Part 8
“I gazed upon them and upon it by turns,” proceeds the Vicar, “and then looked round me for my two little ones; but they were not to be seen. O misery! ‘Where,’ cried I, ‘where are my little ones?’ ‘They are burnt to death in the flames,’ says my wife calmly, ‘and I will die with them.’ That moment I heard the cry of the babes within, who were just awaked by the fire, and nothing could have stopped me. ‘Where, where are my children?’ cried I, rushing through the flames, and bursting the door of the chamber in which they were confined. ‘Where are my little ones?’ ‘Here, dear papa, here we are!’ cried they together, while the flames were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms, and snatching them through the fire as fast as possible, just as I was got out the roof sunk in. ‘Now,’ cried I, holding up my children, ‘now let the flames burn on, and all my possessions perish. Here they are. I have saved my treasure. Here, my dearest, here are our treasures, and we shall yet be happy.’ We kissed our little darlings a thousand times; they clasped us round the neck, and seemed to share our transports, while their mother laughed and wept by turns.”
Cowper was more secluded from his time and its influence than Goldsmith, but like him he felt the instinct for a return to the elemental in life and nature. The gentleness of Cowper, combined with a poetic sensibility, found expression in simple themes. His life, led in a pastoral country, and occupied with trivial pleasures, offered him primitive material, and he sang of hares, and goldfish, and children. His Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools, though having a didactic intention, has some charming bits of descriptive writing, as in the familiar lines which describe the sport of
“The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot.”
The description melts, as do so many of Cowper’s retrospections, into a tender melancholy. A deeper note still is struck in his Lines on the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture.
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The new birth which was coming to England had its premonitions in literature. It had them also in art. In this period appeared Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gainsborough: the one preëminently a painter of humanity, the other of nature, and both of them moved by a spirit of freedom, under well-recognized academic rules. There is in their work a lingering of the old formal character which took sharp account of the diversities of rank, and separated things common from things choice; yet they both belong to the new world rather than to the old, and in nothing is this more remarkable than in the number and character of the children pieces painted by Reynolds. They are a delight to the eye, and in the true democracy of art we know no distinction between 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 Gypsy Boy, the shy grace of Pickaback, the delightful wonder of Master Bunbury, the sweet simplicity and innocence in the pictures so named, and the spiritual yet human beauty of the Angels’ heads. Reynolds studied the work of the mediæval painters, but he came back to England and painted English children. Goldsmith’s Vicar, Cowper’s Lines on his mother’s portrait, and Reynolds’ children bring us close to the heart of our subject.
II
It was the saying of the Swedish seer Count Swedenborg, that a Day of Judgment was to come upon men at the time of the French Revolution. Then were the spirits to be judged. In whatever terms we may express the fact, clear it is to us that the close of the last century marks a great epoch in the history of Christendom, and the farther we withdraw from the events which gather about our own birth as an organized nation, and those which effected such enormous changes in European life, the more clearly do we perceive that the movements of the present century are mainly along lines which may be traced back to genetic beginnings then. There was indeed a great awakening, a renaissance, a new birth.
The French Revolution was a sign of the times: it furnishes a convenient name for an epoch, not merely because important changes in Christendom were contemporaneous with it, but because they were intimately associated with it. Then appeared the portent of Democracy, and the struggle of humanity has ever since been for the realization of dreams which came as visions of a great hope. Then began that examination of the foundation of things in science and philosophy which has become a mighty passion in intellectual life.
