XVITHE CHILD-TEST OF LITERATURE
Their elders are too busy these days devising tests for the children. Is it not time for the children to retort on their testers? “Having pried and prodded into us to see if we measure up to you, dear elders, let us now see,” the children may well say, “whether you measure up to us.” A great philosopher wished to make man the measure of everything. We have a truer, a divine philosophy, a philosophy all the more persuasive, and that philosophy makes the child the measure and test of man’s worth and the arbiter of his eternal destiny. “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God, as a child, shall not enter it.” The millstone mooring the scandalizer in the ooze of ocean’s darkest depths and the angels who see the face of their little one’s Father, these are the extreme sanctions which guarantee the accuracy of the child-test for the measurement of man.
The child-test has often been applied to man’s morals. Onan and Sanger, Sparta and China, Calvin’s unchristian infant damnation and the Christless infant sanctification of Pelagius, Malthus with his“Decrease and subtract” and Moses with his “Increase and multiply,” all, from individuals to nations, are ample evidence that the child is set for the ruin and resurrection of many in Israel. The child-test is surely potent in rating the world’s moral morons and moral geniuses.
Can the child-test be applied to man’s art and literature? Recall the words of Job, “Who shut up the sea with doors, when I made a cloud the garment thereof and wrapt it in a mist in swaddling bands?” That view of the sea in the swaddling bands of infancy is a proof of an imagination looking at the universe with the eyes of the Creator. The child-test is a measure of the sublimity of Hebrew literature. The revelation of Genesis gave the literature of the Bible an outlook never reached by other literatures. As the promise of the Messiah kept a hallowing guard over the cradles of Israel, so the vision of the Creator blotted out from the concepts of the Hebrew imagination the crude and monstrous nativities which make all pagan mythologies hybrid and miscegenetic.
Homer has fewer than others have of these nightmares, but it is not in them nor in the tinsel sublimity of his divine machinery that Homer has touched a wider circle of readers than any of his epic brethren. Rather it is in his unaffected and transparent portrayal of the human nature we all understand that Homer has set the heart of the world throbbing faster. Not the celibate Virgil, nor the PuritanicMilton, dissolver of matrimony, nor yet Dante, idealizer of the maiden Beatrice, gave us childhood and motherhood as Homer has done. Homer is no sentimentalist, but he has wider sympathies with mother and child than any author on the rolls of literature. The mother cow, lowing over its first-born; the mother dog, growling in defense of its litter; the mother lion, all its brow wrinkled with the greatest frown ever sketched; the mother bird, starving and dying for its young, yes, even the mother wasp, solicitous for its menaced brood (note that, S. P. C. A.!) these are evidences of Homer’s tenderness. Achilles likens his friend Patroclus to a little maid fondly catching at her mother’s dress and getting in her way with persistent tearful pleading till the mother takes her up. In theIliad, Helen’s sorrow for her abandoned Hermione is a pleasing element in her repentance. Odysseus proudly styles himself the father of Telemachus; the mother of Odysseus dies for longing of him, and his father, Laertes, in the most exquisite of the many recognition scenes of theOdyssey, passes from view in that story, while his long-absent son tells him of the fruit trees, “which,” says Odysseus, “thou once gavest me for mine own, and I was begging of thee this and that, being but a child and following thee through the garden.” We have natural sketches of the babyhood of his two heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.
Yet, more than all these pictures, stands out in the world’s imagination Hector’s boy, whose futurefate Andromache, after Hector’s death, details with a mother’s despairing vividness, whose childish terror at his father’s helmet, while Andromache smiles through her tears, has brought home to unnumbered thousands the grim specter of war. That scene has etched itself so deeply into the heart of mankind that it has almost ruined Homer’s poem, alienating universal sympathy from Achilles to Hector.
After Homer, the childmotifin literature is less in evidence. Drama, of its nature, has little place for the child except to put a keener poignancy in tragedy. So Sophocles used the children of Œdipus. So in his time did Shakespeare with the princes ofRichard III, with Marcellus inCoriolanus, with Macduff’s sprightly lad, and with others. Theocritus has a child to furnish an aside for the gossipy Syracusan dames. Anacreon introduces the counterfeit of childhood in the Cupids, whose sophisticated conventionality checked invention in Elizabethan lyrics as it did in art from Pompeii to Rubens and later. Cupids are symbols, children of the brain, not of the heart, and figure in song and painting as signs. They have a message for the mind; they do not touch the feelings, while on the other hand, they free the artist from seeking in life the expressive significance that Homer gave the child.
Literature had to wait long for the naturalness of Homer to reappear. Virgil has a little of it in Ascanius, another Cupid, and it is significant that Virgil’s one outstanding natural touch is found inthe famous Messianic eclogue:Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.As for other Latins, whether it be bachelorship or the erotic preoccupation of the lyricists, or the supreme power of the father in Roman customs and law, Latin literature does not mirror for us prominently the child and mother nor reflect their natural attractiveness as found in Homer. Well, even Greece seems to have lost the art, and a new inspiration was needed. That inspiration came with the Divine Child of Bethlehem.