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WINGS AND THE CHILD
WORKS BY E. NESBIT
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
THE MAGIC CITY
THE WONDERFUL GARDEN
THE MAGIC WORLD
THE RAILWAY CHILDREN
OSWALD BASTABLE
HARDING'S LUCK
THE TREASURE SEEKERS
THE WOULDBEGOODS
FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET
THE AMULET
THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
NINE UNLIKELY TALES
THE HOUSE OF ARDEN
THE BOOK OF DRAGONS
WET MAGIC
FICTION
THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST
DAPHNE IN FITZROY STREET
THESE LITTLE ONES
MAN AND MAID
SALOME AND THE HEAD
THE RED HOUSE
DORMANT
THE LITERARY SENSE
IN HOMESPUN
FEAR
POETRY
LAYS AND LEGENDS. 1st Series
LAYS AND LEGENDS. 2nd Series
LEAVES OF LIFE
THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE
A POMANDER OF VERSE
BALLADS AND LYRICS
JESUS IN LONDON
BALLADS AND LYRICS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
NEW POEMS
[Illustration: _Photo David Norris_
E. Nesbit
[_Frontispiece._]
WINGS AND THE CHILD
OR
THE BUILDING OF MAGIC CITIES
BY
E. NESBIT
AUTHOR OF
"THE MAGIC CITY," "THE WOULDBEGOODS," ETC., ETC.
WITH PICTURES BY GEORGE BARRAUD AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
NEW YORK AND LONDON
_Printed in 1913_
TO THE READER
WHEN this book first came to my mind it came as a history and theory of
the building of Magic Cities on tables, with bricks and toys and little
things such as a child may find and use. But as I kept the thought by me
it grew and changed, as thoughts will do, until at last it took shape as
an attempt to contribute something, however small and unworthy, to the
science of building a magic city in the soul of a child, a city built of
all things pure and fine and beautiful. As you read, it will, I hope,
seem to you that something of what I say is true--in much, no doubt, it
will seem to you that I am mistaken; but however you may disagree with
me, you will, I trust, at least have faith in the honesty of my purpose.
If I seem to you to be too dogmatic, to lay down the law too much as
though I were the teacher and you the learner, I beg you to believe that
it is in no such spirit that I have written. Rather it is as though you
and I, spending a quiet evening by your fire, talked together of the
things that matter, and as though I laid before you all the things that
were in my heart--not stopping at every turn to say "Do you not think so
too?" and "I hope you agree with me?" but telling you, straight from the
heart, what I have felt and thought and, I humbly say, known about
children and the needs of children. I have talked to you as to a friend,
without the reservations and apologies which we use with strangers. And
if, in anything, I shall have offended you, I entreat you to extend to
me the forgiveness and the forbearance which you would exercise towards
a friend who had offended you, not meaning to offend, and to believe
that I have spoken to you as frankly and plainly as I would wish you to
speak to me, were you the writer and I the reader.
E. NESBIT.
CONTENTS
_PART I_
PAGE
CHAPTER I
OF UNDERSTANDING 3
CHAPTER II
NEW WAYS 9
CHAPTER III
PLAYTHINGS 17
CHAPTER IV
IMAGINATION 24
CHAPTER V
OF TAKING ROOT 33
CHAPTER VI
BEAUTY AND KNOWLEDGE 42
CHAPTER VII
OF BUILDING AND OTHER MATTERS 54
CHAPTER VIII
THE MORAL CODE 67
CHAPTER IX
PRAISE AND PUNISHMENT 82
CHAPTER X
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL 94
_PART II_
CHAPTER I
ROMANCE IN GAMES 107
CHAPTER II
BUILDING CITIES 118
CHAPTER III
BRICKS--AND OTHER THINGS 130
CHAPTER IV
THE MAGIC CITY 143
CHAPTER V
MATERIALS 156
CHAPTER VI
COLLECTIONS 165
CHAPTER VII
THE POOR CHILD'S CITY 177
CHAPTER VIII
THE END 190
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR _Frontispiece_
PAGE
THE KING'S SUMMER-HOUSE 8
NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE 13
HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE 18
THE TOMB IN THE DESERT 18
STONEHENGE 22
THE TREE LIKE A MAN 27
POPPY DOLL 29
DOVES AND DRAGON 30
THE ASTROLOGER'S TOWER 32
THE SILVER TOWERS 34
FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH 35
THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE 40
THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED 47
A CHINESE TEMPLE 52
THE SQUARE TOWER 56
SHELL ARCHES 57
HANDKERCHIEF TENTS 65
ONE HALF OF THE CITY 72
THE TAIL OF PUSS 78
THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY 82
THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT 96
OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES 97
THE PALACE OF CATS 120
GUARDED ARCH 123
BOXES 135
ARCHES AND PILLARS 140
PILLARED COURT 141
MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM 148
THE GUARD-ROOM 149
THE DOMINO DOOR 150
LARCH PALM 152
THE MAGIC CITY 152
HONESTY PILLARS 159
TREES 166
THICK ARCHES 168
FAN WINDOW 169
THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE 171
HONESTY ROOF 174
CLOTHES PEGS 181
TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE 185
COTTON REELS 186
LATTICE WINDOWS 187
_PART I_
CHAPTER I
Of Understanding
IT is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I
set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special
means of knowing anything: I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be
known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.
