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Found this essay online somewhere...the BPL linked to it and it's really interesting so I'm posting it here. Yay. Also, hopefully my next post will be a little essay about the popular conservative Christian ideal of femininity, and why I think it's both inaccurate and un-Biblical. Basically, I'm tired of Christian teen girls being valued mainly by their virginity and their submissive nature. Femininity according to the Bible really has nothing to do with white wedding dresses, pink teacups, fancy handwriting, the ability to make a mean apple pie...you get the idea. It should be, ah, interesting, considering most girls on HSB probably disagree with me on this. Anyway, on with the essay, lol.

The Child in English Literature
Nevile Watts

A woman of my acquaintance once confessed to me that she had never tasted the breast of chicken because, she said, "When I was a child it was always kept for the grown-ups, and when I grew up it was always kept for the children." The middle-aged adult of to-day has lived through a half-century which is for many reasons the most momentous the world has seen, but in nothing is it more momentous than in the revolution of thought and manners indicated by this casual remark. Man's passage from age to age has revealed a continually widening expanse not only of the range of his control over matter, but of the scope of his thought; he has charted the globe and exploited its uttermost resources, while his speculation plumbs the infinite and pries into the infinitesimal. And it is precisely this modern man who, at the very apex of his knowledge and his power, has become profoundly and acutely aware of the simplest and weakest embodiment of humanity, the child.
    Once before in history has this paradoxical revolution of thought found expression. In the pride and height of the Roman dominion, in a world which had not only ignored childhood save as the inevitable prelude to manhood, but had actually viewed child-exposure without horror, an obscure teacher of a despised race had, in the presence of a handful of ignorant peasants, taken a child and set him in the midst with the words, "Unless you become as this child, you cannot enter the kingdom." But the world heeded Him not. Year after year it has paid annual lip-service to the Babe of Bethlehem, yet year after year the astonishing warning uttered by the Babe himself has been ignored. Sixteen centuries (for the cult of the child dawned faintly and transiently three hundred years ago) were to pass before it occurred to anyone to treat the words as other than a flourish of epigram, an arresting paradox. And when the sovereignty of the child did at length receive recognition, his title to kingship was derived not so much from the words of Christ as from a theory propounded four hundred years earlier by a Greek philosopher, Plato.
    Plato's doctrine of Recollection, which inspired English seventeenth-century poets and Wordsworth a century and a half later, was an attempt—the first in human history—to answer the questions, What is the Soul? What should men live for? Why do they take pleasure in Goodness and Beauty? His answer is that the soul is the true Ego, is independent of the body, and has existed from all eternity in the world of spirit, which is the world of reality. In this spirit-world too, abide the supreme essences, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, of which things good, true, and beautiful on earth are faint and imperfect copies. The soul, transiently resident in a material frame, is born with no memory of these essences with which she has been in communion, having, in Plato's poetical figure, drunk before birth of the waters of Lethe, river of forgetfulness. But not finally nor irretrievably has the soul forgotten; at the promptings of the imperfect goodness and beauty which she sees on earth she resumes contact with that other and real world, and her divinely ordained end is finally to achieve full reunion with reality by communion with goodness and beauty and rejection of evil and ugliness here on earth. The true education, in Plato's view, is a deliberate cultivation of such recollection, a removal of veil after veil until the soul once again sees and dwells with Truth, Beauty and Goodness pure and unalloyed, and is finally assimilated into God. Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood, to which I shall recur in its due place, contains this same idea of pre-existence, with a strange difference from Plato's view. To the English poet the heavenly memory with which the child is born, "not in entire forgetfulness" dims as life proceeds; to Plato the rightly progressing soul is for ever being more acutely reminded; the shades of the prison-house recede as he travels daily nearer to the East.
    Plato is the chief inspiration in the strong though intermittent vein of child-mysticism in English literature. The child is nearer to Paradise than the man; he cannot but remember something of it, albeit unconsciously. So we watch the child's every movement and every glance and dash down his idlest remark into our note-books, as if we were reporters interviewing some august foreigner. So Wordsworth interrogated, and no doubt terrified, the urchins of the Grasmere countryside:

         And five times to the child I said,
         "Why, Edward? tell me why."

