II
The recognition of childhood as the heart of the family is discoverable even more emphatically in the art of the northern people, among whom domestic life always had greater respect. It may seem a trivial reason, but I suspect nature holds the family more closely together in cold countries, which compel much indoor and fireside life, than in lands which tempt to vagrancy. At any rate, the fact remains that the Germanic peoples have been home-cultivating. It did not need the Roman Tacitus to find this out, but his testimony helps us to believe that the disposition was a radical one, which Christianity reinforced rather than implanted. Lord Lindsay makes the pregnant observation, “Our Saviour’s benediction of the little children as a subject [is] from first to last Teutonic,—I scarcely recollect a single Italian instance of it;”[30] and in the revival of religious art, at which Overbeck and Cornelius assisted, this and similar subjects, by their frequency, mark a differentiation from art south of the Alps, whose traditions, nevertheless, the German school was consciously following.
Although of a period subsequent to the Renaissance, an excellent illustration of the religious representation of the childhood of Jesus in northern art is contained in a series of twelve prints executed in the Netherlands, and described in detail by Mrs. Jameson.[31] The series is entitled The Infancy of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the title-page is surrounded by a border composed of musical instruments, spinning-wheels, distaffs, and other implements of female industry, intermixed with all kinds of masons’ and carpenters’ tools. In the first of the prints, the figure of Christ is seen in a glory, surrounded by cherubim. In the second, the Virgin is seated on the hill of Sion; the infant in her lap, with outspread arms, looks up to a choir of angels, and is singing with them. In the third, Jesus slumbering in his cradle is rocked by two angels, while Mary sits by, engaged in needlework. Beneath is a lullaby in Latin which has been translated:—
“Sleep, sweet babe! my cares beguiling,
Mother sits beside thee, smiling,
Sleep my darling, tenderly!
If thou sleep not, mother mourneth
Singing as her wheel she turneth,
Come soft slumber, balmily!”
The fourth shows the interior of a carpenter’s shop: Joseph is plying his work, while Joachim stands near him; the Virgin is measuring linen, and S. Anna looks on; two angels are at play with the infant Christ, who is blowing soap-bubbles. In the fifth picture, Mary prepares the family meal, while Joseph is in the background chopping wood; more in front, Jesus sweeps together the chips, and two angels gather them. In the sixth, Mary is seen reeling off a skein of thread; Joseph is squaring a plank; Jesus is picking up chips, again assisted by two angels. The seventh shows Mary seated at her spinning-wheel; Joseph, aided by Jesus, is sawing through a large beam, the two angels standing by. The eighth is somewhat similar: Mary holds her distaff, while Joseph saws a beam on which Jesus stands, and the two angels help in the work. In the ninth print, Joseph is busy building the framework of a house, assisted by one of the angels; Jesus is boring with a large gimlet, the other angel helping him; and Mary winds thread. In the next, Joseph is at work roofing the house; Jesus, in company with the angels, carries a beam up the ladder; while below, in front, Mary is carding wool or flax. The eleventh transfers the work, with an apparent adaptation to Holland, to the building of a boat, where Joseph is helped by Jesus, who holds a hammer and chisel, still attended by the angels; the Virgin is knitting a stocking, and the newly built house is seen in the background. In the last of the series, Joseph is erecting a fence round a garden; Jesus, with the help of the angels, is fastening the palings together; while Mary is weaving garlands of roses.
Here is a reproduction of the childhood of the Saviour in the terms of a homely Netherland family life, the naturalistic treatment diversified by the use of angelic machinery. The prints were a part of the apparatus used by the priests in educating the people. However such instruction may have fallen short of the highest truths of Christianity, its recognition of the simple duties of life and its enforcement of these by the example of the Son of Man make us slow to regard such interposition of the church as remote from the spirit of Christ. If, as is quite possible, these prints were employed by the Jesuits, then their significance becomes doubly noticeable. In that vigorous attempt by Loyola and his order to maintain an organic Christian unity against the apparent disruption of Christianity, such a mode as this would find a place as serving to emphasize that connection between the church and the family which the Jesuits instinctively felt to be essential to the supremacy of the former.