CHAPTER X

The One Thing Needful

THE most ardent advocate of our present civilisation, the blindest

worshipper of what we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware of the

steadily increasing and brutal ugliness of life. Civilisation, whatever

else it is, is a state in which a few people have the chance of living

beautifully--those who take that chance are fewer still--and the

enormous majority live, by no choice or will of their own, lives which

at the best are uncomfortable, anxious, and lacking in beauty, and at

the worst are so ugly, diseased, desperate, and wretched that those who

feel their condition most can hardly bear to think of them, and those

who have not imagination enough to feel it fully yet cannot bear it

unless they succeed in persuading themselves that the poor of this world

are the heirs of the next, while hoping, at the same time, that a

portion of Lazarus's heavenly legacy may, after all, be reserved for

Dives.

The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and

mines and pot banks--coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright

rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green

country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the

smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron

advertisements that scar the fields of earth--all the torn paper and

straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root

spring pride, anger, cruelty, and sycophancy, the mean subservience of

the poor and the mean arrogance of the rich. As the fair face of the

green country is disfigured by all this machinery which ministers to the

hope of getting rich, so is the face of man marred by the fear of

getting poor. Look at the faces you see in the street--old and young,

gay and sad--on all there is the brand of anxiety, a terrible anxiety

that never rests, a fear that never sleeps, the anxiety for the future:

the fear of poverty for the rich, the fear of starvation for the poor.

Think of the miles and miles of sordid squalor and suffering in the East

of London--not in comfortable Whitechapel, but out Canning Town way;

think of Barking and Plaistow and Plashet and Bow--then think of Park

Lane and Bond Street. And if your eyes are not blinded, the West is no

less terrible than the East. If you want to be sure of this, bring a

hungry, ragged child from that Eastern land and set it outside a West

End restaurant; let it press its dirty little face against the plate

glass and gaze at the well-to-do people gorging and guzzling round the

bright tables inside. The diners may be smart, the ragged child may be

picturesque--but bring the two together, and consider the conjunction.

[Illustration: THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT.]

And all this ugliness springs from the same cause. As Ruskin says: "We

have forgotten God." We have therefore forgotten His attributes, mercy,

loving-kindness, justice, truth, and beauty. Their names are still on

our lips, but the great, stupid, crashing, blundering machine which we

call civilisation knows them not. The Devil's gospel of _laissez-faire_

still inspires the calloused heart of man. Each for himself, and Mammon

for the foremost. We no longer care that life should be beautiful for

all God's children--we wish it to be beautiful for us and forget who, as

we wish that wish, becomes our foster-father. There can be no healing

of the great wound in the body of mankind till each one of us would die

rather than see the ugliness of a wound on the body of the least of

these our brethren. But so dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty,

our sense of brotherhood, that our brother's wounds do not hurt us. We

have not imagination enough to know how it feels to be wounded. Just as

we have not imagination enough to see the green fields that lie crushed

where Manchester sprawls in the smoke--the fair hills and streams on

which has grown the loathsome fungus of Stockport.

[Illustration: OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES.]

Now I do believe that this insensitiveness to ugliness and misery, this

blindness to wanton befouling of human life and the green world, comes

less from the corruption of man's heart than from the emptiness of the

teaching which man receives when he is good and little and a child. The

teaching in our schools is almost wholly materialistic. The child is

taught the botanical name of the orange--dissects it and its flower and

perhaps learns the Latin names of the flower and fruit; but it is not

taught that oranges are things you will be pleased with yourself for

giving up to some one who is thirstier than you are--or that to throw

orange-peel on the pavement where some one may slip on it, fall and

hurt himself, is as mean a trick as stealing a penny from a blind man.

We teach the children about the wonders of gases and ethers, but we do

not explain to them that furnaces ought to consume their own smoke, or

why. The children learn of acids and starches, but not that it is a

disgraceful thing to adulterate beer and bread. The rules of

multiplication and subtraction are taught in schools, but not the old

rule, "If any will not work, neither shall he eat."

There is no dogmatical teaching. That means a diet of dry bones. It

means that the child is never shown how to look for happiness in the

performance of acts which do not, on the face of them, look as though

they would make him happy. It is not explained to him that man's life

and the will of God are like a poem--God writes a line and man must make

the next line rhyme to it. When it does rhyme, then you get that

happiness which can only come from harmony. And when you do your best to

make your line rhyme and cannot--well, the Author of the first line

knows that it was your best that you did. God is shown, when He is shown

at all, to our modern children, as a sort of glorified head master, who

will be tremendously down on you if you break the rules: alternatively

as a sort of rich uncle who will give you things if you ask properly. He

is not shown as the Father to whom you can tell everything.

If you are successful in your work you win a prize and go home to your

people, and tell them that you are first in history, receiving their

applause without shame.

If you are good at games or athletics you can tell your mates that you

made two goals or eighty-three runs or whatever it is, and delight in

their admiration. If you are an athlete the applause of the bystanders

is your right and your reward.

But whom can you tell of the little intimate triumphs, the secret

successes, the temptations resisted, the kind things done, the gentle

refrainings, the noble darings of that struggling, bewildered,

storm-tossed little thing you call your soul?

God, your Father, is the only person to whom you can talk of these. To

him you can say: "Father, I wanted to pay Smith Minor out to-day for

something he did last week, and I didn't because I thought You wouldn't

like it. Are You pleased with Your boy?" Do they teach you this in

schools or give you any hint or hope of what you will feel when your

Father answers: "Yes, My son, I am pleased." Or do they teach you to

say: "Father, I am sorry I was a beast to-day, and I'll try not to do it

again"--and tell you that a Voice will answer, "I am sorry too, My

son--but I am glad you told Me. Try again, dear lad. And let Me help

you"?

As you show your Latin exes. to your master, so you should be taught to

show the leaves of your life to the only One who can read and understand

that blotted record. And if you learn to show that book every day there

will be less and less in it that you mind showing, and more and more

that will give you the glow and glory of the heart that comes to him who

hears "Faithful and good, well done."

You cannot suppose that your life is rhyming with the will of God when

you destroy the beauty of the country and of the lives of men so that

you may get rich and you and your children may live without working.

Can you imagine a company promoter who should say: "Father, I have made

a lot of money out of a company which has gone to pieces, and a lot of

other people are ruined, but I know that there must always be rich and

poor, and if I didn't do it some one else would"?

Or--"Father, I spoiled the green fields where children used to play and

I have built a lot of streets of hideous and uncomfortable houses, but

they are quite good enough for the working people. As long as they have

such low wages they can't live like human beings. And Thou knowest, O

Father, that wages are and must be regulated by the divine law of supply

and demand."

Or--"Father, I have put sand in the sugar and poison in the beer, alum

in the bread and water in the milk, all these being, as Thou knowest,

Father, long-established trade customs."

Men can say these things to themselves and to each other, but there is

One to whom they cannot say them. It is of Him and not only of the

wonders of His Universe that I would have the children taught. But they

are only taught of the wonders, not of the Wonder-worker.

It is not that there are none who could teach, no initiates of the great

and simple mysteries, no keepers of the faith. There are such, but they

are muzzled, and the detestable horrors of civilisation go on in a

community which calls itself after the name of Christ. And so long as we

have in our schools this materialistic teaching, so long shall we raise

up generation after generation to support that civilisation and to keep

it the damnable thing we know.

Talk goes on and goes on and goes on. There is talk now of a Great

Measure for the Reform of National Education, much talk--there will be

more. There will be much ink spilt, much breath wasted; we shall hear of

Montessori and Froebel and Pestalozzi, of Science and the Classics, of

opportunities of ladders of scholarships and prizes and endowments.

We shall hear how hard it is that the sons of the plumber should not be

able to go to Oxford and how desirable it is that daughters of the

dustman should sometimes take the Prix de Rome.

We shall be told how important are the telescope and the microscope, and

how right it is that children should know all about their little

insides. The one thing we shall not hear about will be the one thing

needful.

A tottering Government may keep itself in power by such a measure, a

defeated party may, by it, bring itself back to office, but such a

measure will not keep the nation from perdition, nor bring back the soul

of a man into the true way.

We may build up as we will schemes of Education and Instruction, add

science to science, learning to learning, and facts to facts; but what

we shall build will be only a dead body unless it be informed by the

breath of the Spirit which maketh alive. For Education which teaches a

man everything but how to live to the glory of God and the service of

man is not Education, but only instruction; and it is the fruit of the

tree, not of Life, but of Death.

_PART II_

CHAPTER I

Romance in Games

A SHARP distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games

without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply

everything, in the former it supplements or corrects the suggestion of

the toy. But in both, as in every movement and desire of the natural

child, it is imagination which tints the picture and makes the whole

enterprise worth while.

