Part 9
The poetic form, while most perfectly inclosing these divinations of childhood, and especially suited to the presentation of the faint and elusive elements, is less adapted to the philosophic and discursive examination of the subject of childhood. It is, then, an indication of the impression which the idea had made upon men that a prose writer of the period, of singular insight and subtlety, should have given some of his most characteristic thought to an examination of the essential elements of childhood. De Quincey was undoubtedly strongly affected by Wordsworth’s treatment of the subject; he has left evidence upon this point. Nevertheless, he appears to have sounded his own mind and appealed to his own memory for additional and corroborative testimony. In his Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he offers an account of his recollections of infancy, together with many reflections upon the experience which he then underwent. If it be said that the opium-eater was an untrustworthy witness, since his dreaming might well lead him to confuse the subtle workings of a mature mind with the vivid remembrance of one or two striking events of childhood, we may consider that De Quincey’s imagination was a powerful one, and capable of interpreting the incidents and emotions brought to it by memory, as a more prosaic mind could not. We are compelled, of course, in all such cases, to submit the testimony of such a man to the judgment of our own reason, but that reason ought, before pronouncing a final verdict, to be educated to perceive the possibilities of a wider range of observation than may have fallen to us individually, and to submit the results to a comparison with known operations of the human mind. Above all, it should be borne in mind that a distinction clearly exists between a child’s consciousness and its power of expression. De Quincey himself in a note says with acuteness and justice:—
“The reader must not forget in reading this and other passages that though a child’s feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks. I decipher what the child only felt in cipher. And so far is this distinction or this explanation from pointing to anything metaphysical or doubtful, that a man must be grossly unobservant who is not aware of what I am here noticing, not as a peculiarity of this child or that, but as a necessity of all children. Whatsoever in a man’s mind blossoms and expands to his own consciousness in mature life must have preëxisted in germ during his infancy. I, for instance, did not, as a child, consciously read in my own deep feelings these ideas. No, not at all; nor was it possible for a child to do so. I, the child, had the feelings; I, the man, decipher them. In the child lay the handwriting mysterious to him; in me, the interpretation and the comment.”
Assuredly this is reasonable, and since we are looking for the recognition of childhood in literature, we may wisely ask how it presents itself to a man like De Quincey, who had peculiar power in one form of literature—the autobiographic-imaginative. He entitles the first part of his Suspiria, The Affliction of Childhood. It is the record of a child’s grief, interpreted by the man when he could translate into speech the emotion which possessed him in his early suffering; and near its close, De Quincey, partially summing up his philosophy of the subject, declares:—
“God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in solitude, above all things when made vocal by the truths and services of a national church, God holds communion undisturbed with children. Solitude, though silent as light, is like light the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone. Even a little child has a dread, whispering consciousness that if he should be summoned to travel into God’s presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude, therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child’s heart, is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he has to pass; reflex of one solitude, prefiguration of another.
“Deeper than the deepest of solitudes is that which broods over childhood, bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which watches for it, within the gates of death. Reader, I tell you in truth, and hereafter I will convince you of this truth, that for a Grecian child solitude was nothing, but for a Christian child it has become the power of God and the mystery of God. O mighty and essential solitude, that wast and art and art to be! thou, kindling under the touch of Christian revelations, art now transfigured forever, and hast passed from a blank negation into a secret hieroglyphic from God, shadowing in the hearts of infancy the very dimmest of his truths!”
I must refer the reader to the entire chapter for a full exposition of De Quincey’s views on this subject. Despite the bravura style, which makes us in our soberer days listen a little incredulously to these far-fetched sighs and breathings, the passage quoted bears testimony to that apprehension of childhood which De Quincey shared with Wordsworth. Both of these writers were looked upon in their day as somewhat reactionary in their poetical philosophy; so much the more valuable is their declaration of a poetical and philosophical faith which was fundamentally in unison with the political faith that lay behind the outburst of the French Revolution. The discovery of this new continent of childhood by such explorers of the spiritual world marks the age as distinctly as does the discovery of new lands and explorations in the earlier renaissance. It was indeed one of the great signs of the period ushered in by the French Revolution and the establishment of the American republic, that the bounds of the spiritual world were extended. When poverty and childhood were annexed to the poet’s domain, the world of literature and art suddenly became larger.