I have said that every great renaissance has left its record in the recognition which childhood receives in literature and art. I add that the scope and profundity of that renaissance may be measured by the form which this recognition takes. At the birth of Christianity the pregnant sentences, “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” “For of such is the kingdom of heaven,” “Verily I say unto you, their angels do always behold the face of my Father in heaven,” sound a depth unreached before. They were, like other words from the same source, veritable prophecies, the perfect fulfillment of which waits the perfect manifestation of the Son of Man. At the Renaissance, when mediævalism gave way before modern life, art reflected the hopes of mankind in the face of a divine child. At the great Revolution, when, amidst fire and blood, the new life of humanity stood revealed, an unseen hand again took a little child and placed him in the midst of men. It was reserved for an English poet to be the one who most clearly discerned the face of the child. Himself one of the great order of angels, he beheld in the child the face of God. I may be pardoned, I trust, for thus reading in Western fashion the meaning of that Oriental phrase which I find has perplexed theologians and Biblical critics. Was it any new disclosure which the Christ made if he merely said that the attendant ministers of children always beheld the face of the Father in heaven? Was it not the very property of such angelic nature that it should see God? But was it not rather a revelation to the crass minds of those who thrust children aside, that the angels who moved between the Father of spirits and these new-comers into the world saw in their faces a witness to their divine origin? They saw the Father repeated in the child.
When Wordsworth published his Lyrical Ballads, a storm of ridicule fell upon them. In that age, when the old and the new were clashing with each other on every hand, so stark a symbol of the new as these ballads presented could not fail to furnish an objective point for criticism which was born of the old. Wordsworth, in his defensive Preface, declares, “The principal object proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting, by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”
Every one of these reasons, unless the last, which I do not understand, be excepted, applies with additional force to the use of forms and images and incidents drawn from childhood; and though Wordsworth takes no account of this in his Preface, it is more to the point that he does freely and fully recognize the fact in his poetry. The Preface, with its dry formality, was like much of Wordsworth’s poetry,—Pegasus on a walk, his wings impeding free action. It is one of the anomalies of nature that a poet with such insight as Wordsworth should never apparently have discovered his own pragmatical dullness. It seems to me that Wordsworth’s finer moods were just those of which he never attempted to give a philosophic account, and that he did not refer to childhood in his Preface is an evidence of his inspiration when dealing with it.
Be this as it may, his treatment of childhood accords with his manifesto to the British public. Could anything be more trivial, as judged by the standards of the day, than his ballad of Alice Fell, or Poverty?—of which he has himself said, “The humbleness, meanness if you like, of the subject, together with the homely mode of treating it, brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my Poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends, in particular my son-in-law, Edward Quillinan.” What is the motive of a poem which excited such derision that the poet in a moment of alarm withdrew it from publication, and when he restored it held his son-in-law responsible? Simply the grief of a poor child, who had stolen a ride behind the poet’s post-chaise, upon finding that her tattered cloak had become caught in the wheel and irretrievably ruined. The poet makes no attempt to dignify this grief; the incident is related in poetic form, but without any poetic discovery beyond the simple worth of the grief. It is, perhaps, the most audaciously matter of fact of all Wordsworth’s poems; and yet, such is the difference in the audience to-day from what it was in Wordsworth’s time that Alice Fell appears as a matter of course in all the anthologies for children, and is read by men and women with positive sympathy, with a tenderness for the forlorn little girl, and without a question as to the poem’s right of existence. The misery, the grief of childhood, is conceived of as a real thing, measured by the child’s mind into which we enter, and not by our own standards of pain and loss.
Again, recall the poem of Lucy Gray, or Solitude. The story is far more pathetic, and has an appeal to more catholic sensibility: a child, sent with a lantern to town from the moor on which she lives, that she may light her mother back through the snow, is lost among the hills, and her footsteps are traced at last to the fatal bridge through which she has fallen. The incident was one from real life; Wordsworth seized upon it, reproducing each detail, and with a touch or two of genius made a wraith. He discovered, as no one before had done, the element of solitude in childhood, and invested it with a fine spiritual, ethereal quality, quite devoid of any ethical property,—a subtle community with nature.
How completely Wordsworth entered the mind of a child and identified himself with its movements is consciously betrayed in his pastoral, The Pet Lamb. He puts into the mouth of Barbara Lewthwaite the imaginary song to her lamb, and then says for himself,—
“As homeward through the lane I went with lazy feet, This song to myself did I oftentimes repeat; And it seemed, as I retraced the ballad line by line, That but half of it was hers, and one half of it was mine. Again and once again did I repeat the song; Nay, said I, more than half to the damsel must belong, For she looked with such a look and she spake with such a tone That I almost received her heart into my own.”
His second thought was best: more than half did belong to the child, for he himself was but the wise interpreter.
