Book XX “when the black earth ran blood,” “when beneath the great-hearted

Achilles his whole-hooved horses trampled corpses and shields together; and with blood all the axle-tree below was sprinkled and the rims that ran around the car, for blood-drops from the horses’ hooves splashed them and blood-drops from the tires of the wheels. But the son of Peleus pressed on to win his glory, flecking with gore his irresistible hands.”

Then follows the battle in the river, and finally the battle of the gods themselves, and after the necessary relief and lull and reawakening of interest comes the last battle of all and the climax of the poem in the conflict of Achilles and Hector.

A study of the art of Homer along its great lines will give us the true principles upon which to judge him. Such a study will put him in the right perspective. The statue of Phidias will mount on high where its artist wished to have it enshrined. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were meant to cross the bronze threshold of some great palace, “where there was a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high roofed hall of a great-hearted King. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round then was a frieze of blue and within were seats arrayed against the wall this way and that.” Then “after the men had put from them the desire of meat and drink,” they called upon the minstrel. “For minstrels from all men on earth get their meed of honor and worship; inasmuch as the muse teacheth them the paths of song and loveth the tribe of minstrels.” “And the minstrel being stirred by the god began and showed forth his minstrelsy and took up the tale where it tells how the Argives sailed away.” That was the setting of the Homeric Epic, and thus speaks one whose “heart had melted at the song and whose tears wet his cheeks beneath his eyelids.” “Verily it is a good thing to list to a minstrel, like to the gods in voice. Nay, as for me, I say there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people makes merry, and the men sit orderly at feasts in the halls and listen to the singer and the tables by them are laden with bread and flesh, and pours it into cups. This fashion seems to me the fairest thing in the world.”

There is the place that Homer chose for his matchless poems, and there they should be judged. The hearts that melt with song are not searching for digammas or Æolic forms. They want the story, the long voyages and the strange adventures, the swaying lines of battle and the prowess of heroes. They look for and recognize the different characters which must be as varied and as clearly marked as in the life around them. They must not be surfeited with too much of anything. Voyages and battles must vary and grow in intensity and be crossed with pictures of nature, brief but thrilling and immensely relieving,—the lion, the wheat field, the tossing ocean and the steady downfall of an unending snow storm. With these and the plot entangling and disentangling, the listeners to Homeric song and story will not look for that polished smoothness and frigid exactness, the absence of which vexes the minds of modern Germany. Phidias’ statue occupies its proper pedestal, and the true judges award to Phidias his well-deserved prize.

XVI

THE 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 Puritanic Milton, 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 the _Iliad_, 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 future fate 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 child _motif_ in 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 of _Richard III_, with Marcellus in _Coriolanus_, 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 in the 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.

XVII

THE 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 the _Children 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 incentive to 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’s _Bards of the Gael and Gall_:

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 imperialistic ode 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 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 better to republish in his _Book of Verses for Children_ the graceful and humorous lessons of the Greek fables than perpetuate Taylor and Turner.

After Wordsworth we see the child _motif_ gradually 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 a _Child’s Garden of Verses_ who brought back into poetry, as Lewis Carroll did in prose and verse, the natural child that Homer saw about him, and that painting discerned in the 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 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 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.