Childhood in literature and art, with some observations on literature for children

by Horace Elisha Scudder

I

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

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

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

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

“‘What wish leav’st thou thy step-mother

Little daughter dear?’

‘Of hell the bitter sorrow

Sweet step-mother mine

For ah, all! I am so ill, ah!’

“‘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 fause nourice sang

Till frae ilkae bore o’ the cradle

The red blood out sprang.

“Then out it spak the ladie

As she stood on the stair,

‘What ails my bairn, nourice,

That he’s greeting sae sair?

“‘O still my bairn, nourice

O still him wi’ the pap!’

‘He winna still, lady,

For this nor for that.’

“‘O still my bairn, nourice;

O still him wi’ the wand!’

‘He winna still, lady,

For a’ his father’s land.’

“‘O still my bairn, nourice,

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 piteous tale. The story of Hugh of Lincoln—that in the reign of Henry III., the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy of eight years, named Hugh, tortured and crucified him—was received with great credit, for it concentrated the venomous enmity with which Christians regarded the Jews, and by a refinement of cruelty pictured the Jews in a solitary instance as behaving in a Christian-like manner. Chaucer tells the story with exquisite pathos, lingering upon the childish ways of Hugh, and preparing the tears of his readers by picturing the little boy as a miniature saint. It can scarcely be called a picture of artless childhood; for though touches here and there bring out the prattler, Chaucer appears to have meant that his readers should be especially impressed by the piety of this “litel clergeoun,” or chorister boy:—

“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 through the Jews’ quarter:—

“As I have seyd, thurgh-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 syngyng 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 faste

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.

“And up she rist, and walketh doun the stronde

Toward the ship,—hir folweth al the prees,—

And evere she preyeth hire child to hold his pees.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,

When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.

The wanton smiled, father wept,

Mother cried, baby leapt,

More thou crowed, more he cried,

Nature could not sorrow hide;

He must go, he must kiss

Child and mother, baby 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 account for the absence of the young. Girls were not allowed to act in Shakespeare’s time, and it is not easy to reduce boys capable of acting to the stature of young girls. More than this, boys and girls are not themselves dramatic in action, though in the more modern drama they are sometimes used, especially in domestic scenes, to heighten effects, and to make most reasonable people wish them in bed.

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

“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’ll run away till I am bigger, but then I’ll fight.”

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

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

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

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

“Vol. One on ’s father’s moods.

“Val. Indeed, la, ’tis a noble child.

“Vir. A crack, madam.”

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

“I’ll go with thee

And find the inheritance of this poor child,

His little kingdom of a forced grave.”

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

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

“Come hither, boy; come, come, and learn of us

To melt in showers: thy grandsire loved thee well:

Many a matter hath he told to thee,

Meet and agreeing with thine infancy;

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 ’tis to love the babe that milks 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 infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has stolen his mate and pretty brood.

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

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

“Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn

To do this ruthless piece of butchery,

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 O! the devil’—there the villain stopp’d;

Whilst 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. Ægeon, 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 passages and lines which touch lightly or significantly the realm of childhood: as,—

“Pity like a naked, new-born babe;”

“’Tis the eye of childhood

That fears a painted devil,”

in Macbeth;

“Love is like a child

That longs for every thing that he can come by;”

“How wayward is this foolish 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 Midsummer-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 hung over the greenwood, and he fell to thinking of the round world and all that dwell therein, the Seven Ages of Man passed in procession before him:—

“At first the infant

Muling 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 would have associated, not with children, but with young men. His marriage as a mere lad and the scanty legends of his youth all tend in the same direction. The course of his life led him to live apart from his children in their youth; his busy life in London brought him into the interior of but few families; his son, of whom he saw but little, died young. If our supposition be true, it is a pathetic thought that the great dramatist was shut out from the one kind of companionship which, even while it is in no degree intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental powers, can take delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect far more matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.”[32]

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

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

“Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein

Afford a present to the Infant God?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Then said Samuel,” who is as communicative as most younger brothers, “‘Mother, mother, what was that which my brother did gather up and eat, so soon as we were come from the Gate that is at the head of this way? You know that there was an orchard on the left hand, on the other side of the wall, and some of the trees hung over the wall, and my brother did plash and did eat.’