In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and still more in its sister "I

spy," a little live streak of fear brought down from who knows what wild

ancestry lends to the game an excitement not to be found in games with

bats and balls and nets and bails and straightforward trappings bought

at shops. When you lurk in the shrubbery ready to spring out on the one

who is hunting you, and to become in your turn the hunter, you are no

longer a child, you are a red Indian or a Canadian settler, or a tiger

or a black-fellow, according to the measure of your dreams and the

nature of the latest book of your reading.

At this point it occurs to me that perhaps you who read may have

forgotten the difference between "Hide-and-seek" and "I spy."

Hide-and-seek is just what it says it is; half the players hide, and the

others seek them and there's an end of it. It is an interesting game,

but flat compared with "I spy." It has, however, this merit, that it can

be played without those screams to which grown-ups are, usually, so

averse. Whereas I defy any one to play "I spy" without screaming.

Hide-and-seek is a calm game; the thing sought for might almost as well

be an inanimate object: it is the game of stoats looking for pheasants'

eggs, of bears looking for honey. But "I spy" is the game of enemy

looking for enemy: it calls for the virtues of fortitude, endurance,

courage--for the splendours of physical fitness, for aptness, for speed.

In "I spy" half the players hide and the others seek; but they seek not

an unresisting stationary object, but a keen, watchful retaliatory

terror. They seek, in shrubbery and garden, behind summer-house and

conservatory, in the shelter of tree, hedge, and arbour, for the enemy,

and when that enemy is found the seeker does not just say, "Oh, here

you are"--that ending the game. Far otherwise; the seeker in "I spy"

goes warily, his heart in his mouth--for, the moment he sees a hider, he

must shout "I spy," adding the hider's name. "I spy Jimmy!" he cries,

and turning, flees at his best speed. The hidden one follows after--the

hunted becoming in one swift terrible transition the hunter, and he who

was the seeker flies with all the speed he may, across country, to the

appointed "home." The quarry unearthed has become the pursuer and

follows with yells. Grown-ups would always rather that you played

hide-and-seek--and can you wonder? But sometimes they will concede to

you "I spy" rights, and even join in the sport. It is always well, in

playing any game where anything may be trampled, such as asparagus beds,

or broken, such as windows, to have a grown-up or two on your side. And

by "your," here, of course I mean children. The habit of years is not

easily broken, and I am so much more used to writing _for_ children than

_of_ them.

Chevy Chase is a good old-fashioned game of courage and adventure. Does

any one play it now? No child can play it _con amore_ who does not know

who it was who

When his legs were smitten off

He fought upon his stumps,

and to what bold heart the bitterest drop in the cup of defeat was "Earl

Percy sees my face----"

All wreathed with romance are the song-games, "Nuts in May," "There came

Three Knights," and the rest, where the up-and-down dancing movement and

the song of marriage-by-capture ends in a hard jolly tug-of-war, and woe

to the vanquished! This is a very old game--and there are many words to

it. One set I know, but I never have known the end. Little boys in light

trousers and short jackets and little girls in narrow frilled gowns used

to play it on the village green a hundred years ago. This is how it

began:

Up and down the green grass

This and that and thus,

Come along, my pretty maid,

And take a walk with us;

You shall have a duck, my dear,

And you shall have a drake,

And you shall have a handsome man,

For your father's sake.

My mother told me all of that song-game, and that is all of it that I

can remember. She always said she would write it down, and I always

thought there was plenty of time, and somehow there was not, and so I do

not know the end. Perhaps Mr. Charles Marson, who first found out the

Somerset folk-songs of which Mr. Somebody Else now so mysteriously gets

all the credit, may know the end of these verses. If he does, and if he

sees this, perhaps he will write and tell me.

This game of come and go and give and take is alive in France; witness

the old song:

Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,

Compagnons de la Marjolaine?

Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard

Toujours si gai?

Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi,

Compagnons de la Marjolaine.

Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi

Toujours si gais.

Et que veulent ces cavaliers,

Compagnons de la Marjolaine?

Et que veulent ces cavaliers

Toujours si gais?

Des jeunes filles a marier,

Compagnons de la Marjolaine;

Des jeunes filles a marier,

Toujours si gais.

And I have no doubt that stout Dutch children and German children with

flaxen plaits, and small contadine, and Spanish and Swedish and Russian

and Lithuanian babes all move rhythmically back and forth on their

native greensward and rehearse the old story of the fair maid and the

Knight "out to marry."

The Mulberry Bush is another of the old song-games, where play-acting is

the soul of the adventure, and this too is everywhere. "A la claire

fontaine," I remember as the French version, danced on wet days in the

cloisters of the convent of my youth. Le Pont d'Avignon, a glorious

game, with its impersonations of animals, has, as far as I know, no

counterpart in this country.

All these games are active games: they can, of course, be played by

sheer imitation, a sort of parrot-and-monkey aptitude will do it; but if

they are to be enjoyed to the full, the imagination must have full play.

To _be_ a knight a-riding to fetch a fair lady is quite simple, and

quite thrilling--just as to be a bear demands nothing but growls and a

plantigrade activity in the performer to be a fearful joy to the

non-bear.

Cricket and football, fives and racquets, the games that are played with

things out of shops, do not need imagination to help them out. The games

without bought accessories should perhaps rather be termed "plays" than

games. And the more highly cultivated the imagination the more intensely

joyous are the games. All sorts of acting, dressing-up, and pretending

games depend entirely on the imagination, and it is well to encourage

children to act scenes which they have observed, or heard about or read

about. The smallest child will experience a real joy in putting its

pinafore on wrong way round, call it a coat, and announce with pride

that it is "Daddy going a tata."

In the dolls' tea-parties you will observe a careful copy or travesty of

your own "company manners," and as the small minds are filled with tales

of wonder and adventure, you will find them re-enacted, the nursery

rocking chair serving as charger for the gallant knight, and nurse's

hassock taking quite adequately the part of the dragon. A small sister

can generally be relied on to be the captive princess, especially if

handsome trappings go with the part--and a cobweb brush is an admirable

spear. The princess will be released from her bonds in time to act as

chief mourner at the funeral of the slain hassock, which can be carried

down the river in a barge made of the nursery table wrong way up--with

the nursery tablecloth for a sail--an admirable tableau certain to occur

if any one has told the children the story of Elaine. That the dragon

should have as sumptuous a funeral as Enoch Arden himself, need not

surprise you: a funeral is a funeral, be the corpse canary, guinea pig,

or hassock, and to a dead dragon are due all the honours we pay to a

gallant if unfortunate antagonist. Not only fairy tales, but history

will be acted. You will have Jane as Queen Eleanor sucking the poison

from Jack's grubby paws, and Alice as an Arab physician curing the

plague, represented by blobs of paint-water on the rigid arms of Robert.

How beloved will be the grown-up who, passing by the scene, shall

refrain from commenting on the deafening groans of the patient, and

shall, instead, offer the physician a ribbon for his girdle or a plume

from the dusting brush for his turban.

Exploring plays and all the plays which include wigwams and war paint

are such as an intelligent grown-up will be able to intensify and add

backbone to--for a child's fancy will naturally outrun his performance,

and though he may imagine a feather head-dress or moccasins, he will be

only too pleased that a grown-up should make the things for him with

that strong, unerring touch to which his small experimenting hands

cannot yet attain. All such games require numbers; your only lonely

child cannot play Indians to the full. Two is better than one and more

than two is better than two, up to the number of six or eight. People

don't seem to see how important numbers are for play. They see it fast

enough when it comes to schools, but a regular association of children

for the purposes of play is not encouraged. In a large family of boys

and girls it just happens happily, but an association of children from

various homes generally means a predatory horde of boys: girls don't

associate with unrelated girls in joyous play-adventures, and boys are

apt to think that little girls who are not their sisters are either

angels or muffs, and neither a muff nor an angel is what you want to

play games with. Parents and guardians might do a great deal to render

play-association possible: I suggest that house parties of children,

where the utmost possible liberty should be given, would stimulate

enormously the plays which encourage daring and initiative, and would

teach boys that girls are not necessarily muffs or angels, and teach

girls that boys are not all brutes.

Fathers and mothers sacrifice themselves every year in August; you see

them doing it, heavily, definitely, with clenched teeth and a grim

determination not to be selfish, and to spend a month with the children

at the seaside, however much it may cost in time, temper, and money. The

Browns go to Scarborough, their friends the Robinsons go to Wales, the

Smiths are in Devonshire and the Joneses at Littlehampton. They all go

to the same sort of lodgings, do the same sort of things, and lucky is

the mother whose nerves are not worn very thin indeed before the holiday

ends. Now suppose all these worthy and self-sacrificing parents agreed

to pool their families and let Mr. and Mrs. Brown take charge of them

all--in some jolly big house suited to the needs of so swollen a

household. Sixteen children are really, in many ways, four times easier

to manage than four--and at least forty times as easy to amuse. In fact,

you don't need to amuse them--they will amuse themselves and each other:

Mr. and Mrs. Brown will only have to adjust ebullitions.

