Chapter V: Part 5

French literature before the Revolution was more barren of reference to childhood than was English literature. Especially is this true of the eighteenth century, with its superficial disbelief and its bitter protest against superstition, under which term was comprehended the supernatural as well as the preternatural. There were exceptions, as in the case of Fénelon, and the constitutional sentiment of the French was easily moved by the appeal of dependent childhood. In Rousseau one may read how it is possible to weep over children, and yet leave one’s own to the cold mercy of a foundling asylum. It is in Rousseau’s disciple, however, Bernardin de St. Pierre, that we find the most artistic expression of pure sentimentalism, and the story of Paul and Virginia is an effort at representing a world where childhood, in its innocence, is conceived of as the symbol of ideal human life. St. Pierre thought of childhood and nature as possessed of strong negative virtues; they were uncontaminated, they were unsophisticated. To escape from an evil world, he fled in imagination to an island of the tropics, where all that life required was readily furnished by lavish nature. He makes his family to consist chiefly of women and children. The masculine element is avoided as something disturbing, and except for the harmless old man who acts as chorus, it is discovered first as a rude, barbaric, and cruel force in the person of the governor of the island, who has no faith in Madame de la Tour, and in the person of the planter at the Black River, who has been an inhuman master to his slave.

The childhood of Paul and Virginia is made to have a pastoral, idyllic character. Their sorrows and misfortunes come wholly from evils which lie beyond their control. St. Pierre brought back a golden age by ignoring the existence of evil in the heart of man; he conceived it possible to construct an ideal world by what was vaguely expressed in the words “a return to nature.” As he reflects in the story: “Their theology consisted in sentiment like that of nature; and their morality in action like that of the gospel. Those families had no particular days devoted to pleasure, and others to sadness. Every day was to them a holiday, and all which surrounded them one holy temple, where they forever adored an Infinite Intelligence, almighty and the friend of humankind. A sentiment of confidence in his supreme power filled their minds with consolation for the past, with fortitude for the present, and with hope for the future. Behold how these women, compelled by misfortune to return to a state of nature, had unfolded in their own bosoms, and in those of their children, the feelings which nature gives us, our best support under evil!”

However we may discover the limitations of the sentimental philosophy, and its inadequacy when brought face to face with evil in life, there is a surface agreement with Christianity in this instinctive turning to childhood as the hope of the world. Yet the difference is radical. The child, in the Christian conception, holds the promise of things to come; in the conception of French sentiment of the Rousseau and St. Pierre type, the child is a refuge from present evil, a mournful reminiscence of a lost Paradise. If only we could keep it a child! is the cry of this school,—keep it from knowing this wicked, unhappy world! But alas! there are separations and shipwrecks. Virginia is washed ashore by the cruel waves. Paul, bereft of reason, dies, and is buried in the same grave. The two, growing like plants in nature, are stricken down by the mysterious, fateful powers of nature.

The contrast between this unreal recourse to nature and the strong yet subtle return which characterizes Wordsworth and his school is probably more apparent to the English and American mind than to the French. Yet a reasonable comparison betrays the fatal weakness of the one in that it leaves out of view whatever in nature disturbs a smooth, summer-day world. When St. Pierre talks of a return to nature, he does not mean the jungle and the pestiferous swamp; he regards these as left behind in Paris. Yet the conclusion of his story is the confession wrung from faithful art that Nature is after all but a step-mother to humanity.

In the great romantic movement which revolutionized French literature, an immense impetus was given to the mind, and literature thenceforth reflected a wider range of thought and feeling. In few respects does this appear more significantly than in the treatment of childhood. There is a robustness about the sentiment which separates it from the earlier regard of such writers as we have named. Lamartine, who certainly was not devoid of sentiment, passes by his own earliest childhood in Les Confidences with indifference. “I shall not,” he says, “follow the example of J. J. Rousseau in his Confessions. I shall not relate to you the trifling events of my early childhood. Man only dates from the commencement of feeling and thought; until the man is a being, he is not even a child.... Let us leave, then, the cradle to the nurses, and our first smiles, our first tears, and our first lisping accents to the ecstasies of our mothers. I do not wish to inflict on you any but my earliest recollections, embellished by the light of reason.” He gives, accordingly, two scenes of his childhood: one an interior, where his father reads aloud to his mother from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered; the other an outdoor scene, where he engages in the rural sports of the neighborhood. Each picture is delightfully drawn, with minute detail, with poetic touch, with affectionate recollection. Encouraged, apparently, by the warmth which this memory has inspired, Lamartine continues to dwell upon the images of his childhood, especially as it has to do with the thought of his mother. He paints the simple garden attached to his father’s home, and resting a moment reflects:—

“Yes, that is indeed all, and yet that is what sufficed during so many years for the gratification, for the reveries, for the sweet leisures, and for the as sweet labors of a father, a mother, and eight children! Such is what still suffices, even at the present day, for the nourishment of these recollections. Such is the Eden of their childhood, where their most serene thoughts take refuge when they wish to receive a little of that dew of the morning life, a little of that beaming light of early dawn, which shines pure and radiant for man only amid the scenes of his birth. There is not a tree, there is not a carnation, there is not a mossy stone of this garden, which is not entwined in their soul as if it formed part of it. This nook of earth seems to us immense, such a host of objects and of recollections does it contain for us in so narrow a space.”

