Part 2
We are related to the Greeks not only through the higher forms of literature, but through the political thought which had with them both historical development and speculative representation. It comes thus within the range of our inquiry to ask what recognition of childhood there was in writings which sought to give an artistic form to political thought. There is a frequent recurrence by Plato to the subject of childhood in the state, and we may see in his presentation not only the germinal relation which childhood bears, so that education becomes necessarily one of the significant functions of government, but also what may not unfairly be called a reflection of divinity.
The education which in the ideal state is to be given to children is represented by him, indeed, as the evolution from the sensations of pleasure and pain to the perception of virtue and vice. “Pleasure and pain,” he says,[8] “I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years; and he who possesses them, and the blessings which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children; when pleasure and friendship and pain and hatred are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, when perfected, is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love, from the beginning to the end, may be separated off, and, in my view, will be rightly called education.”
In the Republic, Plato theorizes at great length upon a possible selection and training of children, which rests for its basis upon a too pronounced physical assumption, so that one in reading certain passages might easily fancy that he was considering the production of a superior breed of colts, and that the soul was the product of material forces only; but the fifth book, which contains these audacious speculations, may fairly be taken in the spirit in which Proudhon is said to have thrown out some of his extravagant assertions,—he expected to be beaten down in his price.
There are other passages, especially in the Laws, in reading which one is struck by a certain reverence for childhood, as that interesting one where caution is given against disturbing the uniformity of children’s plays on account of their connection with the life of the state. The modern theories of the Kindergarten find a notable support in Plato’s reasoning: “I say that in states generally no one has observed that the plays of childhood have a great deal to do with the permanence or want of permanence in legislation. For when plays are ordered with a view to children having the same plays and amusing themselves after the same manner and finding delight in the same playthings, the more solemn institutions of the state are allowed to remain undisturbed. Whereas, if sports are disturbed and innovations are made in them, and they constantly change, and the young never speak of their having the same likings or the same established notions of good and bad taste, either in the bearing of their bodies or in their dress, but he who devises something new and out of the way in figures and colors and the like is held in special honor, we may truly say that no greater evil can happen in a state; for he who changes the sports is secretly changing the manners of the young, and making the old to be dishonored among them, and the new to be honored. And I affirm that there is nothing which is a greater injury to all states than saying or thinking thus.”[9]
It is, however, most germane to our purpose to cite a striking passage from the Laws, in which Plato most distinctly recognizes the power resident in childhood to assimilate the purest expression of truth. The Athenian, in the dialogue, is speaking, and says: “The next suggestion which I have to offer is that all our three choruses [that is, choruses representing the three epochs of life] shall sing to the young and tender souls of children, reciting in their strains all the noble thoughts of which we have already spoken, or are about to speak; and the sum of them shall be that the life which is by the gods deemed to be the happiest is the holiest, and we shall affirm this to be a most certain truth; and the minds of our young disciples will be more likely to receive these words of ours than any others which we might address to them....
“First will enter, in their natural order, the sacred choir, composed of children, which is to sing lustily the heaven-taught lay to the whole city. Next will follow the chorus of young men under the age of thirty, who will call upon the God Pæan to testify to the truth of their words, and will pray to him to be gracious to the youth and to turn their hearts. Thirdly, the choir of elder men, who are from thirty to sixty years of age, will also sing. There remain those who are too old to sing, and they will tell stories illustrating the same virtues, as with the voice of an oracle.”[10]
Plato used human society as material from which to construct an organization artistically perfect and representing political order, just as Pheidias or Praxiteles used clay as a material from which to construct the human being artistically perfect and representing the soul of man. With this fine organism of the ideal state Plato incorporated his conception of childhood in its two relations of singing and being sung to. He thought of the child as a member of the three-fold chorus of life: and when he set these choirs hymning the divine strain, he made the recipients of the revelation to be themselves children, the forming elements of the growing, organic state. Certainly it is a wide arc which is spanned by these three great representatives of Greek art, and in passing from Homer to Sophocles, and from Sophocles to Plato, we are not merely considering the epic, the tragic, and the philosophic treatment of childhood in literature; we are discovering the development of the conception of childhood in a nation which has communicated to history the eidolon of the fairest humanity. It is scarcely too much to speak of it as the evolution of a soul, and to find, as one so often finds in his study of Greece, the outline of the course of the world’s thought.