Meanwhile the Smiths, Robinsons, and Joneses are having their holiday

where they will. Their turn of having the children will come another

year, when the Browns will be free to range the world in August, knowing

that their children are safe and happy and are, thank you, having a much

better time than they could have in small seaside lodgings, even with

the undivided attention of their fathers and mothers. Besides, if I may

for once take the part of the mothers instead of that of the children,

what sort of holiday do you think the mother has, when to the ordinary

routine of housekeeping at home are added the difficulties of

housekeeping in unfamiliar surroundings, in a house of whose

capabilities she has no experience, and with a landlady whose temper, as

often as not, is as short as her tale of extras is long? The woman who

works all the year round at the incredibly arduous task of making a

home, answering week in and week out the constant, varying demands on

all her complex mental and physical activities, does really deserve a

real holiday. What is more, she needs it. She will be a better mother

the rest of the year if she be allowed for that one month to be just a

wife, and a wife on a holiday. The wife whose turn it is to take charge

of the amalgamated families will find so great a change from the

exclusive care of her own chickens that the change in itself will be a

sort of holiday. And the children themselves, perhaps, will learn a

little from the enforced separation from the fount of unselfish

devotion, and appreciate their mother all the more if they have, be it

only half-consciously, missed her a little even through the varied and

joyous experiences of their month's house-party.

CHAPTER II

Building Cities

THE devotion of aunts has often stirred my admiration. The heroism of

aunts deserves an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place to write

that epic. Give me leave, however, to say that of all the heroic acts of

the devoted aunt, none seems to me more magnificent than the

self-sacrifice which nerves those delightful ladies to settle themselves

down to play, in cold blood, with their nephews and nieces games bought

at a shop, games in boxes. I am not talking of croquet, or even

badminton, though these may be, and are, bought in boxes at shops. Nor

do I wish to depreciate chess and draughts, nor even halma, the poor

relation of draughts and chess, nor dominoes, which we all love. These

games, so precious on wet days, or when other people have headaches,

cannot be too highly prized, too assiduously cultivated.

The rigours of the seaside holiday, too often in wet weather a time of

trial and temper, would be considerably mitigated if chess and

chess-board, draughts, dominoes, and halma were packed in the trunks

along with the serge suits, the sandshoes, and the sun-bonnets. The

games which I do so 'wonder and admire' to see aunts playing are the

meaningless games with counters and dice: ill-balanced dice and roughly

turned counters and boards that look like folding chequer-boards till

you open them, and then you find all the ugliest colours divided into

squares and circles or slabs, with snakes or motors or some other

unpleasing devices on them. These games are all exactly the same in

their primary qualities: the first of them that was invented had all the

faults of all its successors. Yet dozens of new ones are invented every

year, just to sell, and helpless children try to play them, knowing no

better, and angel aunts abet them, knowing all.

Grown-ups suffer a great deal in playing with children: it is not the

least charm of a magic city that a grown-up can play it and suffer

nothing worse than the fatigue incidental to the bricklayer's calling.

Of course, most grown-ups will say that they would rather be burnt at a

slow fire, or play halma, than be bothered with magic cities. But that

is only because they do not understand. Try the experiment the next

time you are spending a wet week-end in a country house where there are

children. Get the children to yourself and ask your hostess whether you

may borrow what you want for a game. The library is the best place for

building: there is almost certainly a large and steady table: also there

are the books. I need not urge you to spare the elegantly bound volumes,

and the prized first editions, and the priceless folios and duodecimos

in their original calf and vellum. You will find plenty of books that

nobody will mind your using--the old _Whitakers_, bound volumes of the

_Cornhill_ and _Temple Bar_--good solid blocks for the foundations of

your city. If there be a pair of candlesticks or an inkstand which

match, you may make a magnificent archway by setting up the candlesticks

as pillars and laying the inkstand on the top. You can see how this is

done in the picture of the Elephant Temple. Get the children to bring

down the bricks and enlist a friendly parlour-maid to let you have the

run of the china cupboard, or a footman, if you are in that sort of

house, to bring you the things you want on a tray.

[Illustration: THE PALACE OF CATS.

120]

But it is much better if you can go alone over the house and choose what

you really want. You invite the children to help you build, and to

build themselves. If they have never built a magic city you will find

that they will presently desert their plain brick edifices to watch the

development of your palace or temple. They will offer suggestions, and

quite soon they will offer objects. They will begin to look about the

room with their sharp eyes--and about the house with their keen memory

and imagination, and produce the sort of things that look like the sort

of things they think you might like for your building. They will wander

off, returning with needle-cases, little boxes, shells--and "Would this

do for something?" is the word on every lip. They are soon as much

absorbed in the building as you are--and I take it you are an

enthusiast--and your magic city grows apace. Then after a little while a

grown-up, bored and out of employment, will stray into the library with

"Hullo! what are you kids up to with all this rubbish?" and stand with

his hands in his pockets contemplating the building industry. If you

answer him simply and kindly, and don't resent his choice of epithet, it

is almost certain he will quite soon withdraw a hand from his pocket and

reach out to touch your magic walls with "Wouldn't it be better like

that?" Admit it, and in hardly any time at all you have him building on

his own account. Another grown-up will stray in presently with the same

question on his lips. He too will come to be bored and will remain to

build, and by tea-time you will have collected every grown-up of the

house-party--every grown-up, that is to say, with the right feeling for

cities. It will surprise you to find how keen you will yourself become

as the work goes on, and how it will call into play all your invention

and your latent craftsmanship.

You will be amazed at the results you can achieve with quite

dull-looking materials, and still more will you be surprised at the

increasing interest and skill of the grown-ups. When it is time to dress

for dinner you will feel a pang of positive despair at the thought that

your beautiful city, the child of your dreams and skill, must be taken

down. It is like the end of the magic of Cinderella when her coach

became a pumpkin, her horses mice and her coachman a fat rat. Now your

domes are once more mere basins, your fountain basins are ash-trays,

your fountains are but silver pen-cases and their gleaming waters only

strips of the tin-foil that comes off chocolate or cigarettes. The walls

of your palaces go back into the book-cases, and their facades return to

the dull obscurity of the brick-boxes. The doors and the animals who

stood on guard at the door-ways and terraces, on plinths or pillars,

share in the dark rattling seclusion where many a wooden tail has been

broken, many a painted ear lost for ever, but the tidying up has to be

done: unless your hostess is one of those rare and delightful people who

see what their guests like and lets them do it. In that case she may say

"Oh! what a pity to disturb the pretty thing! Why not let your city

stay for a day or two, so that the children can build some more to it

to-morrow. No, of course it won't be in the way--and wouldn't it be

pretty if we lighted it up with fairy lights after dark?"

Then your city really has a chance. The children will think of it till

bed-time and fall asleep in the happy throes of their first

town-planning.

You may think that I exaggerate the charms of magic cities, because I

happened to invent them, and you may be afraid that my swan, if you ever

make up your mind to adopt it, may turn out to be an ugly and

dispiriting duckling. I assure you this is not so. I have never met a

child who did not like building magic cities, and not many grown-ups. Of

course the love of them grows, like other loves, and the longer you can

keep the city standing, the fonder you and your playmates will get of

it. It will grow more and more finished in detail, and the ugly

make-shifts will be reorganised and made neat with an irreproachable

neatness. If the magic city game were played in schools, as I think it

ought to be, a long table--or series of tables--could easily be kept for

it, and the city kept standing and be added to from day to day. But it

will not be the same sort of city as the one you build in the house

where the parlour-maid lives and still less the sort that happens in

the house where there is a butler and many silver boxes and cups and

candlesticks.

Now I come to write all this down it seems very trivial, and it will

perhaps seem even more so when I come to tell you about the different

things we made and used for magic cities. But it is not really trivial.

I do not think I claim for the magic city game more than it justifies,

and I will tell you, presently, why I think this. Of course, when you

have finished your city, if you ever do finish it, you make up stories

about it, and always, even when you are building it, you imagine how

splendid it would be if you were small enough to walk through the arches

of your city gates, to run along the little corridors of your city

palaces. Of course, it would do quite as well if your city became big

enough for you to run about in while still keeping your natural

size--but it is somehow not really so cosy to think of.

When I had built my first three or four magic cities this idea of

getting into the city--being, of course, correct citizen-size--lived

with me so much that I wrote a story-book about it called _The Magic

City_,[A] in which a boy and girl do really become the right size and

enter into the city they have built. They have there all the adventures

whose wraiths danced before me when I was building courts and making

palm trees and finding out the many fine and fair uses of cowries and

fir-cones.