The fullness with which Lamartine treats the recollection of his youth partakes of the general spirit of French memoirs,—a spirit, to speak roughly, which regards persons rather than institutions,—but indicates also something of the new spirit which informed literature when it elevated childhood into a place of real dignity. There are passages, indeed, which have a special significance as intimating a consciousness of the deeper relations of childhood. Michelet, for instance, in his philosophy of the unfolding of woman’s life, recognizes the characteristics of maidenhood as anticipatory of maturity, and does it with so serious a contemplation that we forget to smile when we discover him profoundly observant of those instincts of maternity which are shown in the care of a child for its doll.

This attitude toward the child is observable in the masters of modern French literature. However far they may be removed from any mere domestic regard of the subject, they apprehend the peculiar sacredness attaching to children. Alfred de Musset, for example, though by no means a poet of the family, can never speak of children without emotion. Not to multiply instances, it is enough to take the great poet of the period. Victor Hugo deserves, it has been said, to be called the poet of infancy, not only for the reason that he has written of the young freely, but has in his Les Enfants, Livre des Mères, written for them. It is to be observed that the suggestion comes, with Hugo, chiefly from the children of his family; from his brother Eugène, who died an early death; from his daughter, whom he mourns in tender verse; and from his grandchildren. One feels the sincerity of a great poet when he draws the inspiration for such themes from his own familiar kind.

It may be said in general of the contribution made to this literature by the French that it partakes of those qualities of lightness and grace which mark the greater literature; that the image of childhood is a joyous, innocent one, and satisfies the eye that looks for beauty and delicacy. Sentiment predominates, but it is a sentiment that makes little draught upon thought. There is a disposition now to regard children as dolls and playthings, the amusement of the hour; now to make them the object of an attitudinizing sentiment, which is practically wasted unless there be some one at hand to applaud it.

II

When we pass from France to Germany we are aware that, however we may use the same terms, and recognize the existence of sentiment as a strong element in the literature of both countries, there is a radical difference in tone. It is not merely that French sentiment is graceful and German sentiment clumsy: the grace of the one connects itself with a fine art,—we feel an instinctive good taste in its expression; in the other, the awkwardness, the obtrusiveness, seem to be the issue of an excess of natural and homely feeling. It would be too much to say that French sentiment is insincere and German sentiment unpleasantly sincere; that the one is assumed and the other uncalculating,—we cannot thus dismiss elementary feeling in two great peoples. But an Englishman or American, to whom, in his reserve, the sentiment of either nation is apt to be a little oppressive, is very likely to smile at the French and feel uncomfortable in the presence of the German; to regard the French feeling as a temporary mood, the German as a permanent state.

Be this as it may, it is true that the German feeling with regard to childhood, as it finds expression in life and literature, revolves very closely about the child in its home, not the child as a charming object in nature. Childhood, in German literature, is conceived very generally in its purely domestic relations, and is so positive an element as to have attracted the attention of other nations, and even to have given rise to a petty cult. Coleridge, writing from Germany in 1799, reports to his English readers, as something strange to himself, and of local significance only, the custom of Christmas gifts from parents to children and from children to parents. He is especially struck with the custom of representing these presents as coming from Jesus Christ.

The whole structure of Santa Claus and Kriss Kringle, the Christ Child and Pelznichel, with the attendant ceremonies of the Christmas tree, is built into the child life of Germany and the Low Countries; and it is by the energy of this childish miracle that it has passed over into English, and especially into American life. All this warmth of domestic feeling is by no means a modern discovery. It is a prime characteristic of the Germanic people, and one strong reason for the ascendency of Lutheranism may be found in the singular exposition of the German character which Luther presented. He was not merely a man of the people; through his life and writings and organizing faculty he impressed himself positively on the German national character, not turning it aside, but deepening the channels in which it ran. Certain it is that the luxuriance of his nature was almost riotous on the side of family life. “The leader of the age,” says Canon Mozley, “and the adviser of princes, affecting no station and courting no great men, was externally one of the common crowd, and the plainest of it. In domestic life the same heart and nature appear. There he overflows with affection, warmth, tenderness; with all the amiable banter of the husband, and all the sweet arts and pretty nonsense of a father among his little children. Whether he is joking, lecturing his ‘rib Catharine,’ his ‘gracious dame Catharine,’ or writing a description of fairyland and horses with silver saddles to his ‘voracious, bibacious, loquacious,’ little John; or whether he is in the agony of grief over the death-bed of his favorite daughter, Magdalene, we see the same exuberant, tender character.”[34]

In this sketch of Luther we may read some of the general characteristics of the Germanic life, and we are ready, at the first suggestion, to assent to the proposition that the German people, judged by the apparatus of childhood, books, pictures, toys, and schools, stands before other nations. The material for the portraiture of childhood has been abundant; the social history, the biographies, give constant intimations of the fullness with which family life, inclosing childhood, has been dwelt upon in the mind. The autobiographies of poets and novelists almost invariably give great attention to the period of childhood. A very interesting illustration of this may be found in the life of Richter, who stands at the head of the great Germans in his portrayal of childhood.