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At such times there are likely to be singular exhibitions of genius, which are ill-understood in contemporary life, but are perceived by later observers to be part and parcel of the age in which they occur. Something like this may be said of the pictures and poems of William Blake, who was a visionary in a time when a red flame along the horizon made his spiritual fires invisible. He has since been rediscovered, and has been for a generation so potent an influence in English art that we may wisely attend to him, not merely as a person of genius, but as furnishing an illustration of some of the deep things of our subject.
No one acquainted with Blake’s work has failed to observe the recurrence of a few types drawn from elemental figures. The lamb, the child, the old man,—these appear and reappear, carrying the prevalent ideas in this artist’s imagination. Of all these the child is the most central and emphatic, even as the Songs of Innocence is the most perfect expression of Blake’s vision of life. It may be said that in his mind childhood was largely resolvable into infancy, and that when he looked upon a babe, he saw life in its purest form, and that most suggestive of the divine, as in the exquisite cradle song, into which is woven the weeping of the child Jesus for all the human race. The two short antithetical poems, The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, reveal the depths which Blake penetrated when engaged in his solitary voyage of discovery to the little known shores of childhood. They have, to be sure, the teasing property of parables, and it would be hard to render them into the unmistakable language of the understanding; but they could be set to music, and like the Duke we exclaim:—
“That strain again! it had a dying fall.”
It must always be borne in mind that Blake’s contribution to the literature of childhood is through highly idealized forms. It is spiritual or angelic childhood which floats before his eyes, so that the little creatures who dance on the green, the little chimney sweep, the children filing into St. Paul’s, are translated by his visionary power into the images of an essential childhood; they cease to be individual illustrations.
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We are told that in the fearful days of the French Revolution there was an eruption from the secret places of Paris of a vast horde of poor, ignorant, and vicious people, who had been kept out of sight by lords and ladies. One may accept the fact as symbolical of that emergence into the light of Christianity of poverty and degradation. The poor had always been with the world, but it is not too much to say that now for the first time did they begin to be recognized as part and parcel of humanity. Wordsworth’s poems set the seal upon this recognition. Dickens’s novels naturalized the poor in literature, and, as in the case of Wordsworth, poverty and childhood went hand in hand.
Dickens, however, though he made a distinct addition to the literature of childhood, rather registered a presence already acknowledged than acted as a prophet of childhood. The great beneficent and humanitarian movement of the century was well under way, and had already found abundant expression in ragged schools and Sunday-schools and in education generally, when Dickens, with his quick reporter’s sight, seized upon salient features in this new exhibition of humanity. He was quite aside from the ordinary organized charities, but he was moved by much the same spirit as that which was briskly at work among the poor and the young. He was caught by the current, and his own personal experience was swift to give special direction to his imagination.
