-books which are given to chil- 
 dien in the mechanical system of grading. 
 Is this feast of scraps really the best we can 
 offer for the intellectual and spiritual nour- 
 ishment of the young ? What do these books 
 teach the child of reading? They supply 
 him with the power to read print at sight, 
 to pronounce accurately the several words 
 that meet the eye, and to know the time 
 value of the several marks of punctuation ; 
 but they no more make readers of children 
 than an accordeon supplies one with the 
 power to appreciate and enjoy a sonata of 
 Beethoven.
 
 244 CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE 
 
 I do not object to intelligent drill, but I 
 maintain tliat in our schools it bears little 
 or no relation to the actual use of the power 
 of reading. The best of the education of 
 children is not their ability to take up the 
 daily newspaper or the monthly magazine 
 after they leave school, but their interest in 
 good literature and their power to read it 
 with apprehension if not comprehension. 
 This can be taught in school. Not only so, 
 it ought to be taught, for unless the child's 
 mind is plainly set in this direction, it is 
 very unlikely that he will find the way for 
 himself. I look, therefore, with the great- 
 est interest upon that movement in our pub- 
 lic schools which tends to bring the great lit- 
 erature before children. 
 
 The study of childhood in literature has 
 led insensibly to observations on literature 
 for children. The two subjects are not far 
 apart, for both testify to the same fact, that 
 in the growth of human life there has been 
 an irregular but positive advance, and a 
 profounder perception of the rights and du- 
 ties involved in personality. 
 
 What may lie in the future I will not ven- 
 ture to predict, but it is quite safe to say
 
 IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 245 
 
 that the form in which childhood is presented 
 will still depend upon the sympathy of im- 
 aginative writers with the ideal of childhood, 
 and that the form of literature for children 
 will be determined by the greater or less care 
 with which society guards the sanctity of 
 childish life.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Admetus, 19, 20. 
 
 MaeoB, 31, 32. 
 
 ^neid, childhood in the, 31, 
 32. 
 
 Agamemnon, belief in, not de- 
 pendent on the spade, 6. 
 
 Alice Fell, 3, 147. 
 
 Alkeslis, a scene from the, 19, 
 20. 
 
 Amelia, Fielding's, 135. 
 
 Amor, the myth of, 36-38 ; as 
 
 treated by Raphael, 99 ; in the 
 
 . Elizabethan lullabies, 116, 117 ; 
 
 in Shakespeare, 124 ; in Thor- 
 
 waldsen's art, 201. 
 
 Anchises, 31. 
 
 Ancient Leaves, cited, 31, 33. 
 
 Andersen, Hans Christian, the 
 unifiue contribution of, to lit- 
 erature, 201 ; the distinction 
 between his stories and fairy 
 tales, 202 ; tlie basis of his 
 fame, 207 ; the life of his cre- 
 ations, 208 ; their relation to 
 human beings, 209 ; the spring 
 in liis stories, 211 ; his satires, 
 212 ; the deeper experience in 
 them, 213 ; his essential child- 
 ishness, 214 ; his place with 
 novelists, 215; his interpreta- 
 tion of childhood, 216. 
 
 Andromache, the parting of, with 
 Hector, 11, 12 ; the scene com- 
 pared witli one in tlie (Edipus 
 Tyrannus, 16-18 ; and con- 
 trasted with Virgil, 31. 
 
 Angels of children, 144, 145. 
 
 Anna the prophetess, 47. 
 
 Anthology, the Greek, 28-30. 
 
 Antigone, 18. 
 
 Apocryphal Gospels, the legends 
 of the, 57-64. 
 
 Art, American, as it relates to 
 children, 237, 238. 
 
 Art, modem, the foible of, 38. 
 
 Arthur, in King John, 120. 
 
 Ascanius, 31, 32. 
 
 Askbert, 68, 69. 
 
 Astyanax, 11 ; a miniature Hec- 
 tor, 14. 
 
 AtUinlic Monthly, The, cited, 
 34. 
 
 Austin, Alfred, cited, 38. 
 
 Ballads relating to children, 106- 
 108 ; cliaracteristics of, 113. 
 
 Barbauld, Mrs., 173 ; her relation 
 to the literature of childhood, 
 175 ; Coleridge and Lamb on, 
 174. 
 
