CHILDHOOD IN MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE.
When Homer described the pretty fright of Astyanax in his nurse's arms, amid the parting of Hector and Andromache; when Vergil made Damon recall the day when, as a little boy just able to reach up to the branches, he saw his mother and the child who was to be his fate gathering apples—the hyacinths of Theocritus were daintier—they struck two chords of feeling, one charming, the other deeper and richer, which have started vibrations whenever they have met a sympathetic reader ever since. Because we are susceptible to the poetry of childhood we are pleased to find that these ancient poets also cared for it. It adds a personal touch to our feeling for them. It gives us a thrill of the immortality of heart and its simplest, purest sentiment. There may be an element of the fictitious in our feeling about childhood. Heaven may not be about our infancy, those "sweet early days" may not have been "as long as twenty days are now"; and they may not have been the types of innocence, simplicity, the loveliness of the race taken at first hand from nature, which we fancy them. But there is something beyond a fallacy in this sentiment; it is in our purer and more refined moods that we are sensitive to it. Like a whiff of spring smoke, or woodsy odors, a reminder of our early life will sometimes throw us into a revery which is more than recollection. No one can write well about children without sensibility to youthful emotion and some love for family life. Whoever looks back with genial wistfulness upon his own early days, and enjoys renewing them in the playthings of his fancy, can hardly be without a vein of quiet refinement. When an age listens with pleasure to such sketches, it is not barren of the homely affections, nor uniformly given over to restless and unlawful passions. As one wanders through the poetry of the middle ages, one observes the frequency with which it mentions children.
These passages, judged absolutely, may not be remarkable for insight or tenderness, but in those days all emotional subjects were treated crudely. Yet they are often interesting for themselves, and they show a fact which many seem to question that the sentiments of simple family life were felt by poets and people. So much has been written by critics upon the worse side of the society of chivalry, that it is well to recognize this other aspect of its affections. The public has frequently been assured that those days knew nothing of true family sentiment. How much truth there is in the statement that fashionable love disregarded marriage, has been shown in a preceding essay. But on a priori grounds we should disbelieve that general society was permeated by artificial gallantry. Even were the testimony of lyrical lovers uniform, we must recollect how conventional all their love-poetry was; most poets composed on formal lines impersonally, in spite of their pronouns. One of the troubadours, indeed, denied that this was possible when the husband of his theme challenged him, in the lonely place where he was hunting, by his liege truth to tell him whether he had a lady love. "Sire," he replied, "how could I sing unless I loved?" But in most poems there was more business, or ambitious art, than nature. A large number of these poets impress us as having just as little emotional veracity in writing as had Cowley in The Mistress. Moreover, even if a school of poetry, not conventionalized, should treat romantic and sensational sentiment to the exclusion of domestic, it would prove nothing. What if cynical critics some centuries hence should give Mr. Coventry Patmore a place in their encyclopedias, simply on the ground that he was an exception to the nineteenth-century belief that love ended at the bridal altar? Possibly by that time love, poetry, and fiction may deal mainly with domestic emotions after marriage, and then our own romances will very likely appear strange.
From one point of view those centuries were too akin to undeveloped life to be prepared to represent it. Europe seven hundred years ago seems like a vast nursery abandoned by its governess. The people are like children of various ages and sizes, degrees of education, and innate sense of right and wrong. Children are impulsive, passionate, selfish, brutally inconsiderate; they are sometimes religious too. We find apparently sporadic susceptibility to isolation and prayer. They cry at trifles, and while their cheeks are still wet, they are smiling. Bright and simple things please them; they are fickle and impatient; they love lively music; when they are tired playing, nothing pleases them like a story—they listen intently, credulously. When spring comes they can no more help running and dancing over the grass, than sunbeams on a brook. The gentler sit in the meadow making posies, while the rougher are setting traps, and racing, and fighting: but sometimes the rough boys will come and play in the meadow, and be pleasant to the girls. All these traits of children apply to the mediæval character, their barbarisms, their ethical inconsistencies, their delight in stories (no age has ever cared more for story telling), their love of play, their passion for spring, and the rest.
Undoubtedly the popular impression gives the period too little joyousness. Mercurial childhood has capacity for sudden pleasures even when life goes ill, and life frequently went very well even then. But the mystery and grace of motherhood and dawning life are likely to appeal to a calmer and more retrospective age. The seriousness that takes pleasure in contemplating childhood is more serene and pensive than the usual moods of an era undeveloped emotionally. So it would not be a matter for surprise if the literary remains of those days had left us mainly incidental references to children.
Of such plain facts we have many, such as, for instance, that the little ones were entertained with pet dogs, birds, and squirrels (apparently never with cats), mice harnessed to a toy wagon, clay or wooden images of animals, and tiny vessels after kitchen models, toy men, women, and children, tops, and marbles; that they played blind man's buff, and many games attended with songs. As early as the interesting Latin poem called Waltharius et Hiltgunde, which at least in a popular version Walther von der Vogelweide liked, we find the hero appealing to Hagen, by the memory of the boyish games with which they had whiled away their childhood, and over which they never had quarrelled.