The old, formal view of antiquity, which once placed Grecian life almost beyond the pale of our human sympathy, and made the men and women cold marble figures in our imagination, has given place to a warmer regard. Through literary reproduction, which paraphrases Greek life in the dramatic art of Browning and Fitzgerald, gives us Spencerian versions of Homer, or, better still, the healthy childlike recital in Mr. Palmer’s version of the Odyssey, and enables us to sit down after dinner with Plato, Mr. Jowett being an idiomatic interpreter; through the discoveries of Schliemann and others, by which the mythic and heroic ages of Greece are made almost grotesquely familiar,—we are coming to read Grecian history, in Niebuhr’s felicitous phrase, as if it really happened, and to lay aside our artificial and distant ways of becoming familiar with Greek life. Yet the means which have led to this modern attitude toward classic antiquity are themselves the product of modern life; the secrets of Greek life are more open to us now because our own life has become freer, more hospitable, and more catholic. It is a delight to us to turn from the marble of Pheidias to the terra cotta of the unknown modelers of the Tanagra figurines, while these homelike, domestic images serve as interpreters, also, of the larger, nobler designs. So we have recourse to those fragments of the Greek Anthology which give us glimpses of Greek interiors, and by means of them we find a side-light thrown upon the more majestic expressions of poetic and dramatic art.
The Anthology gathers for us the epigrams, epitaphs, proverbs, fables, and little odds and ends which have been saved from the ruins of literature, and in turning its leaves one is impressed by the large number of references to childhood. It is as when, rambling through the streets of the uncovered Pompeii, one comes upon the playthings of children dead nigh two thousand years. Here are tender memorials of lost babes in inscriptions upon forgotten tombs, and laments of fathers and mothers for the darkness which has come upon their dwellings. We seem to hear the prattle of infancy and the mother’s lullaby. The Greeks, as we, covered their loss with an instinctive trust in some better fortune in store for the child, and hushed their skepticism with the song of hope and the remembrance of stories which they had come in colder hours to disbelieve. Here, for example, is an anonymous elegy:—
“Thou hast not, O ruler Pluto, with pious intent, stolen for thy underground world a girl of five years, admired by all. For thou hast cut, as it were, from the root, a sweet-scented rose in the season of a commencing spring, before it had completed its proper time. But come, Alexander and Philtatus; do not any longer weep and pour forth lamentations for the regretted girl. For she had, yes, she had a rosy face which meant that she should remain in the immortal dwellings of the sky. Trust, then, to stories of old. For it was not Death, but the Naiads, who stole the good girl as once they stole Hylas.”[11]
Perhaps the most celebrated of these tender domestic passages is to be found in the oft-quoted lines from Simonides, where Danaë sings over the boy Perseus:—
“When in the ark of curious workmanship The winds and swaying waters fearfully Were rocking her, with streaming eyes, around Her boy the mother threw her arms and said:
“‘O darling, I am very miserable; But thou art cosy-warm and sound asleep In this thy dull, close-cabin’d prison-house, Stretched at full ease in the dark, ebon gloom. Over thy head of long and tangled hair The wave is rolling; but thou heedest not; Nor heedest thou the noises of the winds, Wrapt in thy purple cloak, sweet pretty one.