    We can picture the consternation as the gaunt figure appeared in the offing. "Hi, Ted! slip thee into yon hedge! Maister Wudsworth be a-coomin'!"
    Apart from Wordsworth's mystical treatment, which derived partly from Plato, partly from the seventeenth-century poet Vaughan, and partly from his own emotional experience, of which more anon, there has been the sentimental treatment, which chiefly preceded his influence, and the psychological, which developed from it. Chaucer gives us in the tender tale of the Prioress the "litel clergeon seven yeer of age", singing his Alma Redemptoris in Our Lady's honour and murdered by the Jews, but he is no more than a figure in a stained-glass window. Shakespeare's children are pretty stage-properties, tear-compelling appendages to heighten the pathos of the adult. Before the seventeenth century there is no interest in the working of the child-mind, no hint that the child is endowed with any peculiar wisdom, any immortal light.
    The first intimation of the new vision of childhood appears in Earle's Microcosmographie, a series of brief thumb-nail sketches of human types published in 1628:

      A Child is a Man in small Letter, yet the best copie of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the Apple. ... He is purely happy, because he knows no evil nor hath made meanes by Sinne to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evil to come by for-seeing them. ... The elder he growes, he is a stayre lower from God. ... Could he put off his body with his little Cote, he had got eternitie without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.

    Here are the first clear notes, as of a solitary thrush, that foretell the dawn (though it was to be long deferred) of Wordsworth. And in two other writers of this century, Vaughan and Traherne, the note swells into a broader chorus. Henry Vaughan, a Welsh physician, published in 1650 a volume of verse mainly religious, which includes the immortal 'Retreate':

         Happy those early days! when I
         Shined in my angel-infancy.
         Before I understood this place
         Appointed for my second race,
         Or taught my soul to fancy aught
         But a white celestial thought,
         When yet I had not walked above
         A mile or two from my first love,
         And looking back at that short space
         Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
         When in some gilded cloud or flower
         My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
         And in those weaker glories spy
         Some shadows of eternity;
         Before I taught my tongue to wound
         My conscience with a sinful sound,
         Or had the black art to dispense
         A several sin to every sense,
         But felt through all this fleshly dress
         Bright shoots of everlastingness.
         O how I long to travel back
         And tread again that ancient track!
         That I might once more reach that plain
         Where first I left my glorious train;
         But ah, my soul with too much stay
         Is drunk and staggers by the way.
         Some men a forward motion love,
         But I by backward steps would move;
         And when this dust falls to the urn
         In that state I came, return.

    In 1897 a Mr. Brooke bought for a few pence at a street bookstall a bundle of manuscript which proved to contain some remarkable outpourings in prose and verse of a visionary interpretation of childhood based on the author's own memories and intuitions. This author was one Thomas Traherne, who was born at Hereford or Ledbury, probably in 1636, and served for some years as curate at Credenhill. The poetry is but a lame metrification of the far more powerful prose of the Century of Meditations:

      Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had in my infancy and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day wherein I can see the universe. By the gift of God they attended me into the world and by his special favour I remember them till now. ... Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child. All appeared new and strange at first. ... I was a little stranger which at my entrance was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. ... My very ignorance was advantageous. ... All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine and joyful and precious. ... Is it not strange that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold!

    But the poets and the philosophers by virtue of their visions stand aloof from the common herd. What of the rank and file in this age? Are they infected with the same indifference to childhood which blinded all mankind for so long after, and for so long before? Here is the Tinker of Bedford, leading his pilgrims through the Valley of Humiliation:

      Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a boy feeding his father's sheep. The boy was in very mean clothes but of a very fresh and well-favoured countenance, and as he sat by himself he sung:

         He that is down need fear no fall,
           He that is low no pride;
         He that is humble ever shall
           Have God to be his guide ...

