Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (24 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 59
God takes your babes, and theyoh! think of this
Are by creation and redemption His;
Christ shed for them His blooda wondrous price;
His spirit sweetened each for paradise;
There, no destructive canker-worm of sin
Can carry on its deadly work within,
But pure and perfect in the realms on high,
Your flowerets bloom, and they shall never die.
23
The analogy between earthly and heavenly master is old and familiar: it was a commonplace of medieval and Renaissance ideas of order and degree that God was the ruler of the world, the father was a God to his family, and the monarch was the father of his people: a threefold analogy that could be invoked when speaking of theology, of state, or of domestic politics. This poem, coming at the end of a long tradition, exposes with simplistic clarity the ambivalence of the parallel. It makes a double comparison: first, that a child is like a rose, and because a rose is plucked to serve a higher purpose, shedding its perfume in a gorgeous room, so the child was plucked to adorn God's mansion; and second, that the master who took the rose was behaving like God, whose power is absolute and exercised only for good. Now which element in this analogy explains the other? Do we know about God and therefore use the parallel to understand the human master better, or do we (this is surely the more realistic case) explain our idea of God's authority by invoking the earthly master? But if we do not start by viewing this master as godlike, he might not greatly impress us as a model. Who, after all, owns a garden? In the legal sense, of course, the master does, but there is another sense in which a garden belongs to the person who cultivates it, and a thoughtful owner will remember this and will not (surely) steal up behind his gardener's back to remove the flowers without a word. Either the divine parallel tells us that this master is not high-handed, or the earthly parallel tells us that God is.
Consolation can be direct or indirect: directly, it addresses the grief of the survivor; indirectly, it looks at the departed and claims that all was for the best, even in the case of a child. Heaven was "benign," in Hemans's poem, to call the child hence, "E'er yet the world could breathe one blight / O'er thy sweet innocence." Hemans's abstract nouns "passion" and "grief'' and the dead metaphor of "blight" in both Hemans's poem and in
 
Page 60
"The Gathered Flower" are poeticisms for sin; the theological point is simply that the less you live in the world, the less you will be tainted. Better dead: the view could be held without belief in an afterlife, in which case it will be deeply pessimisticlike those gloomy assurances by the chorus in Greek tragedies that it is best not to be born, and second best is to die as early as possible.
It is perhaps surprising to find something very close to this in a letter of George Eliot's, written to Cara Bray on the death of her only daughter in 1865:
I don't know whether you strongly share, as I do, the old belief that made men say the gods loved those who died young. It seems to me truer than ever, now life has become more complex and more difficult problems have to be worked out. Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought, it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion, to go on pretending things are better than they arelike talking of "your Majesty's happy reign" to a successful monarch whose reign has been one of blood and fire to half a population, who happen to be at a distance and out of sight. So to me, early death takes the aspect of salvationthough I feel too that those who live and suffer may sometimes have the greater blessedness of
being
a salvation.
24
This paragraph is preceded by an explanation that she has let some weeks go by without writing a letter of condolence because "If I could have been with you in bodily presence, I should have sat silent, thinking silence a sign of feeling that speech, trying to be wise, must always spoil"; not writing has therefore been a way of avoiding presumption. "There is no such thing as consolation, when we have made the lot of another our own as you did Nelly's." This is something one could only say to a close and understanding friend, and to such a one it might be the best thing to say. It is then followed by the knotty paragraph quoted above, George Eliot at her most thoughtfully pessimistic and agnostic. She begins with pagan pessimism and then shows her deep emotional attraction to the Christianity she rejectedabove all through the play on the meaning of salvation: the first instance meaning, I take it, salvation from the pain of living (Greek tragic pessimism) and the second a kind of imitation of Christ, joining the ''choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence." It is almost an impertinence to call this purely humanist
 
Page 61
point a belief in "salvation"; but it is in its way a strategy of consolation.
The most ingeniously tortured theological consolation I have come across is that of T Binney (of whom I know nothing): "It would be a terrible world, I think, if it was not embellished by little children;
but
it would be a far more terrible one
if little children did not die
!"(his italics). Granting that death is the punishment for sin, he then explains that God looked for ways of making mortality tolerable. The two solutions he came up with were, first, that death happens alike to all, and second that it occurs at all ages. "It is important both for happiness and virtue that no one should know when he is to die"; and "to be thoroughly kind'' [
sic
], that law must apply from the very earliest age. It is therefore necessary that some children, along with those of other ages, should die, in order to carry out God's benevolent plan; and to the grieving mother he therefore points out that "all thy life thou hast been reaping advantages that came to thee by the death of the infants of others."
25
Catherine Tait, after the first of her daughters had died, read to the others a poem by Lydia Sigourney, the "sweet singer of Hartford," which is strikingly similar to "The Gathered Flower":
The Mother's Sacrifice
"What shall I render Thee, Father Supreme,
For thy rich gifts, and this the best of all?"
Said the young mother, as she fondly watched
Her sleeping babe. There was an answering voice
That night in dreams:
"Thou hast a tender flower
Upon thy breastfed with the dews of love:
Send me that flower. Such flowers there are in heaven."
But there was silence. Yea, a hush so deep,
Breathless and terror-stricken, that the lip
Blanched in its trance.
"Thou hast a little harp,
How sweetly would it swell the angels' hymn!
Yield me that harp."
There rose a shuddering sob,
As if the bosom by some hidden sword
Was cleft in twain.

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