“‘True, my child,’ said Christiana, ‘he did take thereof and did eat, naughty boy as he was. I did chide him, and yet he would eat thereof.’” So Mr. Skill, the physician, proceeds to make a purge. “You know,” says Bunyan, in a sly parenthesis, “physicians give strange medicines to their patients.” “And it was made up,” he goes on, “into pills, with a promise or two, and a proportionable quantity of salt. Now he was to take them three at a time, fasting, in half a quarter of a pint of Tears of Repentance. When this Portion was prepared and brought to the boy, he was loth to take it, though torn with the gripes as if he should be pulled in pieces. ‘Come, come,’ said the physician, ‘you must take it.’ ‘It goes against my stomach,’ said the boy. ‘I must have you take it,’ said his mother. ‘I shall vomit it up again,’ said the boy. ‘Pray, sir,’ said Christiana to Mr. Skill, ‘how does it taste?’ ‘It has no ill taste,’ said the doctor, and with that she touched one of the pills with the tip of her tongue. ‘O Matthew,’ said she, ‘this Portion is sweeter than honey. If thou lovest thy mother, if thou lovest thy brothers, if thou lovest Mercy, if thou lovest thy life, take it.’ So with much ado, after a short prayer for the blessing of God upon it, he took it, and it wrought kindly with him. It caused him to purge, it caused him to sleep and rest quietly, it put him into a fine heat and breathing sweat, and did quite rid him of his gripes.”

The story is dotted with these lifelike incidents, and the consistency is rather in the basis of the allegory than in the allegory itself. In truth, we get in the Pilgrim’s Progress an inimitable picture of social life in the lower middle class of England, and in this second part a very vivid glimpse of a Puritan household. The glimpse is corrective of a too stern and formal apprehension of social Puritanism, and in the story are exhibited the natural charms and graces which not only could not be expelled by a stern creed, but were essentially connected with the lofty ideals which made Puritanism a mighty force in history. Bunyan had a genius for story-telling, and his allegory is very frank; but what he showed as well as what he did not show in his picture of Christiana and the children indicates the constraint which rested upon the whole Puritan conception of childhood. It is seen at its best in Bunyan, and this great Puritan poet of common life found a place for it in his survey of man’s estate; nature asserted itself in spite of and through Puritanism.

Milton’s Christmas Hymn has the organ roll of a mind moving among high themes, and making the earth one of the golden spheres. Pope’s sacred eclogue of the Messiah is perhaps the completest expression of the religious sentiment of an age which was consciously bounded by space and time. In Pope’s day, the world was scarcely a part of a greater universe; eternity was only a prolongation of time, and the sense of beauty, acute as it was, was always sharply defined. Pope’s rhymed couplets, with their absolute finality, their clean conclusion, their epigrammatic snap, are the most perfect symbols of the English mind of that period. When in the Messiah we read,—

“Rapt into future times the bard begun,

A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a son!

...

Swift fly the years and rise the expected morn!

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 philosophy, as exhibited most elaborately in his Essay on Man, and set it beside Shakespeare’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;

Till 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 philosophy underlying Pope and his school was the whole thought of childhood. The passage, while not perhaps consciously imitative of Shakespeare, suggests comparison, and one finds in Jaques under the greenwood a more human feeling. Commend us to the tramp before the drawing-room philosopher!

The prelusive notes of a new literature were sounded by Fielding, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper. It was to be a literature which touched the earth again, the earth of a common nature, the earth also of a national inheritance.

Fielding, though painting contemporary society in a manner borrowed in a measure from the satiric drama, was moving constantly into the freer domain of the novelist who is a critic of life, and when he would set forth the indestructible force of a pure nature in a woman who is placed in a loose society, as in Amelia, he instinctively hedges the wife about with children, and it is a mark of his art that these children are not mere pawns which are moved about to protect the queen; they are genuine figures, their prattle is natural, and they are constantly illustrating in the most innocent fashion the steadfastness of Amelia.

It is significant that Gray, with his delicate taste and fine classical scholarship, when he composed his Elegy used first the names of eminent Romans when he wrote:—

“Some village Cato, who with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of the fields withstood;

Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest,

Some Cæsar, guiltless of his country’s blood.”

He changed these names for those of English heroes, and in doing so broke away from traditions which still had a strong hold in literature. It is a pity that for a reason which hardly convinces us he should have thought best to omit the charming stanza,—

“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 pictures 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 the use made of childhood in this poem, as a foil for tried manhood, its little life treated as the lost golden age of mankind; but that sentiment was a prevailing one in the period.

