I

To hunt through English literature and art for representations of childhood would seem to be like looking for the persons of children in any place where people congregate. How could there be any conspicuous absence, except under conditions which necessarily exclude the very young? Yet it is impossible to follow the stream of English literature, with this pursuit in mind, without becoming aware that at one point in its course there is a marked access of this force of childhood. There is, to be sure, a fallacy lurking in the customary study of the development of literature. We fall into the way of thinking of that literature as an organism proceeding from simpler to more complex forms; we are attent upon the transition of one epoch into another; we come to regard each period as essentially anticipatory of the succeeding period. We make the same mistake often in our regard of historical sequence, looking at all past periods simply and exclusively with reference to the present stand from which we take our observations. A too keen sensibility to the logic which requires time for its conclusion, a too feeble sense of the logic which dwells in the relation between the seen and the unseen,—these stand in the way of a clear perception of the forces immanent in literature and life.

The distinction is worth bearing in mind when one surveys English literature with the purpose of recognizing the child in it. There are certain elemental facts and truths of which old and new cannot be predicated. The vision of helpless childhood is no modern discovery; it is no ancient revelation. The child at play was seen by Homer and by Cowper, and the latter did not derive his apprehension from any study of the former. The humanism which underlies all literature is independent of circumstances for its perception of the great moving forces of life; it is independent of the great changes in human history; even so great a change as the advent of Christianity could not interfere with the normal expression of elemental facts in life.

Wherein, then, lies the difference between an antique and a modern apprehension of childhood? For what may one look in a survey of English literature that he would not find in Greek or Roman authors? Is there any development of human thought in relation to childhood to be traced in a literature which has reflected the mind of the centuries since the Renaissance? The most aggressive type of modern Christianity, at any rate the most free type, is to be found amongst English-speaking people; and if Christianity has in any way modified the course of thought regarding the child, the effect will certainly be seen in English literature and art.

A recollection of ballad literature, without critical inquiry of the comparative age of the writings, brings to light the familiar and frequent incident of cruelty to children in some form: of the secret putting away of babes, as in the affecting ballad of the Queen’s Marie; of the cold and heartless murder, as in the Cruel Mother, and in the tragic tale of The Child’s Last Will, where a sudden dramatic and revealing turn is given, after the child has willed its various possessions, in the lines,—

That grewsome story of Lamkin, with its dripping of blood in almost every stanza, gets half its curdling power from the slow torture of the sensibilities, as the babe is slain and then rocked in its cradle, and the mother, summoned by its cries, meets her own fate at the hands of the treacherous nurse and Lamkin, whose name is a piece of bald irony:—

Another early and significant illustration is found in the popular story of Hugh of Lincoln; but instead of turning to the ballad of that name, one may better have recourse to Chaucer’s version as contained in the Canterbury tale of the Prioress. In the prologue to this tale appear the words of Scripture, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” in a paraphrase, and the Prioress turns to the Virgin, beseeching her to give words for the telling of the piteous tale. The story of Hugh of Lincoln—that in the reign of Henry III., the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy of eight years, named Hugh, tortured and crucified him—was received with great credit, for it concentrated the venomous enmity with which Christians regarded the Jews, and by a refinement of cruelty pictured the Jews in a solitary instance as behaving in a Christian-like manner. Chaucer tells the story with exquisite pathos, lingering upon the childish ways of Hugh, and preparing the tears of his readers by picturing the little boy as a miniature saint. It can scarcely be called a picture of artless childhood; for though touches here and there bring out the prattler, Chaucer appears to have meant that his readers should be especially impressed by the piety of this “litel clergeoun,” or chorister boy:—

And so we are told of the little fellow eager to learn the Alma Redemptoris of his elders, and conning it as he went to and from school, his way leading through the Jews’ quarter:—

The wicked Jews, vexed by his singing, kill him, and cast his body into a pit. His weeping mother seeks him, and, happening by the pit, is made aware of his presence by the miracle of his dead lips still singing the Alma Redemptoris.

