This, then, may be taken as the peculiar contribution of Andersen: that he, appearing at a time when childhood had been laid open to view as a real and indestructible part of human life, was the interpreter to the world of that creative power which is significant of childhood. The child spoke through him, and disclosed some secrets of life; childhood in men heard the speech, and recognized it as an echo of their own half-forgotten voices. The literature of this kind which he produced has become a distinct and new form. It already has its imitations, and people are said to write in the vein of Andersen. Such work, and Andersen’s in particular, presents itself to us under two aspects: as literature in which conceptions of childhood are embodied, and as literature which feeds and stimulates the imagination of children. But this is precisely the way in which a large body of current literature must be regarded.
IX
IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART
The conditions of life in the United States have been most favorable to the growth of a special literature for children, but, with one or two notable exceptions, the literature which is independent of special audiences has had little to do with childhood as a subject, and art has been singularly silent. There is scarcely anything in Irving, for example, which touches upon child life. A sentence now and then in Emerson shows an insight of youth, as when he speaks of the unerring instinct with which a boy tells off in his mind the characters of the company in a room. Bryant has touched the subject more nearly, but chiefly in a half-fantastic way, in his Little People of the Snow and Sella. Thoreau could hardly be expected to concern himself with the young of the human race when he had nearer neighbors and their offspring. Lowell has answered the appeal which the death of children makes to the heart, but aside from his tender elegiac verses has scarcely dwelt on childhood either in prose or verse. Holmes, with his boyishness of temper, has caught occasionally at the ebullition of youthful spirits, as in the humorous figure of young Benjamin Franklin in the Autocrat, and in some of his autobiographic sketches. His School-Boy, also, adds another to those charming memories of youth which have made Cowper, Goldsmith, and Gray known to readers who else would scarcely have been drawn to them; for the one unfailing poetic theme which finds a listener who has passed his youth is the imaginative rendering of that youth.
Whittier, though his crystalline verse flows through the memory of many children, has contributed very little to the portrayal of childhood. His portrait of the Barefoot Boy and his tender recollection In School Days are the only poems which deal directly with the subject, and neither of them is wholly objective. They are a mature man’s reflection of childhood. Snow-Bound rests upon the remembrance of boyish days, but it deals rather with the circumstance of boyhood than with the boy’s thoughts or feelings. Yet the poet shows unmistakably his sense of childhood, although one would not be far wrong who understood him as never separating the spirit of childhood from the human life at any stage. His editorial work in the two volumes, Child-Life in Poetry and Child-Life in Prose, is an indication of his interest in the subject, and he was quick to catch the existence of the sentiment in its association with another poet, whose name is more directly connected with childhood. In his verses, The Poet and the Children, he gave expression to the thought which occurred to many as they considered how soon Longfellow’s death followed upon the spontaneous celebration of his birthday by multitudes of children.
This testimony to Longfellow was scarcely the result of what he had written either for or of children. It was rather a natural tribute to a poet who had made himself a household word in American homes. Children are brought up on poetry to a considerable extent; they are, moreover, under training for the most part by young women, and the pure sentiment which forms the unfailing element of Longfellow’s writings finds in such teachers the readiest response. When one comes to consider the subjects of Longfellow’s poetry, one finds that the number addressed to children, or finding their motive in childhood, is not large. Those of direct address are, To a Child, From my Arm-Chair, Weariness, Children; yet which of these demands or would receive a response from children? Only one, From my Arm-Chair, and that chiefly by the circumstance which called it out, and on which the poet relies for holding the direct attention of children. He gets far away from most children before he has reached the end of his poem To a Child, and in the other two poems we hear only the voice of a man in whom the presence of children awakens thoughts which lie too deep for their tears, though not for his.
Turning aside from those which appeal in form to children, one finds several which, like those last named, are evoked by the sentiment which childhood suggests. Such are The Reaper and the Flowers, Resignation, The Children’s Hour, and A Shadow, all in the minor key except The Children’s Hour; and this poem, perfect as it is in a father’s apprehension, yields only a subtle and half-understood fragrance to a child. One poem partly rests on a man’s thought of his own childhood, My Lost Youth; The Hanging of the Crane contains for its best lines a vignette of infancy; a narrative poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, has for its chief figure a child; and Hiawatha is bright with a sketch of Indian boyhood. The translations show two or three which include this subject.
While, therefore, Longfellow is repeatedly aware of the presence of children, it is not by the poems which spring out of that recognition that he especially reaches them. In his poem From my Arm-Chair, he refers to The Village Blacksmith; that has a single verse in which children figure, but the whole poem will arrest the attention of children far more than From my Arm-Chair, and it belongs to them more. It cannot be too often repeated that books and poems about children are not necessarily for children. The thoughts which the man has of the child often depend wholly upon the fact that he has passed beyond childhood, and looks back upon it; it is impossible for the child to stand by his side. Thus the poem Weariness contains the reflection of a man who anticipates the after life of children; there is nothing in it which belongs to the reflection of childhood itself. Tennyson’s May Queen, which has found its way into most of our anthologies for the young, is a notable example of a large class of verses quite unfit for such a place. It may be said in general that sentiment, when made a part of childhood, is very sure to be morbid and unnatural. We have a sentiment which rises at the sight of childhood, but children themselves have none of it; the more refined it is, the more unfit it is to go into their books.
Here is a collection of poetry for children, having all the marks of a sound and reputable work. As I turn its leaves, I come upon a long ballad of The Dying Child, Longfellow’s The Reaper and the Flowers, a poem called The Little Girl’s Lament, in which a child asks, “Is heaven a long way off, mother?” and for two or three pages dwells upon a child’s pain at the loss of her father; Tennyson’s May Queen, who is so unconscionably long a time dying; Mrs. Hemans’s imitation of Mignon’s song in a poem called The Better Land; and a poem by Dora Greenwell which I must regard as the most admirable example of what a poem for a child should not be. It is entitled A Story by the Fire, and begins,—
“Children love to hear of children!