Part 1
Horace E. Scudder
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK
CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE AND ART
_WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN_
A Study
BY HORACE E. SCUDDER
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1894, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. U. S. A._ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
TO
S · C · S ·
WHO WAS A CHILD WHEN THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 3
II. IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE 6
III. IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE 39
IV. IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 53
V. IN MEDIÆVAL ART 81
VI. IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND ART 104
VII. IN FRENCH AND GERMAN LITERATURE 180
VIII. HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 201
IX. IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART 217
INDEX 247
CHILDHOOD IN LITERATURE AND ART
I
INTRODUCTION
There was a time, just beyond the memory of men now living, when the Child was born in literature. At the same period books for children began to be written. There were children, indeed, in literature before Wordsworth created Alice Fell and Lucy Gray, or breathed the lines beginning,
“She was a phantom of delight,”
and there were books for the young before Mr. Day wrote Sandford and Merton; especially is it to be noted that Goldsmith, who was an _avant-courier_ of Wordsworth, had a very delightful perception of the child, and amused himself with him in the Vicar of Wakefield, while he or his double entertained his little friends in real life with the Renowned History of Goody Two Shoes. Nevertheless, there has been, since the day of Wordsworth, such a succession of childish figures in prose and verse that we are justified in believing childhood to have been discovered at the close of the last century. The child has now become so common that we scarcely consider how absent he is from the earlier literature. Men and women are there, lovers, maidens, and youth, but these are all with us still. The child has been added to the _dramatis personæ_ of modern literature.
There is a correlation between childhood in literature and a literature for children, but it will best be understood when one has considered the meaning of the appearance and disappearance of the child in different epochs of literature and art; for while a hasty survey certainly assures one that the nineteenth century regards childhood far more intently than any previous age, it is impossible that so elemental a figure as the child should ever have been wholly lost to sight. A comparison of literatures with reference to this figure may disclose some of the fundamental differences which exist between this century and those which have preceded it; it may also disclose a still deeper note of unity, struck by the essential spirit in childhood itself. It is not worth while in such a study to have much recourse to the minor masters; if a theme so elemental and so universal in its relations is not to be illustrated from the great creative expositors of human nature, it cannot have the importance which we claim for it.
II
IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
I
When Dr. Schliemann with his little shovel uncovered the treasures of Mycenæ and Ilium, a good many timid souls rejoiced exceedingly over a convincing proof of the authenticity of the Homeric legends. There always will be those who find the proof of a spiritual fact in some corresponding material fact; who wish to see the bones of Agamemnon before they are quite ready to believe in the Agamemnon of the Iliad; to whom the Bible is not true until its truth has been confirmed by some external witness. But when science has done its utmost, there still remains in a work of art a certain testimony to truth, which may be illustrated by science, but cannot be superseded by it. Agamemnon has lived all these years in the belief of men without the aid of any cups, or saucers, or golden vessels, or even bones. Literature, and especially imaginative literature, is the exponent of the life of a people, and we must still go to it for our most intimate knowledge. No careful antiquarian research can reproduce for us the women of early Greece as Homer has set them before us in a few lines in his pictures of Helen and Penelope and Nausikaä. When, therefore, we ask ourselves of childhood in Greek life, we may reconstruct it out of the multitudinous references in Greek literature to the education of children, to their sports and games; and it is no very difficult task to follow the child from birth through the nursery to the time when it assumes its place in the active community: but the main inquiries must still be, What pictures have we of childhood? What part does the child play in that drama which is set before us in a microcosm by poets and tragedians?
The actions of Homer’s heroes are spiritualized by reflection. That is, as the tree which meets the eye becomes a spiritual tree when one sees its answering image in the pool which it overhangs, so those likenesses which Homer sets over against the deeds of his heroes release the souls of the deeds, and give them wings for a flight in the imagination. A crowd of men flock to the assembly: seen in the bright reflection of Homer’s imagination, they are a swarm of bees:—
“Being abroad, the earth was overlaid With flockers to them, that came forth, as when of frequent bees Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising new From forth their sweet nest; as their store, still as it faded, grew, And never would cease sending forth her clusters to the spring, They still crowd out so; this flock here, that there, belaboring The loaded flowers.”[1]
So Chapman, in his Gothic fashion, running up his little spires and pinnacles upon the building which he has raised from Homer’s material; but the idea is all Homer’s, and Chapman’s “repairing the degrees of their egression endlessly,” with its resonant hum, is hardly more intentionally a reflex of sound and motion than Homer’s αἰεὶ νέον ἐρχομενάων.
