IV. The Poets: Watts; Jane and Ann Taylor; William Blake.
Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious.—Matthew Arnold, in “The Study of Poetry.”
We have progressed sufficiently in our outline to begin showing the links that bind the past with the present. To dwell upon more writers of the generation just treated is simply to repeat the same essential characteristics of the type. These authors all used the medium of prose in their desire to give young people books suitable to their comprehension. But there were a few poets who braved the intricacies of verse, and who wrote some very simple and pleasing lyrics, which have survived the change in spirit, and form some of the most agreeable pages in our children’s anthologies. It will be recollected that Mrs. Barbauld feared poetry would not be understood, and so she wrote her volume of prose pieces which acted as a substitute.
Wordsworth himself could not have demanded a more careful attention to the simplicity of word selection than that paid by Dr. Isaac Watts (1674–1748), who, though not first in the field of hymn-writers, for his immediate predecessor was Bishop Thomas Ken[37] (1637–1711), author of “Morning and Daily Hymns,” was nevertheless one of the very first consciously to pen a book of verse for a juvenile public.
Not only was he actively engaged in the interests of education, but, during his famous thirty-six years’ spent as visitor in the household of Sir Thomas Abney, of Newington, he crystallised his ideas on education, and incorporated them in his “The Improvement of the Mind: To which is added A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth.”
This treatise may be regarded as a fair example of the pre-Rousseau style of pedagogy. The child was measured in terms of sectarian standards, it being assumed that the first step was to impress him with the truth that his very nature was sinful, and that it could be shrived only by having the mind centred always upon holy thoughts. The religion of the closet must be held above every pleasure. Yet Dr. Watts notices that such pleasures are increasing to an alarming state; that children are rebelling against Puritan principles. His sternness relents, in so far as he would allow children to play draughts and chess, and to amuse themselves with games which might instruct them in the rudiments of grammar and geometry.
Though there are not many who would discountenance his diatribe against the gaming table, the dangers besetting midnight revellers, and the freedom which results in immorality, one cannot but view with distrust the strictures which would turn girls into dowdy creatures and boys into prigs. The theoretical predecessors of Rousseau’s Émile were the two creations of Dr. Watts,—Eugenio and Phronissa—his ideal children, combining those qualities which rob youth of all charm. Theirs must have been wearisome lives. The boy, we are told, “is an entertaining companion to the gay young gentlemen, his equals; and yet divines and philosophers take pleasure to have Eugenio amongst them.” Dr. Watts never deigned to tell us what requirements Eugenio set for the staid divines, or whether he tried to get away from them. And Phronissa: she stands before us now, in attitude betokening detestation of the stage, and we hear her proclaiming the song and the dance as her meanest pleasures—talents not to be proud of!
Two points are worthy of note in Dr. Watts’s book. Despite his many limitations which argued for piousness and for the composure of the youthful spirit; despite his disapproval of all exercise which might turn one’s thoughts away from the prescribed paths, he was nevertheless a pleader in the cause of advance. For what he lays down as educational theory he would have parents hearken to; in his eyes the bringing up of youth is a sacred duty, involving obligations of a delicate nature. He would emphasise the responsibility of the Home; he would have parents eager to see the moral laws obeyed by their children. He would have education applied equally as well to girls as to boys; in fact, so Dr. Watts confesses, in tones as though he were making a great concession, the habit of reading is quite as important to the former as to the latter.
Dark as the days may seem in the lives of those children educated according to theories and tracts, the lighter recreations must have brightened moments unrecorded. Even John Locke (1632–1704), in his “Thoughts on Education” (1693), recommends besides the Psalter and the New Testament, Æsop and Reynard the Fox, as good food for infant minds. This was an excellent basis to start upon.
The two small volumes of “Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children” [editions, New York: Mahlon Day; Cambridge: 1803] which I have examined, bear upon the fly-leaves tales recorded in uncertain handwriting. The one has, “To ——, a present from his Mamma”; the other, “—— his Book: If this should be lost and you should fine, Return to me, for it is mine.”
