Childhood in literature and art, with some observations on literature for children

by Horace Elisha Scudder

The sketch of a regenerated human society, contained in the New Testament, has been long in filling out, and the day which the first generation of Christians thought so near at hand has thus far had only a succession of proleptic appearances; but from the first the note of the power of Christianity, which lies in the recognition of poverty and weakness, has never been wanting, and has been most loudly struck in the great epochs of Christian revival. In the struggle after purity of associated life, which had its witness in the orders of the church, poverty was accepted as a necessary condition, and the constructive genius of the human mind, dealing with the realities of Christian faith, rose to its highest point in presenting, not the maturity, but the infancy of Jesus Christ. Each age offers its contribution to the perfection of the Christian ideal, and while, in the centuries lying on either side of the Renaissance, the church as an ecclesiastical system was enforcing the dogma of mediatorial sacrifice as something outside of humanity, the spirit of God, in the person of great painters, was drawing the thoughts of men to the redemption of the world, which lies in the most sacred of human relations. The great efflorescence of art, which we recognize as the gift of these centuries, has left as its most distinctive memorial the type of Christianity expressed in the Madonna.

I

In the Holy Family the child is the essential figure. In the earliest examples of the mother and child, both Mary and Jesus are conceived as symbols of religious faith, and the attitude of the child is unchildlike, being that of a dispenser of blessings with uplifted hand. The group is not distinctly of the mother and child, but of the Virgin and the Saviour, the Saviour being represented as a child in order to indicate the ground of the adoration paid to the Virgin. They stand before one as possessed of coördinate dignity. It is a curious and suggestive fact that the Byzantine type of the Madonna, which rarely departed much from this symbolic treatment, has continued to be the preference of those whose conceptions of the religious life are most closely identified with a remote sacramentarianism. The Italian lemonade-seller has a Byzantine Madonna in his booth: the Belgian churches abound in so-called sacred pictures: the Russian merchant salutes an icon of the same type; and the ritualistic enthusiast of the Anglican revival modifies his æsthetic views by his religious sympathy, and stops short in his admiration with Cimabue and Giotto.

In the development of the Madonna from its first form as a rigid symbol to its latest as a realistic representation of motherhood, we are aware of a change in the minds of the people who worship before the altars where the pictures are placed, and in the minds of the painters who produce the almost endless variations on this theme. The worshipper, dispossessed of a belief in the fatherhood of God, came to take refuge in the motherhood of Mary. Formally taught the wrath of God, he found in the familiar relation of mother and child the most complete type vouchsafed to him of that love which the church by many informal ways bade him believe lay somewhere in the divine life.

Be this as it may, the treatment of the subject in a domestic and historical form followed the treatment in a religious and ecclesiological mode. In the earlier representations of the Madonna there was a twofold thought exhibited. The mother was the queen of heaven, and she derived her dignity from the child on her knee. Hence she is sometimes shown adoring the child, and the child looks up into the mother’s face with his finger on his lip, expressive of the utterance, I am the Word. This adoration of the child by the mother was, however, but a transient phase: the increasing worship paid to the Virgin forbade that she should be so subordinated; and in the gradual expansion of the theme, by which saints and martyrs and angels were grouped in attendant ministry, more and more importance was attached to the person of the Virgin. The child looks up in wonder and affectionate admiration. He caresses her, and offers her a child’s love mingled with a divine being’s calm self-content.

For throughout the whole period of the religious presentation of the Madonna, even when the Madonna herself is conspicuously the occasion of the picture, we may observe the influence of the child,—an influence sometimes subtle, sometimes open and manifest. It is not enough to say that this child is Jesus, as it is not enough to say that the mother is the Virgin Mary. The divine child is the sign of an ever-present childhood in humanity; the divine mother the sign of a love which the religion of Christianity never wholly forgot. The common imagination was perpetually seeking to relieve Mary and Jesus of all attributes which interfered with the central and inhering relation of mother and child: through this type of love the mind apprehended the gospel of Christianity as in no other way.

Indeed, this apotheosis of childhood and maternity is at the core of the religion of hope which was inclosed in the husk of mediæval Christianity, and it was made the theme of many variations. Before it had ceased to be a symbol of worship, it was offering a nucleus for the expression of a more varied human hope and interest. The Holy Family in the hands of painters and sculptors, and the humbler class of designers which sprang into notice with the introduction of printing and engraving, becomes more and more emblematic of a pure and happy domestic group. Joseph is more frequently introduced, and John Baptist appears as a playmate of the child Jesus; sometimes they are seen walking in companionship. Certain incidents in later life are symbolically prefigured in the realistic treatment of homely scenes, as in the Madonna by Giulio Romano, where the child stands in a basin, while the young S. John pours water upon him, Mary washes him, S. Elizabeth stands by holding a towel, and S. Joseph watches the scene,—an evident prefigurement of the baptism in the Jordan. Or again, Mary, seated, holds the infant Christ between her knees; Elizabeth leans over the back of the chair; Joseph rests on his staff behind the Virgin; the little S. John and an angel present grapes, while four other angels are gathering and bringing them. By such a scene Ippolito Andreasi would remind people that Jesus is the true vine.

II

The recognition of childhood as the heart of the family is discoverable even more emphatically in the art of the northern people, among whom domestic life always had greater respect. It may seem a trivial reason, but I suspect nature holds the family more closely together in cold countries, which compel much indoor and fireside life, than in lands which tempt to vagrancy. At any rate, the fact remains that the Germanic peoples have been home-cultivating. It did not need the Roman Tacitus to find this out, but his testimony helps us to believe that the disposition was a radical one, which Christianity reinforced rather than implanted. Lord Lindsay makes the pregnant observation, “Our Saviour’s benediction of the little children as a subject [is] from first to last Teutonic,—I scarcely recollect a single Italian instance of it;”[30] and in the revival of religious art, at which Overbeck and Cornelius assisted, this and similar subjects, by their frequency, mark a differentiation from art south of the Alps, whose traditions, nevertheless, the German school was consciously following.