“Men who have a firm hold on nothing else,” says Richter in his brief autobiography, “delight in deep, far-reaching recollection of their days of childhood, and in this billowy existence they anchor on that, far more than on the thought of later difficulties. Perhaps for two reasons: that in this retrospection they press nearer to the gate of life guarded by spiritual existences; and secondly, that they hope, in the spiritual power of an earlier consciousness, to make themselves independent of the little, contemptible annoyances that surround humanity.” He then recites an incident from his second year, and continues: “This little morning-star of earliest recollection stands yet tolerably clear in its low horizon, but growing paler as the daylight of life rises higher. And now I remember only this clearly, that in earlier life I remembered everything clearly.”

How clearly will be apparent to the reader who follows Richter through the minute and detailed narrative of his childish life, and in his writings the images of this early life are constantly reappearing under different forms. Something is no doubt due to the early birth in Richter of a self-consciousness, bred in part by the solitude of his life. It may be said with some assurance that the vividness of early recollection has much to do with determining the poet and novelist and essayist in his choice of themes bearing directly upon childhood. The childish experience of Wordsworth, De Quincey, Dickens, Lamartine, and Richter is clearly traceable in the writings of these men. If they look into their own hearts and write, the images which they bring forth are so abundantly of childhood that they cannot avoid making use of them, especially since they retain recollections which demand the interpretation of the maturer mind. That they should so freely draw from this storehouse of childish experience reflects also the temper of the age for which they write. The fullness with which the themes of childhood are treated means not that a few men have suddenly discovered the subject, but that all are sensitive to these same impressions.

It is not, however, the vividness of recollection alone, but the early birth of consciousness, which will determine the treatment of the subject. If one remember the facts of his early years rather than how he thought and felt about those facts, he will be less inclined to dwell upon the facts afterward, or make use of them in his work. They will have little significance to him. A distinction in this view is to be observed between Richter and Goethe. The autobiographies of the two men reveal the different impressions made upon them by their childhood. The facts which Goethe recalls are but little associated with contemporaneous reflection upon the facts, and they serve but a trifling purpose in Goethe’s art. The facts which Richter recalls are imbedded in a distinct conception regarding them, and perform a very positive function in his art.

The character of Mignon may be dismissed from special consideration, for it is clear that Goethe used Mignon’s diminutiveness and implied youth only to heighten the effect of her elfish and dwarfish nature. The most considerable reference to childhood is perhaps in the Sorrows of Young Werther, where the relations between Werther and Charlotte comprise a sketchy group of children who act as foils or accompaniments to the pair. Werther discovers Charlotte, it will be remembered, cutting slices of bread for her younger brothers and sisters; it is by this means that Goethe would give a charm to the character, presenting it in its homely, domestic setting. But his purpose is also to intimate the exceeding sensibility of Werther, and he represents him as taking a most affectionate interest in the little children whom he sees on his walks. I suspect, indeed, that Goethe in this has distinctly borrowed from the Vicar of Wakefield; at any rate, the comparison is easily suggested, and one brings away the impression of Goldsmith’s genuine feeling and of Goethe’s deliberate assumption of a feeling for artistic purposes. Nevertheless, Goethe makes very positive use of childhood in this novel, not only through the figures of children, but also through the sentiment of childhood.

“Nothing on this earth, my dear Wilhelm,” says Werther, “affects my heart so much as children. When I consider them; when I mark in the little creatures the seeds of all those virtues and qualities which they will one day find so indispensable; when I behold in the obstinate all the future firmness and constancy of a noble character, in the capricious that levity and gayety of temper which will carry them lightly over the dangers and troubles of life, their whole nature simple and unpolluted, then I call to mind the golden words of the Great Teacher of mankind: ‘Except ye become as little children.’ And now, my friend, these children, who are our equals, whom we ought to consider as our models, we treat as subjects. They are allowed no will of their own! And have we then none ourselves? Whence comes our exclusive right? Is it because we are older and more experienced? Great God! from the height of thy heaven, thou beholdest great children and little children, and no others; and thy Son has long since declared which afford the greatest pleasure. But they believe in him, and hear him not,—that too is an old story; and they train their children after their own image.”