“You will find here nothing that savours of party,” says the poet in his foreword. “... As I have endeavoured to sink the language to the level of a child’s understanding, and yet to keep it, if possible, above contempt, so I have designed to profit all, if possible, and to offend none.”
Yet the usual theological doctrines reek from every page; there is much of the tenor of the “New England Primer” in the verses. The wonder is that with all their atmosphere of brimstone and sulphur, with all their effort to present to the child grown-up beliefs in simple doses, the poems still retain a spontaneity, a sweet, quaint simplicity that strike the sympathy, if they do not entirely appeal to the fancy. “His dreadful Majesty” is more suited to Milton than to a song; “How doth the little busy bee,” though not yet in accord with the lyrist’s pure, unfeigned delight in nature, is overtopping in childish appeal, “The eternal God will not disdain, To hear an infant cry.” We pit an understanding of childhood’s graces against that old-time theory of inherited ruin. There has been a revulsion of feeling which tends to bring the heart much nearer the soul, and to give to the nursery the sanctified love of good rather than the abiding fear of evil.
There is a picture in Lamb’s “Books for Children” [ed. E. V. Lucas], showing the ark with the animals in their symmetrically built stalls. The clouds are rolling over the waters with as much substantial outline as though they were balls of cotton; there is interest for a child in the close examination of this graphic art, which is done with that surety as though the artist had been on the spot. The reproduction was made from Stackhouse’s Bible, with which Mrs. Trimmer used to amuse her young folks on Sundays. Your wooden Noah’s Ark, with the sticky animals, was built along the same lines. Dr. Watts’s poems have been illustrated many times in similar conventional fashion. One cut in particular represented creation by a dreadful lion and a marvellous tiger, anatomically wonderful.
Though parts of the Bible have been paraphrased by Dr. Watts as well as such can ever be done; though ducks and lambs and doves, symbols of simplicity, take one to the open, there is no breath of clover sweeping across the page. It is by such a beautiful cradle hymn as “Holy angels guard thy bed,” which is to be treasured with Martin Luther’s exquisite “Hymn to the Christ Child,” that this poet deserves to be remembered.
Always the truest verse, the truest sentiment, the truest regard for children are detected in that retrospective tone—the eternal note of sadness, as Matthew Arnold phrases it—in which grown people speak of the realm of youth lost to them; not the sentimental stooping, not the condescending superiority,—but a yearning note brought about by the tragedy of growing up,—a yearning that passeth understanding, and that returns with every flash of the remembered child you were.
The Taylors of Ongar, the two sisters, Ann (1782–1866) and Jane (1783–1824), are the poets of the didactic era; they apply to verse the same characteristics Miss More introduced in her tracts—a sympathetic feeling, but a false tenderness. They are not doctrinal in their “Original Poems for Infant Minds,” but are generally and genuinely ethical. Their attitude is different from that of Watts; they attempt to interpret feelings and impressions in terms of the child’s own comprehension. But so far were they ruled by the customary requirements of their time, that they falsely endowed the juvenile mind with the power of correlating external beauty with its own virtuous possibilities. The simplicity of Jane’s “The Violet” and “Thank you, Pretty Cow” is marked by an unnatural discrimination on the part of the children from whom such sentiments are supposed to flow; these defects detract from many a delicate verse deserving of better acquaintance than “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”
The Taylors wrote together for a number of years; they opened a field of interest in and kindness to animals; their verse abounds in the beginnings of a spontaneous love of nature. Their children troop past us, the industrious boy and the idle boy, the rich and the poor. They are not active children; their positions are fixed ones of contemplation, of inward communing, not of participation. Yet the sweet spirit predominates, and the simple words are not robbed of their purity and strength. However, their desire “to abridge every poetic freedom and figure” dragged them often into absurdities. This is the great danger in writing simple verse; unless its excellence is dominant, it shows its weakness; the outline of lyric beauty must have perfect symmetry; the slightest falsity in imagery, the slightest departure from consistency and truth, destroys the whole.[38]
Jane, when she was very small, used to edify her neighbours by preaching to them; this impulse found expression later in a series of hymns. Ann also composed religious songs which in quality are superior to those of her sister. The literary association of the two lasted until 1812, when Ann was sought in marriage by a Mr. Gilbert; this negotiation was consummated by letter before they had even met.