      Then said the Guide, Do you hear him? I will dare to say that this boy lives a merrier life, and wears more of that herb called Heart's-Ease in his bosom than he that is clad in silk and velvet.

    And here is our good friend Samuel Pepys, taking a jaunt upon Epson Downs:

      W. Hewer and I walked upon the Downs where a flock of sheep was; and the most innocent and pleasant sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sightof people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did, with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty, and then I did give him something, and went to the father and talked with him. ... He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after.

    His fellow-diarist Evelyn, after the death of his little son of five years, writes:

      Such a child I never saw; for such a child I bless God in whose bosom he is. May I and mine become as this little child, who now follows the Child Jesus that Lamb of God in a white robe. ... Even so, Lord Jesus, fiat voluntas tua. Thou gavest him to us, Thou hast taken him from us, blessed be the Name of the Lord!

    With the coming of the Age of Good Sense, the age of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift and Johnson, of the powdered periwig and the embroidered brocade, the darkness of oblivion settles again upon the child. But in 1751 appeared Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard which, still moving stiffly as it does in its classical garb, is yet turning its head with kindling eye upon the world of nature. Gray is a poet who would fain have been romantic, but lacked the courage. "He never spoke out." In the Elegy the most significant stanza for our purpose is one which is not there, because the author rejected it, perhaps as introducing figures—flowers, birds, children—below the dignity of verse:

      There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
        By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
      The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
        And little footsteps lightly print the ground.

    We pass to the age when childhood at length not only had justice done to it, but was made to sit upon a throne which, as its chief courtier Wordsworth sang, had "more power than all the elements." We have not leisure here to inquire why and how the movement arose, if indeed it can be called a movement at all, seeing that its two earliest voices, Burns and Blake, represented no school and were in touch with no current literary influences. It is not sufficient to say that the Romantic Revival was a return to nature; every literary or artistic movement claims to be a return to nature, and in particular the movement of a century earlier, of which Dryden was the leading figure, and from which the Romantic Revival was a conscious and violent reaction, also wrote the Return to Nature upon its banners. It was rather a harking back to earlier and simpler standards and forms of expression, and children, along with trees and animals and rustics, were its chief mentors. The philosophers and political theorists like Rousseau and Voltaire had led Europe into disillusion and war; perhaps the children, who had only instincts and intuitions, would prove better guides.
    So it was that Wordsworth, shattered in mind by the outbreak of war between the England he loved and the Revolution to which he had pinned his hopes, retired with his sister to a remote Dorset farm-house and set himself to build his life anew. And into the void of his heart came crowding pictures of his youth. Those adventures of his among the mountains and the lakes, rowing at night on Ullswater in a stolen boat, robbing the snares of another and fancying retributive footsteps padding behind him along the fell, appeared to him, at twenty years' remove, like visions direct from heaven. He would recover that childhood; he would preach to the world that only through the eyes of a child could the truth be seen. For some ten years he laboured and dreamed, conceiving a vast work, of which The Prelude stands as a mere vestibule, which should enshrine his dreams.
    And then a dreadful thing began to happen. His power of vision weakened. He was only thirty-five. Was this fading the universal lot? Did maturity confer nothing to compensate its loss?
    He wrote his immortal Ode to answer these torturing questions, to convince himself that if one glory had faded, another better one had taken its place. The child has glimpses of a miraculous past. True, but the ageing man has glimpses of a miraculous childhood, and those glimpses kept the chain intact. The mature man had forgotten heaven; but at least he remembered that he had once remembered it.
    The soul in its life on earth is like a prince who has been sent away from his father's palace to be brought up in a distant land by a foster-nurse, who does her best to make him forget his regal childhood, plying him with toys in order to habituate him to his exile.
    And in time he does become habituated. Use and wont lay their frosty fingers upon his eyes and he no longer lives in careless familiarity with the truths which grown men toil laboriously to attain. But he is not unhappy; he remembers how as a child a sudden shock of strangeness would come upon him, when he would ask himself, "How did I get here?" "Am I in a dream?" And this memory is a proof to him that the world of time is an illusion and the world of eternity alone true. So, in tranquil intervals, although he has travelled far inland, his vision can pierce back to, and his ears catch the roar of the great deep whence he came, and see the children still playing upon the beach. The vision may have grown dim, but he will love nature not less but more, because the meanest flower by the wayside speaks to his soul a message of tremendous import.
    I have paraphrased this great poem at some length, because it is the pivot on which our whole theme turns. It is the cue for the entry upon the stage of legions of children, no lay figures now, but principals. The Marchioness and Little Em'ly and Tiny Tim, Jo and Pip and Jenny Wren; Maggie Tulliver and Richard Feverel and Alice and Jim Hawkins and Jeremy and Michael Fane and Huck Finn and Christopher Robin; and with them come their interpreters, Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson and Edmund Gosse and Katherine Mansfield and Walter de la Mare and a host of others. The emancipation of the children has been won, and William Wordsworth is their William Wilberforce.
    But a crusade had yet to be fought to assert the children's new-won rights. In the mills and the mines children were being treated worse than any slaves. Workhouses and schools and magistrates' courts were dark with ignorance and cruelty. And the man who was to lead and to win this crusade was a man of no ideas, no culture, no deep insight into life, but of abounding charity and high spirits, and of an imagination so intense that he compelled his readers to see through his eyes. And those eyes were the eyes of a man who had never grown up. So, being himself an eternal child, children alone appealed to him, whatever their age in years; men and women with adult minds seemed, as Clutton-Brock said, to be playing some stupid game. Every adult whom he means us to love is an over-grown child—Pickwick, Old Peggotty, Tom Pinch, Joe Gargery. But in spite of all his charity and his chivalry, it is almost equally true that the children whom he means us to love are undergrown adults—Paul Dombey, Little Dorrit, Agnes Wickfield, Jenny Wren. For he always sees the pathos of childhood, and it is when he is pathetic that he fails, and fails outrageously. What he hated above all was pretentiousness—the snob, the humbug, the canter, the pompous authoritarian. His greatest child-characters are the poor maid-of-all-work the Marchioness, and Jo the crossing-sweeper, who epitomize in concrete form all the Beatitudes. If Dickens had had the ruling of the state, he would have indented at the outset for a large supply of millstones.

