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

by Horace Elisha Scudder

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 Æneas bearing upon his shoulders the aged Anchises and leading by the hand the young 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. Æneas, on the other hand, seems always the centre of a family group, 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 illustration in these poems. Throughout the Æneid the figure of Ascanius is an important one. There is a nice disclosure of growth in personality, and one is aware that the grandson is coming forward into his place as a member of the family, to be thereafter representative. The poet never loses sight of the boy’s future. Homer, in his shield of Achilles, that microcosm of human life, forgets 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 Æneid is the childhood of Camilla, in which the warrior maid’s nature is carried back and reproduced in diminutive form. The evolutions of the boys in the fifth book, while full of boyish life, come rather under the form of mimic soldiery than of spontaneous youth. In one of the Eclogues, Virgil has a graceful suggestion 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 reckoned as scarcely more than cubs; but with 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,

Young 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 be 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.”[13]

The epitaphs and the elegies of the Greek Anthology have their counterpart in Latin. Mr. Thompson has tried his hand at a passage from Statius:[14]—

ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD.

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,

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.”[15]

In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find references to childhood; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a perception 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 ground, speechless, 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.”[16] 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.”[17]

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 greatest reverence is due to the boy.”[18]

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 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 transcendent 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 Pantheon 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 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 cannot 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 sculpture, or in Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway. 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 well 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 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 subtends 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 conception never wholly lost, even when the child was robbed of the purity which we recognize 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.[19]

III
IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE

The literature of Greece and Rome is a possession of the modern world. For the most part it has been taken as an independent 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 conception 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 influence which has issued from ancient sources has been one in which literature as such has been almost subordinated to the religious and ethical ideas of which it was the vehicle; even the strong institutional forces inherent in it have had only exceptional attention. There was a time, indeed, when the history of the Jews, as contained in the books of the Old Testament, was isolated 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 proportion in relation to other parts of human history, has been impressed upon modern civilization through 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 out of the way, and appropriate his national documents as the old title-deeds of Christianity. 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 Roman 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.[20]

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 anything in classic history and literature. It has been the book from which youth with us has drawn its conceptions of life outside of the limited circle of human experience; and the geographical, historical, and archæological 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 foreign 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 narrative of the restoration of the son of the widow of Zarephath by Elijah; and the still more graphic and picturesque description of the bringing back to life by Elisha of the child who had been born at his intercession to the Shunamite, and had been sunstruck 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 indication which was shown of the majesty of the prophetic office, it is clear that the Jew of that day would not have felt any disproportion between the guilt of the boys and their dire and speedy punishment; he would have been impressed by the sanctity of the prophet, and the swiftness of the divine demonstration. 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, 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 warnings, the brightest promises to the fathers, are through the children. The prophet Hosea could use no more terrible word to the people than when, speaking as the mouthpiece of God, he says: “Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children;”[21] and Zechariah, inspiriting the people, declares: “They shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children.”[22] The promise of the golden age of peace and prosperity 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;”[23] while the lofty anticipation 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.[24] In the Greek fable, Hercules in his cradle strangled the snakes by his might; in the Jewish picture, the child enters fearlessly the very dens of the asp and the adder, secure under the reign of a perfect righteousness.

Milton, in his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, has pointed out this parallel:—

“He feels from Judah’s land

The dreaded infant’s hand,

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;

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 damnëd crew.”

To the Jew, childhood was the sign of fulfillment 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 children to their fathers,”[25] 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 which had for centuries found expression in numberless ways. The Magnificat of Mary is the song of Hannah, purified and ennobled 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 influence 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 effort, to think of it as Jewish at all. The Gospels transcend national and local and temporal limits, and we find ourselves, when considering them, reading the beginnings of modern, not the close of Jewish history. The incidents 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 Christianity inevitably draws the mind forward to the new day.