A further advance in the art of children’s verse was made when William Blake (1757–1827) wrote his “Songs of Innocence,” and infused into them a light spirit of grace and of joy. Strangely, he had difficulty in disposing of his poems; on this account, he determined to prepare the plates for them himself. The drawings which resulted proved to be some of his very best art work. Through his acquaintance with Godwin, he was employed to illustrate many of the books issuing from Mrs. Godwin’s publishing house, and it has not yet been fully settled whether or not he made the original illustrations for the Lambs’ “Tales from Shakespeare.” He was employed to engrave the plates for Mary Wollstonecraft’s translation of Salzmann’s “Elements of Morality.”
We detect in Blake’s verses the apt blending of grown-up regard for childhood, with the ready response of childhood to grown-up love. By his exuberance, by his fancy, by his simple treatment he set a standard which is the same that dominates the best of Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti. Stevenson later carried forward the art, by adding thereto a touch as though youth, fearful of growing up, knew something of the heavy burden of man’s estate. Thus does Blake express infant joy:
“I have no name:
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee.
The crystal clearness in such sentiment is born of our adult reverence. Again he makes the nurse in one of his poems sing:
“Then come home, my children, the sun is going down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.”
A child appreciates such mellow tones; there is no reaching down; the picture is distinct, reduced to its truest sentiment. It contains traceries of action, and fairest hints of beneficent nature. It gives a promise of to-morrow. There is no herding into the land of sleep. Let us away! Do you not feel the distinction of dignity in it, rather than “get you to bed”?
In Stevenson’s verse the dominant note is retrospective; he returns to childhood with his quota of world experience; he slips into the youthful state, glad of being there once more, yet knowing what it all means to have to leave it again. Night fears and day joys flow through his lines:
Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
There is the preternatural strain of sadness in the make-up of youth; they like to discover in their elders those same characteristics they possess; they will creep to the strong arm of him who marvels as they do at the mystery of silent things. Such a one, even though grown-up, is worth while; he knows what it is to be in bed in summer with “the birds still hopping on the grass”; he knows what it is to be a child. Stevenson, the man, becomes the remembered boy.
The poetry for children that has lived is of that quality which appeals to the pristine sense of all that is fair and good and beautiful. Tender love, unfettered joy, protecting gentleness recognise no age; we, who are no longer young, look through the barred gates and up the gravel road, flanked by the dense freshness of green. Somewhere we hear the splash of water, far off we see the intense white of marble. Clinging to the iron bars outside, we watch the girl and boy, we count their footprints in the sand. They stoop to pick the violets as we stooped years ago; they look into the basin of clear water as we looked years ago. And then the path curves out of view. Here is where our appreciative contemplation of childhood becomes self-conscious; we cannot see the little ones doing what we did in years gone by. Perhaps this, perhaps that; we have our first moral doubt. Through the bars we call to the childhood of our memory; we call it to come back. The poet has but to sing of what he found beyond that bend when he was young, of the child he was, who once looked up at him from the clear depths; the boy and girl will creep down the gravel path again, they will marvel at what is told them of revolving suns, of the lost childhood, of the flight of birds, and of the shiver of grass. Let the poet but sing in true notes, making appeal to their imagery, giving them vigour in exchange for their responsiveness, and understanding in exchange for their trust; they will return, even to the iron gate, and take him by the hand. This is what it means to be the laureate of childhood.