We look again at Chapman’s way of rendering the caressing little passage in the fourth book of the Iliad, where Homer, wishing to speak of the ease and tenderness with which Athene turns aside the arrow shot at Menelaos, calls up the image of a mother brushing a fly from the face of her sleeping child:—
“Stood close before, and slack’d the force the arrow did confer With as much care and little hurt as doth a mother use, And keep off from her babe, when sleep doth through his powers diffuse His golden humor, and th’ assaults of rude and busy flies She still checks with her careful hand.”[2]
Here the Englishman has caught the notion of ease, and emphasized that; yet he has missed the tenderness, and all because he was not content to accept the simple image, but must needs refract it into “assaults of rude and busy flies.” Better is the rendering of the picturesque figure in which Ajax, beset by the Trojans, is likened to an ass belabored by a pack of boys:—
“As when a dull mill ass comes near a goodly field of corn, Kept from the birds by children’s cries, the boys are overborne By his insensible approach, and simply he will eat About whom many wands are broke, and still the children beat, And still the self-providing ass doth with their weakness bear, Not stirring till his paunch be full, and scarcely then will steer.”[3]
Apollo, sweeping away the rampart of the Greeks, does it as easily as a boy, who has heaped a pile of sand upon the seashore in childish sport, in sport razes it with feet and hands. Achilles half pities, half chides, the imploring, weeping Patroclos, when he says,—
“Wherefore weeps my friend So like a girl, who, though she sees her mother cannot tend Her childish humors, hangs on her, and would be taken up, Still viewing her with tear-drowned eyes, when she has made her stoop.”[4]
Chapman’s “hangs on her” is hardly so particular as Homer’s εἱανοῦ ἀπτομένη, plucks at her gown; and he has quite missed the picture offered by the poet, who makes the child, as soon as she discovers her mother, beg to be taken up, and insistently stop her as she goes by on some errand. Here again the naïve domestic scene in Homer is charged in Chapman with a certain half-tragic meaning.
This, we think, completes the short catalogue of Homer’s indirect reference to childhood, and the comparison with the Elizabethan poet’s use of the same forms brings out more distinctly the sweet simplicity and native dignity of the Greek. When childhood is thus referred to by Homer, it is used with no condescension, and with no thought of investing it with any adventitious property. It is a part of nature, as the bees are a part of nature; and when Achilles likens his friend in his tears to a little girl wishing to be taken up by her mother, he is not taunting him with being a “cry-baby.”
Leaving the indirect references, one recalls immediately the single picture of childhood which stands among the heroic scenes of the Iliad. When Hector has his memorable parting with Andromache, as related in the sixth book of the Iliad, the child Astyanax is present in the nurse’s arms. Here Chapman is so careless that we desert him, and fall back on a simple rendering into prose of the passage relating to the child:—
“With this, famous Hector reached forth to take his boy, but back into the bosom of his fair-girded nurse the boy shrank with a cry, frightened at the sight of his dear father; for he was afraid of the brass,—yes, and of the plume made of a horse’s mane, when he saw it nodding dreadfully at the helmet’s peak. Then out laughed his dear father and his noble mother. Quick from his head famous Hector took the helmet and laid it on the ground, where it shone. Then he kissed his dear son and tossed him in the air, and thus he prayed to Zeus and all the gods.... These were his words, and so he placed the boy, his boy, in the hands of his dear wife; and she received him into her odorous bosom, smiling through her tears. Her husband had compassion on her when he saw it, and stroked her with his hand, spoke to her, and called her by her name.”[5]
Like so many other passages in Homer, this at once offers themes for sculpture. Flaxman was right when he presented his series of illustrations to the Iliad and Odyssey in outline, and gave a statuesque character to the groups, though his interpretation of this special scene is commonplace. There is an elemental property about the life exhibited in Homer which the firm boundaries of sculpture most fitly inclose. Thus childhood, in this passage, is characterized by an entirely simple emotion,—the sudden fear of an infant at the sight of his father’s shining helmet and frowning plume; while the relation of maturity to childhood is presented in the strong man’s concession to weakness, as he laughs and lays aside his helmet, and then catches and tosses the child.