This book, _The Magic City_, produced a curious effect. I hope I shall

not look conceited (because really I am only proud) when I say that

about my books I have had the dearest letters from children, saying

pretty things about the stories in the prettiest way. It is one of the

most heart-warming things in the world to get these letters and to

answer them. And if I had letters like these I should have been only

pleased and not disturbed. But the letters about the Magic City, though

they were full of the pretty, awkward, delicious things that children

write to the author of the books they like, held something else--a

demand, severe and almost unanimous, to know how magic cities were

built, and whether "children like us" could build one, and, if so, how?

I got so many of these letters that I decided to build a magic city

where any child, in London at any rate, could come and see it. And I

built it at the Children's Welfare Exhibition which the _Daily News_

arranged last year at Olympia. The history of that building would make

a largish and intimate volume. The difficulties that beset a

home-dweller when she goes out into the world, the anguish of

misunderstandings which arise between the builder of magic cities and

the people who lay linoleum and put up electric lights, the confusion

which results from having packed in boxes and all mixed up the building

materials which you are accustomed to look for as you need them in your

own home, the extraordinary mass of people, the extraordinary kindness

of people; for after all, it is the kindness which stands out. It is

true that the gentleman who, very much isolated, fixed the electric

lights, behaved exactly like an earthquake, upsetting two temples, a

palace, and a tank with an educated seal in it. But then how more than a

brother was the man who did the whitewash! It is true that the dictator

with the linoleum--but I will not remember these things. Let me remember

how many good friends I found among the keepers of the stalls, how a

great personage of the _Daily News_ came with his wife at the last

despairing moment, and lent me the golden and ruby lamps from their

dining-table, how the Boy Scouts "put themselves in four" to get me some

cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how their Scout Master gave me

fourteen beautiful little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in my

silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers on the one side and the home

hobbies on the other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry Blossom Boot

Polish lady gave me hairpins and the wardens of Messrs. W. H. Smith's

bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted boy-sculptor for the

Plasticine stall, moved by sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day

and dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled by his own hands, in

the sands about my Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came and

talked to me for half an hour in the most flattering French, while the

Deity from the _Daily News_ looked on benign.

These are things I can never forget. When the show opened I was feeling

like a snail who has inadvertently come out without his shell. Think how

all this kindness comforted and protected me. And then came the long

stream of visitors--crowds of them--I don't know how many thousands, who

came and looked at my magic city and asked questions, and looked and

looked at it, looked and said things. It is because of what they said

that I am writing about that show at all. They all liked the city except

two, and I cannot think that those two were, in other respects, really

nice people. And more than half of them asked whether I would not write

a book about the magic city which I had built there, and which lay

looking so real and romantic under the soft glow of the tinted lamps:

not a story-book, but a book to tell other people how to make such

cities. And I said I would tell all I knew in a book. And when I came to

write I found that there were many other things that I wanted to write

about children, and other things than magic cities, and I wrote them,

and this is the book.

And the reason I am telling you all this is that my big magic city at

Olympia showed me, more than anything else could have done, that the

building of magic cities interests practically every one, young or old.

It is very difficult to say all this and yet not to feel that you will

think that I am boasting about my magic city. But I want you to believe

that it was very beautiful, and that you can build one just as beautiful

or much more beautiful if you care to try it. It is such an easy game.

Every one can play it. And every one likes it--even quite old people. By

the way, I have been asked to build another city at Olympia in April,

and I hope that it will be a prettier one even than the other which I

loved so.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Macmillans.

CHAPTER III

Bricks--and Other Things

IT is a mistake when you are going to build a city to make too large a

collection of building materials before you begin to build. If it is

natural to you to express yourself by pencil lines on paper you might

perhaps draw an outline of the masses of your city as you see them in

the architect's vision or illumination which should precede all

building, either of magic cities or municipal cab-shelters. Having

roughly indicated on paper the general shape of your city as you look at

it from the front--the shape it would have against the western sky at

dusk (I think architects call this the elevation, don't they?)--you

proceed to collect such material as will roughly indicate that shape on

the table or other building-place. And here let me once more warn the

builder new to his business not to be trapped by the splendid obvious

bait of floor's wide space. To build palaces while prone on the stomach

may be natural and easy to extreme youth. To grown-up people it is

agonising and impossible. The floor has only two qualifications as a

building site. It is large--larger at least than any of the pieces of

furniture which stand on it--and it is flat. And when you have said that

you have said all. Whereas the inconveniences of the floor as a place

for building are innumerable. The floor is draughty, it is inaccessible,

except from the attitude of the serpent, and the serpent's attitude,

even if rich in a certain lax comfort, is most unfavourable for the

steady use of both hands. If you want to see how unfavourable assume

that attitude and try to build a card-house on the floor. You cannot do

it. If you kneel--well, you know how hard the floor gets if you kneel on

it for quite a little time; if you sit or squat your dress or your

coat-tails insist on playing at earthquakes with your building. Also the

city on the floor is liable to hostile invasion by cats or dogs or

servants: to the crushing and scattering by short-sighted outsiders or

people who rush into the room to look for something in a hurry. Think of

a playful elephant in some Eastern court of carved pearl and ivory

lattice; an elephant co-inciding with one of the more fanciful volcanic

eruptions, and your conception will pale into placidity in the face of

the spectacle of a normal puppy in a floor-built city. And on the floor

things not only get broken, they get lost. Cotton reels roll under

sofas, draughts bowl away into obscurity and are only found next day by

the housemaid when she moves the fender, and not then, as often as not;

chess kings are walked on and get their crowns chipped; card counters

disappear for ever, and it is quite impossible for you to keep an eye on

your materials when you are grovelling among them. Therefore build on a

table--or tables. Tables of different shapes, heights, and sizes make

beautiful sites for cities. And bureaux are good, if you may take the

drawers out and empty the pigeon-holes. I remember a wonderful city we

made once: it was called the "City of the Thousand Lights," and it was

built on a bureau, two large tables and three other smaller ones, all

connected by bridges in the handsomest way. (The lids of the brick boxes

make excellent bridges and you can adorn them to your fancy, and make

impressive gate-houses at each end.) The bureau was the Temple of Mung,

and we sacrificed a pale pink animal from the Noah's Ark at the shrine

of this, the most mysterious of the Gods of Pegana. The thousand

lights--there were not a thousand, really, but there were many luminous

towers, with windows of a still brighter glow. You make them by putting

a night-light in a tumbler--a little water first by way of fire

insurance--and surrounding the tumbler by a sheet of paper with windows

and battlements and fixed to a cylindrical shape by pins. The paper

cylinders are, of course, fitted on outside the tumblers so that there

is no danger of fire. All the same it is better to let a grown-up do the

luminous towers.

[Illustration: GUARDED ARCH.]

Having chosen your site and blocked out the mass of your buildings, you

begin to collect the building material. For my own part I see the city I

am going to build in the eye of the mind--or of the heart--so vividly

and consistently that I never need to make notes of it on paper. I know

when what I am building is not in accord with the vision, and then I

pull it down. Truly in accord it never really is, but it approximates.

Now when you have seen the silhouette of your city and begin to look for

stuff to build with, you will instantly find that everything you can lay

your hands on is too small. The bricks, even the boxes which contained

them, are suited for the detailed building which is to come later, but

now you want something at once bigger and less conventionally

proportioned. Now is the time to look for boxes--not the carved

sandal-wood boxes in which aunts keep their pins, nor the smooth

cedarwood boxes in which uncles buy their cigars, though both these are

excellent when you come to the details of your work, but for the mass

you want real big boxes; if you have a large table, or tables, Tate's

sugar boxes are not too large. Also there are the boxes in which starch

is packed, and cocoa, and the flatter boxes which the lady at the

sweet-shop will give you if she likes you, and sell to you for a penny

anyhow. The boxes in which your father gets his collars, and the boxes

in which your mother gets her chocolates, though not really large,

should be collected at the same time, because they need the same

treatment. I am assuming now that you are not building a city for an

afternoon's amusement, but one for which you have found a safe resting

place--a city that may take days to build and will not be disturbed for

days. If you can once found your city in a safe place, and you are

working at it day after day, you will go on thinking of more and more

things to be added to it, and it will grow in beauty under your hands as

naturally as a flower under the hand of summer.

[Illustration: BOXES.]

You have now your collection of boxes--but they are of plain, rough

wood, and probably disfigured by coarse coloured printed papers telling

what the boxes once held. These papers you wash off, and when the boxes

are clean and dry, you paint or colour-wash them to suit your

requirements. Now your requirements are large blocks of colours to match

your bricks, and bricks are of three colours--white, terra-cotta, and

stone colour.

