CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE AND ART.* Ifa. SCUDDER is a lover
of children in the abstract as in the concrete, in the ideal no less than in the actual. Last year he gave us an admirable book of selections for the children themselves to read ; now he gives their elders a no less excel- lent study on childhood in its relation to literature, art, and life. It is a study, not a historical treatise; and the range of the subject is necessarily so vast that the author's method is suggestive rather than exhaustive in his dealing with it. But while we thus escape being ourselves exhausted by the weari- some tediousness of a learned Dr. Dryasdust, the suggestive- ness which takes its place is that of the man of thought as well as culture. Mr. Scudder brings new and old things out of his stores, sets the old in the light of the new, and we may say of him, as Dr. Johnson said of Goldsmith, " Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit." If the author's quotations or allusions are old and familiar, their appropriateness shows him to be a man of culture, and we do not regard them as bores, but welcome them as old friends ; and if they belong to a wider range of reading than our own, we have the pleasant sense that we are in the company of a man who has some- thing new to tell us. The book is a sketch-map by one who knows the road well, though he only puts in a mountain or a. river here and there. The subject, as we have already said,, is rather treated by suggestion than exhaustion, and in our sketch of the sketch we shall not think it necessary to mark always where we have followed out a suggestion for ourselves,, and where we tread in the footsteps of our author.
In the critical apparatus for the study of what may be called' the historical philosophy of literature and art, we used to be familiar with the term "idea," as used by Plato, Bacon, and Coleridge. Then the old Greek word began to be represented by the French word " motif" in the sense of the musical term ; and still more lately by the German "moment," adopted from the language of physical science,—not as referring to time, but in the sense of momentum or impelling force. And so—bar- barously enough, we confess, we may call this book the "Child- Moment in Literature and Art." It is a far cry from Words- worth to Homer, and from the valleys of Westmorland to the plains of Troy ; but all over that long interval of time and place, the child has "looked with such a look and spoken with such a tone" that the poet has everywhere 4 almost received its heart into his own." And Mr. Scudder traces the influence of the child upon the literature of the three nations of antiquity who can be said to have had a literature worthy of the name,—the Greek, the Latin, and the Hebrew. Indirectly in the similes in which Homer pictures the mother and child,. and directly in the scene of Hector and his child, he recognises the motive-force of the idea of childhood. He finds it again in the agony with which tEdipus and Alcestis respectively anticipate the lot of their children, and he—though we cannot here pretend to follow him—suggests an ingenious defence • Childhood in Literature ana Art, with soma absareations on Literatura for
Childron : a Study. By Horace &Scudder. Boston, : Houghton, Nod Co. Loudon: Gay aud Bird, 1994,
—or rather explanation—of Plato's treatment of children in his Republic. When we pass from Homer to Virgil, we see in the much larger part which the son of his hero plays in the Latin poem, the greater prominence of family relationship in the Roman thought as compared with what is so much more purely personal in the Greek. And still greater is the im- portance of the child in Hebrew literature, and in the history which it embodies. Essential as are the traditions of the past, the life and growth of the nation, its hopes, its prospects and its promises, are still more so. And above all other nations, was this true of the Hebrews. They, more than other nations, read their earlier history in the light of the later, and these national memories and hopes are embodied in national traditions, from Eve's " I have gotten a man from Jehovah" to the Magnificat of Mary. The Patriarchs rejoice in promises to be fulfilled to their children, not to themselves. Again and again the birth and training up of the child is recorded as the most important work of the generation. We think of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and the sons of Jacob, and of Joseph, in the world's history; and later—when the fortunes of Judah seemed 'at their lowest ebb—the most convincing sign that God had not forsaken his people, was the promised birth of a child. Then these several currents of childhood, as the force of life in history and literature, found their highest moral and spiritual expression when the Divine Teacher, who had him- self been a child, "called a little child," and said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." From that time to our own, this stream has flowed on with increasing strength, though more than once almost disappearing for a time while it was finding its course through "caverns measureless to man."