 Bathsheba's child, 42. 
 
 Beatrice, first seen by Dante, 
 77. 
 
 Better Land, The, 222. 
 
 Bible, the truth of the, not de- 
 pendent on external witness, 
 6 ; the university to many in 
 modern times, 41, 42. 
 
 Blake, William, 163-165. 
 
 Boccaccio, 79. 
 
 Browning, Robert, as an inter- 
 preter of Greek life, 27 ; his 
 Pied Piper, 237. 
 
 Bryant, William CuUen, 217. 
 
 Bunyan, childhood in, 129-133. 
 
 Byzantine type of the Madonna, 
 83,84. 
 
 Catullus, 33. 
 
 Chapman's translation of Homer, 
 quoted, 8, 9, 10, 16 ; the quality 
 of his defects, 9, 10. 
 
 Chaucer's treatment of child- 
 hood, 108-111 ; compared with 
 the Madonna in art, 113. 
 
 Childhood, discovered at the 
 close of the last century, 4 ; 
 in literature as related to lit- 
 erature for children, 4 ; in 
 Greek life, how attested, 7 ;
 
 248 
 
 INDEX 
 
 indirect reference to it in 
 Homer, 8-11 ; tlie direct refer- 
 ence, 11, 12 ; in the Greek tra- 
 gedians, lC-21 ; in Plato, 22- 
 26 ; in tlie Greek Anthology, 
 29, 30; in Virgil, 31, 32; con- 
 ception of, in Roman litera- 
 ture, 32, 33 ; in Catullus, 33 ; 
 In epitaphs, 33, 34 ; in Lucre- 
 tius, 34 ; in Juvenal, 35 ; in 
 classic conception of the su- 
 pernatural, 34-36 ; in the myth 
 of Amor, 36-38; in Old Tes- 
 tament literature, 42-46 ; in 
 New Testament literature, 48, 
 49 ; attitude of the Saviour 
 toward, 49 ; as a sign of his- 
 tory, 52 ; in the legends of the 
 Apocryphal Gospels, 57-64 ; of 
 saints, 65-71 ; under the form- 
 ing power of Christianity, 73 ; 
 in Dante, 75-78 ; in the rep- 
 resentations of the Holy 
 Family, 83-87 ; in the art of 
 the northern peoples, 87-92 ; 
 in the Madonnas of Raphael, 
 92-98 ; in Raphael's Amor, 98, 
 99 ; in his representations of 
 children generally, 100, 101 ; 
 in the art of Luca della Rob- 
 bia, 101, 102 ; its elemental 
 force the same in all litera^ 
 tures, 105 ; in ballad literature, 
 106-108 ; in Chaucer, 108-111 ; 
 its character in early English 
 literature, 112, 113; in Spen- 
 ser, 114, 115 ; in the lighter 
 strains of Elizabethan litera^ 
 ture, 116, 117 ; in Shakespeare, 
 117-126 ; its absence in Milton, 
 127, 128 ; how regarded in 
 Puritanism, 128, 129 ; in Bun- 
 yan, 129-133; in Pope, 133, 
 134 ; in Fielding, 135 ; in Gray, 
 135-137 ; in Goldsmith, 137- 
 140 ; in Cowper, 140, 141 ; in 
 the art of Reynolds and Gains- 
 borough, 141, 142; in Words- 
 worth, 144-157 ; in De Quincey, 
 158-162; in William Blake, 
 163-105; in Dickens, 165-170; 
 in Paul and Virginia, 181-183 ; 
 in Lamartine, 184-186 ; in 
 Michelet de Musset, and Vic- 
 tor Hugo, 186, 187 ; in German 
 sentiment, 189 ; illustrated by 
 
 Luther, 190, 191 ; in Richter, 
 191, 192; in Goethe, 194-196; 
 in Froebel's system, 197, 198 ; 
 in Overbeck's art, 199, 200 ; in 
 Hans Christian Andersen, 201- 
 216 ; in Emerson, Bryant, Low- 
 ell, and Holmes, 217, 218; in 
 Whittier, 218, 219; in Long- 
 fellow, 219-222 ; mistakenly 
 presented in sentimental verse, 
 222-225; in Hawthorne, 225- 
 234. 
 
