Into the true life not without a cause
Are entered so, these more, and those less, bright,”—
an interpretation of the vision which is really less scholastic than suggested by the deeper insight of the poetic mind.
The most significant passage, however, is found in the famous words at the beginning of the Vita Nuova, which fix Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when he was nine years old. “And since,” he closes, “to dwell upon the passions and actions of such early youth seems like telling an idle tale, I will leave them, and, passing over many things which might be drawn from the original where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under larger paragraphs.”[28] In these last words is apparent Dante’s own judgment upon the worth of his recollections of childhood: one page only in that book of his memory he deems worthy of regard,—the page upon which fell the image of Beatrice. It will be said with truth that the childhood of Dante and Beatrice is in reality the beginning of maturity, for it is counted only as the initiation of a noble passion. The time, indeed, had not yet come in the history of human life when the recollection of that which is most distinctive of childhood forms the basis of speculation and philosophic dream.
The absence of childhood from the visions of Dante is a negative witness to the absence from the world, in the age prior to the Renaissance, of hope and of simple faith and innocence. Dante’s faint recognition of these qualities throws them back into a quickly forgotten and outgrown childhood. The lisping child becomes the greedy worldling, the cruel and unloving man, and the tyranny of an empire of souls is hinted at in the justification by the poet of the presence of innocent babes in Paradise; they are there by the interposition of a sacrificial act. The poet argues to still the doubts of men at finding these children in Paradise. It would almost seem as if the words had been forgotten which characterized heaven through the very image of childhood.
Indeed, it is not to be wondered at that childhood was little regarded by an age which found its chief interest in a thought of death. “Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio,” we are reminded by Mr. Pater, “gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the plague in a country house.”[29] The great Florentine work was executed under this dominant thought; nevertheless, an art which is largely concerned about tombs and sepulchral monuments implies an overweening pride in life and a weightier sense of the years of earth. The theology which had furnished the panoply within which the human soul was fighting its battle emphasized the idea of time, and made eternity itself a prolongation of human conditions. The imagination, at work upon a future, constructed it out of the hard materials of the present, and was always looking for some substantial bridge which should connect the two worlds; seeing decay and change here, it transferred empires and powers to the other side of the gulf, and sought to reërect them upon an everlasting basis.
Such thought had little in common with the hope, the fearlessness, the faith, of childhood, and thus childhood as an image had largely faded out of art and literature. One only great exception there was,—the representation in art of the child Jesus; and in the successive phases of this representation may be read a remarkable history of the human soul.
V
IN MEDIÆVAL ART
The power of Christianity lies in its prophecy of universality, and the most significant note of this power is in its comprehension of the poor and the weak, not merely as the objects of a benediction proceeding from some external society, but as themselves constituent members of that society, sharing in all its rights and fulfilling its functions. When the last great prophet of Israel and forerunner of Judaic Christianity sent to inquire what evidence Jesus of Nazareth could give that he was the Christ, the answer which came back had the conclusive words, “To the poor the gospel is preached.” The same Jesus, when he would give his immediate followers the completest type of the kingdom which was to prevail throughout the world, took a child, and set him in the midst of them. There is no hardly gained position in the development of human society which may not find its genetic idea in some word or act of the Son of Man, and the proem to the great song of an expectant democracy is in the brief hour of the first Christian society, which held all things in common.