“‘But if this fearful place had fear for thee, Those little ears would listen to my words; But sleep on, baby, and let the sea-waves sleep, And sleep our own immeasurable woes. O father Zeus, I pray some change may come; But, father, if my words are over-bold, Have pity, and for the child’s sake pardon me.’”[12]
II
As before we stopped in front of the charming group which Homer gives us in the parting of Hector and Andromache, with the child Astyanax set in the midst, so in taking the poet who occupies the chief place in Latin literature we find a significant contrast. The picture of Æneas bearing upon his shoulders the aged Anchises and leading by the hand the young Ascanius is a distinct Roman picture. The two poems move through somewhat parallel cycles, and have adventures which are common to both; but the figure of Odysseus is essentially a single figure, and his wanderings may easily be taken to typify the excursions of the human soul. Æneas, on the other hand, seems always the centre of a family group, and his journeyings always appear to be movements toward a final city and nation. The Greek idea of individuality and the Roman of relationship have signal illustration in these poems. Throughout the Æneid the figure of Ascanius is an important one. There is a nice disclosure of growth in personality, and one is aware that the grandson is coming forward into his place as a member of the family, to be thereafter representative. The poet never loses sight of the boy’s future. Homer, in his shield of Achilles, that microcosm of human life, forgets to make room for children. Virgil, in his prophetic shield, shows the long triumphs from Ascanius down, and casts a light upon the cave wherein the twin boys were suckled by the wolf. One of the most interesting episodes in the Æneid is the childhood of Camilla, in which the warrior maid’s nature is carried back and reproduced in diminutive form. The evolutions of the boys in the fifth book, while full of boyish life, come rather under the form of mimic soldiery than of spontaneous youth. In one of the Eclogues, Virgil has a graceful suggestion of the stature of a child by its ability to reach only the lowest branches of a tree.
Childhood, in Roman literature, is not contemplated as a fine revelation of nature. In the grosser conception, children are reckoned as scarcely more than cubs; but with the strong hold which the family idea had upon the Roman mind, it was impossible that in the refinement which came gradually upon life childhood should not play a part of its own in poetry, and come to represent the more spiritual side of the family life. Thus Catullus, in one of his nuptial odes, has a charming picture of infancy awaking into consciousness and affection:—
“Soon my eyes shall see, mayhap, Young Torquatus on the lap Of his mother, as he stands Stretching out his tiny hands, And his little lips the while Half open on his father’s smile.
“And oh! may he in all be like Manlius, his sire, and strike Strangers when the boy they meet As his father’s counterfeit, And his face the index be Of his mother’s chastity.”[13]
The epitaphs and the elegies of the Greek Anthology have their counterpart in Latin. Mr. Thompson has tried his hand at a passage from Statius:[14]—
ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD.
Shall I not mourn thee, darling boy? with whom, Childless I missed not children of my own; I, who first caught and pressed thee to my breast, And called thee mine, and taught thee sounds and words, And solved the riddle of thy murmurings, And stoop’d to catch thee creeping on the ground, And propp’d thy steps, and ever had my lap Ready, if drowsy were those little eyes, To rock them with a lullaby to sleep; Thy first word was my name, thy fun my smile, And not a joy of thine but came from me.
There is, too, that epitaph of Martial on the little girl Erotion, closing with the lines which may possibly have been in Gray’s mind when he wrote the discarded verse of his Elegy, Englished thus:—
“Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free; Press lightly on her form, dear Mother Earth, Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee.”[15]
In the literature which sounds the deeper waters of life, we find references to childhood; but the child rarely, if ever, draws the thought outside of the confines of this world. As near an approach as any to a perception of the mystery of childhood is in a passage in Lucretius, where the poet looks down with compassion upon the new-born infant as one of the mysteries of nature: “Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to life when first nature has cast him forth by great throes from his mother’s womb, and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass through so much misery in life.”[16] Lucretius displayed a profound reverence for human affection. Scattered through his great poem are fine lines in which childhood appears. “Soon,” he says, in one mournful passage,—“soon shall thy home receive thee no more with glad welcome, nor thy dear children run to snatch thy first kiss, touching thy heart with silent gladness.”[17]
Juvenal, with the thought of youth as the possible restoration of a sinking world, utters a cry, which has often been taken up by sensualists even, when he injects into his pitiless satire the solemn words, “the greatest reverence is due to the boy.”[18]
Any survey of ancient Greek and Roman life would be incomplete which left out of view the supernatural element. We need not inquire whether there was a conscious materialization of spiritual forces, or an idealization of physical phenomena. We have simply to do with certain shapes and figures which dwelt in the mind and formed a part of its furniture; coming and going like shadows, yet like shadows confessing a forming substance; embodying belief and symbolizing moods. In that overarching and surrounding world, peopled by the countless personages of Greek and Roman supernaturalism, we may discover, if we will, a vague, distorted, yet sometimes transcendent reflection of the life which men and women were living upon the more palpable and tangible earth.
