Next my heart thro’ every night.
The bambino shines through medieval song in Adam of St. Victor and in other writers of hymns. The Catholic writers of the Renaissance celebrate the same theme in the revived meters of classicism. Sarbievius, the Jesuit lyricist of Poland, is full of the Christ-Child, and in his well-known lines “To the Violet” he calls upon that “dawn of spring” to crown his “Little Lad” with its flowers in place of the gold and gems and purple which weighted the Infant. Sarbievius was doing what the painters did, discarding the Byzantine ornament and convention.
Test Puritanism with the child and it fails; test it with the Christ-Child, and you will get the ponderous “Hymn to the Nativity” of Milton, an imperialistic ode which must have gladdened Cromwell. No familiarity there, no mirthfulness, no Jesukin with violets for crown jewels, not even Byzantine immobility. Milton does not even doff the helmet of war, as Hector did; no, he sees
from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.
... Our Babe to show His Godhead true
Can in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.
A Prince of Peace indeed with a mailed fist! Merry medieval England would not recognize Jesukin in Miltonic panoply. Fortunately for art it had attained excellence before the Puritanic blight fell upon the world, but for literature in the English language we must wait until the nineteenth century to see the child come to its own. Wordsworth attempted a revival of Plato’s philosophy and found immortality, if not familiarity, in childhood when he wrote his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth took a more fruitful lesson from the Greeks when he went back to nature in other poems to study childhood. Even before him, Blake, painter and poet, influenced no doubt by the traditions of painting, began to see the heart in childhood. The interminable moralizing stories of Ann and Jane Taylor and of Elizabeth Turner, which date from this time, are heavy with grown up condescension. E. V. Lucas would have done better to republish in his Book of Verses for Children the graceful and humorous lessons of the Greek fables than perpetuate Taylor and Turner.
After Wordsworth we see the child motif gradually taking a larger place in the literature of England and America. Despite Francis Thompson’s vigorous effort in his famous essay, he has not succeeded in making Shelley pass the child-test. Shelley had no faith, no humility, no humor, no real tenderness, and even granting him the dreaming power of childhood, which in Thompson’s essay is largely a reflection of Thompson, Shelley had not the heard of a child to enter into the Kingdom. Walter Scott’s friendship for Marjorie Fleming shows that the great poet and novelist had the necessary qualifications, but no performance comes now to mind except a lullaby and the glorification of merry England at Christmas. Swinburne glimpses gleams of a baby’s pink toes and lists to low laughter of mouths of gold. The child is picturesque for him. Moore, Byron, Browning, for different reasons, fail in the child-test. Tennyson touched the surface, although in the “Princess” he came close to the mystery. Patmore, uxorious and paternal, came closer and even touched the depths of the child in “Toys.” Longfellow and Whittier were of the same school.