It is somewhat perilous to comment upon Homer. The appeal in his poetry is so direct to universal feeling, and so free from the entanglements of a too refined sensibility, that the moment one begins to enlarge upon the sentiment in his epic one is in danger of importing into it subtleties which would have been incomprehensible to Homer. There is preserved, especially in the Iliad, the picture of a society which is physically developed, but intellectually unrefined. The men weep like children when they cannot have what they want, and the passions which stir life are those which lie nearest the physical forms of expression. When we come thus upon this picture of Hector’s parting with Andromache, we are impressed chiefly with the fact that it is human life in outline. Here are great facts of human experience, and they are so told that not one of them requires a word of explanation to make it intelligible to a child. The child, we are reminded in a later philosophy, is father of the man, and Astyanax is a miniature Hector; for we have only to go forward a few pages to find Hector, when brought face to face with Ajax, confessing to a terrible thumping of fear in his breast.
There is one figure in early Greek domestic life which has frequent recognition in literature. It helps in our study of this subject to find the nurse so conspicuous; in the passage last quoted she is given an epithet which is reserved for goddesses and noble women. The definite regard paid to one so identified with childhood is in accord with the open acceptance of the physical aspect of human nature which is at the basis of the Homeric poems. The frankness with which the elemental conditions of life are made to serve the poet’s purpose, so that eating and drinking, sleeping and fighting, weeping and laughing, running and dancing, are familiar incidents of the poem, finds a place for the nurse and the house-dog. Few incidents in the Odyssey are better remembered by its readers than the recognition of the travel-worn Odysseus by the old watch-dog, and by the nurse who washes the hero’s feet and discovers the scar of the wound made by the boar’s tusk when the man before her was a youth.
The child, in the Homeric conception, was a little human creature uninvested with any mystery, a part of that society which had itself scarcely passed beyond the bounds of childhood. As the horizon which limited early Greece was a narrow one, and the world in which the heroes moved was surrounded by a vast _terra incognita_, so human life, in its Homeric acceptance, was one of simple forms; that which lay beyond tangible and visible experience was rarely visited, and was peopled with shapes which brought a childish fright. There was, in a word, nothing in the development of man’s nature, as recorded by Homer, which would make him look with questioning toward his child. He regarded the world about him with scarcely more mature thought than did the infant whom he tossed in the air, and, until life should be apprehended in its more complex relations, he was not likely to see in his child anything more than an epitome of his own little round. The contrast between childhood and manhood was too faint to serve much of a purpose in art.
The difference between Homer and the tragedians is at once perceived to be the difference between a boy’s thought and a man’s thought. The colonial growth, the Persian war, the political development, the commerce with other peoples, were witnesses to a more complex life and the quick causes of a profounder apprehension of human existence. It happens that we have in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles an incident which offers a suggestive comparison with the simple picture of the parting of Hector and Andromache. In the earlier poem, the hero, expecting the fortunes of war, disdains all suggestions of prudence, and speaks as a brave man must, who sets honor above ease, and counts the cost of sacrifice only to stir himself to greater courage and resolution. He asks that his child may take his place in time, and he dries his wife’s tears with the simple words that no man can separate him from her, that fate alone can intervene; in Chapman’s nervous rendering:—
“Afflict me not, dear wife, With these vain griefs. He doth not live that can disjoin my life And this firm bosom but my fate; and fate, whose wings can fly? Noble, ignoble, fate controls. Once born, the best must die.”