Thenceforth. childhood becomes a dominant factor and force in the literature: and art of Christendom, never to be again wholly lost. Our author traces its first rude expression in his stories of the childhood of Jesus in the apocryphal gospels ; it came to light again with new and greater power in the Renaissance in the representations of the Virgin and Child, of the baby angels, and the Innocents specially de- picted by the art named " della Robbia." It is in art rather than in literature that we look for the child in the Renais- sance; and in our own great burst of the imagination in the Elizabethan era, the drama was not favourable to the repre- sentation of childhood. Yet we Englishmen expect Shake- 43 pears to know everything; and we are not disappointed in oar faith. We cannot think that Shakespeare needs any apology. What deeper recognition is there of the innermost power of the child in human life, and so in literature, than that which is expressed in that one line of the speech of the Lady Con- stance, "He talks to me who never had a son" P—a recog- nition of a whole world of man's life unknown to the celibate Cardinal, however great his worldly knowledge and power. The picture of the Royal babes in Richard III. is no less important than that of Arthur; and then, as Mr. Scudder points out, we have other shorter sketches of the child in Macbeth, Coriolanus, As You Like It, and A Winter's Tale, and even in Cleopatra's comparison of the asp to an infant at her breast. And to this we might add Shakespeare's description of those "little (vases," the child-players of his own day, in which, whether he approved of them or no, he acknowledges that they hold a place in the drama,—that is, in the literature of his own time. In Milton, our author finds hardly any refer. once to his subject-matter, except in the "Infant God" of the "Ode on the Nativity." But we think he must have over- looked the noble passage in the "Apology for Smectymnuus " .on the influence of the Tales of Chivalry on his boyhood,—a passage dear to all who have had the like experience. Then he observes that if the severity of the Puritan life seems not favourable to the expressions and development of childhood, we seem to owe to it the beginnings of domestic biography ; and he dwells at some length on the pictures in the Pilgrim's Progress of the children and the middle-class family life of Bunyan's own time.
After an interval in which the child was hidden though not lost, we come to the period of the Second Renaissance, marked in history by the French Revolution and the Constitution of the American Republic. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the preludings of the reappearance of the child in literature and art are to be recognised,—in Gray, Gold- smith and Cowper, and in Sir Joshua Reynolds. Of the works of Reynolds, Mr. Scudder says :—
They are a delight to the eye, and in the true democracy of art we know no distinction 1 etween Master Crewe as Henry VIII. and a boy with a child on his back and cabbage-nets in his hand. What a revelation of childhood is in this great group ! There is the tenderness of the Children in the Wood, the peace of the Sleeping Child, where nature itself is in slumber, the timidity of the Strawberry Girl, the wildness of the Gipsy Boy, the shy grace of Pickaback, the delightful wonder of Master I3unbury, the sweet simplicity and innocence in the pictures so named, and the spiritual yet human beauty of the Angels' heads."
Then came the Renaissance itself, political, social, moral, spiritual. Of the new life in our English literature, with childhood as one of its most imminent forces, Mr. Scudder holds, and rightly holds, Wordsworth to have been the chief high-priest. His criticism of the poet is as thoughtful as original. We give a partial extract :—
" Wordsworth's incidents of childhood are sometimes given a purely objective character, as in Rural Architecture,' 'The Anecdote for Fathers," The Idle Shepherd Boys ;' but more often childhood is to him the occasion and suggestion of the deeper thoughts of life. A kitten, playing with falling leaves before the poet and his child Dora, leads him on by exquisite movement to the thought of his own decay of life. But what impresses us most is the twofold conception of childhood as a part of nature and as containing within itself not only the germ of human life but the echo of the divine. There are poems of surpassing beauty which so blend the child and nature that we might almost fancy, as we look upon the poetical landscapes, that we are mistaking children for bushes, or bushes for children. Such is that one beginning Three years she grew in sun and shower,' and Wisdom and Spirit of the universe !' He drew images from his children, and painted a deliberate portrait of his daughter Catherine, solemnly entitled, Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old.' Yet, though Wordsworth drew many suggestions from his own children and from those whom he saw in hi a walks, it is remarkable how little he regards children in the relation to parents in comparison of their individual and isolated existence. Before Wordsworth, the child, in literature, was almost wholly considered as one of a group, as a part of a family, and only those phases of childhood were treated which were obvious to the most careless observer. Wordsworth—and here is the notable fact— was the first deliberately to conceive of childhood as a distinct, individual element of human life. He first, to use a truer phrase, apprehended the personality of childhood. He did this, and gave it expression in artistic form in some of the poems already named ; he did it methodically, and with philosophic intent, in his auto- biographic poem, The Prelude,' and also in The Excursion.'"
We have not room to follow up this extract with Mr. Scudder'a admirable analysis of the "great ode" in which Wordsworth carries out to the full his ideal of childhood as the motive. force of the man's highest and deepest thoughts and feelings, We can only commend it to the reader, and add that he will find in it fresh proof that in the study and the understanding of English literature as well as in other things, the men across the Atlantic are our brothers, and that more than half the brotherly sympathy between us is their own. We will conclude with a specimen of the humour which the Americans can put into their gravest State documents :—
"The sixteenth amendment to the Constitution reads : The rights and caprices of children in the United States shall not be denied or abridged on account of age, sex, or formal condition of tutelage ;' and this amendment has been recognised in literature, as in life, while waiting its legal adoption."
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