In two other stories has Chaucer dwelt upon the pathos of childhood and bereft or suffering motherhood. In the Man of Law’s tale of Custance, there is a touching passage where Custance and her babe are driven away from the kingdom, and exposed to the sea in the ship which had brought them. The mother kneels upon the sand before embarking, and puts her trust in the Lord.

Then she commits herself and her child to Mary by the love of Mary’s child.

Again, in the Clerk’s tale of Patient Griselda, the effect of the story is greatly heightened by the narrative of the successive partings of the mother with her child; and the climax is reached in the burst of gladness and pent-up feeling which overtakes Griselda at the restoration of her son and daughter. It is noticeable that in these and other instances childhood appears chiefly as an appeal to pity, rarely as an object of direct love and joy. This is not to be wondered at when one considers the character of the English race, and the nature of the redemption which it has been undergoing in the slow process of its submission to the spirit of Christ. We say the English race, without stopping to make nice distinctions between the elements which existed at the time of the Great Charter, just as we may properly speak of the American people of the time of the Constitution.

This character is marked by a brutality, a murderous spirit, which lies scarcely concealed, to-day, in the temper of every English crowd, and has left its mark on literature from the ballads to Oliver Twist. This brutal instinct, this rude, savage, northern spirit, is discovered in conflict with the disarming power of the spirit of Christ, and the stages of the conflict are most clearly indicated in poetry, which is to England what pictorial and sculpturesque art is to the south, the highest exponent of its spiritual life. More comprehensively, English literature affords the most complete means of measuring the advance of England in humanity.

It belongs to the nature of this deep conflict that there should appear from time to time the finest exemplars of the ideals formed by the divine spirit, side by side with exhibitions of the most willful baseness. English literature abounds in these contrasts; it is still more expressive of tides of spiritual life, the elevation of thought and imagination succeeded by almost groveling animalism. And since one of the symbols of a perfected Christianity is the child, it is not unfair to seek for its presence in literature, nor would it be a rare thing to discover it in passages which hint at the conflict between the forces of good and evil so constantly going on.

It is not strange, therefore, that the earliest illustrations of childhood should mainly turn, as we have seen, upon that aspect which is at once most natural and most Christian. Pity, like a naked, new-born babe, does indeed ride the blast in those wild, more than half-savage bursts of the English spirit which are preserved for us in ballad literature; and in the first springs of English poetic art in Chaucer, the child is as it were the mediator between the rough story and the melody of the singer. One cannot fail to see how the introduction of the child by Chaucer, in close union with the mother, is almost a transfer of the Madonna into English poetry,—a Madonna not of ritual, but of humanity.

There are periods in the history of every nation when the inner life is more completely exposed to view, and when the student, if he be observant, may trace most clearly the fundamental arteries of being. Such a period in England was the Elizabethan era, when the tumultuous English spirit manifested itself in religion, in politics, in enterprise, in adventure, and in intellectual daring,—that era which was dominated by the great master of English speech. It is the fashion of every age to write its characteristics in forms which have become obsolete, and to resort to masquerade for a display of its real emotions. It was because chivalry was no longer the every-day habit of men that Spenser used it for his purposes, and translated the Seven Champions of Christendom into a profounder and more impassioned poem, emblematical of that great ethical conflict which has been a significant feature of English history from the first. In that series of knightly adventures, The Faery Queen, wherein the field of human character is traversed, sin traced to its lurking-place, and the old dragon of unrighteousness set upon furiously, there is a conspicuous incident contained in the second book. In each book Spenser conceives the antagonist of the knight, in some spiritual form, to have wrought a mischief which needs to be repaired and revenged. Thus a dragon occasions the adventures of the Red Cross knight, and in the legend of Sir Guyon the enchantress Acrasia, or Intemperance, has caused the death of a knight and his lady; the latter slays herself because of her husband’s death, and plunges her babe’s innocent hands into her own bloody breast for a witness. Sir Guyon and the Palmer, standing over the dead bodies, hold grave discourse upon the incident; then they bury the dead, and seek in vain to cleanse the babe’s hands in a neighboring fountain. The pure water will not be stained, and the child bears the name Ruddymane,—the Red-Handed,—and shall so bear the sign of a vengeance he is yet to execute.