 Child-Life in Poetry, 219. 
 
 Child-Life in Prose, 219. 
 
 Children, books for, the begin- 
 ning of, 171, 172 ; the char- 
 acteristics of this beginning, 
 173 ; their revolutionary char- 
 acter, 174 ; the sincerity of 
 the early books, 175 ; the union 
 of the didactic and artistic in, 
 177 ; a new branch of litera- 
 ture, 177, 178 ; art in connec- 
 tion with, 179. 
 
 Children's Hour, The, 220. 
 
 Child's Last Will, The, 106. 
 
 Christ, the childhood of, 48 ; his 
 scenes with children, 48, 49 ; 
 his attitude toward childhood, 
 49-52 ; an eflScient cause of 
 the imagination, 55 ; legends 
 of, in the Apocryphal Gospels, 
 57-64 ; his symbolic use of tlie 
 child, 81 ; his infancy the sub- 
 ject of art, 82 ; especially in 
 Netherlands, 89 ; his words il- 
 lustrative of human history, 
 102. 
 
 Christianity and French senti- 
 ment, 182. 
 
 Christianity, living and struc- 
 tural, 53 ; its supersedure of 
 ancient life, 54 ; its germinal 
 truth, 55 ; its operative imagi- 
 nation, 56 ; its care of cliildren, 
 especially orphans, 73 ; its of- 
 fice of organization, 74 ; its in- 
 fluence on the family, 75 ; its 
 insistence on death, 79 ; in 
 what its power consists, 81 ; 
 its ideals, 82 ; its type in the 
 Madonna, 83 ; does not inter- 
 fere with elemental facts, 105. 
 
 Christmas in Germany, 189. 
 
 Cimabue, 84. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, OB
 
 INDEX 
 
 249 
 
 Mrs. Barbauld, 176 ; on Christ- 
 mas ill Germany, 189. 
 
 Comus, 127. 
 
 Confidences, Les, 184. 
 
 Coriolanus, 118. 
 
 Cornelius, 88. 
 
 Courtship of Miles Siandish, 
 The, 22G. 
 
 Cowper, William, 140, 141. 
 
 Cruel Mother, The, ballad of, 106. 
 
 Cupid aud Psyche, 36. 
 
 Danae, the, of Euripides, 20 ; of 
 Simonides, 30. 
 
 Dante, childhood in, 75-78. 
 
 Day, Tliomas, author of Sanford 
 and Merton, 3. 
 
 Death of children, how regarded 
 by Dickens, 167 ; by Words- 
 worth, 168. 
 
 Democracy revealed in the 
 French Revolution, 143. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, reflections 
 of, on his childhood, 158-162. 
 
 Deserted Village, The, 137. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, his naturali- 
 zation of the poor in litera- 
 ture, 165 ; his report of child- 
 hood, 166 ; the children created 
 by, 166-170 ; compared with 
 Wordsworth, 168, 1<;9. 
 
 Distant Prospect of Eton College, 
 On a, 136. 
 
 Dollirer Romance, The, 234. 
 
 Doyle, Richard, 179. 
 
 Draraa, children in, 20. 
 
 Dying Child, The, 222. 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria, and Words- 
 worth, 174. 
 
 Edward Fane's Rosebud, 231. 
 
 Elegy, Gray's, 135, 136. 
 
 Elijah, the prophet, 42 ; the inci- 
 dent of the boys and, 43. 
 
 Elisha, 43. 
 
 Elizabethan era, characteristics 
 of, 113, 116. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 217. 
 
 English race, characteristics of 
 tiie, exemplified in literature, 
 111-113. 
 
 Eros, the myth of, 36-38. 
 
 Erotion, 34. 
 
 Essay on Man, The, 134. 
 
 Euripides, in his view of chil- 
 dren, 19 ; examples from, 20. 
 
 Evangeline, 226. 
 Excursion, The, 151, 152. 
 
 Fables, Andersen's stories dis- 
 tinguished from, 210, 211. 
 
 Faery Queen, The, 114, 115. 
 
 Fairy-tales, Andersen's stories 
 distinguished from, 202 ; the 
 origin of, 203 ; fading out from 
 modern literature, 204 ; upon 
 the stage, 204, 205 ; the scien- 
 tific fairy-tale, 206. 
 
