Horace E. Scudder

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CHILDHOOD
IN LITERATURE AND ART

WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

A Study

BY
HORACE E. SCUDDER

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

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.

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]

It is certain that the Bible has been a storehouse from which have been drawn illustrations of life and character, and that these have had an authority beyond anything in classic history and literature. It has been the book from which youth with us has drawn its conceptions of life outside of the limited circle of human experience; and the geographical, historical, and archæological apparatus employed to illustrate it has been far more considerable than any like apparatus in classical study. The Bible has been the university to the person of ordinary culture; it has brought into his life a foreign element which Greece and Rome have been powerless to present; and though the images of this remote foreign life often have been distorted, and strangely mingled with familiar notions, there can be no doubt that the mind has been enlarged by this extension of its interests and knowledge.

It is worth while, therefore, to ask what conceptions of childhood are discoverable in the Old Testament literature. The actual appearances of children in the narrative portions are not frequent. We have the incident of the exposure of Moses as a babe in the bulrushes; the sickness and death of Bathsheba’s child, with the pathetic story of the erring father’s fasting and prayer; the expulsion of Ishmael; the childhood of Samuel in the temple; the striking narrative of the restoration of the son of the widow of Zarephath by Elijah; and the still more graphic and picturesque description of the bringing back to life by Elisha of the child who had been born at his intercession to the Shunamite, and had been sunstruck when in the field with his father. Then there is the abrupt and hard to be explained narrative of the jeering boys who followed the prophet Elisha with derisive cries, as they saw how different he was in external appearance from the rugged and awe-inspiring Elijah. Whatever may be the interpretation of the fearful retribution which befell those rude boys, and the indication which was shown of the majesty of the prophetic office, it is clear that the Jew of that day would not have felt any disproportion between the guilt of the boys and their dire and speedy punishment; he would have been impressed by the sanctity of the prophet, and the swiftness of the divine demonstration. Life and death were nothing before the integrity of the divine ideal, and the complete subordination of children to the will of their parents accustomed the mind to an easy assent to the exhibition of what seems to us almost arbitrary will.

No attentive reader of the Old Testament has failed to remark the prominence given to the preservation of the family succession, and to the birth of male children. That laugh of Sarah—at first of scorn, then of triumph—sounds out from the early records with a strange, prophetic voice; and one reads the thirtieth chapter of the book of Genesis with a sense of the wild, passionate rivalry of the two wives of Jacob, as they bring forth, one after another, the twelve sons of the patriarch. The burst of praise also from Hannah, when she was freed from her bitter shame and had brought forth her son Samuel, has its echo through history and psalm and prophecy until it issues in the clear, bell-like tones of the Magnificat, thenceforward to be the hymn of triumph of the Christian church. The voice of God, as it uttered itself in commandment and prophetic warning, was for children and children’s children to the latest generation. It is not the person so much as the family that is addressed, and the strongest warnings, the brightest promises to the fathers, are through the children. The prophet Hosea could use no more terrible word to the people than when, speaking as the mouthpiece of God, he says: “Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children;”[21] and Zechariah, inspiriting the people, declares: “They shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their children.”[22] The promise of the golden age of peace and prosperity has its climax in the innocence of childhood. “There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof;”[23] while the lofty anticipation of Isaiah, in words which still serve as symbols of hopeful humanity, reaches its height in the prediction of a profound peace among the very brutes, when the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf, the young lion, and the fatling shall not only lay aside their mutual hate and fear, but shall be obedient to the tender voice and gentle hand of a little child, and even the noxious reptiles shall be playmates for the infant.[24] In the Greek fable, Hercules in his cradle strangled the snakes by his might; in the Jewish picture, the child enters fearlessly the very dens of the asp and the adder, secure under the reign of a perfect righteousness.

Milton, in his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, has pointed out this parallel:—

“He feels from Judah’s land

The dreaded infant’s hand,

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;

Nor all the gods beside

Longer dare abide,

Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine;

Our babe, to show his Godhead true,

Can in his swaddling bands control the damnëd crew.”

To the Jew, childhood was the sign of fulfillment of glorious promises. The burden of psalm and prophecy was of a golden age to come, not of one that was in the dim past. A nation is kept alive, not by memory, but by hope. The God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob was the God of a procession of generations, a God of sons and of sons’ sons; and when we read, in the last words of the last canonical book of the Old Testament, that “he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers,”[25] we are prepared for the opening, four centuries later, of the last chapter in the ancient history of this people. In the adoration there of the child we seem to see the concentration of Jewish hope which had for centuries found expression in numberless ways. The Magnificat of Mary is the song of Hannah, purified and ennobled by generations of deferred hope, and in all the joy and prophecy of the shepherds, of Simeon and of Anna, we listen to strains which have a familiar sound. It is indeed the expectation of what this child will be and do which moves the pious souls about it, but there is a direct veneration of the babe as containing the hope of the people. In this supreme moment of the Jewish nation, age bows itself reverently before childhood, and we are able by the light which the event throws backward to perceive more clearly how great was the power of childhood, through all the earlier periods, in its influence upon the imagination and reason. We may fairly contend that the apprehension of the sanctity of childhood was more positive with the Jew than with either the Greek or the Roman.

It remains, however, that this third great stream of humanity passes out, in the New Testament, from its Hebraic limitations, and we are unable, except by a special effort, to think of it as Jewish at all. The Gospels transcend national and local and temporal limits, and we find ourselves, when considering them, reading the beginnings of modern, not the close of Jewish history. The incidents lying along the margin of the Gospels and relating to the birth of the Christ do, as we have seen, connect themselves with the earlier national development, but the strong light which comes at the dawn of Christianity inevitably draws the mind forward to the new day.

The evangelists record no incidents of the childhood of Jesus which separate it from the childhood of other of the children of men. The flight into Egypt is the flight of parents with a child; the presence of the boy in the temple is marked by no abnormal sign, for it is a distorted imagination which has given the unbiblical title to the scene,—Christ disputing with the Doctors, or Christ teaching in the Temple. But as the narrative of the Saviour’s ministry proceeds, we are reminded again and again of the presence of children in the multitudes that flocked about him. The signs and wonders which he wrought were more than once through the lives of the young, and the suffering and disease of humanity which form the background in the Gospels upon which we see sketched in lines of light the outline of the redeeming Son of Man are shown in the persons of children, while the deeper life of humanity is disclosed in the tenderness of parents. It is in the Gospels that we have those vignettes of human life,—the healing of the daughter of Jairus, the delivery of the boy possessed with devils, that striking antithesis to the transfiguration which Raphael’s genius has served to fix in the mind, the healing of the nobleman’s son, and the blessing of children brought to the Master by their fond mothers. Most notable, too, is the scene of the final entry into Jerusalem, when the Saviour appeared to accept from children the tribute which he shunned when it came from their elders.