Goldsmith, whose Bohemianism helped to release him from subservience to declining fashions in literature, treats childhood in a more genuine and artless fashion. In his prose and poetry I hear the first faint notes of that song of childhood which in a generation more was to burst from many lips. The sweetness which trembles in the Deserted Village finds easy expression in forms and images which call up childhood to memory, as in those lines,—

“The playful children just let loose from school,”

“E’en children followed with endearing wile,

And plucked his gown, 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 husbandman, and the father of a family;” and the whole of the significant preface may lead one to revise the estimate of Goldsmith which his contemporaries have fastened upon English literary history. The waywardness and unconventionality of this man of genius and his eager desire to be accepted by the world, which was then the great world, were the characteristics which most impressed the shallower minds about him. In truth, he had not only an extraordinary sympathy with the ever-varying, ever-constant flux of human life, but he dropped a deeper plummet than any English thinker since Milton.

It was in part his loneliness that threw him upon children for complete sympathy; in part also his prophetic sense, for he had an unerring vision of what constituted the strength and the weakness of England. After the portraiture of the Vicar himself, there are no finer sketches than those of the little children. “It would be fruitless,” says the unworldly Vicar, “to deny exultation when I saw my little ones about me;” and from time to time in the tale, the youngest children, Dick and Bill, trot forward in an entirely natural manner. They show an engaging fondness for Mr. Thornhill. “The whole family seemed earnest to please him.... My little ones were no less busy, and fondly stuck close to the stranger. All my endeavors could scarcely keep their dirty fingers from handling and tarnishing the lace on his clothes, and lifting up the flaps of his pocket holes to see what was there.” The character of Mr. Burchell is largely drawn by its association with the children. The account given by little Dick of the carrying off of Olivia is full of charming childish spirit, and there is an exquisite passage where the Vicar returns home with the news of Olivia’s recovery, and discovers his house to be on fire, while in a tumult of confusion the older members of the family rush out of the dwelling.

“I gazed upon them and upon it by turns,” proceeds the Vicar, “and then looked round me for my two little ones; but they were not to be seen. O misery! ‘Where,’ cried I, ‘where are my little ones?’ ‘They are burnt to death in the flames,’ says my wife calmly, ‘and I will die with them.’ That moment I heard the cry of the babes within, who were just awaked by the fire, and nothing could have stopped me. ‘Where, where are my children?’ cried I, rushing through the flames, and bursting the door of the chamber in which they were confined. ‘Where are my little ones?’ ‘Here, dear papa, here we are!’ cried they together, while the flames were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms, and snatching them through the fire as fast as possible, just as I was got out the roof sunk in. ‘Now,’ cried I, holding up my children, ‘now let the flames burn on, and all my possessions perish. Here they are. I have saved my treasure. Here, my dearest, here are our treasures, and we shall yet be happy.’ We kissed our little darlings a thousand times; they clasped us round the neck, and seemed to share our transports, while their mother laughed and wept by turns.”

Cowper was more secluded from his time and its influence than Goldsmith, but like him he felt the instinct for a return to the elemental in life and nature. The gentleness of Cowper, combined with a poetic sensibility, found expression in simple themes. His life, led in a pastoral country, and occupied with trivial pleasures, offered him primitive material, and he sang of hares, and goldfish, and children. His Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools, though having a didactic intention, has some charming bits of descriptive writing, as in the familiar lines which describe the sport of

“The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot.”

The description melts, as do so many of Cowper’s retrospections, into a tender melancholy. A deeper note still is struck in his Lines on the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture.

The new birth which was coming to England had its premonitions in literature. It had them also in art. In this period appeared Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough: the one preëminently a painter of humanity, the other of nature, and both of them moved by a spirit of freedom, under well-recognized academic rules. There is in their work a lingering of the old formal character which took sharp account of the diversities of rank, and separated things common from things choice; yet they both belong to the new world rather than to the old, and in nothing is this more remarkable than in the number and character of the children pieces painted by Reynolds. They are a delight to the eye, and in the true democracy of art we know no distinction between Master Crewe as Henry VIII. and a Boy with a Child on his back and cabbage nets in his hand. What a revelation of childhood is in this great group! There is the tenderness of the Children in the Wood, the peace of the Sleeping Child, where nature itself is in slumber, the timidity of the Strawberry Girl, the wildness of the Gypsy Boy, the shy grace of Pickaback, the delightful wonder of Master Bunbury, the sweet simplicity and innocence in the pictures so named, and the spiritual yet human beauty of the Angels’ heads. Reynolds studied the work of the mediæval painters, but he came back to England and painted English children. Goldsmith’s Vicar, Cowper’s Lines on his mother’s portrait, and Reynolds’ children bring us close to the heart of our subject.