It is somewhat difficult to see into the full meaning of Spenser’s allegory, for the reason that the poet breaks through the meshes of his allegoric net and soars into a freer air; but there are certain strong lines running through the poem, and this of the ineradicable nature of sin is one of them. To Spenser, vexed with problems of life, that conception of childhood which knit it closely with the generations was a significant one, and in the bloody hand of the infant, which could not be suffered to stain the chaste fountain, he saw the dread transmission of an inherited guilt and wrong. The poet and the moralist struggle for ascendency, and in this conflict one may see reflected the passion for speculation in divinity which was already making deep marks in English literature.

But the Elizabethan era had its share of light-heartedness. The songs of the dramatists and other lyrics exhibit very clearly the influence upon literature of the revival of ancient learning. As the art of Italy showed the old poetic grace risen again under new conditions, so the dominant art of England caught a light from the uncovered glory of Greece and Rome. It was the time of the great translations of Phaer, Golding, North, and Chapman; and as those translations are bold appropriations of antiquity, not timid attempts at satisfying the requisitions of scholarship, so the figures of the old mythology are used freely and ingenuously; they are naturalized in English verse far more positively than afterwards in the elegantia of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods. Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway is an exquisite illustration of this rich, decorative use of the old fable. It was partly through this sportive appropriation of the myth of Amor, so vital in all literature, that the lullabies of the time came to get their sweetness. The poet, in putting songs into the mother’s mouth, is not so much reflecting the Virgin and Child as he is possessed with the spirit of Greek beauty, and his delicate fancy plays about the image of a little Love. Thus may we read the Golden Slumbers of Dekker, in his Patient Grissel. By a pretty conceit George Gascoigne, in his Lullaby of a Lover, captures the sentiment of a mother and babe, to make it tell the story of his own love and content. There is a touching song by Robert Greene in his Menaphon, where Sephestia puts into her lullaby the story of her parting with the child’s father:—

We are apt to look for everything in Shakespeare, but in this matter of childhood we must confess that there is a meagreness of reference which almost tempts us into constructing a theory to account for it. So far as dramatic representation is concerned, the necessary limitations of the stage easily account for the absence of the young. Girls were not allowed to act in Shakespeare’s time, and it is not easy to reduce boys capable of acting to the stature of young girls. More than this, boys and girls are not themselves dramatic in action, though in the more modern drama they are sometimes used, especially in domestic scenes, to heighten effects, and to make most reasonable people wish them in bed.

Still, within the limits enforced by his art, Shakespeare more than once rested much on youthful figures. The gay, agile Moth has a species of femineity about him, so that we fancy he would be most easily shown on the stage by a girl; but one readily recalls others who have distinct boyish properties. In Coriolanus, when the mother and wife go out to plead with the angry Roman, they take with them his little boy. Volumnia, frantic with fear, with love, and with a woman’s changing passion, calls upon one and another to join her in her entreaty. Virgilia, the wife, crowds in a word at the height of Volumnia’s appeal, when the voluble grandmother has been rather excitedly talking about Coriolanus treading on his mother’s womb, that brought him into the world. Virgilia strikes in,—

Whereupon young Marcius, with delicious boyish brag and chivalry:—

In the same play there is a description of the boy which tallies exactly with the single appearance which he makes in person. Valeria drops in upon the mother and grandmother in a friendly way, and civilly asks after the boy.

The most eminent example in Shakespeare of active childhood is unquestionably the part played by young Arthur in the drama of King John. It is the youth of Arthur, his dependence, his sorry inheritance of misery, his helplessness among the raging wolves about him, his childish victory over Hubert, and his forlorn death, when he leaps trembling from the walls, which impress the imagination. “Stay yet,” says Pembroke to Salisbury,—

Shakespeare, busy with the story of kings, is moved with deep compassion for this child among kings, who overcomes the hard heart of Hubert by his innocent words, the very strength of feeble childhood, and falls like a poor lamb upon the stones, where his princedom could not save him.