 F^nelon, 180. 
 
 Fielding, Henry, in his Amelia, 
 135. 
 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 27. 
 
 Flaxman, John, his illustration 
 of Homer in outline, 12. 
 
 French literature as regards 
 childhood, 180-188. 
 
 French Revolution, the, a sign 
 of regeneration, 52 ; a day of 
 judgment, 142 ; the name for 
 an epoch, 143; synchronous 
 with a revelation of childhood, 
 144 ; its connection with Eng- 
 lish literature, 162 ; the erup- 
 tion of poverty in, 165. 
 
 Froebel's kindergarten system, 
 197, 198. 
 
 Fiom my Arm Chair, 220, 221. 
 
 Gainsborough, Thomas, 141. 
 
 Gascoigne, George, 117. 
 
 Gentle Boy, The, 231. 
 
 Germanic peoples, home-culti- 
 vating, 88. 
 
 German literature and childhood, 
 188-198. 
 
 Giotto, 84. 
 
 Goethe, compared with Richter 
 as regards memory of child- 
 hood, 194 ; his Mignon, 194 ; 
 his indebtedness to the Vicar 
 of Wiikefield, 195 ; his Sorrows 
 of Werther, 195 ; compared 
 with Lutlier, 196. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, avant-courier 
 of Wordsworth, 3 ; the precur- 
 sor of the poets of childhood, 
 
 137 ; his position in literature, 
 
 138 ; his Vicar of Wakefield, 
 138-140. 
 
 Goody Two Shoes, 3. 
 Grandfather's Chair, 225. 
 Gray, Thomas, 135-137.
 
 250 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Gray, Thomas, borrowing possi- 
 bly from Martial, 34. 
 
 Greece, life in ancient, how illus- 
 trated, 7 ; silence of the child 
 in the art of, 21 ; our relation 
 to, 21 ; modern interpretations 
 of, 27, 28 ; compared with 
 Rome, 31 ; compared with Ju- 
 daea, 42. 
 
 Greenaway, Kate, 179. 
 
 Greene, Robert, 117. 
 
 Greenwell, Dora, her poem, A 
 Story by the Fire, an example 
 of peruicioiis literature, 222- 
 225. 
 
 Grimm, the brothers, 207. 
 
 Hannah, the song of, 44, 47. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, the most 
 abundant of American authors 
 in his treatment of childhood, 
 225 ; his use of New England 
 history, 226 ; his rendering of 
 Greek myths, 226, 227 ; his ob- 
 servation of childhood, 228, 
 229 ; his relation to children, 
 229, 230 ; his apologue in The 
 Snow-Image, 232 ; children in 
 his romances, 232, 233 ; his 
 Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, 
 233, 234; his Pansie in The 
 Dolliver Romance, 234. 
 
 Hebrew life, in its influence on 
 modern thought, 39-41 ; the 
 child in, 46, 47 ; its transfor- 
 mation into Christianity, 47, 
 48, 53. 
 
 Hector parting with Andro- 
 mache, 11, 12 ; face to face 
 with Ajax, 14 ; comforts his 
 wife, 16, 17. 
 
 Hemans, Felicia, 222. 
 
 Hen and chickens, in the Bible 
 and Shakespeare, 122. 
 
 Herakles, 36. 
 
 Hermes, 36. 
 
 Hiawatha, "iflX. 
 
 Hilarion, 67. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 218. 
 
 Holy Family, the child in the, 
 83 ; character of the early type 
 of the, 83 ; emblematic of do- 
 mesticity, 86, 87. 
 
 Homer, authenticity of the le- 
 gend of, supposed to be proved 
 by Schliemann, 6 ; a better 
 
 preserver of Greek womanhood 
 than antiquaries, 7 ; the value 
 of his similes, 7, 8 ; passages in 
 illustration of his indirect ref- 
 erence to childhood, 8-11 ; the 
 elemental character of, 12 ; the 
 peril of commenting on, 13 ; 
 the nurse in, 14 ; his view of 
 childhood, 15 ; compared with 
 that of the tragedians, 16-18 ; 
 with that of Virgil, 31, 32. 
 