Here, as in other cases, we ask what was the attitude of the Saviour toward children, since the literature of the New Testament is so confessedly a revelation of life and character that we instinctively refuse to treat it otherwise. In vain do we listen to those who point out the ethical beauty of the Sermon on the Mount, or the pathos of this or that incident; our minds break through all considerations of style and form, to seize upon the facts and truths in their relation to life. We do not ask, what is the representation of childhood to be found in the writings of certain Jews known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; we ask, what is there between children and the central figure disclosed in those writings. We ask purposely, for, when we leave behind this ancient world, we enter upon the examination of literature and art which are never beyond the horizon lying under the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. The attitude which Christ took toward children must contain the explanation of the attitude which Christianity takes toward the same, for the literature and art of Christendom become the exponents of the conception had of the Christ.

There are two or three significant words and acts which leave us in no doubt as to the general aspect which childhood wore to Jesus Christ. In the conversation which he held with the intellectual Nicodemus, he asserted the necessity of a new birth for mankind; in the rite of baptism he symbolized the same truth; he expanded this word again, accompanying it by a symbolic act, when he placed a child in the midst of his disciples and bade them begin life over again; he illustrated the truth by an acted parable, when he called little children to him with the words, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven;” he turned from the hard, skeptical men of that generation with the words of profound relief: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes;” he symbolized the charity of life in the gift of a cup of cold water to a child.

The eyes of this Jesus, the Saviour of men, were ever upon the new heavens and the new earth. The kingdom of heaven was the burden of his announcement; the new life which was to come to men shone most plainly in the persons of young children. Not only were the babes whom he saw and blessed to partake of the first entrance into the kingdom of the spirit, but childhood possessed in his sight the potency of the new world; it was under the protection of a father and mother; it was fearless and trusting; it was unconscious of self; it lived and did not think about living. The words of prophets and psalmists had again and again found in the throes of a woman in labor a symbol of the struggle of humanity for a new generation. By a bold and profound figure it was said of the great central person of humanity: “He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.” A foregleam of that satisfaction is found in his face as he gazes upon the children who are brought to him. There is sorrow as he gazes upon the world, and his face is set toward Jerusalem; there is a calm joy as he places a child before him and sees in his young innocence the promise of the kingdom of heaven; there is triumph in his voice as he rebukes the men who would fain shut the mouths of the shouting children that run before him.

The pregnant words which Jesus Christ used regarding childhood, the new birth, and the kingdom of heaven become indicative of the great movements in life and literature and art from that day to this. The successive gestations of history have their tokens in some specific regard of childhood. There have been three such periods, so mighty that they mark each the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. The first was the genesis of the Christian church; the second was the Renaissance; the third had its great sign in the French Revolution.

IV
IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY

The parabolic expression, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” has been applied with force to the destruction of Judaism, and the reconstruction upon its ruins of a living Christianity. It may be applied with equal justice, though in more recondite sense, to the death of the old literature and art, and the resurrection of the beautiful creations of the human mind in new form. The three days were more than a thousand years, and during that long sleep what had become of those indestructible forces of imagination and reason which combine in literature and art? Roughly speaking, they were disjoined, and only when reunited did they again assert themselves in living form. The power which kept each in abeyance was structural Christianity, and only when that began to be burst asunder by the vital force inherent in spiritual Christianity was there opportunity for the free union of the imagination and reason. As the Jewish temple could no longer inclose divinity, but was thrust apart by the expansive power of the Christianity which was fostered within it, so the Christian church, viewed as an institution which aimed at an inclosure of humanity, was in its turn disrupted by the silent growth of the human spirit which had fed within its walls upon the divine life. After the birth of Christianity the parallel continuity of the old world was broken. The Greek, the Roman, and the Hebrew no longer carried forward their separate movements. Christianity, professing to annul these forces, had taken their place in history. Again, at the Renaissance, it was found that the three great streams of human thought had been flowing underground; they reissued to the light in a generous flood, each combining with the others.

It was during this long period of apparent inaction in literature and art that the imagination, dissevered from reason, was in a state of abnormal activity. The compression of its field caused the faculty to find expression through forms which were very closely connected with the dominant sphere of human life. Before religious art and ecclesiastical architecture had become the abundant expression of Christian imagination, there was generated a great mass of legend and fable, which only by degrees became formally embodied in literature or perpetuated in art and symbol. The imaginative faculty had given it, for material in which to work the new life, the soul of man as distinctly related to God. An ethical principle lay at the foundation of Christianity, and the imagination, stimulated by faith, built with materials drawn from ethical life. The germinal truth of Christianity, that God had manifested himself to men in the person of Jesus Christ, however it might be obscured or misunderstood, was the efficient cause of the operations of the Christian imagination. This faculty set before itself the perfect man, and in that conceived not the physical and intellectual man of the Greek conception, nor the Cæsar of the Roman ideal, nor even the moral man of the Jewish light, but a man whose perfection was the counterpart of the perfection of God and its great exemplar, the man Jesus Christ. In his life the central idea of service, of victory through suffering and humiliation, of self-surrender, and of union with God was perceived with greater or less clearness, and this idea was adumbrated in that vast gallery of saints constructed by Christianity in its ceaseless endeavor to reproduce the perfect type. Through all the extravagance and chaotic confusion of the legendary lore of the mediæval church, one may discover the perpetually recurring notes of the perfect life. The beatitudes—those spiritual witnesses of the redeemed human character—are ever floating before the early imagination, and offering the standards by which it measures its creations. It was by no fortuitous suggestion, but by a profound sense of fitness, that the church made the gospel of All Saints’ Day to consist of those sentences which pronounce the blessedness of the poor in spirit, the meek, and the persecuted for righteousness sake; while the epistle for the same day is the roll-call of the saints who are to sit on the thrones of the twelve tribes, and of the multitudes who have overcome the world.

