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

by Horace Elisha Scudder

A child that did not breathe nor stir,—

A little, happy child,

Who had met his little friend again,

And in the meeting smiled.”

Here is a fantastic conception, extremely puzzling to a healthy-minded child. Imagine the natural questions of a simple, ingenuous boy or girl upon hearing this read. Who is this other child? Why was he coming back when the rose was blown? You explain, as well as you are able, that it was a phantom of death; or, if that seems too pallid, you try to imagine that the poet meant Jesus Christ or an angel by this other little child: but, in whatever way you explain it, you are obliged, if you will satisfy the downright little inquirer, to say plainly, This little boy died, and you begin to wish with all your heart that the poet with all her ed rhymes had added dead. Then the puzzle begins over again to connect the blooming rose and the little playmate with death. Do you say that you will leave the delicate suggestion of the lines to find its way into the child’s mind, and be the interpreter of the poem? This is what one might plead in Wordsworth’s We are Seven, for instance. The comparison suggested by the two poems is a partial answer. Wordsworth’s poem is a plain, objective narrative, which a child might hear and enjoy with scarcely a notion of what was implied in it, returning afterward to the deep, underlying sense. This poem of Dora Greenwell’s has no real objective character; the incident of the walk in the forest is of the most shadowy sort, and is used for its subtlety. I object to subtlety in literature for children. We have a right to demand that there shall be a clear outward sense, whatever may be the deeper meaning to older people. Hans Andersen’s story of The Ugly Duckling is a consummate example of a narrative which is enjoyable by the most matter-of-fact child, and yet recalls to the older reader a life’s history.

I have been led into a long digression through the natural correlation which exists between childhood in literature and a literature for children. Let me get back to my main topic by a similar path. The one author in America whose works yield the most fruitful examples in illustration of our subject is Hawthorne, and at the same time he is the most masterly of all our authors who have aimed at writing for an audience of children. Whatever may become of the great mass of books for young people published in America during the past fifty years,—and most of it is already crumbling in memory,—it requires no heroism to predict an immortality of fame for the little books which Hawthorne wrote with so much good nature and evident pleasure, Grandfather’s Chair and the Wonder Book, with its companion, Tanglewood Tales. Mr. Parkman has given a new reading in the minds of many people to the troubles in Acadia, but he has not disturbed the vitality of Evangeline; one may add footnote after footnote to modify or correct the statements in The Courtship of Miles Standish, but the poem will continue to be accepted as a picture of Pilgrim times. So the researches of antiquarians, with more material at their command than Hawthorne enjoyed, may lead them to different conclusions from those which he reached in his sketches of early New England history, but they cannot destroy that charm in the rendering which makes the book a classic.

More notable still is Hawthorne’s version of Greek myths. Probably he had no further authority for the stories than Lemprière. He only added the touch of his own genius. Only! and the old rods blossomed with a new variety of fruit and flower. It is easily said that Hawthorne Yankeeized the stories, that he used the Greek stones for constructing a Gothic building, but this is academic criticism. He really succeeded in naturalizing the Greek myths in American soil, and all the labors of all the Coxes will not succeed in supplanting them. Moreover, I venture to think that Hawthorne’s fame is more firmly fixed by means of the Wonder Book. The presence of an audience of children had a singular power over him. I do not care for the embroidery of actual child life which he has devised for these tales; it is scarcely more than a fashion, and already strikes one as quaint and out of date. But I cannot read the tales themselves without being aware that Hawthorne was breathing one air when he was writing them and another when he was at work on his romances. He illustrates in a delicate and subtle manner the line of Juvenal which bids the old remember the respect due to the young. Juvenal uses it to shame men into decorum; but just as any sensitive person will restrain himself in expression before children, so Hawthorne appears to have restrained his thought in their silent presence,—to have done this, and also to have admitted into it the sunshine which their presence brought. With what bright and joyous playfulness he repeats the old stories, and with what a paternal air he makes the tales yield their morsels of wisdom! There is no opening of dark passages, no peering into recesses, but a happy, generous spirit reigns throughout.

All this could have been predicated from the delightful glimpses which we now have of Hawthorne’s relations to his children, glimpses which his Note-Books, indeed, had already afforded, and which were not wanting also in his finished work. Nor was this interest in childhood something which sprang up after he had children of his own. In that lonely period of his young manhood, when he held converse only with himself, his Note-Books attest how his observation took in the young and his fancy played about them. As early as 1836 he makes a note: “To picture a child’s (one of four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s day,—his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a whipping, etc.” Again, how delicate is the hint conveyed in a passage describing one of his solitary walks! “Another time I came suddenly on a small Canadian boy, who was in a hollow place among the ruined logs of an old causeway, picking raspberries,—lonely among bushes and gorges, far up the wild valley; and the lonelier seemed the little boy for the bright sunshine, that showed no one else in a wide space of view except him and me.” He has elsewhere a quick picture of a boy running at full speed; a wistful look at a sleeping infant, which somehow touches one almost as if one had seen a sketch for a Madonna; and then this passage, significant of the working of his mind,—he is noting a Mediterranean boy from Malaga whom he saw on the wharf: “I must remember this little boy, and perhaps I may make something more beautiful of him than these rough and imperfect touches would promise.”

The relation which Hawthorne held to his own children, as illustrated both in the memoirs of him and in his Note-Books, was unquestionably a sign of that profound humanity which was the deep spring of his writings. But it was not, as some seem to think, a selfish love which he bore for them; he could show to them, because the relation was one of the elemental things in nature, a fullness of feeling which found expression otherwise only as all his nature found outlet,—in spiritual communion with mankind. How deep this inherent love of childhood lay is instanced in that passage in Our Old Home which one reads as it were with uncovered head. It is in the chapter entitled Some Glimpses of English Poverty, and relates how one of the party visiting an almshouse—Hawthorne himself, as his wife has since told us—was unexpectedly and most unwillingly made the object of demonstrative attention on the part of a poor, scrofulous, repulsive waif of humanity. Nothing that he had done had attracted the child,—only what he was; and so, moved by compassion, this strange, shy man took the child in his arms and kissed it. Let any one read the entire passage, note the mingled emotions which play about the scene like a bit of iridescent glass, and dare to speak of Hawthorne again except with reverence.