      "This boy," says the constable, "although he's repeatedly told to, won't move on."
      "I'm always a-moving on, sir," cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. "I've always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possible move to, sir, more nor I do move?"
      "He won't move on," says the constable calmly, with a slight professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in his stiff stock, "although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and therefore I'm obliged to take him into custody. ... He won't move on."
      "O my eye! where can I move to?" cries the boy, clutching desperately at his hair.
      "Don't you come none of that, or I shall make blessed short work of you," says the constable, giving him a passionless shake. "My instructions are that you are to move on. I've told you so five hundred times."
      ... Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to anyone else that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed ... to set you the great example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you—the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth—Move on!

    He could not paint a normal child; his children are either characters (in the sense of being freaks) or they are characterless (in the sense of being plaster casts). But there is one quality in the vision of Dickens which gives him a title to be the great revealer of childhood. We all remember how a children we possessed the power of vitalising and humanising the things that made up our environment. Patterns in carpets and wall-papers came alive to us; the letters of the alphabet had personalities; the knobs of our cot were gnomes that winked solemnly at us in the fading light. Dickens retained throughout his life this eerie realism. His world was alive with inanimate things. Door-knockers, tall-boys, gas-lamps, house-fronts, arm-chairs, take on an elfin humanity; they leer or grin or scowl; they are benevolent or disdainful or sardonic. To Dickens everything is gloriously alive; it is only living men and women who are sometimes dead.
    After Dickens the treatment of the child in literature branches into a dozen different channels, and the various streams grow to so great a volume that any complete analysis becomes impossible. George Eliot's Mill on the Floss is perhaps the prototype of the autobiographical novel in which the author dives into his remote consciousness in the endeavour to fish up life. The later nineteenth century, shaken to its foundations by the evolutionary theory, was obsessed by origins; it studied childhood as it studied the primitive types of the horse revealed in fossils; its literature is a museum stocked with specimens of infantile experience duly pinned and labelled. The novel becomes autobiographical and the autobiography partakes of the novel, until they are distinguishable only by the persons in which they are written. Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh and Edmund Gosse's account of his own childhood in Father and Son both appeared at the dawn of the twentieth century; each portrays the clash between the grim and humourless puritanism which was dying and the spirit of childhood which was insisting on its right to delight and liberty.