In that ghastly play of Titus Andronicus, which melts at last into unavailing tears, with what exquisite grace is the closing scene humanized by the passage where the elder Lucius calls his boy to the side of his dead grandsire:—

The relentless spirit of Lady Macbeth is in nothing figured more acutely than when the woman and mother is made to say,—

In the witch’s hell-broth one ingredient is “finger of birth-strangled babe,” while in the portents which rise to Macbeth’s vision a bloody child and a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, are apparitions of ghostly prophecy. Then in that scene where Ross discloses slowly and with pent-up passion the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and Macduff hears as in a dream, waking to the blinding light of horrid day, with what a piercing shriek he cries out,—

and then surges back to his own pitiful state, transformed for a moment into an infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has stolen his mate and pretty brood.

By what marvelous flash of poetic power Shakespeare in this mighty passage lifts that humblest image of parental care, a hen and chickens, into the heights of human passion. Ah! as one sees a hen with a brood of chickens under her,—how she gathers them under her wings, and will stay in the cold if she can but keep them warm,—one’s mind turns to those words of profound pathos spoken over the unloving Jerusalem; there was the voice of a nature into which was gathered all the father’s and the mother’s love. In these two passages one sees the irradiation of poor feathered life with the glory of the image of the highest.

How important a part in the drama of King Richard III. do the young princes play; as princes, indeed, in the unfolding of the plot, yet as children in the poet’s portraiture of them. We hear their childish prattle, we see their timid shrinking from the dark Tower, and then we have the effect of innocent childhood upon the callous murderers, Dighton and Forrest, as related in that short, sharp, dramatic account which Tyrrel gives:—

The glances at infancy, though infrequent, are touched with strong human feeling. Ægeon, narrating the strange adventures of his shipwreck, tells of the

and scattered throughout the plays are passages and lines which touch lightly or significantly the realm of childhood: as,—

in Macbeth;

in Two Gentlemen of Verona;

says Desdemona; and Cleopatra, when the poisonous asp is planting its fangs, says with saddest irony,—

There is a charming illustration of the blending of the classic myth of Amor with actual childhood in these lines of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, where Helena says,

In the noonday musing of Jaques, when the summer sky hung over the greenwood, and he fell to thinking of the round world and all that dwell therein, the Seven Ages of Man passed in procession before him:—

until the last poor shambling creature is borne off in second childhood.

There are doubtless other passages which might be gleaned, but the survey is full enough to show how scantily, after all, Shakespeare has made use of the figure and the image of childhood. The reflection has led an ingenious writer to explain the fact by the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life, which hindered his study of children. “He was clearly old for his age when still a boy, and so would have associated, not with children, but with young men. His marriage as a mere lad and the scanty legends of his youth all tend in the same direction. The course of his life led him to live apart from his children in their youth; his busy life in London brought him into the interior of but few families; his son, of whom he saw but little, died young. If our supposition be true, it is a pathetic thought that the great dramatist was shut out from the one kind of companionship which, even while it is in no degree intellectual, never palls. A man, whatever his mental powers, can take delight in the society of a child, when a person of intellect far more matured, but inferior to his own, would be simply insufferable.”[32]

The explanation is rather ingenious than satisfying. Where did Shakespeare get his knowledge of the abundant life which his dramas present? He had the privilege of most people of remembering his own boyhood, and the mind which could invent Hamlet out of such stuff as experience and observation furnished could scarcely have missed acquaintance enough with children to enable him to portray them whenever the exigencies of his drama required. No, it is simpler to refer the absence of children as actors to the limitations of the stage, and to ascribe the infrequent references to childhood to the general neglect of the merely domestic side of life in Shakespeare’s art. Shakespeare’s world was an out-of-doors, public world, and his men, women, and lovers carried on their lives with no denser concealment than a wood or an arras could afford.