The stone bricks are stone colour and terra-cotta--oak bricks are very

nearly stone colour--and there are white-wood bricks. To these three I

would add a dark brown; and as this dark brown is not sold in boxes at

the shops, you had better colour some of your bricks with it for

yourself. Dark wood in a city gives a wonderful richness and helps the

lighter colours more than you would think possible. A city in which some

buildings are of dark wood will have an air of reality never achieved by

a city where all is red or white or stone colour. By the way, among the

stone bricks there are some blue ones, but you will always have enough

of them, for they are the last things you will ever want to use.

Your boxes then must be coloured either white, red, stone colour, or

dark brown. In the white use either white paint--flat, not shining, or

if that cost too much trouble and money, whitewash made of whitening,

size, hot water and a pinch of yellow ochre or chrome powder to give it

a pleasant ivory creaminess. There should be a good deal of size so that

the whitewash does not come off on every thing.

The red boxes can be painted to match the red bricks, or colour-washed

(whitewash as before, but red ochre for colour).

Stone colour is not a very satisfactory tint and too much of it makes

for gloom. The lids and bottoms of the brick boxes will generally give

you as much of it as you want. But if you desire stone colour you can

make it by putting a pinch of raw umber in the whitewash. Or you can

paint your boxes with this uninteresting tint--resembling the doors of

back kitchens. With these paints or colour-washes you can make your odd

many-shaped boxes into smooth-surfaced blocks to match your bricks: and

not only wooden, but cardboard boxes can be treated in this way. All

these colours can be bought in gigantic penn'orths at the oil-shops. But

when I come to the dark brown, which I confess is my favourite colour,

no cardboard box will serve your turn. You must choose clean, smooth

wood, because the brown colouring is transparent, and the grain will

show through. Your bricks will be smooth enough, and if the boxes are

not smooth a little sand-paper will soon subdue their rough exterior. I

suppose you know how to use sand-paper? If you just rub with your

fingers you hurt your fingers and don't make much progress; the best way

is to wrap the sand-paper round a flat piece of wood--a wooden brick

will do--and rub with that.

When your wood is all smooth you mix your stain. And here I make a

present to all housewives of the best floor stain in the world. Get a

tin of Brunswick black--the kind you put on stoves--and some turpentine.

Mix a little of the black and a little of the turpentine in a pot and

try it on the wood with a smooth brush--a flat brush is the best--till

you have the colour you want, always remembering that it will be a

little lighter when it is dry. When you have decided on the colour,

paint your bricks and boxes on five out of their six sides lightly and

smoothly, keeping to the grain of the wood, and not going over the same

surface twice if you can help it. This is why a flat brush is the best:

it will go right down the side of a brick and colour it at one sweep.

Then stand each brick up on end to dry. When it is dry you can paint the

under bit on which it has been standing. While you have stains and

colours going it is well to colour some of your arches, and also such

things as cotton-reels, and the little wooden pill-boxes that you get at

the chemist's. Before colouring these boxes fill them with sand or

stones and stick the lids on with glue. Otherwise they will not be heavy

enough to build with happily.

This painting or colouring should be done out of doors, or in an

out-house, if possible. If you have to do it in the house spread several

thicknesses of newspaper before you begin, and make a calm resting place

for your painted things where they can dry at leisure and not be

scarred with the finger-marks of her who "clears away."

The earnest builder will keep a watchful eye on any carpentering that

may go on in the house, and annex the smaller blocks of wood cut off the

end of things, which, to an alien eye, are so much rubbish, but which

are to the builder stores of price.

If there are a few shillings to spare, the carpenter will, for those few

shillings, cut you certain shapes which you cannot buy in shops--arches

of a comfortable thickness and of satisfying curves, and slabs of board

for building steps. These should be of varying lengths and thicknesses

and made in sets of twelve steps, with two boards to each step,

twenty-four slabs to a set. The biggest might be 1 in. thick and the

bottom and largest slabs 12 by 6 in., lessening to 6 by 1 in. The next

set might be 3/4 in., and of corresponding proportions, then 1/2 in., then 1/4

in. The two basic slabs of the 3/4 in. would be 9 by 4-1/2 in., and those of

the 1/2 in. would be 6 by 3 in. A set with 1/4 in. steps (the basic slabs 3

by 1-1/2 in.) would complete the set. Flights of steps of many varying

heights and sizes could be built with these slabs. Ask the carpenter--if

the shillings are forthcoming--to save for you the curved pieces of

wood which come out of the arches. They are very useful for the bases

of pillars, for towers and for the pedestals of statues or vases. Some

of the arches, steps, and blocks should be coloured to match the red,

white, and brown bricks.

[Illustration: ARCHES AND PILLARS.]

Some of the boxes, particularly the larger ones, should have doorways

sawn in them on opposite sides--it is pleasant to look _through_ a

building and see the light beyond; and if you are a thorough builder you

can make a pillared interior which will delight the eyes of those who

stoop down and peer through the doorway. A few narrow, oblong windows,

high up, will also be useful. You need not show them unless you wish:

you can always conceal them by a facade of bricks.

[Illustration: PILLARED COURT.]

Another pleasant use of a big box is to cut out the top and sides and

make a columned court of it, which, when cream-washed, dignifies your

city with almost all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was

Rome. The columns are cut from broom-handles--twopence each at the

oil-shop, or, in the case of smaller boxes, from those nice round smooth

wooden sticks which cost a penny and are used in ordinary life to thread

window-blinds on.

If you are going to make a city which is to stand for some time, a

little thin glue is a good help to stability. If it is only a

here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow city, Plasticine is good--the least touch

of it seeming to make things safe which otherwise might totter to their

ruin. But except as mortar Plasticine should be shunned. It is not good

as a building material.

Having now your bricks, boxes, arches, steps, and rounds, you may begin

to block out your building. Quite soon you will begin to find that

everything is too rectilinear. Even the arches and the rounds and the

pillars and the pill-boxes cannot satisfy your desire for curves. This

is the moment when you will begin to look about you for domes. And the

domes, on the instant of their imposition in your building, will call

out for minarets. It is then that you will wander about the house

seeking eagerly for things that are like other things. Your search will

be magnificently successful, if only the lady of the house has given you

a free hand, and you have been so fortunate as to secure the sympathies

of the kitchen queen.

CHAPTER IV

The Magic City

THE only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after

all, the best magic in the world. The idea of it came to me when I was

dissatisfied with the materials provided for children to build with, and

I think it must be a really true idea, because wherever I have applied

it, it has worked, and that, I am told, is in accordance with the

philosophy of pragmatism and a characteristic of all great discoveries.

You may build magic cities in homes of modest comfort, using all the

pretty things you can lay your hands on. You may build them in the

mansions of the rich, if the rich are nice people and love cities, and

if the butler will let you have the silver candlesticks for pillars, and

the silver-gilt rose-bowls for domes; and you could build one in the

houses of the very poor, if the very poor had any space for

building--build them there and not use a single thing that could not be

begged or borrowed by an intelligent child, no matter how poor.

Children love to build. I still think with fond affection, and I am

afraid speak with tiresome repetition, of those big oak bricks which we

had when we were children. They disappeared when we left the old London

house where I was born. It was in Kennington, that house--and it had a

big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and

cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lilies and flags in

the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that

smelt like heaven. Our nursery was at the top of the house, a big room

with a pillar in the middle to support the roof. "The post," we called

it: it was excellent for playing mulberry bush, or for being martyrs at.

The skipping rope did to bind the martyrs to the stake. When we left

that house we went to Brighton, where there was a small and gritty

garden, where nothing grew but geraniums and calceolarias. And we did

not have our bricks any more. Perhaps they were too heavy to move.

Perhaps the Brighton house was too small for the chest. I think I must

have clamoured for the old bricks, for I remember very well the advent

of a small box of deal bricks made in Germany, which had indeed two

arches and four pillars, and a square of glass framed in wood daubed

with heavy, ugly body colour, and called a window. But you could not

build with those bricks. So there was no building at Brighton except on

the beach. Sand is as good as anything in the world to build with--but

there is no sand on the beach at Brighton, only sandiness. There are

stones--pebbles you call them, but they are too round to be piled up

into buildings. The only thing you can play with them is dolls' dinner

parties. There are plenty of oyster shells and flat bits of slate and

tile for dishes and plates--and it is quite easy to find stones the

proper shape and colour for boiled fowls and hams and roast legs of

mutton, German sausages, ribs of beef, mince pies, pork pies, roast hare

or calf's head. But building is impossible.

In the courtyard of our house in France there was an out-house with a

sloping roof and a flat parapet about four feet high. We used to build

little clay huts along this, and roof them with slates, leaving a hole

for a chimney. The huts had holes for windows and doors, and we used to

collect bits of candle and put them in our huts after dark and enjoy the

lovely spectacle of our illuminated buildings till some one remembered

us and caught us, and sent us to bed. That was the curse of our

hut-building--the very splendour of the result attracted the attention

one most wished to avoid. But clay was our only building material, and

after the big bricks were lost I never had any more bricks till I had

children of my own who had bricks of their own. And then I played with

them and theirs. And even then I never thought of building magic cities

till the Indian soldiers came.