Here, the impending disaster to Troy, with the inclusion of Hector’s fortune, appears as one fact out of many, an incident in life, bringing other incidents in its train, yet scarcely more ethical in its relations than if it followed from the throw of dice. In the Œdipus, when the king, overwhelmed by his fate, in the supreme hour of his anguish takes vengeance upon his eyes, there follows a passage of surpassing pathos. To the mad violence has succeeded a moment of tender grief, and the unhappy Œdipus stretches out his arms for his children, that he may bid them farewell. His own terrible fate is dimmed in his thought by the suffering which the inevitable curse of the house is to bring into their lives. He reflects; he dismisses his sons,—they, at least, can fight their battles in the world; he turns to his defenseless little daughters, and pours out for them the tears of a stricken father. The not-to-be-questioned fate of Homer, an inexplicable incident of life, which men must set aside from calculation and thought because it is inexplicable, has become in Sophocles a terrible mystery, connecting itself with man’s conduct, even when that is unwittingly in violation of divine decree, and following him with such unrelenting vigilance that death cannot be counted the end of perilous life. The child, in the supreme moment of Hector’s destiny, is to him the restoration of order, the replacement of his loss; the children, in the supreme moment of the destiny of Œdipus, are to him only the means of prolonging and rendering more murky the darkness which has fallen upon him. Hector, looking upon Astyanax, sees the world rolling on, sunlight chasing shadow, repeating the life he has known; Œdipus, looking upon Antigone and Ismene, sees new disclosures of the possibilities of a dread power under which the world is abiding.
In taking one step more from Sophocles to Euripides, there is food for thought in a new treatment of childhood. Whatever view one may choose to take of Euripides and his art in its relation to the heroic tragedy, there can be no question as to the nearness in which Euripides stands to the characters of his dramas, and this nearness is shown in nothing more than in the use which he makes of domestic life. With him, children are the necessary illustrations of humanity. Thus, in the Medea, when Medea is pleading with Creon for a respite of a day only from banishment, the argument which prevails is that which rests on pity for her little ones, and in the very centre of Medea’s vengeance is that passion for her children which bids her slay them rather than leave them
“Among their unfriends, to be trampled on.”
Again, in Alkestis, the last words of the heroine before she goes to her sacrifice are a demand of Admetus that the integrity of their home shall be preserved, and no step-dame take her place with the children. Both Alkestis and Admetus, in that wonderful scene, are imaged to the eye as part of a group, and, though the children themselves do not speak, the words and the very gestures are directed toward them.
_Alkestis._ My children, ye have heard your father’s pledge Never to set a step-dame over you, Or thrust me from the allegiance of his heart.
_Admetus._ What now I say shall never be unsaid.
_Alkestis._ Then here our children I entrust to thee.
_Admetus._ And I receive them as the gage of love.
_Alkestis._ Be thou a mother to them in my place.
_Admetus._ Need were, when such a mother has been lost.
_Alkestis._ Children, I leave you when I fain would live.
_Admetus._ Alas! what shall I do, bereft of thee?
_Alkestis._ Time will assuage thy grief: the dead are nought.
_Admetus._ Take, take me with thee to the underworld.
_Alkestis._ It is enough that I must die for thee.
_Admetus._ O Heaven! of what a partner I am reft!
_Alkestis._ My eyes grow dim and the long sleep comes on.
_Admetus._ I too am lost if thou dost leave me, wife.
_Alkestis._ Think of me as of one that is no more.
_Admetus._ Lift up thy face, quit not thy children dear.
_Alkestis._ Not willingly; but, children, fare ye well.
_Admetus._ Oh, look upon them, look!
_Alkestis._ My end is come.
_Admetus._ Oh, leave us not.
_Alkestis._ Farewell.
_Admetus._ I am undone.
_Chorus._ Gone, gone; thy wife, Admetus, is no more.[6]
A fragment of Danaë puts into the mouth of Danaë herself apparently lines which send one naturally to Simonides:—
“He, leaping to my arms and in my bosom, Might haply sport, and with a crowd of kisses Might win my soul forth; for there is no greater Love-charm than close companionship, my father.”[7]
It cannot have escaped notice how large a part is played by children in the spectacular appointments of the Greek drama. Those symbolic processions, those groups of human life, those scenes of human passion, are rendered more complete by the silent presence of children. They serve in the temples; their eyes are quick to catch the coming of the messenger; they suffer dumbly in the fate that pulls down royal houses and topples the pillars of ancestral palaces. It was impossible that it should be otherwise. The Greek mind, which found expression in tragic art, was oppressed by the problems, not alone of individual fate, but of the subtle relations of human life. The serpents winding about Laokoön entwined in their folds the shrinking youths, and the father’s anguish was for the destiny which would not let him suffer alone. Yet there is scarcely a child’s voice to be heard in the whole range of Greek poetic art. The conception is universally of the child, not as acting, far less as speaking, but as a passive member of the social order. It is not its individual life so much as its related life which is contemplated.