      All these matters (writes Gosse) drew my thoughts to the subject of idolatry, which was severely censured at the missionary meeting. I cross-examined my father very closely as to the nature of this sin, and pinned him down to the categorical statement that idolatry consisted in praying to anyone or anything but God himself. Wood and stone, in the words of the hymn, were peculiarly liable to be bowed down to by the heathen in their blindness. I pressed my father further on this subject, and he assured me that God would be very angry, and would signify his anger, if anyone, in a Christian country, bowed down to wood and stone... I determined ... to test the matter for myself, and one morning, when both my parents were safely out of the house, I prepared for the great act of heresy. I was in the morning-room on the ground-floor, where, with much labour, I hoisted a small chair on the table close to the window. My heart was now beating as if it would leap out of my side, but I pursued my experiment. I knelt down on the carpet in front of the table and looking up I said my daily prayer in a loud voice, only substituting the address, "O Chair" for the habitual one.
      Having carried this act of idolatry safely through, I waited to see what would happen. It was a fine day, and I gazed up at the slip of white sky above the house opposite, and expected something to appear in it. God would certainly exhibit his anger in some terrible form, and would chastise my impious and wilful action. ... But nothing happened; there was not a cloud in the sky, not an unusual sound in the street. Presently I was quite sure that nothing would happen. I had committed idolatry, flagrantly and deliberately, and God did not care.

    The reality of progress may be doubted, if by progress we mean that men become with the passing of time better, wiser and kinder. There is a current illusion of progress at those periods of history that recur with an almost rhythmic regularity, when humanity is lifted upon a crest of achievement; men eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and deem themselves as gods and lords of creation. But man never eats of the fruit of that tree without being banished from some Eden; and between the wave-crests of exaltation lie the deep troughs of despondency. The later Victorian age was one of pride and hope; its achievement was portentous, but it was thought to be a mere earnest of what would be achieved. Then the crash came; and the disillusion was as hell-deep as the illusion had been heaven-high.
    In its bereavement the age turned to the child to draw assurance from his untroubled serenity, to divert its vision from the hideous present to the brighter future that the child would inherit.
    All the greatest writers—Kipling, Barrie, Belloc, Wells, Mackenzie—wrote of and for children. Only Hardy, Galsworthy and Shaw, who had never suffered the illusion, and therefore were immune from the disillusion, remained unrepentantly adult. In the past twenty years we have wandered yet deeper into the Valley of Humiliation. The children of 1914 became the cannon-fodder of 1939. And what of the children of 1939? For nineteen centuries men have ignored the solemn warning that only by becoming children can they enter the kingdom; and the inevitable and accumulated nemesis has fallen. And it will fall yet again, and fall more heavily, unless the world will heed the warning. It is futile to psychoanalyse the child, to patronize the child, to sentimentalize the child, for that is to assume superiority over the child, and not to take him as a pattern. It has been said that the wise teacher teaches more than he knows; it is equally true that the wise teacher comes in the end to learn more than he has taught. To be a teacher is to have opportunities of learning that are denied to ordinary men. Ordinary men may reject the lesson, you cannot reject it save at the peril that yours will be the greater judgment. The Wise Men saw His star in the east, and came to worship Him—Him, for whom no room was found at a poor inn in the meanest of all the cities of Judah.

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