 Hosea, quoted, 44. 
 
 House of the Seven Gables, The, 
 232, 233. 
 
 Hubert, 120. 
 
 Hugh of Lincoln, 108. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 187. 
 
 Iliad, the swarm of bees in the, 
 8 ; the passage describing the 
 brushing away of a fly, 9 ; the 
 ass belabored by a pack of 
 boys, 9 ; Achilles chiding Pa- 
 troclos, 10 ; Hector parting 
 with Andromache, 11, 12 ; stat- 
 uesque scenes in, 12. 
 
 Imaginary Conversations, 
 quoted, 153. 
 
 Imagination, the, abnormal ac- 
 tivity of, in early Christianity, 
 54 ; the direction of its new 
 force, 56, 57. 
 
 Intimations of Immortality, 154, 
 156, 157. 
 
 Irving, Washington, 217. 
 
 Isaiah, quoted, 45. 
 
 Ishmael, 42. 
 
 Ismene, 18. 
 
 Jacob, the two wives of, 44. 
 
 James, Henry, alluded to, 236. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 169. 
 
 Jerusalem, the entry into, 49, 52. 
 
 John the Baptist, 81. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 37. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, Vemis' Runaway 
 
 of, 116. 
 Jowett, Benjamin, translation 
 
 by, 22-26. 
 Juvenal, 35, 227. 
 
 Kenwulf of Wessex, 68. 
 
 Kindergarten, the, fortified by 
 reference to Plato, 24 ; in con- 
 nection with politics, 197, 
 198.
 
 INDEX 
 
 251 
 
 King John, 119, 120. 
 Kriss Kringle, 189. 
 
 Lafarge, John, 237. 
 
 i' Allegro, 127. 
 
 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 184- 
 186. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, on Mrs. Bar- 
 b.aiild's work, 176, 177 ; his and 
 his sister's books, 177. 
 
 Lambdiu, George C, 237. 
 
 Lamkin, the ball.ad of, 107, 108. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, remark 
 of, on children, 153. 
 
 Laokoon, 21. 
 
 Laws, Plato's, cited, 22, 24, 25. 
 
 Legends of the Madonna, 89. 
 
 Leslie, C. R., on Raphael's chil- 
 dren, 100. 
 
 Lindsay, Lord, quoted, 88. 
 
 Lines on the Receipt of my Mo- 
 tiler's Picture, 141, 142. 
 
 Literature for children in the 
 United States, 235, 230 ; some 
 of its tendencies, 239, 240,; 
 measures for its enrichment, 
 240. 
 
 Literature, the source of know- 
 ledge, 7 ; of Christendom, the 
 exposition of tlie conception of 
 the Christ, 50 ; inaction in, 54 ; 
 fallacy in the study of the de- 
 velopment of, 104 ; its bounds 
 enlarged, 103. 
 
 Little Annie's Ramble, 231. 
 
 Little Daffvdou-ndilly, 231. 
 
 Little Girl's Lament, The, 222. 
 
 lyittle People of the Snou; 217. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
 childhood in the writings of, 
 219-221. 
 
 Love, the figure of, in classic and 
 modern art, 37. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 217. 
 
 Loyola, 91. 
 
 Luca della Robbia, the children 
 of, 101. 
 
 Lucretius, 34, 35. 
 
 Lucy Gray, 3, 148. 
 
 Luther, Martin, an exponent of 
 Oerman character, 190 ; his 
 treatment of childhood, 190. 
 
 Macbeth, 121, 123. 
 Madonna, development of the, 
 84-87 ; treatment of by Ra- 
 
 phael, 92-98 ; a domestic sub. 
 ject, 98. 
 
 Magnificat, The, 44, 47. 
 
 Man of Law's Tale, The, 110. 
 
 Marcius, 118. 
 
 Martial, 34. 
 
 Martin, Theodore, translation by, 
 33. 
 
 Mary, the Virgin, legends con- 
 cerning, in the Apocryplial 
 Gospel.s, 58-60 ; her childhood, 
 65 ; her appearance in early 
 art, 83 ; her motherhood, 84 ; 
 her relation to Jesus, 85. 
 
 May Queen, The, 222. 
 
 Medea, The, cited, 19. 
 