We must regard this as a somewhat distorted application of the words of the gospel, but it is interesting as denoting that Goethe also, who stood so much in the centre of illumination, had perceived the revealing light to fall upon the heads of young children. It is not, however, so much by his direct as by his indirect influence that Goethe is connected with our subject. If Luther was both an exponent of German feeling and a determining cause of its direction, Goethe occupies a similar relation as an expression of German intellectualism and a stimulator of German thought. A hundred years after his birth, when measures were taking to celebrate the centenary by the establishment of some educational foundation to bear his name, the enthusiastic supporters of Froebel sought to divert public interest into the channel of this movement for the cultivation of childhood. Froebel’s philosophy has affected modern educational systems even where his method has not been scrupulously followed. Its influence upon literature and art can scarcely be traced, except so far as it has tended to give direction and set limits to the great body of books and pictures, which, made for children, are also expository and illustrative of the life of children. I mention him simply as an additional illustration of the grasp which the whole subject of childhood has obtained in Germany; it has made itself felt in religion and politics; so revolutionary was Froebel’s philosophy held to be that his schools were suppressed at one time by the government as tending to subvert the state. This was not strange, since Froebel’s own view as to the education of children was radical and comprehensive.

A child’s life finds its chief expression in play, and in play its social instincts are developed. Now the kindergarten recognizes the fact that play is the child’s business, not his recreation, and undertakes to guide and form the child through play. It converts that which would otherwise be aimless or willful into creative, orderly, and governed action. Out of the play as governed by the wise kindergartner grows a spirit of courtesy, self-control, forbearance, unselfishness. The whole force of the education is directed toward a development of the child which never forgets that he is a person in harmonious relation to others. Community, not competition, is the watchword of the school. In this view the kindergarten has its basis in the same law which lies at the foundation of a free republic. Obedience, as taught by the system of public schools, is an obedience to rules; it may be likened to the obedience of the soldier,—a noble thing, but not the highest form of human subjection of the will. Obedience as evolved in the true kindergarten is a conscious obedience to law. The unity of life in the school, with entire freedom of development in the individual, is the aim of the kindergarten.

* * * * *

The enthusiasm which made itself felt in France in the rise of the romantic school, with its expression chiefly through poetry, the drama, and fiction, disclosed its power likewise in Germany. There, however, other channels offered a course for the new current. The rise of the school of religious painters, of which Overbeck and Cornelius were eminent examples, was a distinct issue of the movement of the times. It was regarded as reactionary by some, but its reaction was rather in form than in spirit. It ran counter to a Philistinism which was complacent and indifferent to spiritual life, and it sought to embody its ideas in forms which not only Philistinism but humanism contemned, yet it was all the while working in the interest of a higher freedom. It is noticeable, therefore, that this religious art, in its choice of subjects, not only resorted to the early ecclesiological type, but struck out into a new path, choosing themes which imply a subjective view of Christianity. Thus, Overbeck’s picture of Christ blessing little children, a subject which is a favorite one of modern religious art, is a distinct recognition of modern sentiment. Here is the relation borne by the Christ to little children presented by a religious art, which, however much it might seek to reinstate the old forms, could not help being affected by the new life of Christianity. Overbeck went to the early Florentines for his masters, but he did not find this subject among their works. He caught it from the new reading of the old gospel.

VIII

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

As Overbeck and his school returned to the religious art which preceded the Renaissance, so Thorwaldsen, like Canova and lesser men, turned back to Greek art, and was working contemporaneously with Overbeck at Rome in a very different temper. To him the central figure of Christianity was not a child in its mother’s arms, but a strong, thoughtful man; for childhood he turned to the sportive conception of Amor, which he embodied in a great variety of forms. The myth appealed, aside from the opportunity which it offered for the expression of sensuous beauty, to his northern love of fairyland. His countryman, Andersen, tells us how, when they were all seated in the dusk, Thorwaldsen would come from his work and beg for a fairy-tale.

It is Andersen himself who has made the most unique contribution not only to the literature which children read, but to that which is illustrative of childhood. He attained his eminence sheerly by the exhibition of a power which resulted from his information by the spirit of childhood. He was not only an interpreter of childhood; he was the first child who made a real contribution to literature. The work by which he is best known is nothing more nor less than an artistic creation of precisely the order which is common among children.

It is customary to speak of his best known short stories as fairy tales; wonder-stories is in some respects a more exact description, but the name has hardly a native sound. Andersen himself classed his stories under the two heads of _historier_ and _eventyr_; the _historier_ corresponds well enough with its English mate, being the history of human action, or, since it is a short history, the story; the _eventyr_, more nearly allied perhaps to the German _abenteuer_ than to the English _adventure_, presumes an element of strangeness causing wonder, while it does not necessarily demand the machinery of the supernatural. When we speak of fairy tales, we have before our minds the existence, for artistic purposes, of a spiritual world peopled with beings that exercise themselves in human affairs, and are endowed in the main with human attributes, though possessed of certain ethereal advantages, and generally under orders from some superior power, often dimly understood as fate; the Italians, indeed, call the fairy _fata_. In a rough way we include under the title of fairies all the terrible and grotesque shapes as well, and this world of spiritual beings is made to consist of giants, ogres, brownies, pixies, nisses, gnomes, elves, and whatever other creatures have found in it a local habitation and name. The fairy itself is generally represented as very diminutive, the result, apparently, of an attempted compromise between the imagination and the senses, by which the existence of fairies for certain purposes is conceded on condition they shall be made so small that the senses may be excused from recognizing them.