Besides innumerable minor references, there are certain childish figures in the multitude of the creations of Dickens, which at once rise to mind,—Paul Dombey, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield in his earliest days, and the Marchioness. Dickens found out very soon that the power to bring tears into the eyes of people was a surer road to success than even the power to amuse. When he was drawing the figures of children, their tenderness, their weakness, their susceptibility, presented themselves as the material in which he could skillfully work. Then he used the method which had served him so well in his larger portraiture; he seized upon the significant feature and emphasized it until it became the unmistakable mark of the person. Childhood suggests weakness, and weakness is more apparent when there is a foil of mental prematurity; so he invented the hydrocephalic Paul Dombey. It suggests tenderness; he appealed to an unhesitating sympathy and drew for us Little Nell, intensifying her nature by bringing her into contrast and subtle companionship with her imbecile grandfather. It is the defect of Dickens that by such characters he displayed his skill in morbid conceptions. The little old man in Paul Dombey is not without its prototype in real life, but Dickens appears to have produced it as a type of tender childhood, much as one might select a consumptive for an illustration of extreme refinement. Tiny Tim is a farther illustration of this unhealthy love, on Dickens’s part, of that which is affecting through its infirmity. That art is truest which sees children at play or in their mother’s arms, not in hospitals or graveyards. It is the infirmity of humanitarianism and of Dickens, its great exponent, that it regards death as the great fact of life; that it seeks to ward it off as the greatest of evils, and when it comes, hastens to cover it out of sight with flowers. This conception of death is bound up with an overweening sense of the importance of these years of life. There is a nobler way, and literature and art are slowly confessing it, as they devote their strength to that which is eternal in life, not to that which is perishable. Wordsworth’s maiden in We are Seven, with her simple, unhesitating belief in the continuity of life, the imperishability of the person, holds a surer place in literature than Paul Dombey, who makes the ocean with its tides wait for him to die.
It is only fair to say, however, that the caricature to be found in Dickens is scarcely more violent an extreme to some minds than is the idealism to be found in Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Blake an opposite extreme to minds otherwise constituted. The early life of Wordsworth, passed, as he tells us, in the solitude of nature, explains much of his subsequent attitude toward childhood and youth. It is out of such an experience that Lucy Gray was written. In like manner the early life of Dickens discloses something of a nature which reappears afterward in his pictures of childhood. A wounded sensibility is unquestionably the pathetic history of many, and Dickens has contributed to the natural history of childhood a distinct account of this feature.
The first appearance of a new form in literature produces an impression which can never be repeated. However freshly readers in this decade may come to the works of Dickens, it is impossible that they should have the same distinct sensation which men and women had who caught up the numbers of The Old Curiosity Shop as they fell from the press for the first time. There can never again be such a lamentation over Little Nell, when men like Jeffrey, a hardened old critic, made no concealment of their tears. Yet I am disposed to think that this does not give a complete account of the phenomenon. Just as Wordsworth’s Alice Fell is now but one of a procession of forlorn maidens, though at the head of it, so the children of Dickens are merely somewhat more vivid personages in a multitude of childish creation. The child is no longer a novelty either in poetry or in fiction. It is an accepted character, one of the _dramatis personæ_ of literature.
For, when all is said of Dickens’s work, taken only as the product of a mind singularly gifted with reporting what it has seen, there remains the noticeable fact that scarcely had the echoes died away from the voice of Wordsworth, who ushered in the literature of the new age, when a great man of the people came forward, in the person of Dickens, and found it the most natural thing in the world to give men pictures of child-life, and that after the first surprise attendant upon novelty was over, writers of all sorts were busy modeling these small figures.
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The child once introduced into literature, the significance of its appearance thereafter is not so much in individual instances as in the general and familiar acceptance of the phenomenon. At least, so it appears from our near view. It is not impossible that later students may perceive notes in our literature of more meaning than we now surmise. They may understand better than we why Tennyson should have made a babe the heroine of The Princess, as he acknowledges to Mr. Dawson that he did, though only one or two critics had discovered the fact, and why Mr. Swinburne, who is supposed to scoff at a literature _virginibus puerisque_, should have devoted so much of his lyric energy to childhood. The stream which ran with so broken a course down to Wordsworth has spread now into a broad, full river. Childhood is part and parcel of every poet’s material; children play in and out of fiction, and readers are accustomed to meeting them in books, and to finding them often as finely discriminated by the novelist as are their elders.