It is not strange, therefore, that the imagination, busying itself about the spiritual life of man, should have dwelt with special emphasis upon those signs of the new life brought to light in the Gospels, which seemed to contain the promise of perfection. It seized upon baptism as witnessing to a regeneration; it traced the lives of saints back to a childhood which began with baptism; it invested the weak things of the world with a mighty power; and, keeping before it the pattern of the Head of the church, it traced in the early life of the Saviour powers which confounded the common wisdom of men. It dwelt with fondness upon the adoration of the Magi, as witnessing to the supremacy of the infant Redeemer; and, occupied as it was with the idea of a suffering Saviour, it carried the cross back to the cradle, and found in the Massacre of the Innocents the type of a substitution and vicarious sacrifice.

The simple annals of the Gospels shine with great beauty when confronted by the ingenuity and curious adornment of the legends included in the so-called Apocryphal Gospels. Yet these legends illustrate the eagerness of the early Christian world to invest the person of Jesus with every possible charm and power; and since the weakness of infancy and childhood offers the strongest contrast to works of thaumaturgy, this period is very fully elaborated. A reason may also be found in the silence of the evangelists, which needed to be broken by the curious. Thus, when, in the flight into Egypt, the Holy Family was made to seek rest in a cave, there suddenly came out many dragons; and the children who were with the family, when they saw the dragons, cried out in great terror.

“Then Jesus,” says the narrative, “went down from the bosom of his mother, and stood on his feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus, and thereafter retired.... And the young child Jesus, walking before them, commanded them to hurt no man. But Mary and Joseph were very much afraid lest the child should be hurt by the dragons. And Jesus said to them; ‘Do not be afraid, and do not consider me to be a little child; for I am and always have been perfect, and all the beasts of the field must needs be tame before me.’ Lions and panthers adored him likewise, and accompanied them in the desert. Wherever Joseph and the blessed Mary went, these went before them, showing them the way and bowing their heads, and showing their submission by wagging their tails; they adored him with great reverence. Now at first, when Mary saw the lions and the panthers, and various kinds of wild beasts coming about them, she was very much afraid. But the infant Jesus looked into her face with a joyful countenance, and said: ‘Be not afraid, mother; for they come not to do thee harm, but they make haste to serve both thee and me.’ With these words he drove all fear from her heart. And the lions kept walking with them, and with the oxen and the asses and the beasts of burden which carried their baggage, and did not hurt a single one of them; but they were tame among the sheep and the rams which they had brought with them from Judæa, and which they had with them. They walked among wolves and feared nothing, and no one of them was hurt by another.”[26]

So, too, when Mary looked helplessly up at the fruit of a palm-tree hanging far out of her reach, the child Jesus, “with a joyful countenance, reposing in the bosom of his mother, said to the palm, ‘O tree, bend thy branches, and refresh my mother with thy fruit.’ And immediately at these words the palm bent its top down to the very feet of the blessed Mary; and they gathered from its fruit, with which they were all refreshed. And after they had gathered all its fruit, it remained bent down, waiting the order to rise from him who had commanded it to stoop. Then Jesus said to it, ‘Raise thyself, O palm-tree, and be strong, and be the companion of my trees which are in the paradise of my Father; and open from thy roots a vein of water which has been hid in the earth, and let the waters flow, so that we may be satisfied from thee.’ And it rose up immediately, and at its root there began to come forth a spring of water, exceedingly clear and cool and sparkling. And when they saw the spring of water they rejoiced with great joy, and were satisfied, themselves and all their cattle and their beasts. Wherefore they gave thanks to God.”

The legends which relate to the boyhood of Jesus carry back with a violent or confused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus he is represented more than once as willing the death of a playmate, and then contemptuously bringing him to life again. A favorite story grossly misconceives the incident of Christ with the Doctors in the temple, and makes him turn his schoolmaster into ridicule. There are other stories, the incidents of which are not reflections of anything in the Gospels, but are used to illustrate in a childish way the wonder-working power of the boy. Here is one which curiously mingles the miraculous power with the Saviour’s doctrine of the Sabbath:—

“And it came to pass, after these things, that in the sight of all Jesus took clay from the pools which he had made, and of it made twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when Jesus did this, and there were very many children with him. When, therefore, one of the Jews had seen him doing this, he said to Joseph, ‘Joseph, dost thou not see the child Jesus working on the Sabbath at what it is not lawful for him to do? For he has made twelve sparrows of clay.’ And when Joseph heard this, he reproved him, saying, ‘Wherefore doest thou on the Sabbath such things as are not lawful for us to do?’ And when Jesus heard Joseph he struck his hands together, and said to his sparrows, ‘Fly!’ and at the voice of his command they began to fly. And in the sight and hearing of all that stood by he said to the birds, ‘Go and fly through the earth, and through all the world, and live.’ And when those that were there saw such miracles they were filled with great astonishment.”

It is interesting to note how many of these stories connect the child with animals. The passage in Isaiah which prophesied the great peace in the figure of a child leading wild beasts had something to do with this; so had the birth of Jesus in a manger, and the incident of the entry into Jerusalem: but I suspect that the imagination scarcely needed to hunt very far or very curiously for suggestions, since the world over childhood has been associated with brute life, and the writers of the Apocryphal Gospels had only to make these animals savage when they would illustrate the potency of the childhood of Jesus.

“There is a road going out of Jericho,” says the Pseudo-gospel of Matthew, “and leading to the river Jordan, to the place where the children of Israel crossed; and there the ark of the covenant is said to have rested. And Jesus was eight years old, and he went out of Jericho and went towards the Jordan. And there was beside the road, near the banks of the Jordan, a cave, where a lioness was nursing her cubs; and no one was safe who walked that way. Jesus, then, coming from Jericho, and knowing that in that cave the lioness had brought forth her young, went into it in the sight of all. And when the lions saw Jesus they ran to meet him, and adored him. And Jesus was sitting in the cavern, and the lion’s cubs ran hither and thither round his feet, fawning upon him and sporting. And the older lions, with their heads bowed down, stood at a distance and adored him, and fawned upon him with their tails. Then the people, who were standing afar off, not seeing Jesus, said, ‘Unless he or his parents had committed grievous sins, he would not of his own accord have offered himself up to the lions.’ And when the people were thus reflecting within themselves, and were lying under great sorrow, behold, on a sudden, in the sight of the people, Jesus came out of the cave, and the lions went before him, and the lion’s cubs played with each other before his feet. And the parents of Jesus stood afar off, with their heads bowed down, and watched; likewise, also, the people stood at a distance, on account of the lions; for they did not dare to come close to them. Then Jesus began to say to the people, ‘How much better are the beasts than you, seeing that they recognize their Lord and glorify him; while you men, who have been made after the image and likeness of God, do not know him! Beasts know me, and are tame; men see me, and do not acknowledge me.’”