The belief in fairies gave rise to the genuine fairy tale, which is now an acknowledged classic, and the gradual elimination of this belief from the civilized mind has been attended with some awkwardness. These creations of fancy—if we must so dismiss them—had secured a somewhat positive recognition in literature before it was finally discovered that they came out of the unseen and therefore could have no life. Once received into literature they could not well be ignored, but the understanding, which appears to serve as special police in such cases, now has orders to admit no new-comers unless they answer to one of three classes: either they must be direct descendants of the fairies of literature, having certain marks about them to indicate their parentage, or they must be teachers of morality thus disguised, or they may be mere masqueraders; one thing is certain, they must spring from no belief in fairy life, but be one and all referred to some sufficient cause,—a dream, a moral lesson, a chemical experiment. But it is found that literature has its own sympathies, not always compassed by the mere understanding, and the consequence is that the sham fairies in the sham fairy tales never really get into literature at all, but disappear in limbo; while every now and then a genuine fairy, born of a genuine, poetic belief, secures a place in spite of the vigilance of the guard.

Perhaps nothing has done more to vulgarize the fairy than its introduction upon the stage; the charm of the fairy tale is in its divorce from human experience; the charm of the stage is in its realization, in miniature, of human life. If the frog is heard to speak, if the dog is turned before one’s eyes into a prince, by having cold water dashed over it, the charm of the fairy tale has fled, and in its place we have only the perplexing pleasure of legerdemain. The effect of producing these scenes upon the stage is to bring them one step nearer to sensuous reality, and one step further from imaginative reality; and since the real life of fairy is in the imagination, a wrong is committed when it is dragged from its shadowy hiding-place and made to turn into ashes under the calcium light of the understanding.

By a tacit agreement fairy tales have come to be consigned to the nursery; the old tools of superstition have become the child’s toys, and when a writer comes forward, now, bringing new fairy tales, it is almost always with an apology, not for trespassing upon ground already occupied, but for indulging in what is no longer belief, but make-belief. “My story,” he is apt to say, “is not true; we none of us believe it, and I shall give you good evidence before I am done that least of all do I believe it. I shall probably explain it by referring it to a strange dream, or shall justify it by the excellent lesson it is to teach. I adopt the fairy form as suited to the imagination of children; it is a childish thing, and I am half ashamed, as a grown person, to be found engaged in such nonsense.” Out of this way of regarding fairy tales has come that peculiar monstrosity of the times, the scientific fairy tale, which is nothing short of an insult to a whole race of innocent beings. It may be accepted as a foregone conclusion that with a disbelief in fairies the genuine fairy tale has died, and that it is better to content ourselves with those stories which sprang from actual belief, telling them over to successive generations of children, than to seek to extend the literature by any ingenuity of modern skepticism. There they are, the fairy tales without authorship, as imperishable as nursery ditties; scholarly collections of them may be made, but they will have their true preservation, not as specimens in a museum of literary curiosities, but as children’s toys. Like the sleeping princess in the wood, the fairy tale may be hedged about with bristling notes and thickets of commentaries, but the child will pass straight to the beauty, and awaken for his own delight the old charmed life.

It is worth noting, then, that just when historical criticism, under the impulse of the Grimms, was ordering and accounting for these fragile creations,—a sure mark that they were ceasing to exist as living forms in literature,—Hans Christian Andersen should have come forward as master in a new order of stories, which may be regarded as the true literary successor to the old order of fairy tales, answering the demands of a spirit which rejects the pale ghost of the scientific or moral or jocular or pedantic fairy tale. Andersen, indeed, has invented fairy tales purely such, and has given form and enduring substance to traditional stories current in Scandinavia; but it is not upon such work that his real fame rests, and it is certain that while he will be mentioned in the biographical dictionaries as the writer of novels, poems, romances, dramas, sketches of travel, and an autobiography, he will be known and read as the author of certain short stories, of which the charm at first glance seems to be in the sudden discovery of life and humor in what are ordinarily regarded as inanimate objects, or what are somewhat compassionately called dumb animals. When we have read and studied the stories further, and perceived their ingenuity and wit and humane philosophy, we can after all give no better account of their charm than just this, that they disclose the possible or fancied parallel to human life carried on by what our senses tell us has no life, or our reason assures us has no rational power.