The comprehensiveness of Shakespeare found some place for children; the lofty narrowness of Milton, none. The word child, even, can scarcely be found on a page of Milton’s verse. In his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, with its Hymn, how slight is the mention of the child Jesus! How far removed is the treatment from that employed in the great procession of Madonnas!

The Infant God!—that is Milton’s attitude, more than half pagan. In L’Allegro and in Comus the lightness, which denotes the farthest swing of Milton’s fancy, is the relief which his poetic soul found from the high themes of theology, in Greek art. One is aware that Milton’s fine scholarship was the salvation of his poetry, as his Puritan sense of personality held in check a nature which else might have run riot in sportiveness and sensuousness. When he permitted himself his exquisite short flights of fancy, the material in which he worked was not the fresh spring of English nature, human or earthly, but the remote Arcadian virginity which he had learned of in his books. Not dancing children, but winged sprites, caught his poetic eye.

The weight of personal responsibility which rests upon the Puritan conception of life offers small play for the wantonness and spontaneity of childhood. Moreover, the theological substratum of Puritan morality denied to childhood any freedom, and kept the life of man in waiting upon the conscious turning of the soul to God. Hence childhood was a time of probation and suspense. It was wrong, to begin with, and was repressed in its nature until maturity should bring an active and conscious allegiance to God. Hence, also, parental anxiety was forever earnestly seeking to anticipate the maturity of age, and to secure for childhood that reasonable intellectual belief which it held to be essential to salvation; there followed often a replacement of free childhood by an abnormal development. In any event, the tendency of the system was to ignore childhood, to get rid of it as quickly as possible, and to make the state contain only self-conscious, determinate citizens of the kingdom of heaven. There was, unwittingly, a reversal of the divine message, and it was said in effect to children: Except ye become as grown men and be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.

Nevertheless, though Puritanism in its excessive anxiety may have robbed childhood of its freedom, the whole spirit of the movement was one conservative of family relations, and the narratives of domestic life under Puritanic control are often full of a grave sweetness. Indeed, it may almost be said that the domestic narrative was now born into English literature. Nor could the intense concern for the spiritual well-being of children, a religious passion reinforcing natural affection, fail to give an importance to the individual life of the family, and prepare the way for that new intelligence of the scope of childhood which was to come later to an England still largely dominated by Puritan ideas.

Milton expressed the high flight of the soul above earthly things. He took his place upon a summit where he could show the soul all the confines of heaven and earth. Bunyan, stirred by like religious impulses, made his soul trudge sturdily along toward an earthly paradise. The realism of his story often veils successfully the spiritual sense, and makes it possible for children to read the Pilgrim’s Progress with but faint conception of its religious import. In the second part of the allegory, Christian’s wife and children set out on their ramble, in Christian’s footsteps. There is no lack of individuality in characterization of the persons. The children are distinctly conceived as children; they are, to be sure, made to conform occasionally to the demands of the spiritual side of the allegory, yet they remain children, and by their speech and action betray the childish mind.

They come in sight of the lions, and “the boys that went before were glad to cringe behind, for they were afraid of the lions, so they stepped back and went behind.” When they come to the Porter’s Lodge, they abide there awhile with Prudence, Piety, and Charity; Prudence catechizes the four children, who return commendably correct answers. But Matthew, the oldest boy, falls sick of the gripes; and when the physician asks Christiana what he has been eating lately, she is as ignorant as any mother can be.

“Then said Samuel,” who is as communicative as most younger brothers, “‘Mother, mother, what was that which my brother did gather up and eat, so soon as we were come from the Gate that is at the head of this way? You know that there was an orchard on the left hand, on the other side of the wall, and some of the trees hung over the wall, and my brother did plash and did eat.’