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 thought 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 landscape, 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 Catharine, 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 his walks, it is remarkable how little he regards children in their 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 autobiographic poem The Prelude, and also in The Excursion. Listen how he speaks of his infancy even, giving it by anticipation a life separate from mother and nurse. “Was it for this?” he asks,—
“Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And, from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou, O Derwent! winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a babe in arms, Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.”
Still more minutely does he disclose the consciousness of childhood in his record of the mind of the Wanderer in The Excursion, in the lines beginning:—
“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak In summer tended cattle on the hills.”
It may be said that in all this Wordsworth is simply rehearsing and expanding an exceptional experience; that his recollection of his own childhood passed through the alembic of a fervid poetic imagination. Be it so; we are not so much concerned to know how the poet came by this divination, as to know that he should have treated it as universal and common to the period of childhood. Again and again in descriptive poem, in direct address, in indirect allusion, he so uses this knowledge as to forbid us to regard it as peculiar and exceptional in his own view; and a poet’s attestation to a universal experience is worth more than any negation which comes from our individual blurred recollection. Wordsworth discovers in childhood the germ of humanity; he sees there thoughts, emotions, activities, sufferings, which are miniatures of the maturer life,—but, he sees more than this and deeper. To him the child is not a pigmy man; it has a life of its own, out of which something even may pass, when childhood is left behind. It is not the ignorant innocence of childhood, the infantile grace, which holds him, but a certain childish possession, in which he sees a spiritual presence obscured in conscious youth. Landor in one of his Imaginary Conversations stoutly asserts a similar fact when he says, “Children are not men or women; they are almost as different creatures, in many respects, as if they never were to be one or the other; they are as unlike as buds are unlike flowers, and almost as blossoms are unlike fruits.”[33]
In all this again, in this echo of the divine which Wordsworth hears in the voice of childhood, there is reference, psychologically, to his own personal experience. Yet why should we treat that as ruled out of evidence, which only one here and another there acknowledges as a part of his history? Is it not fairer, more reasonable, to take the experience of a profound poet as the basis of spiritual truth than the negative testimony of those whose eyes lack the wondrous power of seeing? In the preface to his ode, Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth declares with great earnestness:—
“To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself; but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or experiences of my own mind, on which the structure of the poem partly rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have said elsewhere—
‘A simple child That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death!’
But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times, while going to school, have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we all have reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character.”
Here Wordsworth defends the philosophy of the poem by making it an induction from his own experience. There will be found many to question its truth, because they have no recollections which correspond with the poet’s; and others who will claim that the poem is but a fanciful argument in behalf of the philosophic heresy of a preëxistent state. In my judgment, Wordsworth’s preface is somewhat misleading by its reference to this theory, although he has furnished hints in the same preface of his more integral thought. As I have noticed before, his artistic presentation is truer and more final than his exegesis. Whoever reads this great ode is aware of the rise and fall of the tide of thought; he hears the poet reasoning with himself; he sees him passing in imagination out of childhood into age, yet constantly recovering himself to fresh perception of the immortality which transcends earthly life. It is visible childhood with its intimation of immortality which brings to the poet, not regret for what is irretrievably lost, but firmer faith in the reality of the unseen and eternal. The confusion into which some have been cast by the ode arises from their bringing to the idea of immortality the time conception; they conceive the poet to be hinting of an indefinite time antedating the child’s birth, an indefinite time extending beyond the man’s death, whereas Wordsworth’s conception of immortality rests in the indestructibility of spirit by any temporal or earthly conditions,—an indestructibility which even implies an absence of beginning as well as of ending.
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,”
he declares. It is the investment of this visible life by an unseen, unfelt, yet real spiritual presence for which he contends, and he maintains that the inmost consciousness of childhood bears witness to this truth; this consciousness fades as the earthly life penetrates the soul, yet it is there and recurs in sudden moments.
“Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”
In thus connecting childhood with the highest hope of the human race, Wordsworth was repeating the note which twice before had been struck in great epochs of history. This third renaissance was the awaking of the human soul to a sense of the common rights and duties of humanity, the dignity and worth of the Person.
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