The life which Andersen sets before us is in fact a dramatic representation upon an imaginary stage, with puppets that are not pulled by strings, but have their own muscular and nervous economy. The life which he displays is not a travesty of human life, it is human life repeated in miniature under conditions which give a charming and unexpected variety. By some transmigration, souls have passed into tin-soldiers, balls, tops, beetles, money-pigs, coins, shoes, leap-frogs, matches, and even such attenuated individualities as darning-needles; and when, informing these apparently dead or stupid bodies, they begin to make manifestations, it is always in perfect consistency with the ordinary conditions of the bodies they occupy, though the several objects become by this endowment of souls suddenly expanded in their capacity. Perhaps in nothing is Andersen’s delicacy of artistic feeling better shown than in the manner in which he deals with his animated creations when they are brought into direct relations with human beings. The absurdity which the bald understanding perceives is dexterously suppressed by a reduction of all the factors to one common term. For example, in his story of The Leap-Frog, he tells how a flea, a grasshopper and a leap-frog once wanted to see which could jump highest, and invited the whole world “and everybody else besides who chose to come,” to see the performance. The king promised to give his daughter to the one who jumped the highest, for it was stale fun when there was no prize to jump for. The flea and the grasshopper came forward in turn and put in their claims; the leap-frog also appeared, but was silent. The flea jumped so high that nobody could see where he went to, so they all asserted that he had not jumped at all; the grasshopper jumped in the king’s face, and was set down as an ill-mannered thing; the leap-frog, after reflection, leaped into the lap of the princess, and thereupon the king said, “There is nothing above my daughter; therefore to bound up to her is the highest jump that can be made: but for this, one must possess understanding, and the leap-frog has shown that he has understanding. He is brave and intellectual.” “And so,” the story declares, “he won the princess.” The barren absurdity of a leap-frog marrying a princess is perhaps the first thing that strikes the impartial reader of this abstract, and there is very likely something offensive to him in the notion; but in the story itself this absurdity is so delightfully veiled by the succession of happy turns in the characterization of the three jumpers, as well as of the old king, the house-dog, and the old councilor “who had had three orders given him to make him hold his tongue,” that the final impression upon the mind is that of a harmonizing of all the characters, and the king, princess, and councilor can scarcely be distinguished in kind from the flea, grasshopper, leap-frog, and house-dog. After that, the marriage of the leap-frog and princess is quite a matter of course.

The use of speaking animals in story was no discovery of Andersen’s, and yet in the distinction between his wonder-story and the well-known fable lies an explanation of the charm which attaches to his work. The end of every fable is _hæc fabula docet_, and it was for this palpable end that the fable was created. The lion, the fox, the mouse, the dog, are in a very limited way true to the accepted nature of the animals which they represent, and their intercourse with each other is governed by the ordinary rules of animal life, but the actions and words are distinctly illustrative of some morality. The fable is an animated proverb. The animals are made to act and speak in accordance with some intended lesson, and have this for the reason of their being. The lesson is first; the characters, created afterward, are, for purposes of the teacher, disguised as animals; very little of the animal appears, but very much of the lesson. The art which invented the fable was a modest handmaid to morality. In Andersen’s stories, however, the spring is not in the didactic but in the imaginative. He sees the beetle in the imperial stable stretching out his thin legs to be shod with golden shoes like the emperor’s favorite horse, and the personality of the beetle determines the movement of the story throughout; egotism, pride at being proud, jealousy, and unbounded self-conceit are the furniture of this beetle’s soul, and his adventures one by one disclose his character. Is there a lesson in all this? Precisely as there is a lesson in any picture of human life where the same traits are sketched. The beetle, after all his adventures, some of them ignominious but none expelling his self-conceit, finds himself again in the emperor’s stable, having solved the problem why the emperor’s horse had golden shoes. “They were given to the horse on my account,” he says, and adds, “the world is not so bad after all, but one must know how to take things as they come.” There is in this and other of Andersen’s stories a singular shrewdness, as of a very keen observer of life, singular because at first blush the author seems to be a sentimentalist. The satires, like The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Swiftest Runners, mark this characteristic of shrewd observation very cleverly. Perhaps, after all, we are stating most simply the distinction between his story and the fable when we say that humor is a prominent element in the one and absent in the other; and to say that there is humor is to say that there is real life.

It is frequently said that Andersen’s stories accomplish their purpose of amusing children by being childish, yet it is impossible for a mature person to read them without detecting repeatedly the marks of experience. There is a subtle undercurrent of wisdom that has nothing to do with childishness, and the child who is entertained returns to the same story afterward to find a deeper significance than it was possible for him to apprehend at the first reading. The forms and the incident are in consonance with childish experience, but the spirit which moves through the story comes from a mind that has seen and felt the analogue of the story in some broader or coarser form. The story of The Ugly Duckling is an inimitable presentation of Andersen’s own tearful and finally triumphant life; yet no child who reads the story has its sympathy for a moment withdrawn from the duckling and transferred to a human being. Andersen’s nice sense of artistic limitations saves him from making the older thought obtrude itself upon the notice of children, and his power of placing himself at the same angle of vision with children is remarkably shown in one instance, where, in Little Klaus and Big Klaus, death is treated as a mere incident in the story, a surprise but not a terror.

The naïveté which is so conspicuous an element in Andersen’s stories was an expression of his own singularly artless nature. He was a child all his life; his was a condition of almost arrested development. He was obedient to the demands of his spiritual nature, and these led him into a fresh field of fancy and imagination. What separates him and gives him a distinct place in literature is, as I have said, that he was the first child who had contributed to literature. His very autobiography discloses at every turn this controlling genius of childhood, and the testimony of his friends confirms it.