To the mind of these early Christians the life of Jesus was compounded of holiness and supernatural power; so far as they distinguished these, the holiness was the cause of the power, and hence, when the imagination fashioned saints out of men and women, it followed the same course which it had taken with the Master. The childhood of the saints was an anticipation of maturer virtues and powers, rather than a manifestation of ingenuous innocence. There was a tendency to explain exceptional qualities in lives by extending them backward into youth, thereby gaining for them an apparent corroboration. The instances of this in the legends are frequent. Mothers, like the Virgin Mary, have premonitions that their children are to be in some special manner children of God, and the characteristics of later life are foreshadowed at birth. The Virgin herself was thus dealt with. The strong human feeling which subsequently, when the tenderness of Christ had been petrified into judgment, interposed the Virgin as mediator, found gratification in surrounding Mary’s infancy and childhood with a supernatural grace and power, the incidents in some cases being faint reflections of incidents in the life of her son; as when we are told that Joachim and Anna carried Mary, then three years old, to place her among the virgins in the temple of God. “And when she was put down before the doors of the temple, she went up the fifteen steps so swiftly that she did not look back at all; nor did she, as children are wont to do, seek for her parents. Whereupon her parents, each of them anxiously seeking for the child, were both alike astonished until they found her in the temple, and the priests of the temple themselves wondered.”

In like manner a halo of light played about S. Catherine’s head when she was born. The year of the birth of S. Elizabeth of Hungary was full of blessings to her country; the first words she uttered were those of prayer, and when three years old she gave signs of the charity which marked her life by giving her toys and garments to those less fortunate than herself. A pretty story is told of her betrothal to Prince Louis of Thuringia. Herman of Thuringia sent an embassy to the king of Hungary, desiring the little Elizabeth, then only four years old, for his son; and the maiden accompanied the embassy, carrying with her a silver cradle and silver bath, which her father had given her. She was betrothed to Louis, and the little pair played happily together in the same cradle. S. Genevieve of Paris was a maiden of seven, who tended a flock of sheep at the village of Narterre. Hither came S. Germain, and when the inhabitants were assembled to receive his benediction his eyes rested on the little shepherdess, and seeing her saintliness he set her apart as a bride of Christ. S. Gregory Nazianzen had a dream when he was a boy, in which two heavenly virgins of celestial beauty visited him: they were Chastity and Temperance, and so captivating was their presence, so winning were their words, that he awoke to take perpetual vows of continence. S. John Chrysostom was a dull boy at school, and so disturbed was he by the ridicule of his fellows that he went into a church to pray to the Virgin for help. A voice came from the image: “Kiss me on the mouth, and thou shalt be endowed with all learning.” He did this, and when he returned to his school-fellows they saw a golden circle about his mouth, and his eloquence and brilliancy astounded them. Martyrdom was the portion of these saintly children as well as of their elders. The story is told of Hilarion, one of the four children of Saturninus the priest, that when the proconsul of Carthage thought to have no difficulty in dealing with one of tender age, the child resisted all cajolings and threats. “I am a Christian,” said the little fellow. “I have been at the collect [that is, assisted as an acolyte], and it was of my own voluntary choice, without any compulsion.” Thereupon the proconsul, who was probably a father, threatened him, as the story runs, “with those little punishments with which children are accustomed to be chastised,” but the child only laughed at the idea of giving up his faith for fear of a whipping. “I will cut off your nose and ears!” shouted the exasperated inquisitor. “You may do it, but I shall be a Christian still,” replied the undaunted boy; and when he was ordered off to prison with the rest, he was heard to pipe forth, “God be thanked,” and so was led away.

These random incidents are, for the most part, mainly anticipatory of mature experience. They can be matched with the details of Protestant hagiology as recorded in a class of books more common forty years ago than now. It is their remoteness that lends a certain grace and charm to them. The life of a little Christian in the fourth century is invested with an attraction which is wanting in the circumstance of some juvenile saint living in the midst of indifferent scoffers of the early part of the nineteenth century.

Occasionally, however, the legends inclose the saintly attributes in some bit of romance, or betray a simple, ingenuous sympathy with childish nature. The legend of S. Kenelm has a faint suspicion of kinship with the story of the babes in the wood. King Kenwulf of Wessex died, and left two daughters, Cwendrida and Burgenilda, and a son of seven years, named Kenelm. The elder of the daughters wished the child out of the way, that she might reign; so she gave money to Askbert, his guardian, the wicked uncle of the story, and bade him privily slay the boy. So Askbert took Kenelm into a wood, as if for a hunt, and by and by the child, tired with the heat, fell asleep under the shade of a tree. Askbert, seeing his time had come, set to work to dig a grave, that all might be in readiness; but Kenelm woke, and said, “It is in vain that you think to kill me here. I shall be slain in another spot. In token whereof, see this rod blossom;” and so saying, he stuck a stick into the ground, and it instantly took root and began to flower. In after days it was a great ash-tree, known as S. Kenelm’s ash. Then Askbert took the little king to another spot, and the child, now wide awake, began to sing the Te Deum. When he came to the verse, “The noble army of martyrs praise Thee,” Askbert cut off his head, and then buried him in the wood. Just as he did this, a white dove flew into the church of S. Peter in Rome, and laid on the high altar a letter, which it bore in its beak. The letter was in English, and it was some time before any one could be found who could read it. Then it was discovered that Kenelm had been killed and his body hidden away. The Pope thereupon wrote letters into England telling of this sorry affair, and men went forth to find the body of the little king. They were led by a pillar of light, which stood over the place where the body lay. So they bore it off and buried it; but they built a chapel over the spot where they had found the body, which is known as S. Kenelm’s chapel to this day. There the chapel stands near Hales Owen; how else did it get its name? and as Mr. Freeman sagely remarks, “It is hard to see what should have made anybody invent such a tale, if nothing of the kind had ever happened.”