And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the
recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from
observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may
observe the actions of children and chronicle their sayings, and produce
from these, perhaps, a lifelike sketch of a child, as it appears to the
grown-up observer; but observation is no key to the inner mysteries of a
child's soul. The only key to those mysteries is in knowledge, the
knowledge of what you yourself felt when you were good and little and a
child. You can remember how things looked to you, and how things looked
to the other children who were your intimates. Our own childhood,
besides furnishing us with an exhaustless store of enlightening
memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity of our lives for the
observation of children--other children. There is a freemasonry between
children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take which is and must
be for ever impossible between children and grown-ups, no matter how
sympathetic the grown-up, how confiding the child. Between the child and
the grown-up there is a great gulf fixed--and this gulf, the gulf
between one generation and another, can never be really bridged. You may
learn to see across it, a little, or sometimes in rare cases to lean
very far across it so that you can just touch the tips of the little
fingers held out from the other side. But if your dealings with those on
the other side of the gulf are to be just, generous, noble, and helpful,
they must be motived and coloured by your memories of the time when you
yourself were on the other side--when you were a child full of your own
hopes, dreams, aims, interests, instincts, and imaginings, and over
against you, kindly perhaps, tenderly loving, often tenderly loved, but
still in some mysterious way antagonistic and counting as "Them," were
the grown-ups. I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors
and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for
all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully
and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people
who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a
child. And Time marks with the same outward brand those who have
forgotten and those who do not forget. So that even the few who have
managed to slip past the Customs-house with their bundle of memories
intact can never fully display them. These are a sort of contraband, and
neither the children nor the grown-ups will ever believe that that which
we have brought with us from the land of childhood is genuine. The
grown-ups accuse us of invention, sometimes praise us for it, when all
we have is memory; and the children imagine that we must have been
watching them, and thus surprised a few of their secrets, when all that
we have is the secrets which were our own when we were children--secrets
which were so bound up with the fibre of our nature that we could never
lose them, and so go through life with them, our dearest treasures. Such
people feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world. For
a middle-aged gentleman with a beard or a stout elderly lady with
spectacles to move among other elderly and spectacled persons feeling
that they are still children, and that the other elderly and spectacled
ones are really grown-ups, seems thoroughly unreasonable, and therefore
those who have never forgotten do not, as a rule, say anything about it.
They just mingle with the other people, looking as grown-up as any
one--but in their hearts they are only pretending to be grown-up: it is
like acting in a charade. Time with his make-up box of lines and
wrinkles, his skilful brush that paints out the tints and the contours
of youth, his supply of grey wigs and rounded shoulders and pillows for
the waist, disguises the actors well enough, and they go through life
altogether unsuspected. The tired eyes close on a world which to them
has always been the child's world, the tired hands loose the earthly
possessions which have, to them, been ever the toys of the child. And
deep in their hearts is the faith and the hope that in the life to come
it may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.
Such people as these are never pessimists, though they may be sinners;
and they will be trusting, to the verge of what a real grown-up would
call imbecility. To them the world will be, from first to last, a
beautiful place, and every unbeautiful thing will be a surprise, hurting
them like a sudden blow. They will never learn prudence, or parsimony,
nor know, with the unerring instinct of the really grown-up, the things
that are or are not done by the best people. All their lives they will
love, and expect love--and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not
get it. They will expect beautiful quixotic impulsive generosities and
splendours from a grown-up world which has forgotten what impulse was:
and to the very end they will not leave off expecting. They will be
easily pleased and easily hurt, and the grown-ups in grain will
contemplate their pains and their pleasures with an uncomprehending
irritation.
If these children, disguised by grown-up bodies, are ever recognised for
what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their
pens--when they write for and about children. Then grown-up people will
call them intelligent and observant, and children will write to them and
ask the heart-warm, heart-warming question, "How did you know?" For if
they can become articulate they will speak the language that children
understand, and children will love, not them, for their identity is
cloaked with grey grown-up-ness, but what they say. There are some of
these in whom the fire of genius burns up and licks away the trappings
under which Time seeks to disguise them--Andersen, Stevenson, Juliana
Ewing were such as these--and the world knows them for what they were,
and adores in them what in the uninspired it would decry and despise.
To these others who have the memories of childhood untainted and yet
have not the gift and relief of words, to these I address myself in the
first instance, because they will understand without any involved
explanation on my part what it is that I am driving at, and it is these
who, alone, can teach the real grown-ups the things which they have
forgotten. For these things can be taught, these things can be
re-learned. I would have every man and woman in whom the heart of
childhood still lives, protest, however feebly and haltingly, yet with
all the power of the heart, against machine-made education--against the
instruction which crams a child with facts and starves it of dreams,
which forces the free foot into heavy boots and bids it walk on narrow
pavement, which crushes with heavy hand the wings of the soul, and
presses the flower of imagination flat between the pages of a lexicon.
[Illustration: THE KING'S SUMMER-HOUSE.
8]]