Meanwhile, from the time when childhood was newly discovered, that is to say, roughly, in the closing years of the last century, there has been a literature in process of formation which has for its audience children themselves. I called attention briefly, at the beginning of this study, to the interesting fact that there was a correlation in time, at least, between childhood in literature and a literature for children. A nearer study of the literature of this century shows very clearly that while the great constructive artists have been making room for the figures of infancy and youth, and even consciously explaining their presence, a host of minor writers, without much thought of art, have been busy over the same figures for other purposes. Not only so, but in several instances the great artists themselves have distinctly turned aside from their ordinary audience and appealed directly to children.
Where was the child in English literature before Goldsmith? and where before Goldsmith’s time was there a book for children? There have been, it is true, nursery tales in all ages: ditties, and songs, and lullabies; unwritten stories, which mothers in England told when they themselves could have read nothing; but there came a time when children were distinctly recognized as the occasion of formal literature, when authors and publishers began to heed a new public. It was impossible that there should be this discovery of childhood without a corresponding effort on the part of men and women to get at it, and to hold direct intercourse with it.
By a natural instinct, writers for children began at once to write about children. They were moved by educational rather than by artistic impulses, so that their creations were subordinate to the lessons which they conveyed. During the period when Wordsworth, Lamb, De Quincey, and Blake were idealizing childhood, and seeing in it artistic possibilities, there flourished a school of writing for the young which also dealt with childhood, but with a sturdy realism. This school had its representatives in Mrs. Barbauld, Mr. Day, the Aikens, Maria Edgeworth, Ann and Jane Taylor, and holds a place still with Evenings at Home, The Parent’s Assistant, Hymns in Prose for Children, Hymns for Infant Minds, Frank, and Sandford and Merton. The characteristics of this literature are simple, and will be recalled by many who dwell with an affectionate and regretful regard upon books which they find it somewhat difficult to persuade their children to read.
These books were didactic; they assumed in the main the air of wise teachers; they were sometimes condescending; they appealed to the understanding rather than to the imagination of the child, and they abounded in stores of useful information upon all manner of subjects. They contained precursors of a long series of juvenile monitors, and the grandfathers who knew Mr. Barlow had children who knew Mr. Holiday, Rollo, Jonas, and Mr. George, and grandchildren who may be suspected of an acquaintance with Mr. Bodley and his much traveled and very inquisitive family.
Yet, the earlier works, though now somewhat antiquated, were not infrequently lively and even humorous in their portraiture of children. They were written in the main out of a sincere interest in the young, and by those who were accustomed to watch the unfolding of childish nature. If they reflected a somewhat formal relation between the old and the young, it must be remembered that the actual relation was a formal one: that the young had not yet come into familiar and genial relation with the old. Indeed, the books themselves were somewhat revolutionary in a small way. Much that seems stiff and even unnatural to us now was quite easy and colloquial to their first readers, and in their eagerness to lure children into ways of pleasant instruction, the authors broke down something of the reserve which existed between fathers and sons in the English life which they portrayed. Yet we cannot help being struck by the contrast between the sublimated philosophy of Wordsworth and the prosaic applications of the Edgeworth school. Heaven lies about us in our infancy? Oh, yes, a heaven that is to be looked at through a spy-glass and explained by means of a home-made orrery. It would seem as if the spirit of childhood had been discerned with all its inherent capacity, but that the actual children of this matter-of-fact world had not yet been fairly seen by the light of this philosophy.
The literature which we are considering was indeed a serious attempt at holding intercourse with childish minds. It had the embarrassment of beginnings; there was about it an uncertain groping in the dark of childhood, and it was desperately theory-ridden. But it had also the mark of sincerity, and one feels in reading it that the writers were genuinely indifferent in most cases to the figure they might be cutting before the world; they were bent upon reaching this audience, and were unobservant of the larger world behind. In most cases, I say. I suspect that Mrs. Barbauld, with her solemn dullness, was the victim of a notion that she was producing a new order of literature, and in this she was encouraged by a circle of older readers; the children probably stared at her with sufficient calmness to keep her ignorant of their real thoughts.