Now that Andersen has told his stories, it seems an easy thing to do, and we have plenty of stories written for children that attempt the same thing, sometimes also with moderate success; for Andersen’s discovery was after all but the simple application to literature of a faculty which has always been exercised. The likeness that things inanimate have to things animate is constantly forced upon us; it remained for Andersen to pursue the comparison further, and, letting types loose from their antitypes, to give them independent existence. The result has been a surprise in literature and a genuine addition to literary forms. It is possible to follow in his steps, now that he has shown us the way, but it is no less evident that the success which he attained was due not merely to his happy discovery of a latent property, but to the nice feeling and strict obedience to laws of art with which he made use of his discovery. Andersen’s genius enabled him to see the soul in a darning-needle, and he perceived also the limitations of the life he was to portray, so that while he was often on the edge of absurdity he did not lose his balance. Especially is it to be noted that these stories, which we regard as giving an opportunity for invention when the series of old-fashioned fairy tales had been closed, show clearly the coming in of that temper in novel-writing which is eager to describe things as they are. Within the narrow limits of his miniature story, Andersen moves us by the same impulse as the modern novelist who depends for his material upon what he has actually seen and heard, and for his inspiration upon the power to penetrate the heart of things; so that the old fairy tale finds its successor in this new realistic wonder-story, just as the old romance gives place to the new novel. In both, as in the corresponding development of poetry and painting, is found a deeper sense of life and a finer perception of the intrinsic value of common forms.

This, then, may be taken as the peculiar contribution of Andersen: that he, appearing at a time when childhood had been laid open to view as a real and indestructible part of human life, was the interpreter to the world of that creative power which is significant of childhood. The child spoke through him, and disclosed some secrets of life; childhood in men heard the speech, and recognized it as an echo of their own half-forgotten voices. The literature of this kind which he produced has become a distinct and new form. It already has its imitations, and people are said to write in the vein of Andersen. Such work, and Andersen’s in particular, presents itself to us under two aspects: as literature in which conceptions of childhood are embodied, and as literature which feeds and stimulates the imagination of children. But this is precisely the way in which a large body of current literature must be regarded.

IX

IN AMERICAN LITERARY ART

The conditions of life in the United States have been most favorable to the growth of a special literature for children, but, with one or two notable exceptions, the literature which is independent of special audiences has had little to do with childhood as a subject, and art has been singularly silent. There is scarcely anything in Irving, for example, which touches upon child life. A sentence now and then in Emerson shows an insight of youth, as when he speaks of the unerring instinct with which a boy tells off in his mind the characters of the company in a room. Bryant has touched the subject more nearly, but chiefly in a half-fantastic way, in his Little People of the Snow and Sella. Thoreau could hardly be expected to concern himself with the young of the human race when he had nearer neighbors and their offspring. Lowell has answered the appeal which the death of children makes to the heart, but aside from his tender elegiac verses has scarcely dwelt on childhood either in prose or verse. Holmes, with his boyishness of temper, has caught occasionally at the ebullition of youthful spirits, as in the humorous figure of young Benjamin Franklin in the Autocrat, and in some of his autobiographic sketches. His School-Boy, also, adds another to those charming memories of youth which have made Cowper, Goldsmith, and Gray known to readers who else would scarcely have been drawn to them; for the one unfailing poetic theme which finds a listener who has passed his youth is the imaginative rendering of that youth.

Whittier, though his crystalline verse flows through the memory of many children, has contributed very little to the portrayal of childhood. His portrait of the Barefoot Boy and his tender recollection In School Days are the only poems which deal directly with the subject, and neither of them is wholly objective. They are a mature man’s reflection of childhood. Snow-Bound rests upon the remembrance of boyish days, but it deals rather with the circumstance of boyhood than with the boy’s thoughts or feelings. Yet the poet shows unmistakably his sense of childhood, although one would not be far wrong who understood him as never separating the spirit of childhood from the human life at any stage. His editorial work in the two volumes, Child-Life in Poetry and Child-Life in Prose, is an indication of his interest in the subject, and he was quick to catch the existence of the sentiment in its association with another poet, whose name is more directly connected with childhood. In his verses, The Poet and the Children, he gave expression to the thought which occurred to many as they considered how soon Longfellow’s death followed upon the spontaneous celebration of his birthday by multitudes of children.

This testimony to Longfellow was scarcely the result of what he had written either for or of children. It was rather a natural tribute to a poet who had made himself a household word in American homes. Children are brought up on poetry to a considerable extent; they are, moreover, under training for the most part by young women, and the pure sentiment which forms the unfailing element of Longfellow’s writings finds in such teachers the readiest response. When one comes to consider the subjects of Longfellow’s poetry, one finds that the number addressed to children, or finding their motive in childhood, is not large. Those of direct address are, To a Child, From my Arm-Chair, Weariness, Children; yet which of these demands or would receive a response from children? Only one, From my Arm-Chair, and that chiefly by the circumstance which called it out, and on which the poet relies for holding the direct attention of children. He gets far away from most children before he has reached the end of his poem To a Child, and in the other two poems we hear only the voice of a man in whom the presence of children awakens thoughts which lie too deep for their tears, though not for his.

