XVIITHE CHRIST-CHILD TEST OF LITERATURE
The influence of the Christ-Child on painting was tremendous and lasting. A history of Christian art could be written around the Madonna, and the subject has attracted the notice of many writers, indexed in art libraries. Alice Meynell has treated the subject attractively and with her studious insight in theChildren of the Old Masters. In the Catacombs, Christian art felt and portrayed the Divine Child and His Mother. Byzantine ornamentation and mosaics gave the Child a rigid majesty which veiled His winsomeness, but the master painters came closer to childhood and brought Madonnas from the walls of crypts and of cathedrals to the devotional shrine and the chapel, making the Child less architectural and more natural.
In literature the Christ-Child had equal influence until Puritanism tried to remove Christmas from the calendar. Drama originated in the liturgy of Easter and of Christmas, and although Holy Week was more elaborate and in substance more dramatic, Christmas to Twelfth Night, offering more incentiveto play and song and more holidays, exercised a larger influence on the stage. In lyric poetry at the beginning of the sixth century we have already the familiar, intimate and loving contact with the Christ-Child, which finds its latest expression in Thompson and Tabb. St. Ita, the Irish saint (480-570), is of their faith and tenderness in the song of “Isucan,” “Little Jesus,” given in Sigerson’sBards of the Gael and Gall:
JesukinLives my little cell within...Jesu of the skies who artNext my heart thro’ every night.
JesukinLives my little cell within...Jesu of the skies who artNext my heart thro’ every night.
JesukinLives my little cell within...Jesu of the skies who artNext my heart thro’ every night.
Jesukin
Lives my little cell within
...
Jesu of the skies who art
Next my heart thro’ every night.
The bambino shines through medieval song in Adam of St. Victor and in other writers of hymns. The Catholic writers of the Renaissance celebrate the same theme in the revived meters of classicism. Sarbievius, the Jesuit lyricist of Poland, is full of the Christ-Child, and in his well-known lines “To the Violet” he calls upon that “dawn of spring” to crown his “Little Lad” with its flowers in place of the gold and gems and purple which weighted the Infant. Sarbievius was doing what the painters did, discarding the Byzantine ornament and convention.
Test Puritanism with the child and it fails; test it with the Christ-Child, and you will get the ponderous “Hymn to the Nativity” of Milton, an imperialisticode which must have gladdened Cromwell. No familiarity there, no mirthfulness, no Jesukin with violets for crown jewels, not even Byzantine immobility. Milton does not even doff the helmet of war, as Hector did; no, he sees
from Juda’s landThe dreaded Infant’s hand;The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.... Our Babe to show His Godhead trueCan in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.
from Juda’s landThe dreaded Infant’s hand;The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.... Our Babe to show His Godhead trueCan in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.
from Juda’s landThe dreaded Infant’s hand;The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.... Our Babe to show His Godhead trueCan in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.
from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes.
... Our Babe to show His Godhead true
Can in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.
A Prince of Peace indeed with a mailed fist! Merry medieval England would not recognize Jesukin in Miltonic panoply. Fortunately for art it had attained excellence before the Puritanic blight fell upon the world, but for literature in the English language we must wait until the nineteenth century to see the child come to its own. Wordsworth attempted a revival of Plato’s philosophy and found immortality, if not familiarity, in childhood when he wrote his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth took a more fruitful lesson from the Greeks when he went back to nature in other poems to study childhood. Even before him, Blake, painter and poet, influenced no doubt by the traditions of painting, began to see the heart in childhood. The interminable moralizing stories of Ann and Jane Taylor and of Elizabeth Turner, which date from this time, are heavy with grown up condescension. E. V. Lucas would have done betterto republish in hisBook of Verses for Childrenthe graceful and humorous lessons of the Greek fables than perpetuate Taylor and Turner.
After Wordsworth we see the childmotifgradually taking a larger place in the literature of England and America. Despite Francis Thompson’s vigorous effort in his famous essay, he has not succeeded in making Shelley pass the child-test. Shelley had no faith, no humility, no humor, no real tenderness, and even granting him the dreaming power of childhood, which in Thompson’s essay is largely a reflection of Thompson, Shelley had not the heard of a child to enter into the Kingdom. Walter Scott’s friendship for Marjorie Fleming shows that the great poet and novelist had the necessary qualifications, but no performance comes now to mind except a lullaby and the glorification of merry England at Christmas. Swinburne glimpses gleams of a baby’s pink toes and lists to low laughter of mouths of gold. The child is picturesque for him. Moore, Byron, Browning, for different reasons, fail in the child-test. Tennyson touched the surface, although in the “Princess” he came close to the mystery. Patmore, uxorious and paternal, came closer and even touched the depths of the child in “Toys.” Longfellow and Whittier were of the same school.
It was Stevenson, in aChild’s Garden of Verseswho brought back into poetry, as Lewis Carroll did in prose and verse, the natural child that Homer saw about him, and that painting discerned inthe Babe of Bethlehem. Humor, imagination, sympathy, these were the factors which discovered the heart of childhood for our modern world. Barry and Belloc in England, Eugene Field and Riley in America, Earls and “Tom” Daly and many others have furthered the discoveries. There is no hope for the child in the “New Poetry” which takes itself too seriously. Who would hold up the world if the “new poets” started in to mind the baby?
One more element was needed, and sorely needed, to enter fully into the mystery of the child. That element is faith. Evolution looked on the child as an epitome of its theory; pedagogy plotted out, weighed and measured the child and drew up formidable statistics; eugenics faced the child as though it were a dire microbe, source of poverty, ignorance, bootlegging, war, pestilence and famines. The modern child had and still has before it a dismal prospect. It is the camping ground of the specialist, the experimental laboratory of the theorist, and the peculiarly delectable victim of physical and moral vivisectionists. Faith must save the child, faith in the Babe of Bethlehem. Tabb and Thompson had that faith. They are the counterpart in literature of a St. Anthony or a St. Stanislaus in life and art. They play with the Child Jesus. Isucan has come into His own again. Tabb sings in “Out of Bounds”:
O comrades, let us one and allJoin in to get Him back his ball!
O comrades, let us one and allJoin in to get Him back his ball!
O comrades, let us one and allJoin in to get Him back his ball!
O comrades, let us one and all
Join in to get Him back his ball!
And Francis Thompson with medieval intimacy asks in “Ex Ore Infantium”:
And did Thy Mother at the nightKiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?
And did Thy Mother at the nightKiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?
And did Thy Mother at the nightKiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?
And did Thy Mother at the night
Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?
And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,
Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said?
“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven,” said Thompson. He will surely be at home there, and Tabb and many another will be with him.
The first seven chapters of this work were given in substance as lectures at the Champlain Assembly, Cliff Haven, N. Y.
Chapter XII, Educating the Emotions, is a summary of an address given to the Public School Teachers of Rhode Island.
Other chapters have appeared inAmerica,Catholic World,Educational Review of Washington,School Interests,Classical Weekly,Magnificatand are reproduced through the courtesy of the editors.