They were very fine soldiers with turbans and swords and eyes that

gleamed in quite a lifelike way, riding on horses of a violently active

appearance: they came to my little son when he was getting well after

measles or some such sorrow, and he wanted a fort built for them. So we

rattled all the bricks out of their boxes on to the long cutting-out

table in the work-room and began to build. But do what we would our fort

would not look like a fort--at any rate not like an Eastern fort. We

pulled it down and tried again, and then again, but no: regardless of

our patient energy our fort quietly but persistently refused to look

like anything but a factory--a building wholly unworthy of those

military heroes with the prancing steeds and the coloured turbans, and

the eyes with so much white in them. So then I wondered what was needed

to give a hint of the gorgeous East to the fort, and I perceived that

what was wanted was a dome--domes.

So I fetched some brass finger-bowls and lustre basins off the dresser

in the dining-room and inverted one on the chief tower of our fort, and

behold! the East began to sparkle and beckon. Domes called for minarets,

and chessmen on pillars supplied the need. One thing led to another, and

before the day was over the Indian horsemen were in full charge across a

sanded plain where palm trees grew--a sanded plain bounded only by the

edges of the table, along three sides of which were buildings that never

rose beside the banks of Thames, but seemed quite suitable piles to

reflect their fair proportions in the Ganges or the Sutlej, especially

when viewed by eyes which had not had the privilege of gazing on those

fair and distant streams.

I learned a great deal in that my first day of what I may term romantic

building, but what I learned was the merest shadow-sketch of the

possibilities of my discovery. My little son, for his part, learned that

a bowl one way up is a bowl, a thing for a little boy to eat bread and

milk out of; the other way up it is a dome for a king's palace. That

books are not only things to read, but that they will make marble slabs

for the building of temples. That chessmen are not only useful for

playing that difficult and tedious game on which grown-ups are so slowly

and silently intent, or even for playing all those other games, of

soldiers, which will naturally occur to any one with command of the

pleasant turned pieces. Chessmen, he learned, had other and less simple

uses. As minarets of delicate carved work they lightened the mass of

buildings and conferred elegance and distinction, converting what had

been a block of bricks into a pavilion for a sultan or a tomb for a

sultan's bride.

[Illustration: MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM.]

There was a little guard-room, I remember, at the corner of our first

city, and there has been a little guard-room at the corner of every city

we have built since. In simple beauty, that little guard-room seemed to

us then to touch perfection. And really, you know, I have not yet been

able to improve on it. The material was simplicity itself: six books,

five chessmen, and a basin; and you see here how the guard-room looked

when it was done.

[Illustration: THE GUARD-ROOM.]

[Illustration: THE DOMINO DOOR.]

There was a black box, I remember, standing on another box, with domino

steps. It needed a door, and we made it a door of ivory with the double

blank of the dominoes, and a portico of three cigarettes--two for

pillars and one to lie on the top of the pillars and complete the

portico. You have no idea how fine the whole thing looked--like a

strong little house of ebony and ivory--a little sombre in appearance

perhaps, and like a house that has a secret to keep, but quite fine. The

palm trees we made out of pieces of larch and yew fastened by Plasticine

to the tops of elder twigs--and elder twigs have a graceful carriage,

not too upright and yet not drooping. They look very like the trunks of

tropical trees. But if you have not elders and larches and yew trees to

command, you can make trees for your city in other ways. For little

trees in tubs we had southernwood stuck in cotton reels--these make

enchanting tubs, and there are a good many different shapes, so that

your flower tubs are pleasantly varied. Fir cones we found useful, too;

they made magnificent _chevaux de frise_.

[Illustration: LARCH PALM.]

[Illustration: THE MAGIC CITY.

152]]

On the first day of building what we soon came to call magic cities we

trusted to inspiration; there was no time for thought. And this day was

perhaps the most interesting day of all--for we had everything to learn.

One of the things which I learned was that this magic city game was an

excellent training for eye and hand, as well as for the imagination and

the more soothing of the domestic virtues. The eye is trained to

perceive likenesses and differences in the shapes and colours of

things--to notice, as I said, that a bowl is a dome wrong way up, and

that cigarettes are like white pillars. A beautiful yet sinister temple

might be built with cigars for pillars and cigar-boxes for pediments,

if cigars were the sort of things you were ever allowed to play with.

You see that yew and larch and elder can be made to look like palm

trees, and that shrubs in tubs are really like sprigs of southernwood in

cotton reels. You go about with eyes newly opened to form and colour:

you look at every object in a new light, trying to see whether it is or

is not like something else--something that can be used in your magic

city. You notice that a door is much the same shape as auntie's

mother-of-pearl card-case, and your architectural instinct, already

beginning to develop, assures you that a pearly door would be a

beautiful thing for a temple, if only auntie sees things in the same

light as you do. You perceive that a cribbage board is straight and

narrow, as a path leading to such a door might be, and that if you stick

tiny tufts of southernwood or veronica into the holes along the ivory

sides of your path, your path will run between two little green hedges.

You will notice that books make colonnades darkly mysterious if the lids

of the brick boxes are laid along the back and along the top, and that

based on these solidly built colonnades your bricks and arches will rise

in galleries of unexpected dignity and charm. The building itself, the

placing of bricks and dominoes, and books and chessmen and bowls, with

exactness and neatness, is in itself a lesson in firm and delicate

handling, such a lesson as is impossible if you are building with bricks

alone. The call on the imagination is strong and clear. A house--the

meanest hut--cannot be built without a plan or without an architect,

though the architect may be only a little child and the plan may be only

a little child's dream. To build without a plan is to heap bricks one on

another, to make a cairn, not a house. The plan for the magic city,

then, gets itself dreamed--the child's imagination learns to know what

the bowl will look like when it is upside down, and, presently, what

sort of bowls and books and bricks are needed to give to the

cloud-capped palace of its desire some shadow in solid fact perceptible

to the senses. To create in the image of his dream is the hope and the

despair of every artist. And even though the image be distorted--as in

all works of art, even the greatest, it always must be--yet it is joy

even to have created the poorest image of a dream.

And in the labour of creation will blossom those domestic virtues which

best adorn the home; patience--for it is not often that for the young

architect dream and image even vaguely coincide at the first effort, or

the second or the third; good temper, for no one can build anything in a

rage. The spirit of anger is the enemy of the spirit of architecture.

And besides, being angry may make your hand shake, and then nothing is

any good. Perseverance too, without which patience is a mere passive

endurance. All these grow strong while you build your cities and try to

make visible your dream.

I do not mean that a child building a city sees all of it at once--in

every detail; I don't suppose even the heaviest of architects does that.

But I mean that he sees the masses of it with the eye of the mind and

arrives by experiment at the details that best suit those masses. If the

glass ash-tray will not do, the tea-cup without a handle will--or

perhaps the flower-pot saucer, or the lid of a cocoa-tin. . . . One must

look about, and find something that _will_ do, something which when it

is put in its place will seem the only possible thing. I don't know how

real architects work, but this is how you work with magic cities.

CHAPTER V

Materials

YOU wander round the house seeking beautiful things which look like

other beautiful things. Let us suppose that you have the run of a house

where beautiful things are. I will tell you afterwards what to do in the

house where beautiful--or at any rate costly--things are not. It is best

when the owner of the house is an enthusiastic member of the building

party; then she will grudge nothing.

In the drawing-room you will find silver candlesticks and a silver

inkstand. The candlesticks are like pillars. Put the inkstand across the

pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled splendour. If there be a

silver-backed blotting-book, take it. It will make the great door of

your greatest temple. Silver bowls should not be passed by, nor bronzes.

A vase of Japanese bronze set up between two ebony elephants crowns a

flat pillared building with splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or

Egyptian gods that have lain a thousand years safe in their bronze amid

the sands of the desert, cast aside by the foot of the camel, unseen in

the shadow of the tent, and now decking the mantelpiece of the room you

are looting. Little silver figures of knights in armour and what

not--take them if you get the chance. Chessmen, too, as many as you can

get, the carved ivory ones, of red and white, and the black and brown

kind where the heads of the kings and queens are so like marbles and

those of the pawns like boot-buttons; draughts too, and spillikins, and

those little metal animals, heavy and coloured life-like, which you see

on glass shelves in the fancy shop: take them too. They will serve other

uses than those to which you will dedicate your Noah's Ark animals. Card

counters, especially the golden and mother-of-pearl kinds, and dominoes,

and the willow-pattern pots and a blue cup or so from the glass-fronted

cupboard. Take all these, always giving preference to the things that

you will not be asked to put back the same day. Little Japanese

cabinets, tea-caddies of tortoiseshell or wood or silver, silver

boxes--and boxes of all beautiful kinds. Do not take the playing cards

that people play bridge with: these are never quite the same after they

have been used in magic cities, and the Queen of Hearts always gets

lost. You can usually acquire odd packs of cards that nobody wants.

