The character of Mignon may be dismissed from special consideration, for it is clear that Goethe used Mignon’s diminutiveness and implied youth only to heighten the effect of her elfish and dwarfish nature. The most considerable reference to childhood is perhaps in the Sorrows of Young Werther, where the relations between Werther and Charlotte comprise a sketchy group of children who act as foils or accompaniments to the pair. Werther discovers Charlotte, it will be remembered, cutting slices of bread for her younger brothers and sisters; it is by this means that Goethe would give a charm to the character, presenting it in its homely, domestic setting. But his purpose is also to intimate the exceeding sensibility of Werther, and he represents him as taking a most affectionate interest in the little children whom he sees on his walks. I suspect, indeed, that Goethe in this has distinctly borrowed from the Vicar of Wakefield; at any rate, the comparison is easily suggested, and one brings away the impression of Goldsmith’s genuine feeling and of Goethe’s deliberate assumption of a feeling for artistic purposes. Nevertheless, Goethe makes very positive use of childhood in this novel, not only through the figures of children, but also through the sentiment of childhood.
“Nothing on this earth, my dear Wilhelm,” says Werther, “affects my heart so much as children. When I consider them; when I mark in the little creatures the seeds of all those virtues and qualities which they will one day find so indispensable; when I behold in the obstinate all the future firmness and constancy of a noble character, in the capricious that levity and gayety of temper which will carry them lightly over the dangers and troubles of life, their whole nature simple and unpolluted, then I call to mind the golden words of the Great Teacher of mankind: ‘Except ye become as little children.’ And now, my friend, these children, who are our equals, whom we ought to consider as our models, we treat as subjects. They are allowed no will of their own! And have we then none ourselves? Whence comes our exclusive right? Is it because we are older and more experienced? Great God! from the height of thy heaven, thou beholdest great children and little children, and no others; and thy Son has long since declared which afford the greatest pleasure. But they believe in him, and hear him not,—that too is an old story; and they train their children after their own image.”
We must regard this as a somewhat distorted application of the words of the gospel, but it is interesting as denoting that Goethe also, who stood so much in the centre of illumination, had perceived the revealing light to fall upon the heads of young children. It is not, however, so much by his direct as by his indirect influence that Goethe is connected with our subject. If Luther was both an exponent of German feeling and a determining cause of its direction, Goethe occupies a similar relation as an expression of German intellectualism and a stimulator of German thought. A hundred years after his birth, when measures were taking to celebrate the centenary by the establishment of some educational foundation to bear his name, the enthusiastic supporters of Froebel sought to divert public interest into the channel of this movement for the cultivation of childhood. Froebel’s philosophy has affected modern educational systems even where his method has not been scrupulously followed. Its influence upon literature and art can scarcely be traced, except so far as it has tended to give direction and set limits to the great body of books and pictures, which, made for children, are also expository and illustrative of the life of children. I mention him simply as an additional illustration of the grasp which the whole subject of childhood has obtained in Germany; it has made itself felt in religion and politics; so revolutionary was Froebel’s philosophy held to be that his schools were suppressed at one time by the government as tending to subvert the state. This was not strange, since Froebel’s own view as to the education of children was radical and comprehensive.
A child’s life finds its chief expression in play, and in play its social instincts are developed. Now the kindergarten recognizes the fact that play is the child’s business, not his recreation, and undertakes to guide and form the child through play. It converts that which would otherwise be aimless or willful into creative, orderly, and governed action. Out of the play as governed by the wise kindergartner grows a spirit of courtesy, self-control, forbearance, unselfishness. The whole force of the education is directed toward a development of the child which never forgets that he is a person in harmonious relation to others. Community, not competition, is the watchword of the school. In this view the kindergarten has its basis in the same law which lies at the foundation of a free republic. Obedience, as taught by the system of public schools, is an obedience to rules; it may be likened to the obedience of the soldier,—a noble thing, but not the highest form of human subjection of the will. Obedience as evolved in the true kindergarten is a conscious obedience to law. The unity of life in the school, with entire freedom of development in the individual, is the aim of the kindergarten.
The enthusiasm which made itself felt in France in the rise of the romantic school, with its expression chiefly through poetry, the drama, and fiction, disclosed its power likewise in Germany. There, however, other channels offered a course for the new current. The rise of the school of religious painters, of which Overbeck and Cornelius were eminent examples, was a distinct issue of the movement of the times. It was regarded as reactionary by some, but its reaction was rather in form than in spirit. It ran counter to a Philistinism which was complacent and indifferent to spiritual life, and it sought to embody its ideas in forms which not only Philistinism but humanism contemned, yet it was all the while working in the interest of a higher freedom. It is noticeable, therefore, that this religious art, in its choice of subjects, not only resorted to the early ecclesiological type, but struck out into a new path, choosing themes which imply a subjective view of Christianity. Thus, Overbeck’s picture of Christ blessing little children, a subject which is a favorite one of modern religious art, is a distinct recognition of modern sentiment. Here is the relation borne by the Christ to little children presented by a religious art, which, however much it might seek to reinstate the old forms, could not help being affected by the new life of Christianity. Overbeck went to the early Florentines for his masters, but he did not find this subject among their works. He caught it from the new reading of the old gospel.
VIII
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
As Overbeck and his school returned to the religious art which preceded the Renaissance, so Thorwaldsen, like Canova and lesser men, turned back to Greek art, and was working contemporaneously with Overbeck at Rome in a very different temper. To him the central figure of Christianity was not a child in its mother’s arms, but a strong, thoughtful man; for childhood he turned to the sportive conception of Amor, which he embodied in a great variety of forms. The myth appealed, aside from the opportunity which it offered for the expression of sensuous beauty, to his northern love of fairyland. His countryman, Andersen, tells us how, when they were all seated in the dusk, Thorwaldsen would come from his work and beg for a fairy-tale.
It is Andersen himself who has made the most unique contribution not only to the literature which children read, but to that which is illustrative of childhood. He attained his eminence sheerly by the exhibition of a power which resulted from his information by the spirit of childhood. He was not only an interpreter of childhood; he was the first child who made a real contribution to literature. The work by which he is best known is nothing more nor less than an artistic creation of precisely the order which is common among children.
It is customary to speak of his best known short stories as fairy tales; wonder-stories is in some respects a more exact description, but the name has hardly a native sound. Andersen himself classed his stories under the two heads of historier and eventyr; the historier corresponds well enough with its English mate, being the history of human action, or, since it is a short history, the story; the eventyr, more nearly allied perhaps to the German abenteuer than to the English adventure, presumes an element of strangeness causing wonder, while it does not necessarily demand the machinery of the supernatural. When we speak of fairy tales, we have before our minds the existence, for artistic purposes, of a spiritual world peopled with beings that exercise themselves in human affairs, and are endowed in the main with human attributes, though possessed of certain ethereal advantages, and generally under orders from some superior power, often dimly understood as fate; the Italians, indeed, call the fairy fata. In a rough way we include under the title of fairies all the terrible and grotesque shapes as well, and this world of spiritual beings is made to consist of giants, ogres, brownies, pixies, nisses, gnomes, elves, and whatever other creatures have found in it a local habitation and name. The fairy itself is generally represented as very diminutive, the result, apparently, of an attempted compromise between the imagination and the senses, by which the existence of fairies for certain purposes is conceded on condition they shall be made so small that the senses may be excused from recognizing them.