Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free;
Press lightly on her form, dear Mother Earth,
Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee.”[15]
In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find references to childhood; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a perception of the mystery of childhood is in a passage in Lucretius, where the poet looks down with compassion upon the new-born infant as one of the mysteries of nature: “Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to life when first nature has cast him forth by great throes from his mother’s womb, and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass through so much misery in life.”[16] Lucretius displayed a profound reverence for human affection. Scattered through his great poem are fine lines in which childhood appears. “Soon,” he says, in one mournful passage,—“soon shall thy home receive thee no more with glad welcome, nor thy dear children run to snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with silent gladness.”[17]
Juvenal, with the thought of youth as the possible restoration of a sinking world, utters a cry, which has often been taken up by sensualists even, when he injects into his pitiless satire the solemn words, “the greatest reverence is due to the boy.”[18]
Any survey of ancient Greek and Roman life would be incomplete which left out of view the supernatural element. We need not inquire whether there was a conscious materialization of spiritual forces, or an idealization of physical phenomena. We have simply to do with certain shapes and figures which dwelt in the mind and formed a part of its furniture; coming and going like shadows, yet like shadows confessing a forming substance; embodying belief and symbolizing moods. In that overarching and surrounding world, peopled by the countless personages of Greek and Roman supernaturalism, we may discover, if we will, a vague, distorted, yet sometimes transcendent reflection of the life which men and women were living upon the more palpable and tangible earth.
What, then, has the childhood of the gods to tell us? We have the playful incident of Hermes, or Mercurius, getting out of his cradle to steal the oxen of Admetos, and the similar one of Herakles strangling the snakes that attacked him just after his birth; but these are simply stories intended to carry back into childhood the strength of the one and the cunning of the other. It is more to our purpose to note the presence in the Pantheon of the child who remains always a child, and is known to us familiarly as Eros, or Cupid, or Amor. It is true that the myth includes the union of Cupid and Psyche; nevertheless, the prevailing conception is of a boy, winged, armed with bow and arrows, the son and messenger of Venus. It may be said that the myth gradually adapted itself to this form, which is not especially apparent in the earlier stories. The figure of Love, as thus presented, has been more completely adopted into modern poetry than any other in the old mythology, and it cannot be said that its characteristics have been materially altered. It is doubtful whether the ancient idea was more simple than the same when reproduced in Thorwaldsen’s sculpture, or in Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway. The central conception is essentially an unmoral one; it knows not right or wrong, good or evil; the mischief-making is capricious, and not malicious. There is the idea only of delight, of an innocence which is untutored, of a will which is the wind’s will. It would seem as if, in fastening upon childhood as the embodiment of love, the ancients, as well as their modern heirs, were bent upon ridding life of conscience and fate,—upon making love to have neither memory nor foresight, but only the joy of the moment. This sporting child was a refuge, in their minds, from the ills of life, a residence of the one central joy of the world. There is an infinite pathos in the erection of childhood into a temple for the worship of Love. There was, indeed, in the reception of this myth, a wide range from purity to grossness, as the word “love” itself has to do service along an arc which subtends heaven and hell; but when we distill the poetry and art which gather about the myth of Cupid, the essence will be found in this conception of love as a child,—a conception never wholly lost, even when the child was robbed of the purity which we recognize as its ideal property. It should be noted, also, that the Romans laid hold of this idea more eagerly than did the Greeks; for the child itself, though more artistically set forth in Greek literature, appears as a more vital force in Roman literature.[19]
III
IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE
The literature of Greece and Rome is a possession of the modern world. For the most part it has been taken as an independent creation, studied indeed with reference to language as the vehicle of thought, but after all chiefly as an art. It is within a comparatively recent time that the conception of an historical study of literature has been prominent, and that men have gone to Greek and Roman poetry with an eager passion for the discovery of ancient life. The result of these new methods has been to humanize our conception of the literature under examination.