Another of the stories which has a half fairy-tale character is that of the martyrdom of the little S. Christina, who was shut up in a high tower by her father, and bidden spend her time before gold and silver gods; his private purpose being to keep her out of the way of troublesome lovers. Christina tired of her divine playthings, and in spite of her father’s indulgence, since he obligingly took away all the images but three, would have nothing to do with false gods. She was visited by angels and instructed in Christianity. She combined courage in her new faith with a fine spirit of adventure; for she is represented as smashing the idols, letting herself down by a rope from her tower-prison, distributing the fragments of the idols among the poor, and clambering up again before morning. Her martyrdom showed various ingenious inventions of torture, but the odd part of the story is the manner in which the gold and silver idols always suggest a girl’s playthings. We are told that when she was taken into the temple of Apollo she bade the idol step down and walk about the temple until she sent it back to its place. Then, proceeds the story gravely, she was put in a cradle filled with boiling pitch and oil, and four soldiers were set to rocking her.

In these and similar stories which abound in the Acta Sanctorum, the simple attributes of childish nature rarely shine through the more formal covering of churchly investiture. Nature could not always be expelled, but the imagination, busy with the construction of the ideal Christian life, was more concerned, as time went on, to make that conform to an ecclesiastical standard. It is pathetic to see the occasional struggle of poor humanity to break through the meshes in which it was entangled. The life of S. Francis of Assisi is full of incidents which illustrate this. His familiar intercourse with birds and beasts was but one of the signs of an effort to escape from the cage in which he was an unconscious prisoner. One night, we are told, he rose suddenly from the earthen floor which made his bed and rushed out into the open air. A brother monk, who was praying in his cell, looked through his window and saw S. Francis, under the light of the moon, fashion seven little figures of snow. “Here is thy wife,” he said to himself: “these four are thy sons and daughters; the other two are thy servant and handmaid: and for all these thou art bound to provide. Make haste, then, and provide clothing for them, lest they perish with cold. But if the care of so many trouble thee, be thou careful to serve the Lord alone.” The injunction to give up father and mother and family for the Lord’s sake, when obeyed by one so tremulously alive to human sympathy as was S. Francis, had in it a power suddenly to disclose the depths of the human soul; nor can it be doubted that those who, like S. Francis, were eagerly thrusting aside everything which seemed to stand between them and the realization of the divine life paid heed to the significant words of the Lord which made a child the symbol of that life. In practical dealing with the evils of the world the early church never lost sight of children. Orphans, especially the orphans of martyrs, were a sacred charge, and when monasteries arose and became, at least in the West, centres of civilization, they were refuges for foundlings as well as schools for the young. It is one of the distinct signs of the higher life which Christianity was slowly bringing into the world that the church adopted and protected children as children, for their own sakes. Foundlings had before been nurtured for the sake of profit, and we can easily do poor human nature the justice to believe in instances where pity and love had their honest sway; but it certainly was left to the church to incorporate in its very constitution that care of helpless childhood which springs from a profound sense of the dignity of life, and a growing conviction of the rights which pertain to personality.

For the history of Christianity is in the development of personality, and childhood has, from the beginning, come under the influence of a power which has been at work lifting the world into a recognition of its relation to God. It was impossible that the few significant words spoken by Christ should be forgotten; nevertheless, they do not seem to have impressed themselves upon the consciousness of men. At least it may be said that in the growth of Latin Christianity they do not come forward specifically as furnishing the ground and reason for a regard for childhood. The work to be done by the Latin church was largely one of organizing human society under an anthropomorphic conception of God. It gave a certain fixed objectivity to God, placed him at a distance from the world, and made the approach to him to be by a succession of intermediary agents. Nevertheless, the hierarchy which resulted rested upon ethical foundations. The whole grand scheme did, in effect, rivet and fix the sense of personal responsibility and personal integrity. It made each man and woman aware of his and her relation to law in the person of its ministers, and this law was a law which reached to the thoughts of the heart.

The system, as such, had little to do with childhood. It waited for its close, but it pushed back its influence over the line of adolescence, making as early as might be the day when the child should come into conscious relation with the church. Through the family, however, it powerfully affected the condition of childhood, for by its laws and its ritual it was giving religious sanction to the family, even while it was gradually divorcing itself from humanity under plea of a sanctity which was more than human. Its conception of a religious devotedness which was too good for this world, whereby contempt of the body was put in place of redemption of the body, and celibacy made more honorable than marriage, undermined its hold upon the world, which it sought to govern and to furnish with ideals.

Inasmuch as this great system dealt with persons in relations which could be exactly defined and formulated, it would be idle to seek in the literature which reflects it for any considerable representation of that period of human life in which the forms are as yet undetermined. Nevertheless, childhood exercises even here its subtle power of recalling men to elemental truths. Dante was the prophet of a spiritual Rome, which he saw in his vision outlined against the background of the existing hierarchy. It would be in vain to search through the Divine Comedy for many references to childhood. As he says himself in the Inferno,—

“For this is not a sportive enterprise

To speak the universe’s lowest hold,

Nor suits a tongue that Pa and Mammy cries.”[27]

And the only picture of childhood in that vision is the melancholy one of the horrid sufferings of Count Ugolino and his children in the Tower of Hunger. In the Paradiso there are two passages of interest. Near the close of the twenty-seventh canto, Beatrice, breaking forth into a rapt utterance of the divine all in all, suddenly checks herself as she remembers how the curse of covetousness shuts men out from entrance into the full circle of divine movement, and then, with a swift and melancholy survey of the changes in human life, cries bitterly:—

“Faith, Art, and Innocence are found alone

With little children; then they scatter fast

Before the down across the cheek have grown.

There is that lispeth, and doth learn to fast,

Who afterward, with tongue untied from May

To April, down his throat all meats will cast.

There is that, lisping, loveth to obey

His mother, and he’ll wish her in the tomb,

When sentences unbroken he can say.”

Again, in the thirty-second canto, S. Bernard is pointing out the circles of the Rose, and after denoting the degrees of saints before Christ and after, proceeds:—

“And from the seats, in midway rank, that knit

These double files, and downwards, thou wilt find

That none do for their own deserving sit,

But for another’s under terms assigned;

For every one of these hath been set free

Ere truly self-determined was the mind.

This by the childish features wilt thou see,

If well thou scan them, and if well thou list

Wilt hear it by the childlike symphony.”

Dante is perplexed by the difference even in these innocent babes, but S. Bernard reminds him that there is difference in endowment, but that all are subject to the divine all-embracing law:—

“And therefore these, who took such hasty flight,

Into the true life not without a cause

Are entered so, these more, and those less, bright,”—

an interpretation of the vision which is really less scholastic than suggested by the deeper insight of the poetic mind.