What, then, has the childhood of the gods to tell us? We have the playful incident of Hermes, or Mercurius, getting out of his cradle to steal the oxen of Admetos, and the similar one of Herakles strangling the snakes that attacked him just after his birth; but these are simply stories intended to carry back into childhood the strength of the one and the cunning of the other. It is more to our purpose to note the presence in the Pantheon of the child who remains always a child, and is known to us familiarly as Eros, or Cupid, or Amor. It is true that the myth includes the union of Cupid and Psyche; nevertheless, the prevailing conception is of a boy, winged, armed with bow and arrows, the son and messenger of Venus. It may be said that the myth gradually adapted itself to this form, which is not especially apparent in the earlier stories. The figure of Love, as thus presented, has been more completely adopted into modern poetry than any other in the old mythology, and it cannot be said that its characteristics have been materially altered. It is doubtful whether the ancient idea was more simple than the same when reproduced in Thorwaldsen’s sculpture, or in Ben Jonson’s Venus’ Runaway. The central conception is essentially an unmoral one; it knows not right or wrong, good or evil; the mischief-making is capricious, and not malicious. There is the idea only of delight, of an innocence which is untutored, of a will which is the wind’s will. It would seem as if, in fastening upon childhood as the embodiment of love, the ancients, as well as their modern heirs, were bent upon ridding life of conscience and fate,—upon making love to have neither memory nor foresight, but only the joy of the moment. This sporting child was a refuge, in their minds, from the ills of life, a residence of the one central joy of the world. There is an infinite pathos in the erection of childhood into a temple for the worship of Love. There was, indeed, in the reception of this myth, a wide range from purity to grossness, as the word “love” itself has to do service along an arc which subtends heaven and hell; but when we distill the poetry and art which gather about the myth of Cupid, the essence will be found in this conception of love as a child,—a conception never wholly lost, even when the child was robbed of the purity which we recognize as its ideal property. It should be noted, also, that the Romans laid hold of this idea more eagerly than did the Greeks; for the child itself, though more artistically set forth in Greek literature, appears as a more vital force in Roman literature.[19]
III
IN HEBREW LIFE AND LITERATURE
The literature of Greece and Rome is a possession of the modern world. For the most part it has been taken as an independent creation, studied indeed with reference to language as the vehicle of thought, but after all chiefly as an art. It is within a comparatively recent time that the conception of an historical study of literature has been prominent, and that men have gone to Greek and Roman poetry with an eager passion for the discovery of ancient life. The result of these new methods has been to humanize our conception of the literature under examination.
Singularly enough, while the modern world has been influenced by the classic world chiefly through its language, literature, and institutions, the third great stream of influence which has issued from ancient sources has been one in which literature as such has been almost subordinated to the religious and ethical ideas of which it was the vehicle; even the strong institutional forces inherent in it have had only exceptional attention. There was a time, indeed, when the history of the Jews, as contained in the books of the Old Testament, was isolated from the history of mankind and treated in an artificial manner, at its best made to illustrate conduct, somewhat as Latin literature was made to exemplify syntax. The old distinction of sacred and profane history did much to obscure the human element in what was called sacred history, and to blot out the divine element in what was called profane history. There are many who can remember the impression made upon their minds when they learned for the first time of the contemporaneousness of events in Jewish and Grecian history; and it is not impossible that some can even recall a period in their lives when Bible people and the Bible lands were almost as distinct and separate in their conception as if they belonged to another planet.
Nevertheless, the reality of Old Testament history, while suffering from lack of proportion in relation to other parts of human history, has been impressed upon modern civilization through its close identification with the religious life. The inheritance of these scriptures of the ancient Hebrew has been so complete that the modern Jew is regarded almost as a pretender when he sets up a claim to special possession. We jostle him out of the way, and appropriate his national documents as the old title-deeds of Christianity. There is, indeed, an historic truth involved in this; but, however we may regard it, we are brought back to the significant fact that along with the Greek and the Roman influence upon modern life has been the mighty force of Hebraism. The Greek has impressed himself upon our modes and processes of thought, the Roman upon our organization, the Hebrew upon our religious and social life.[20]