carries home water in his cloak"And when his mother saw the miracle that Jesus did, she kissed him and said 'Lord hearken unto me and save my son'"and the moment when they visit a dyer and the child Jesus, for no apparent reason except naughtiness, pushes all the clothes into the black dye.
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The first seems to embody both the mother's awareness of how weird the childhood miracle is and her maternal fear that such powers will, somehow, prove fatal to the child; the second seems pure childish naughtiness. The wise child, in short, is most interesting not when he is really an adult, but when he has the kind of quirky wisdom that a child might have and an adult could not. In the story from Luke, if we are meant to see a connection between the naughtiness of the child who runs off without telling his parents and the insight that astonishes the doctors, then we can say that the uncanny wisdom of childhood is the basis of the mysterious wisdom of the Son of God. The best place to look for that tradition may not be in saints' lives, or even the gospels, but in folklore, and nowhere better than in the tale of the Emperor's new clothes, where it takes the child's bluntness to say what the timid conventionality of the adults pretends not to notice.
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The wise child is not common in English literature before Dickens, but like so much else he does turn up in Shakespeare. Lady Macduff's bitterness at what she sees as her husband's desertion, when he runs off to England, leads her to say to her to her sprightly son, "Sirrah, your father's dead. And what will you do now? How will you live?" It is a brilliant example of female resentment: she is moved by pity for her son, abandoned along with her, but at the same time some of her resentment can be taken out on him by unfairly thrusting onto him a responsibility that she knows to be premature (he'll have to fend for himself now, serve him right, he's a male). The son puts up some stout resistance ("My father is not dead, for all your saying"), but his main response is to turn his mother's cynicism back on her:
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 | | Yes, he is dead: how wilt thou do for a father?
Nay, how will you do for a husband?
Why I can buy me twenty at any market.
Then you'll buy 'em to sell again.
Now God help thee, poor monkey: But how wilt thou do for a father?
If he were dead you'd weep for him: if you would not, it were a good sign, that I should quickly have a new father. (Macbeth IV, ii, 38ff)
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