Turning aside from those which appeal in form to children, one finds several which, like those last named, are evoked by the sentiment which childhood suggests. Such are The Reaper and the Flowers, Resignation, The Children’s Hour, and A Shadow, all in the minor key except The Children’s Hour; and this poem, perfect as it is in a father’s apprehension, yields only a subtle and half-understood fragrance to a child. One poem partly rests on a man’s thought of his own childhood, My Lost Youth; The Hanging of the Crane contains for its best lines a vignette of infancy; a narrative poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, has for its chief figure a child; and Hiawatha is bright with a sketch of Indian boyhood. The translations show two or three which include this subject.

While, therefore, Longfellow is repeatedly aware of the presence of children, it is not by the poems which spring out of that recognition that he especially reaches them. In his poem From my Arm-Chair, he refers to The Village Blacksmith; that has a single verse in which children figure, but the whole poem will arrest the attention of children far more than From my Arm-Chair, and it belongs to them more. It cannot be too often repeated that books and poems about children are not necessarily for children. The thoughts which the man has of the child often depend wholly upon the fact that he has passed beyond childhood, and looks back upon it; it is impossible for the child to stand by his side. Thus the poem Weariness contains the reflection of a man who anticipates the after life of children; there is nothing in it which belongs to the reflection of childhood itself. Tennyson’s May Queen, which has found its way into most of our anthologies for the young, is a notable example of a large class of verses quite unfit for such a place. It may be said in general that sentiment, when made a part of childhood, is very sure to be morbid and unnatural. We have a sentiment which rises at the sight of childhood, but children themselves have none of it; the more refined it is, the more unfit it is to go into their books.

Here is a collection of poetry for children, having all the marks of a sound and reputable work. As I turn its leaves, I come upon a long ballad of The Dying Child, Longfellow’s The Reaper and the Flowers, a poem called The Little Girl’s Lament, in which a child asks, “Is heaven a long way off, mother?” and for two or three pages dwells upon a child’s pain at the loss of her father; Tennyson’s May Queen, who is so unconscionably long a time dying; Mrs. Hemans’s imitation of Mignon’s song in a poem called The Better Land; and a poem by Dora Greenwell which I must regard as the most admirable example of what a poem for a child should not be. It is entitled A Story by the Fire, and begins,—

“Children love to hear of children!
I will tell of a little child
Who dwelt alone with his mother
By the edge of a forest wild.
One summer eve, from the forest,
Late, late, down the grassy track
The child came back with lingering step,
And looks oft turning back.

“‘Oh, mother!’ he said, ‘in the forest
I have met with a little child;
All day he played with me,—all day
He talked with me and smiled.
At last he left me alone, but then
He gave me this rosebud red;
And said he would come to me again
When all its leaves were spread.’”

Thereupon the child declares that it will put the rosebud in a glass, and wait eagerly for the friend to come. So the night goes and the morning comes, and the child sleeps.

“The mother went to his little room.
With all its leaves outspread
She saw a rose in fullest bloom;
And, in the little bed,
A child that did not breathe nor stir,—
A little, happy child,
Who had met his little friend again,
And in the meeting smiled.”

Here is a fantastic conception, extremely puzzling to a healthy-minded child. Imagine the natural questions of a simple, ingenuous boy or girl upon hearing this read. Who is this other child? Why was he coming back when the rose was blown? You explain, as well as you are able, that it was a phantom of death; or, if that seems too pallid, you try to imagine that the poet meant Jesus Christ or an angel by this other little child: but, in whatever way you explain it, you are obliged, if you will satisfy the downright little inquirer, to say plainly, This little boy died, and you begin to wish with all your heart that the poet with all her _ed_ rhymes had added _dead_. Then the puzzle begins over again to connect the blooming rose and the little playmate with death. Do you say that you will leave the delicate suggestion of the lines to find its way into the child’s mind, and be the interpreter of the poem? This is what one might plead in Wordsworth’s We are Seven, for instance. The comparison suggested by the two poems is a partial answer. Wordsworth’s poem is a plain, objective narrative, which a child might hear and enjoy with scarcely a notion of what was implied in it, returning afterward to the deep, underlying sense. This poem of Dora Greenwell’s has no real objective character; the incident of the walk in the forest is of the most shadowy sort, and is used for its subtlety. I object to subtlety in literature for children. We have a right to demand that there shall be a clear outward sense, whatever may be the deeper meaning to older people. Hans Andersen’s story of The Ugly Duckling is a consummate example of a narrative which is enjoyable by the most matter-of-fact child, and yet recalls to the older reader a life’s history.