Part 7

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:—

“Come hither, boy; come, come, and learn of us To melt in showers: thy grandsire loved thee well: Many a matter hath he told to thee, Meet and agreeing with thine infancy; In that respect, then, like a loving child, Shed yet some small drops from thy tender spring, Because kind nature doth require it so.”

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

“I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I sworn as you Have done to this.”

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,—

“He has no children!”

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:—

“Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn To do this ruthless piece of butchery, Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs, Melting with tenderness and kind compassion Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories. ‘Lo, thus,’ quoth Dighton, ‘lay those tender babes:’ ‘Thus, thus,’ quoth Forrest, ‘girdling one another Within their innocent alabaster arms: Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, Which in their summer beauty kiss’d each other. A book of prayers on their pillow lay; Which once,’ quoth Forrest, ‘almost changed my mind; But O! the devil’—there the villain stopp’d; Whilst Dighton thus told on: ‘We smothered The most replenished sweet work of nature, That from the prime creation e’er she framed.’ Thus both are gone with conscience and remorse; They could not speak.”

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

“Piteous plainings of the pretty babes That mourned for fashion, ignorant what to fear;”

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

“Pity like a naked, new-born babe;”

“’Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil,”

in Macbeth;

“Love is like a child That longs for every thing that he can come by;”

“How wayward is this foolish love That like a testy babe will scratch the nurse, And presently all humble kiss the rod,”

in Two Gentlemen of Verona;

“Those that do teach young babes Do it with gentle means and easy tasks,”

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

“Peace! peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?”

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,

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind: Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste: Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in games themselves forswear, So the boy Love is perjured everywhere.”

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:—

“At first the infant Muling and puking in the nurse’s arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school,”

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!

“Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein Afford a present to the Infant God?”

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,—

“Rapt into future times the bard begun, A Virgin shall conceive, a Virgin bear a son! ... Swift fly the years and rise the expected morn! O spring to light, auspicious babe, be born!”

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:—

“Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw: Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite: Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage, And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age: Pleased with this bauble still, as that before; Till tired he sleeps and life’s poor play is o’er.”

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:—

“Some village Cato, who with dauntless breast The little tyrant of the fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest, Some Cæsar, guiltless of his country’s blood.”

He changed these names for those of English heroes, and in doing so broke away from traditions which still had a strong hold in literature. It is a pity that for a reason which hardly convinces us he should have thought best to omit the charming stanza,—

“There, scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are showers of violets found: The Red-breast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.”

When Gray wrote this he doubtless had in mind the ballad of the Children in the Wood. In the succession of English pictures which he does give is that lovely one,—

“For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening’s care; No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the evening kiss to share.”

In his poem On a Distant Prospect of Eton College he has lines which are instinct with a feeling for childhood and youth. There is, it is true, a touch of artificiality in the use made of childhood in this poem, as a foil for tried manhood, its little life treated as the lost golden age of mankind; but that sentiment was a prevailing one in the period.

Goldsmith, whose Bohemianism helped to release him from subservience to declining fashions in literature, treats childhood in a more genuine and artless fashion. In his prose and poetry I hear the first faint notes of that song of childhood which in a generation more was to burst from many lips. The sweetness which trembles in the Deserted Village finds easy expression in forms and images which call up childhood to memory, as in those lines,—

“The playful children just let loose from school,”

“E’en children followed with endearing wile, And plucked his gown, to share the good man’s smile,”—

and in the quaint picture of the village school.

It is in the Vicar of Wakefield, however, that one finds the freest play of fancy about childish figures. Goldsmith says of his hero that “he unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth,—he is a priest, a husbandman, and the father of a family;” and the whole of the significant preface may lead one to revise the estimate of Goldsmith which his contemporaries have fastened upon English literary history. The waywardness and unconventionality of this man of genius and his eager desire to be accepted by the world, which was then the great world, were the characteristics which most impressed the shallower minds about him. In truth, he had not only an extraordinary sympathy with the ever-varying, ever-constant flux of human life, but he dropped a deeper plummet than any English thinker since Milton.

It was in part his loneliness that threw him upon children for complete sympathy; in part also his prophetic sense, for he had an unerring vision of what constituted the strength and the weakness of England. After the portraiture of the Vicar himself, there are no finer sketches than those of the little children. “It would be fruitless,” says the unworldly Vicar, “to deny exultation when I saw my little ones about me;” and from time to time in the tale, the youngest children, Dick and Bill, trot forward in an entirely natural manner. They show an engaging fondness for Mr. Thornhill. “The whole family seemed earnest to please him.... My little ones were no less busy, and fondly stuck close to the stranger. All my endeavors could scarcely keep their dirty fingers from handling and tarnishing the lace on his clothes, and lifting up the flaps of his pocket holes to see what was there.” The character of Mr. Burchell is largely drawn by its association with the children. The account given by little Dick of the carrying off of Olivia is full of charming childish spirit, and there is an exquisite passage where the Vicar returns home with the news of Olivia’s recovery, and discovers his house to be on fire, while in a tumult of confusion the older members of the family rush out of the dwelling.