Those with black and gold backs are the best. They make gorgeous

pagodas, and a touch of Plasticine keeps each card where it should be.

In the dining-room you may acquire perhaps, at least you can in mine,

brass finger-bowls, and the lids of urns and kettles from the

dresser--egg-cups and mugs and basins of lustre and of blue. Also those

very little pewter liqueur-cups from Liberty's, and the tumblers for

your towers of light, if you are going to have any. The library will

yield you books and atlases--very useful for roofs these last, if they

do not slope too much from back to edge; if they do, you can get even

with them by wedges of paper laid in on the thin side.

But the kitchen will be your happiest hunting-ground, and here you will

make a good bag even in those houses where you are not allowed any of

the treasures from the drawing-room or the dining-room.

Tins--tins of all kinds and shapes, from the tin that once held Bath

Olivers and its lesser brother where coffee once lived to the square

smaller tins designed for cocoa, mustard, pepper, and so forth.

[Illustration: HONESTY PILLARS.]

A flour-dredger and a pepper-pot, a potato-cutter, patty pans, and those

little tall tins that you bake castle puddings in, the round wooden

moulds with which dairy-maids imprint cows and swans upon pats of

butter, the kitchen mortar, especially the big marble one, so heavy that

cook does not care to use it, brown earthenware bowls and stewing-pots,

the lids of tea-pots, clothes-pegs, jars that have held ginger, and jars

that have held jam--especially the brownish corrugated kind of jar--all

these things and many more you may glean in a kitchen whose Queen is

kind.

One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever made was built of

kitchen things, and bricks and the boxes of bricks, a few shells, and a

few chessmen.

The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and a Bath Oliver tin, very

brightly polished; the windows and doors and crenellations are of black

_passe-partout_, that nice gummed paper which you buy in reels for

binding pictures and glass together when you don't want to have

picture-frames. On the tops of the tins are the lids of a silver urn, a

silver butter dish, and a silver jam-jar. A salt-cellar (wrong way up,

with a white chess knight on it) and a pepper-pot with _passe-partout_

doors and windows stand at the base of the tower, and turrets are made

of round bricks and draughts, with the chess castles on the top. The

porch is a big potato-cutter, with a white chess king on it, and on each

side two books with a binding of white and pale gold. Along the top of

the porch run the lids of two domino-boxes; on these are two rounds that

happened when the arches were being cut out. On these little pearl

shells are glued, and little roofs of blue tiles complete the porch.

Behind these more books, white and pale gold with marbled sides, lead up

to the platform on which the great tin towers rise up against the snowy

background (linen sheets over the backs of chairs). The lower building

is of the boxes of bricks faced with bricks and bearing a large blue jar

crowned with a silver egg-cup, a flour-dredger, and a pepper-pot, and

some blue and white tiles. An Egyptian god stands at the corner of the

upper and the lower building, and two green trees with white roses grow

out of a tomb at the left. The pathway is of tiles edged with fir cones,

and two rose-trees within tubs (cotton reels) stand at its beginning;

the whole thing was blue and silver and black, and I wish I could show

you a coloured picture of it, or, better still, build the thing up for

you to see.

The lower platform on the right is a box faced with silver seed-vessels

of honesty, and the arches and court are red. The steps are made of

blocks of sugar. The tank is edged with red bricks and the water where

the seal swims is silver paper. In front is a pavement made of

mother-of-pearl card counters, and the inside of the court is made of

one large red tile with a pattern of white on it. (You can do this with

a square board painted red, and counters laid on it.) The fountain in

the middle is a brass match-box and the waters that rise from it are

silver paper; but in the picture the water of the fountain seems to

have been blown aside by the wind, which no doubt is severe in "those

desolate regions of snow." You can build just such another tower and

castle with the things you have, but when once you start building you

will most likely think of some other way, quite different from mine, and

just as good.

Tiles, by the way, are most useful, and if you have an uncle who is an

architect he will have any number sent to him as samples, and he will be

rather glad to get rid of them. If your uncles are all eminent in other

walks of life it is a pity, but you are probably friends with the man

who papers and paints your house, or the man who comes when the pipes

burst at Christmas, or the man who comes about the gas, or the man who

knows all the sullen secrets of the kitchen range. It will be strange if

none of these can get you a few coloured tiles when once they know you

want them. It is well, if you are a child with a taste for building, to

take pains to become acquainted with all the men who come to your house

to do interesting things with tools and wood and iron and lead. Quite

apart from the joy of watching their slow and mysterious processes, and

thinking how easy it would be to be a plumber or a paperhanger yourself,

there are all sorts of things left over from their work which are of no

use to them, but may be of much use to you. All sorts of screws and

nails, for instance, these generous men will now and then bestow--little

screws of dry colour, little pieces of brass, door-knobs and

finger-plates, thick red earthenware pipe, good for towers, lengths of

pleasantly coloured wall-paper--the wrong side of which, being plain,

can be used for all sorts of purposes. Lead piping is useful too,

especially if you get it cut into 2-in. lengths--and cut _straight_. The

sections make excellent and stable flower-pots for cities. Bits of brass

tubing are useful too--in fact, brass objects of all sorts deserve your

careful consideration. Because, if a city is to look handsome, it must

have a good deal of metal about it, as the cities in Atlantis did.

As I write I see more and more clearly that a sharp distinction must be

drawn between cities built and demolished in an afternoon, and cities

that can be kept going and added to day by day for weeks. You may often

be fortunate enough to raid drawing-room and dining-room and to use the

spoils for a building that only lasts a day, but no one will strip her

rooms of all the pretty things you want and let you keep them for weeks.

Therefore if you are going to build a city that is to go on, you must

collect the materials of your own, and the odds and ends that amiable

workmen will readily give you will take a useful place in your

collection. If you let it be known that you want odds and ends of pretty

and simple shapes, your friends will save them for you, and you will

gradually amass the things you need. I know well enough that there will

have to be a place to keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear out

all the toys you never play with, will hold a good deal, and many of the

things you collect will do for other purposes as well as for the

building of cities.

CHAPTER VI

Collections

[Illustration: TREES.]

FIRST in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps

of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably

have. Odd chessmen--quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few

pence--are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men

are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and

nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Glass drops off

old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for

grass plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very

realistic grass lawns can be made by chopping up the long green grass

that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up,

and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you

have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it

all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you

sprinkle your chopped grass thickly all over it and leave it to dry.

Next day, _not before_, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over

so that the loose grass falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your

grass plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick

wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and

charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes

good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard

rose-trees of loofah--dyed green, and the stalks of long matches

painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white

immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large

trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued

on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be

made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge grass.

Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool

or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket

bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten

the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead

piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the grass, fold them back

level, cut the stem.

For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or

marjoram make charming little trees.

Shells are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of

carving. Almost all shells will be useful in one way or another, but I

have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly shells which you

find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs

of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly shells that lie on the

rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these shells strongly

on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.

[Illustration: THICK ARCHES.]

Keep your shells in boxes. There are always plenty of boxes in the

world, and if not boxes, little bags will do to hold the different kinds

of shells. It is well worth while to keep the different kinds separate.

The work of sorting out the shells is very damping to the eager

enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative design. Indeed, it is well to

keep all your building materials sorted each according to its kind, the

wooden things together and the metal things and, above all, the crockery

things. Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and the bricks in

their boxes, and when you are going to build don't get everything out

at once and make a rubbish heap of it on the floor.

[Illustration: FAN WINDOW.]

As you grow more accustomed to building, you will find that sometimes

you build a temple or palace that charms you so much that you wish to

build it again; and you will soon learn what are the materials needed,

and just take out those and a few more from your store. I say a few

more, because you will never build your temple or your palace twice

_exactly_ the same: you are sure to think of some improvement, however

small.

I have made beautiful windows with the sticks of an old ivory fan,

framed in dark wood bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above with

elephant tusk shells and others, and below with carved ivory card

counters.

[Illustration: THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE.]

There is a certain Elephant Temple which I have built many times. Its

floor is a red and white chessboard, and its roof is supported on a

double row of white pillars. White pillars surround the altar--a wooden

box--on which the ebony elephant stands. On each side of him are red

fairy lights, hidden by buttresses from the human eye which peeps

through the brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and falling full on

the elephant on his pillared shrine. The walls are of big red

books--_Sheridan's Plays_, _Tom Jones_, and Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.

The roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing case, stained a

dark brown like the bricks. On the side are the windows made of the

ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant tusk shells. There is a

door, too, a mother-of-pearl one; in a former life it was the card-case

of a much-loved aunt, who nobly contributed it to the Temple. Above this

door is a white animal from the Noah's Ark.

