it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic, appreciative sense that the child’s outlook on the world around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents more truthful appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child, his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot feel the difference between the child’s outlook and his own, this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience, there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional sensibility of a child.
In Edward Fitzgerald’s Euphranor, at the point where Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is interesting:—
“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes; and how it was from those of his own he learned that those of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they might be.”
“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his having watched his child one morning worshipping the sunbeam on the bedpost—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a while!”
(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the baby in question, Vol. I., 357).
THE REVELATION
An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,