 Menaphon, 117. 
 
 Mercurius, 36. 
 
 Messiah, Pope's, 133, 134. 
 
 Michelet, 186. 
 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, 124. 
 
 Millais, John Everett, 179. 
 
 Milton, John, quoted, 46; the 
 absence of childhood in, 127, 
 
 128 ; compared with Bunyan, 
 
 129 ; with Pope, 133. 
 Moses, 42. 
 
 Moth, Shakespeare's, 118. 
 Mozley, T. E., quoted, 190, 191, 
 
 235. 
 Musset, Alfred de, 186. 
 My Lost Youth, 221. 
 
 Netherland family life, pictured 
 in the life of our Lord, 89- 
 92. 
 
 New Testament, childhood in 
 the, 47-52. 
 
 Nicodemus, 50. 
 
 Niebuhr, B. G.,28. 
 
 Norton, Charles Eliot, transla- 
 tion by, 78. 
 
 Note-Books, Hawthorne's, 228, 
 229. 
 
 Nurse, the, in Greek life, 14 ; in 
 the Odyssey, 14, 15. 
 
 Ode on the Morning of Christ's 
 
 Nativity, 127, 133. 
 Odysseus and his nurse, 15. 
 Odyssey, memorable incidents in 
 
 the, i4, 1.5. 
 (Edij)us Tt/rannvs contrasted 
 
 with the Piad, 16-18. 
 Old Testament, childhood in the, 
 
 42-46.
 
 252 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Our Old Home, 230. 
 Overbeck, 88, 199-201. 
 
 Palmer, George Herbert, as a 
 translator of Homer, 28. 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 226. 
 
 Pater, Walter, quoted, 79. 
 
 Patient Griselda, 111. 
 
 Paul and Virginia, representa- 
 tive of innocent childliood, 
 180 ; an escape from the world, 
 181 ; an attempt at the pres- 
 ervation of childhood, 183. 
 
 Pet Lamb, The, 149. 
 
 Pheidias, 26, 28. 
 
 Pied Piper, The, 237. 
 
 Pilgrirn's Progress, The, 130- 
 133. 
 
 Plato, references of,to childhood, 
 22-26 ; compared with artists, 
 26 ; can be read by children, 
 242. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 133; compared 
 with Milton, 133, 134; with 
 Shakespeare, 134. 
 
 Prelude, The, 151. 
 
 Princess, The, 170. 
 
 Puritanism, the attitude of, to- 
 ward childhood, 128, 129. 
 
 Queen's Marie, the ballad of the, 
 106. 
 
 Raphael, an exponent of the idea 
 of his time, 92 ; the Madonnas 
 of, 92 ; in the Berlin Museum, 
 93 ; Casa Connestabile, 93 ; del 
 Cardellino, 93 ; at St. Peters- 
 burg, 93 ; della Casa Tempi, 
 94 ; at Bridgewater, 95 ; del 
 Passegio, 90 ; San Sisto, 97, 98 ; 
 treatment by, of Amor, 99 ; his 
 children, 100. 
 
 Reaper and the Flowers, The, 
 220, 222. 
 
 Renaissance, the spirit of the, in 
 Raphael's work, 98 ; childhood 
 in its relation to the, 102. 
 
 Republic, Plato's, cited, 23. 
 
 Resignation, 220. 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 141, 142. 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, 
 autobiography of, 191 ; early 
 birth of consciousness in, 
 192 ; compared with Goethe, 
 194. 
 
 Riverside Magazine for Young 
 
 People, The, 237, 238. 
 Roman literature, childhood in, 
 
 31-38. 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 180, 
 
 182, 184. 
 Ruskin, John, 242. 
 
 Samuel, 42. 
 
 Sanford and Merton, 3. 
 
 Sarah, tlie laugh of, 44. 
 
 Scarlet Letter, The, 233, 234. 
 
 Schliemann, Dr., 6. 
 
 School, gn^eat literature in, 242. 
 
 Sella, 217. 
 
 Sellar, John Y., quoted, 35. 
 
 Sentiment, French and German, 
 as seen by the English and 
 American, 188. 
 
 Shadow, A, 220. 
 