The evangelists 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 narrative of the Saviour’s ministry proceeds, we are reminded again and again of the presence 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 suffering and disease of humanity which form the background in the Gospels upon which we 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 antithesis to the transfiguration which Raphael’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 Jerusalem, 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 character that we instinctively refuse to treat it otherwise. In vain do we listen to those who point out the ethical beauty of the Sermon 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 life. We do not ask, what is the representation of childhood to be found in the writings of certain Jews known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; we ask, what is there between children and the central figure disclosed 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 Righteousness. The attitude which Christ took toward children must contain the explanation 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 symbolized 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 parable, when he called little children to him with the words, “Of such is the kingdom 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 children. 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 protection 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 humanity for a new generation. By a bold and profound figure it was said of the great central 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 would 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 indicative of the great movements in life and literature 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 destruction of Judaism, and the reconstruction upon its ruins of a living Christianity. It may be applied 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 reason 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 Christianity was there opportunity 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 Christianity 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 continuity of the old world was broken. The Greek, the Roman, and the Hebrew no longer carried forward their separate movements. 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 imagination, dissevered from reason, was in a state of abnormal activity. The compression of its field caused the faculty to find expression through forms which were very closely connected with the dominant sphere of human life. Before religious art and ecclesiastical architecture had become the abundant expression of Christian imagination, there was generated a great mass of legend and fable, which only by degrees became formally embodied in literature or perpetuated 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 principle 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 itself the perfect man, and in that conceived not the physical and intellectual man of the Greek conception, nor the Cæsar 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 service, of victory through suffering and humiliation, of self-surrender, and of union with God was perceived with greater or less clearness, and this idea was adumbrated 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 mediæval 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 standards 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 consist 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 multitudes who have overcome the world.

It is not strange, therefore, that the imagination, busying itself about the spiritual life of man, should have dwelt with special emphasis upon those signs of the new life brought to light in the Gospels, which seemed to contain the promise of perfection. It seized upon baptism as witnessing to a regeneration; it traced the lives of saints back to a childhood which began with baptism; 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 Saviour powers which confounded the common wisdom of men. It dwelt with fondness upon the adoration of the Magi, as witnessing 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 ingenuity and curious adornment of the legends included in the so-called Apocryphal Gospels. Yet these legends illustrate the eagerness of the early Christian world to invest the person of Jesus with every possible charm and power; and since the weakness of infancy and childhood offers the strongest contrast to works of thaumaturgy, this period is 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 panthers 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 saw the lions and the panthers, and various kinds of wild beasts coming about them, she was very much afraid. But the infant Jesus looked into her face with a joyful countenance, 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 Judæa, and which they had with them. They walked among wolves and feared nothing, and no one of them was hurt by another.”[26]

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 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 satisfied 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 confused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus he is represented more than once as willing the death of a playmate, and then contemptuously bringing him to life again. A favorite story grossly misconceives the incident of Christ with the Doctors in the temple, and makes him turn his schoolmaster into ridicule. 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 mingles 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 Sabbath 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 through the earth, and through all the world, and live.’ And when those that were there saw such miracles they were filled with great astonishment.”

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 childhood 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, where a lioness was nursing her cubs; and no one was safe who walked that way. Jesus, then, coming from Jericho, and knowing 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 themselves, and were lying under great 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 dare to come close to them. Then Jesus began to say to the people, ‘How much better 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 distinguished these, the holiness was the cause of the power, and hence, when the imagination 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 manifestation 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 Virgin herself was thus dealt with. The strong human feeling which subsequently, when the tenderness of Christ had been petrified into judgment, interposed the Virgin as mediator, found gratification in surrounding Mary’s infancy and childhood with a supernatural grace and power, the incidents in some cases being faint reflections of incidents 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 country; the first words she uttered were those of prayer, and when three years old she gave signs of the charity which marked her life 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 accompanied 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 fellows that he went into a church to pray to 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 astounded 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 punishments 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 still,” replied the undaunted boy; and when he was ordered off to prison with the rest, 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 experience. 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 century is invested with an attraction which is wanting in the circumstance of some juvenile saint living in the midst of indifferent scoffers of the early part of the nineteenth century.

