It was Stevenson, in a Child’s Garden of Verses who brought back into poetry, as Lewis Carroll did in prose and verse, the natural child that Homer saw about him, and that painting discerned in the Babe of Bethlehem. Humor, imagination, sympathy, these were the factors which discovered the heart of childhood for our modern world. Barry and Belloc in England, Eugene Field and Riley in America, Earls and “Tom” Daly and many others have furthered the discoveries. There is no hope for the child in the “New Poetry” which takes itself too seriously. Who would hold up the world if the “new poets” started in to mind the baby?
One more element was needed, and sorely needed, to enter fully into the mystery of the child. That element is faith. Evolution looked on the child as an epitome of its theory; pedagogy plotted out, weighed and measured the child and drew up formidable statistics; eugenics faced the child as though it were a dire microbe, source of poverty, ignorance, bootlegging, war, pestilence and famines. The modern child had and still has before it a dismal prospect. It is the camping ground of the specialist, the experimental laboratory of the theorist, and the peculiarly delectable victim of physical and moral vivisectionists. Faith must save the child, faith in the Babe of Bethlehem. Tabb and Thompson had that faith. They are the counterpart in literature of a St. Anthony or a St. Stanislaus in life and art. They play with the Child Jesus. Isucan has come into His own again. Tabb sings in “Out of Bounds”:
O comrades, let us one and all
Join in to get Him back his ball!
And Francis Thompson with medieval intimacy asks in “Ex Ore Infantium”:
And did Thy Mother at the night
Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?
And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,
Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?
“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven,” said Thompson. He will surely be at home there, and Tabb and many another will be with him.