 Shakespeare, childhood in, 117 ; 
 limitations of the exhibition, 
 117, 118; his Moth, 118; his 
 Coriolanus, 118,119; his^m^ 
 John, 119, 120; his Tiius An- 
 dronicus, 120, 121 ; his Mac- 
 beth, 121 ; his Richard III., 
 122 ; random passages in, re- 
 lating to childhood, 123-125; 
 reasons for the scanty refer- 
 ence, 125, 126 ; compared with 
 Pope, 134. 
 
 Shunamite, the, 43. 
 
 Simeon, 47. 
 
 Simonides, 20 ; quoted, 30. 
 
 Sketches of the History of Chris- 
 tian Art, 88. 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, translation by, 
 20. 
 
 Snow-Bound, 218. 
 
 Snow-Image, The, 232. 
 
 Solitude, the, of childhood, 160- 
 162. 
 
 Songs of Innocence, 164. 
 
 Sophocles, the CEdipus Tyran- 
 nus of, 16. 
 
 Sparrows, the story of the mi- 
 raculous, 61, 62. 
 
 Spectator, The, a writer in, 
 quoted, 38. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, his Faery 
 Queen, 114, 115. 
 
 Statins, 33. 
 
 Story by t/ie Fire, A, an example 
 of what a poem for a child 
 should not be, 222-225.
 
 INDEX 
 
 253 
 
 Siipematuraltsm in ancient liter- 
 ature, 35, 36. 
 
 Suspiria de Profundis, 158-162. 
 
 Swedenborg, a saying of, 142. 
 
 Syinonds, Jolm Addiugton, trans- 
 lation by, 20. 
 
 S. Bernard, 76, 77. 
 
 S. Catlierine, 65. 
 
 S. Christina, 70. 
 
 8. Elizabeth of Hungary, 65, 
 6G. 
 
 S. Francis of Assisi, 71, 72. 
 
 8. Genevieve, 66. 
 
 8. Gregory Nazianzen, 66. 
 
 8. John Chrysostom, 66. 
 
 8. Kenelon, 68-70. 
 
 8t. Pierre, Bemardin, 180-183. 
 
 Tanagra figurines, 28. 
 
 Tanglewood Tales, 226. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, makes a hero- 
 ine of tlie babe, 170 ; his May 
 Queen, 222. 
 
 Thompson, D'Arcy W., transla- 
 tion by, 31, 33. 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 217. 
 
 Thorwaldsen, 37, 201. 
 
 Tirocinium, 140. 
 
 Titus Andronicus, 120, 121. 
 
 To a Child, 220. 
 
 Translations, the great, of the 
 Elizabethan era, 116. 
 
 Twice- Tuld Tales, 231. 
 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
 124. 
 
 Ugly Duckling, The, 213 ; com- 
 pared with The Snow-Image, 
 232. 
 
 Ugolino, Count, 76. 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 3, 137- 
 140, 142. 
 
 Village Blacksmith, The, 221. 
 
 Virgil, contrasted with Homer, 
 31, 32 ; his treatment of child- 
 hood, 32. 
 
 Virgilia, 118, 119. 
 
 Volumnia, 118, 119. 
 
 We are Seven, 168-224. 
 
 Weariness, 220, 221. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, child 
 hood in the writings of, 218, 
 219. 
 
 Wonder-Book, Hawthorne's, 226, 
 227, 232. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, the cre- 
 ator of Alice Fell and Lucy 
 Gray, 3; quoted, 3; tlie ridi- 
 cule of his Lyrical Ballads, 
 145 ; his defensive Preface, 
 145-147 ; his apology for Alice 
 Fell, 147, 148 ; his poem of 
 Lucy Gray, 148, 149 ; his poem 
 of The Pet Lamb, 149, 150; 
 his treatment of incidents of 
 childhood, 150; the first to 
 treat the cliild as an individ- 
 ual, 151 ; his draft on his own 
 experience, 152 ; his poetic in- 
 terpretation of childhood, 153- 
 156 ; his ode, Intimations of 
 Immortality, 156, 157 ; hia 
 treatment of death, 168 ; liis 
 We are Seven contrasted with 
 A Story of the Fire, 224, 225. 
 
 Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 221. 
 
 Zarephath, the widow of, 42. 
 Zechariah, quoted, 45.
 
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