The most significant passage, however, is found in the famous words at the beginning of the Vita Nuova, which fix Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when he was nine years old. “And since,” he closes, “to dwell upon the passions and actions of such early youth seems like telling an idle tale, I will leave them, and, passing over many things which might be drawn from the original where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under larger paragraphs.”[28] In these last words is apparent Dante’s own judgment upon the worth of his recollections of childhood: one page only in that book of his memory he deems worthy of regard,—the page upon which fell the image of Beatrice. It will be said with truth that the childhood of Dante and Beatrice is in reality the beginning of maturity, for it is counted only as the initiation of a noble passion. The time, indeed, had not yet come in the history of human life when the recollection of that which is most distinctive of childhood forms the basis of speculation and philosophic dream.

The absence of childhood from the visions of Dante is a negative witness to the absence from the world, in the age prior to the Renaissance, of hope and of simple faith and innocence. Dante’s faint recognition of these qualities throws them back into a quickly forgotten and outgrown childhood. The lisping child becomes the greedy worldling, the cruel and unloving man, and the tyranny of an empire of souls is hinted at in the justification by the poet of the presence of innocent babes in Paradise; they are there by the interposition of a sacrificial act. The poet argues to still the doubts of men at finding these children in Paradise. It would almost seem as if the words had been forgotten which characterized heaven through the very image of childhood.

Indeed, it is not to be wondered at that childhood was little regarded by an age which found its chief interest in a thought of death. “Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio,” we are reminded by Mr. Pater, “gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the plague in a country house.”[29] The great Florentine work was executed under this dominant thought; nevertheless, an art which is largely concerned about tombs and sepulchral monuments implies an overweening pride in life and a weightier sense of the years of earth. The theology which had furnished the panoply within which the human soul was fighting its battle emphasized the idea of time, and made eternity itself a prolongation of human conditions. The imagination, at work upon a future, constructed it out of the hard materials of the present, and was always looking for some substantial bridge which should connect the two worlds; seeing decay and change here, it transferred empires and powers to the other side of the gulf, and sought to reërect them upon an everlasting basis.

Such thought had little in common with the hope, the fearlessness, the faith, of childhood, and thus childhood as an image had largely faded out of art and literature. One only great exception there was,—the representation in art of the child Jesus; and in the successive phases of this representation may be read a remarkable history of the human soul.

V
IN MEDIÆVAL ART

The power of Christianity lies in its prophecy of universality, and the most significant note of this power is in its comprehension of the poor and the weak, not merely as the objects of a benediction proceeding from some external society, but as themselves constituent members of that society, sharing in all its rights and fulfilling its functions. When the last great prophet of Israel and forerunner of Judaic Christianity sent to inquire what evidence Jesus of Nazareth could give that he was the Christ, the answer which came back had the conclusive words, “To the poor the gospel is preached.” The same Jesus, when he would give his immediate followers the completest type of the kingdom which was to prevail throughout the world, took a child, and set him in the midst of them. There is no hardly gained position in the development of human society which may not find its genetic idea in some word or act of the Son of Man, and the proem to the great song of an expectant democracy is in the brief hour of the first Christian society, which held all things in common.

The sketch of a regenerated human society, contained in the New Testament, has been long in filling out, and the day which the first generation of Christians thought so near at hand has thus far had only a succession of proleptic appearances; but from the first the note of the power of Christianity, which lies in the recognition of poverty and weakness, has never been wanting, and has been most loudly struck in the great epochs of Christian revival. In the struggle after purity of associated life, which had its witness in the orders of the church, poverty was accepted as a necessary condition, and the constructive genius of the human mind, dealing with the realities of Christian faith, rose to its highest point in presenting, not the maturity, but the infancy of Jesus Christ. Each age offers its contribution to the perfection of the Christian ideal, and while, in the centuries lying on either side of the Renaissance, the church as an ecclesiastical system was enforcing the dogma of mediatorial sacrifice as something outside of humanity, the spirit of God, in the person of great painters, was drawing the thoughts of men to the redemption of the world, which lies in the most sacred of human relations. The great efflorescence of art, which we recognize as the gift of these centuries, has left as its most distinctive memorial the type of Christianity expressed in the Madonna.

I

In the Holy Family the child is the essential figure. In the earliest examples of the mother and child, both Mary and Jesus are conceived as symbols of religious faith, and the attitude of the child is unchildlike, being that of a dispenser of blessings with uplifted hand. The group is not distinctly of the mother and child, but of the Virgin and the Saviour, the Saviour being represented as a child in order to indicate the ground of the adoration paid to the Virgin. They stand before one as possessed of coördinate dignity. It is a curious and suggestive fact that the Byzantine type of the Madonna, which rarely departed much from this symbolic treatment, has continued to be the preference of those whose conceptions of the religious life are most closely identified with a remote sacramentarianism. The Italian lemonade-seller has a Byzantine Madonna in his booth: the Belgian churches abound in so-called sacred pictures: the Russian merchant salutes an icon of the same type; and the ritualistic enthusiast of the Anglican revival modifies his æsthetic views by his religious sympathy, and stops short in his admiration with Cimabue and Giotto.

In the development of the Madonna from its first form as a rigid symbol to its latest as a realistic representation of motherhood, we are aware of a change in the minds of the people who worship before the altars where the pictures are placed, and in the minds of the painters who produce the almost endless variations on this theme. The worshipper, dispossessed of a belief in the fatherhood of God, came to take refuge in the motherhood of Mary. Formally taught the wrath of God, he found in the familiar relation of mother and child the most complete type vouchsafed to him of that love which the church by many informal ways bade him believe lay somewhere in the divine life.

Be this as it may, the treatment of the subject in a domestic and historical form followed the treatment in a religious and ecclesiological mode. In the earlier representations of the Madonna there was a twofold thought exhibited. The mother was the queen of heaven, and she derived her dignity from the child on her knee. Hence she is sometimes shown adoring the child, and the child looks up into the mother’s face with his finger on his lip, expressive of the utterance, I am the Word. This adoration of the child by the mother was, however, but a transient phase: the increasing worship paid to the Virgin forbade that she should be so subordinated; and in the gradual expansion of the theme, by which saints and martyrs and angels were grouped in attendant ministry, more and more importance was attached to the person of the Virgin. The child looks up in wonder and affectionate admiration. He caresses her, and offers her a child’s love mingled with a divine being’s calm self-content.