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 Kenwulf of Wessex died, and left two daughters, 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 the boy. So Askbert took Kenelm 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 blossom;” 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 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. Kenelm’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 private 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 indulgence, since he obligingly took away all the images but three, would have nothing to do with false gods. She was visited by angels and instructed in Christianity. She combined courage in her new faith with a fine spirit of adventure; for she is represented as smashing the idols, letting herself down by a rope from her tower-prison, distributing 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 temple 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 churchly investiture. Nature could not always be expelled, but the imagination, busy with the construction of the ideal Christian life, was more concerned, as time went on, to make that conform 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 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 himself: “these four are thy sons and daughters; the other two are thy servant 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 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 young. 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 nurtured 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 constitution 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 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 Christianity 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 anthropomorphic 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 hierarchy 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 ministers, 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 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 period of human life in which the forms are as yet undetermined. Nevertheless, childhood exercises even here its subtle power of recalling men to elemental truths. Dante was the prophet of a spiritual Rome, which he saw in his vision outlined against the background of the existing hierarchy. It would be in vain to search through the Divine Comedy for many references to childhood. As he says himself in the Inferno,—

“For this is not a sportive enterprise

To speak the universe’s lowest hold,

Nor suits a tongue that Pa and Mammy cries.”[27]

And the only picture of childhood in that vision is the melancholy one of the horrid sufferings of Count Ugolino and his children in the Tower of Hunger. In the Paradiso there are two passages of interest. Near the close of the twenty-seventh canto, Beatrice, breaking forth into a rapt utterance 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 will cast.

There is that, lisping, loveth to obey

His mother, and he’ll wish her in the tomb,

When sentences unbroken he can say.”

Again, in the thirty-second canto, S. Bernard is pointing out the circles of the Rose, and after denoting the degrees of saints before Christ and after, proceeds:—

“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 endowment, 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 found 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 these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under larger paragraphs.”[28] 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 counted only as the initiation 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 Renaissance, 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 lisping child becomes the greedy worldling, the cruel and unloving man, and the tyranny of an empire of souls is hinted at in the justification by the poet of the presence of innocent babes in Paradise; they are there by the interposition of a sacrificial act. The poet argues to still the doubts of men at finding these children in Paradise. It would almost seem as if the words had been forgotten 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 putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the plague in a country house.”[29] The great Florentine work was executed under this dominant thought; nevertheless, an art which is largely concerned about tombs and sepulchral monuments implies an overweening pride in life and a weightier sense of the years of earth. The theology which had furnished the panoply within which the human soul was fighting its battle emphasized the idea of time, and made eternity itself a prolongation of human conditions. The imagination, at work upon a future, constructed 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 reërect them upon an everlasting basis.

Such thought had little in common with the hope, the fearlessness, the faith, of childhood, and thus childhood as an image had largely faded out of art and literature. One only great exception there was,—the representation in art of the child Jesus; and in the successive phases of this representation may be read a remarkable history of the human soul.

V
IN MEDIÆVAL ART

The power of Christianity lies in its prophecy of universality, and the most significant note of this power is in its comprehension of the poor and the weak, not merely as the objects of a benediction proceeding from some external society, but as themselves constituent members of that society, sharing in all its rights and fulfilling its functions. When the last great prophet of Israel and forerunner of Judaic Christianity sent to inquire what evidence Jesus of Nazareth could give that he was the Christ, the answer which came back had the conclusive words, “To the poor the gospel is preached.” The same Jesus, when he would give his immediate followers the completest type 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 development of human society which may not 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 society, 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 succession 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 struggle after purity of associated life, which had its witness 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 ecclesiastical system was enforcing the dogma of mediatorial sacrifice as something 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 relations. 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 Madonna.