“‘True, my child,’ said Christiana, ‘he did take thereof and did eat, naughty boy as he was. I did chide him, and yet he would eat thereof.’” So Mr. Skill, the physician, proceeds to make a purge. “You know,” says Bunyan, in a sly parenthesis, “physicians give strange medicines to their patients.” “And it was made up,” he goes on, “into pills, with a promise or two, and a proportionable quantity of salt. Now he was to take them three at a time, fasting, in half a quarter of a pint of Tears of Repentance. When this Portion was prepared and brought to the boy, he was loth to take it, though torn with the gripes as if he should be pulled in pieces. ‘Come, come,’ said the physician, ‘you must take it.’ ‘It goes against my stomach,’ said the boy. ‘I must have you take it,’ said his mother. ‘I shall vomit it up again,’ said the boy. ‘Pray, sir,’ said Christiana to Mr. Skill, ‘how does it taste?’ ‘It has no ill taste,’ said the doctor, and with that she touched one of the pills with the tip of her tongue. ‘O Matthew,’ said she, ‘this Portion is sweeter than honey. If thou lovest thy mother, if thou lovest thy brothers, if thou lovest Mercy, if thou lovest thy life, take it.’ So with much ado, after a short prayer for the blessing of God upon it, he took it, and it wrought kindly with him. It caused him to purge, it caused him to sleep and rest quietly, it put him into a fine heat and breathing sweat, and did quite rid him of his gripes.”

The story is dotted with these lifelike incidents, and the consistency is rather in the basis of the allegory than in the allegory itself. In truth, we get in the Pilgrim’s Progress an inimitable picture of social life in the lower middle class of England, and in this second part a very vivid glimpse of a Puritan household. The glimpse is corrective of a too stern and formal apprehension of social Puritanism, and in the story are exhibited the natural charms and graces which not only could not be expelled by a stern creed, but were essentially connected with the lofty ideals which made Puritanism a mighty force in history. Bunyan had a genius for story-telling, and his allegory is very frank; but what he showed as well as what he did not show in his picture of Christiana and the children indicates the constraint which rested upon the whole Puritan conception of childhood. It is seen at its best in Bunyan, and this great Puritan poet of common life found a place for it in his survey of man’s estate; nature asserted itself in spite of and through Puritanism.

Milton’s Christmas Hymn has the organ roll of a mind moving among high themes, and making the earth one of the golden spheres. Pope’s sacred eclogue of the Messiah is perhaps the completest expression of the religious sentiment of an age which was consciously bounded by space and time. In Pope’s day, the world was scarcely a part of a greater universe; eternity was only a prolongation of time, and the sense of beauty, acute as it was, was always sharply defined. Pope’s rhymed couplets, with their absolute finality, their clean conclusion, their epigrammatic snap, are the most perfect symbols of the English mind of that period. When in the Messiah we read,—

we remember Milton’s Infant God. The two poets touch, with a like faintness, the childhood of Jesus, but the one through awe and grandeur of contemplation, the other through the polite indifference of a man of the world. Or take Pope’s mundane philosophy, as exhibited most elaborately in his Essay on Man, and set it beside Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man:—

This is the only passage in the Essay hinting at childhood, and suffices to indicate how entirely insignificant in the eyes of the philosophy underlying Pope and his school was the whole thought of childhood. The passage, while not perhaps consciously imitative of Shakespeare, suggests comparison, and one finds in Jaques under the greenwood a more human feeling. Commend us to the tramp before the drawing-room philosopher!

The prelusive notes of a new literature were sounded by Fielding, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper. It was to be a literature which touched the earth again, the earth of a common nature, the earth also of a national inheritance.

Fielding, though painting contemporary society in a manner borrowed in a measure from the satiric drama, was moving constantly into the freer domain of the novelist who is a critic of life, and when he would set forth the indestructible force of a pure nature in a woman who is placed in a loose society, as in Amelia, he instinctively hedges the wife about with children, and it is a mark of his art that these children are not mere pawns which are moved about to protect the queen; they are genuine figures, their prattle is natural, and they are constantly illustrating in the most innocent fashion the steadfastness of Amelia.

It is significant that Gray, with his delicate taste and fine classical scholarship, when he composed his Elegy used first the names of eminent Romans when he wrote:—