For throughout the whole period of the religious presentation of the Madonna, even when the Madonna herself is conspicuously the occasion of the picture, we may observe the influence of the child,—an influence sometimes subtle, sometimes open and manifest. It is not enough to say that this child is Jesus, as it is not enough to say that the mother is the Virgin Mary. The divine child is the sign of an ever-present childhood in humanity; the divine mother the sign of a love which the religion of Christianity never wholly forgot. The common imagination was perpetually seeking to relieve Mary and Jesus of all attributes which interfered with the central and inhering relation of mother and child: through this type of love the mind apprehended the gospel of Christianity as in no other way.

Indeed, this apotheosis of childhood and maternity is at the core of the religion of hope which was inclosed in the husk of mediæval Christianity, and it was made the theme of many variations. Before it had ceased to be a symbol of worship, it was offering a nucleus for the expression of a more varied human hope and interest. The Holy Family in the hands of painters and sculptors, and the humbler class of designers which sprang into notice with the introduction of printing and engraving, becomes more and more emblematic of a pure and happy domestic group. Joseph is more frequently introduced, and John Baptist appears as a playmate of the child Jesus; sometimes they are seen walking in companionship. Certain incidents in later life are symbolically prefigured in the realistic treatment of homely scenes, as in the Madonna by Giulio Romano, where the child stands in a basin, while the young S. John pours water upon him, Mary washes him, S. Elizabeth stands by holding a towel, and S. Joseph watches the scene,—an evident prefigurement of the baptism in the Jordan. Or again, Mary, seated, holds the infant Christ between her knees; Elizabeth leans over the back of the chair; Joseph rests on his staff behind the Virgin; the little S. John and an angel present grapes, while four other angels are gathering and bringing them. By such a scene Ippolito Andreasi would remind people that Jesus is the true vine.

II

The recognition of childhood as the heart of the family is discoverable even more emphatically in the art of the northern people, among whom domestic life always had greater respect. It may seem a trivial reason, but I suspect nature holds the family more closely together in cold countries, which compel much indoor and fireside life, than in lands which tempt to vagrancy. At any rate, the fact remains that the Germanic peoples have been home-cultivating. It did not need the Roman Tacitus to find this out, but his testimony helps us to believe that the disposition was a radical one, which Christianity reinforced rather than implanted. Lord Lindsay makes the pregnant observation, “Our Saviour’s benediction of the little children as a subject [is] from first to last Teutonic,—I scarcely recollect a single Italian instance of it;”[30] and in the revival of religious art, at which Overbeck and Cornelius assisted, this and similar subjects, by their frequency, mark a differentiation from art south of the Alps, whose traditions, nevertheless, the German school was consciously following.

Although of a period subsequent to the Renaissance, an excellent illustration of the religious representation of the childhood of Jesus in northern art is contained in a series of twelve prints executed in the Netherlands, and described in detail by Mrs. Jameson.[31] The series is entitled The Infancy of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the title-page is surrounded by a border composed of musical instruments, spinning-wheels, distaffs, and other implements of female industry, intermixed with all kinds of masons’ and carpenters’ tools. In the first of the prints, the figure of Christ is seen in a glory, surrounded by cherubim. In the second, the Virgin is seated on the hill of Sion; the infant in her lap, with outspread arms, looks up to a choir of angels, and is singing with them. In the third, Jesus slumbering in his cradle is rocked by two angels, while Mary sits by, engaged in needlework. Beneath is a lullaby in Latin which has been translated:—

“Sleep, sweet babe! my cares beguiling,

Mother sits beside thee, smiling,

Sleep my darling, tenderly!

If thou sleep not, mother mourneth

Singing as her wheel she turneth,

Come soft slumber, balmily!”

The fourth shows the interior of a carpenter’s shop: Joseph is plying his work, while Joachim stands near him; the Virgin is measuring linen, and S. Anna looks on; two angels are at play with the infant Christ, who is blowing soap-bubbles. In the fifth picture, Mary prepares the family meal, while Joseph is in the background chopping wood; more in front, Jesus sweeps together the chips, and two angels gather them. In the sixth, Mary is seen reeling off a skein of thread; Joseph is squaring a plank; Jesus is picking up chips, again assisted by two angels. The seventh shows Mary seated at her spinning-wheel; Joseph, aided by Jesus, is sawing through a large beam, the two angels standing by. The eighth is somewhat similar: Mary holds her distaff, while Joseph saws a beam on which Jesus stands, and the two angels help in the work. In the ninth print, Joseph is busy building the framework of a house, assisted by one of the angels; Jesus is boring with a large gimlet, the other angel helping him; and Mary winds thread. In the next, Joseph is at work roofing the house; Jesus, in company with the angels, carries a beam up the ladder; while below, in front, Mary is carding wool or flax. The eleventh transfers the work, with an apparent adaptation to Holland, to the building of a boat, where Joseph is helped by Jesus, who holds a hammer and chisel, still attended by the angels; the Virgin is knitting a stocking, and the newly built house is seen in the background. In the last of the series, Joseph is erecting a fence round a garden; Jesus, with the help of the angels, is fastening the palings together; while Mary is weaving garlands of roses.

Here is a reproduction of the childhood of the Saviour in the terms of a homely Netherland family life, the naturalistic treatment diversified by the use of angelic machinery. The prints were a part of the apparatus used by the priests in educating the people. However such instruction may have fallen short of the highest truths of Christianity, its recognition of the simple duties of life and its enforcement of these by the example of the Son of Man make us slow to regard such interposition of the church as remote from the spirit of Christ. If, as is quite possible, these prints were employed by the Jesuits, then their significance becomes doubly noticeable. In that vigorous attempt by Loyola and his order to maintain an organic Christian unity against the apparent disruption of Christianity, such a mode as this would find a place as serving to emphasize that connection between the church and the family which the Jesuits instinctively felt to be essential to the supremacy of the former.

III

Whatever light the treatment of the Madonna subject may throw upon the ages in which it is uppermost in men’s thoughts, the common judgment is sound which looks for the most significance in the works of Raphael. Even those who turn severely away from him, and seek for purer art in his predecessors, must needs use his name as one of epochal consequence. So many forces of the age meet in Raphael, who was peculiarly open to influences, that no other painter can so well be chosen as an exponent of the idea of the time; and as one passes in review the successive Madonnas, one may not only detect the influence of Perugino, of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, and other masters, but may see the ripening of a mind, upon which fell the spirit of the age, busy with other things than painting.

