Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and can only be made good by miraculous appliances. His watchword, return to nature, included a reversion to the infant as coming virginal and unspoilt by man’s tinkering from the hands of its Maker. To gain a glimpse of this primordial beauty before it was marred by man’s awkward touch was something, and so Rousseau set men in the way of sitting reverently at the feet of infancy, watching and learning. For us of to-day, who have learned to go to the pure springs of nature for much of our spiritual refreshment, the child has acquired a high place among the things of beauty. Indeed, the grace of childhood may almost be said to have been discovered by the modern poet. Wordsworth has stooped over his cradle intent on catching, ere they passed, the ‘ visionary gleams ’ of ‘ the glories he hath known ’. Blake, R. L. Stevenson, and others, have tried to put into language his day-dreamings, his quaint fancyings. Dickens and Victor Hugo have shown us something of his delicate quivering heart-strings ; Swinburne has summed up the divine charm of “ children’s ways and wiles ”. The page of modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child- love and our child-admiration. Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back admiringly to childhood. The aesthetic charm of the infant which draws us so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions is, like every¬ thing else which moves the modern mind, highly complex. Among other sources of this charm we may discern the perfect serenity, the happy ‘insouciance’ of the childish mind. The note of world-complaint in modern life has penetrated into most domains, yet it has not, one would hope, penetrated into the charmed circle of childish experi¬ ence. Childhood has, no doubt, its sad aspect :— Poor stumbler on the rocky coast of woe, Tutored by pain each source of pain to know:
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