Of the early Madonnas of Raphael, it is noticeable how many present the Virgin engaged in reading a book, while the child is occupied in other ways, sometimes even seeking to interrupt the mother and disengage her attention. Thus in one in the Berlin museum, which is formal, though unaffected, Mary reads a book, while the child plays with a goldfinch; in the Madonna in the Casa Connestabile, at Perugia, the child plays with the leaves of the book; in the Madonna del Cardellino, the little S. John presents a goldfinch to Jesus, and the mother looks away from her book to observe the children; in that at Berlin, which is from the Casa Colonna, the child is held on the mother’s knee in a somewhat struggling attitude, and has his left hand upon the top of her dress, near her neck, his right upon her shoulder, while the mother, with a look of maternal tenderness, holds the book aside. In the middle period of Raphael’s work this motive appears once at least in the St. Petersburg Madonna, which is a quiet landscape-scene, where the child is in the Madonna’s lap: she holds a book, which she has just been reading; the little S. John kneels before his divine companion with infantine grace, and offers him a cross, which he receives with a look of tender love; the Madonna’s eyes are directed to the prophetic play of the children with a deep, earnest expression.

The use of the book is presumably to denote the Madonna’s piety; and in the earlier pictures she is not only the object of adoration to the worshipper, who sees her in her earthly form, yet endowed with sinless grace, but the object also of interest to the child, who sees in her the mother. This reciprocal relation of mother and child is sometimes expressed with great force, as in the Madonna della Casa Tempi, in the Pinacothek at Munich, where the Virgin, who is standing, tenderly presses the child’s head against her face, while he appears to whisper words of endearment. In these and other of the earlier Madonnas of Raphael, there is an enthusiasm, and a dreamy sentiment which seems to seek expression chiefly through the representation of holy womanhood, the child being a part of the interpretation of the mother. The mystic solemnity of the subject is relieved by a lightness of touch, which was the irrepressible assertion of a strong human feeling.

Later, in what is called his middle period, a cheerfulness and happy contemplation of life pervade Raphael’s work, as in the Bridgewater Madonna, where the child, stretched in the mother’s lap, looks up with a graceful and lively action, and fixes his eyes upon her in deep thought, while she looks back with maternal, reverent joy. The Madonna of the Chair illustrates the same general sentiment, where the mother appears as a beautiful and blooming woman, looking out of the picture in the tranquil enjoyment of motherly love; the child, full and strong in form, leans upon her bosom in a child’s careless attitude, the picture of trust and content.

The works of Raphael’s third period, and those executed by his pupils in a spirit and with a touch which leave them sometimes hardly distinguishable from the master’s, show a profounder penetration of life, and at the same time a firmer, more reasonable apprehension of the divinity which lies inclosed in the subject. Mary is now something more than a young man’s dream of virginal purity and maternal tenderness,—she is also the blessed among women; the infant Christ is not only the innocent, playful child, but the prophetic soul, conscious of his divinity and his destiny. These characteristics pervade both the treatment which regards them as historic personages and that which invests them with adorable attributes as having their throne in heaven. The Holy Family is interpreted in a large, serious, and dignified manner, and in the exalted, worshipped Madonna there is a like vision of things eternal seen through the human form.

To illustrate this an example may be taken of each class. The Madonna del Passegio, in the Bridgewater gallery, is a well-known composition, which represents the Madonna and child walking through a field; Joseph is in advance, and has turned to look for the others. They have been stopped by the infant S. John Baptist, clad in a rough skin, who presses eagerly forward to kiss Jesus. The mother places a restraining hand upon the shoulders of S. John, and half withdraws the child Jesus from his embrace. A classic grace marks Jesus, who looks steadfastly into the eyes of the impassioned John. The three figures in the principal group are conceived in a noble manner: S. John, prophesying in his face the discovery of the Lamb of God; Mary, looking down with a sweet gravity which marks the holy children, and would separate Jesus as something more than human from too close fellowship with John; Jesus himself, a picture of glorious childhood, with a far-reaching look in his eye, as he gently thrusts back the mother with one hand, and with the other lays hold of the cross which John bears.

On the other hand, an example of the treatment of the adorable Madonna is that of San Sisto, in the Dresden gallery. It is not necessary to dwell on the details of a picture which rises at once to every one’s mind. The circumstance of innumerable angels’ heads, of the attendant S. Sixtus and S. Barbara, the sweep of cloud and drapery, the suggestion of depths below and of heights above, of heaven itself listening at the Madonna’s feet,—all these translate the mother and babe with ineffable sweetness and dignity into a heavenly place, and make them the centre of the spiritual universe. Yet in all this Raphael has rested his art in no elaborate use of celestial machinery. He has taken the simple, elemental relation, and invested it with its eternal properties. He gives not a supernatural and transcendent mother and child, but a glorified humanity. Therefore it is that this picture, and with it the other great Madonnas of Raphael, may be taken entirely away from altar and sanctuary, and placed in the shrine of the household. The universality of the appeal is seen in the unhesitating adoption of the Sistine Madonna as an expression of religious art by those who are even antagonistic to the church which called it forth.

IV

The concentration of Raphael’s genius to so large an extent upon the subject of the Madonna was not a mere accident of the time, nor, when classic forms were renewing their power, was it a solecism. The spirit of the Renaissance entered profoundly into Raphael’s work, and determined powerfully the direction which it took. When he was engaged upon purely classic themes, it is interesting to see how frequently he turned to the forms of children. His decorative work is rich with the suggestion which they bring. One may observe the graceful figures issuing from the midst of flower and leaf; above all, one may note how repeatedly he presents the myth of Amor, and recurs to the Amorini, types of childhood under a purely naturalistic conception.

The child Jesus and the child Amor appear side by side in the creations of Raphael’s genius. In the great Renaissance, of which he was so consummate an exponent, the ancient classic world and the Christian met in these two types of childhood: the one a childhood of the air, unmixed with good or evil; the other a childhood of heaven and earth, proleptic of earthly conflict, proleptic also of heavenly triumph. The coincidence is not of chance. The new world into which men were looking was not, as some thought, to be in the submersion of Christianity and a return to Paganism, nor, as others, in a stern asceticism, which should render Christianity an exclusive church, standing aloof from the world as from a thing wholly evil. There was to be room for truth and love to dwell together, and the symbol of this union was the child. Raphael’s Christ child drew into its features a classic loveliness; his Amor took on a Christ-like purity and truthfulness.