And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained brown wooden

bricks. The other side shows between dark buttresses the red of the

books, and towards the back of this side are small square

buildings--wooden boxes stained brown--with brass domes and mysterious

doorways. I think the priests and attendants of the Temple live here.

The front of the Temple shows a little of the red between dark

buttresses, which, here, are ornamented with delicate dark carved

chessmen. The gate is of pierced brass--two finger-plates for a door,

and the brazen pillars of the portico are two candlesticks, which

support a brass inkstand, on which stand two yellowish wooden chessmen.

On the middle of the roof is a big lacquered wooden bowl--the kind that

nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes or coffee. Above is a

brass rose-bowl, on that a finger-bowl of inlaid brass, crowned with a

black chess king. There are two dark arches with bed-knobs on them, and

round the roof are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets made of

dark bricks with chessmen on the top.

In front of the pillars at the gate two black elephants stand on wooden

plinths, and the fore-court of the Temple and the space at the side are

paved with mother-of-pearl.

I know the main things that are needed for this Temple, but its details

are changed a little every time I build it.

If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card counters you can make a beautiful

pavement by pasting the shining pods of honesty in a pattern on a piece

of dark brown cardboard, or dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if

you do this you must build a little dark-wood brick wall all round to

hide the brown paper edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little ones,

to show off, by contrast, the massive splendour of your Temple. These

honesty pods are a most useful substitute for mother-of-pearl. You can

paste them on square pillars or on the fronts of boxes (houses I mean)

or make sloping roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard

fastened at the proper angle by tapes glued about a third of the way up.

But as a rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities. A grass

garden with paths of honesty, or a shell-built fountain basin in the

middle, will add a charm to any city square. And by the way, don't be

afraid of open spaces. Have as many buildings as you like, and mass them

together as you choose, but let there be open spaces. They will be to

your building as mounts are to pictures or margins to books. And for

frame or binding, let there be a wall all round your city. It gives a

neatness and a completeness which enhance a hundred-fold all the

qualities your city may possess.

[Illustration: HONESTY ROOF.]

There are cardboard models of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower Bridge,

and the Temple at Jerusalem. These are interesting in themselves and it

is good to put them together. The Temple, which is sold by the Religious

Tract Society, is really beautiful, and when you have set it up it looks

like a model in ivory. The bridge and the Cathedral are of dull brown

pasteboard--but they are interesting for all that. But when you are

tired of these things as models, parts of them can be used with great

effect in your building, especially if you paint the brown ones with

aluminium paint, or even whitewash them.

In the foreground of the picture of the Astrologer's tower you will see

a little house which doesn't look as if it belonged where it is. And no

more it does. It was put in just to show you what these little cardboard

buildings are like--it is one of the gate-houses of the Tower Bridge,

and the little white house on the parapet above the steps in the picture

of the silver towers is a little gate-house out of another model.

When you are collecting shells, you will find smooth flat stones of

pleasing colours. Collect them--the thinner the better--you can make

mosaic floors of them, fastening them in their place with glue or a very

thin layer of Plasticine. Fir-cones of all shapes and sizes are useful,

from the delicate cones of the larch to the great varnished-looking

cones that fall from the big pine trees on the Riviera; they call them

pineapples there--_pommes-de-pin_--and they use them for lighting fires.

But you can use them for the tops of towers.

A little, and only a very little, red tinsel paper is good to use, for

the backs of shrines. It gives a suggestion of the glow of hidden

lamps--or, put as windows near the tops of towers, it suggests the glow

of sunset falling on jewelled casements. You can get it, and also

bundles of stamped strips of gold paper, which should be used very

sparingly indeed, from Mr. Bousquet, of the Barbican, in London City.

There are other things which could serve for part of your collection,

but I have told about these in the chapter on poor children's cities,

because the poorest child can get them. But they are desirable in any

collection, such things as tobacco-tins, jam-jars, clothes-pegs, and the

different kinds of common things that you can use for decorating the

fronts and backs and sides of houses, if you have not enough bricks to

build facades to them all. And remember always to make the backs of your

houses as beautiful as the fronts. They may--and should--be plainer but

not less beautiful. Do not be like the jerry-builders who spend all

their decoration, such as it is, on the flat fronts of their villas, and

leave the sides and back flat and ugly, and so that when you see the row

of them from the railway they look miserable and dejected, as though

they knew how ugly they were and were sorry.

CHAPTER VII

The Poor Child's City

WHEN my city was built at Olympia a great many school-teachers who came

to see it told me that they would like to help the children in their

schools to build such cities, but that it would not be possible because

the children came from poor homes, where there were none of the pretty

things--candlesticks, brass bowls, silver ash-trays, chessmen, draughts,

well-bound books, and all the rest of it--which I had used to build my

city. So then I said I would build a city out of the sort of things that

poor children could collect and bring to school. And I did. My friends

Mr. Annis and Mr. Taylor, who were helping me to explain the city and

show it to visitors, helped me with the building. We did it in a day,

and it was very pretty--so pretty that the school-teachers who came to

see it asked me to write a book to say how _that_ was done. And so I

did.

There are no words to express half what I feel about the teachers in

our Council Schools, their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy,

their devotion. When we think of what the lives of poor children are, of

the little they have of the good things of this world, the little chance

they have of growing up to any better fate than that of their fathers

and mothers, who do the hardest work of all and get the least pay of all

those who work for money--when we think how rich people have money to

throw away, how their dogs have velvet coats and silver collars, and eat

chicken off china, while the little children of the poor live on bread

and tea, and wear what they can get--often enough, too little--when we

think of all these things, if we can bear to think of them at all, there

is not one of us, I suppose, who would not willingly die if by our death

we could secure for these children a fairer share of the wealth of

England, the richest country in the world. For wealth, by which I mean

money, can buy all those things which children ought to have, and which

these children do not have--good food, warm clothes, fresh country air,

playthings and books, and pictures. Remembering that by far the greater

number of children of England have none of these things, you would, I

know, gladly die if dying would help. To die for a cause is easy--you

leap into the gulf like Curtius, or fall on the spears like Winkelried,

or go down with your ship for the honour of your country. To lead a

forlorn hope, to try to save one child from fire or water, and die in

the attempt--that is easy and glorious. The hard thing to do is to live

for your country--to live for its children. And it is this that the

teachers in the Council Schools do, year in and year out, with the most

unselfish nobility and perseverance. And nobody applauds or makes as

much fuss as is made over a boy who saves a drowning kitten. In the face

of enormous difficulties and obstacles, exposed to the constant

pin-pricks of little worries, kept short of space, short of materials

and short of money, yet these teachers go on bravely, not just doing

what they are paid to do, but a thousand times more, devoting heart,

mind, and soul to their splendid ambition and counting themselves well

paid if they can make the world a better and a brighter place for the

children they serve. If these children when they grow up shall prove

better citizens, kinder fathers, and better, wiser, and nobler than

their fathers were, we shall owe all the change and progress to the

teachers who are spending their lives to this end.

And this I had to say before I could begin to write about how cities

may be built of such materials as poor children can collect and bring to

school.

For I have to own that poor children live in such little crowded houses

that there is no room for the building of cities, and in the courts and

streets where they play they cannot build, for the passers-by would

tumble over their cities, and the policemen would call it an

obstruction. So if they have a city at all it must be where they have

most of their pleasant plays--at school. Besides, the children I have in

mind are so very poor, that no one child could possibly collect enough

materials for a city. But a number of children could each of them bring

a few things, and thus make up enough for the building. And in most

schools there will be some children not quite so poor who can afford a

penny or so for tinsel paper and the few things--colours, paints, and so

on--that do not occur naturally in a house, even a well-to-do house.

These, let us hope, will be able to furnish a few old chessmen, for

there is nothing like chessmen for giving an air of elegance to domes

and minarets. If you cannot get chessmen, small clothes-pegs are good.

You can cut them in halves and then you have two kinds of minaret. They

can be coloured red or dark brown, or, if your city seems likely to

lack metal, you can paint them with gold or aluminium paint. They look

well when cut shorter as the battlements of buildings, rather like halma

men, but of handsomer and more rotund proportions. Your halma man as you

buy him in a box is ever a bit of a starveling. If you cut your peg into

three, the middle section will make short round pillars to support

little galleries, the roof being a strip of mill-board or the lid of a

narrow box.

[Illustration: CLOTHES PEGS.]

Cardboard and wooden boxes of all sizes and shapes are always easy to

get. These can be coloured as explained in another chapter, and little

doors and windows cut in them. But be sparing of windows; too many

windows detract from the dignity of your tower, and make it look like a

factory. In poor schools there will not be many bricks, and something

must be done to add variety to the facades of buildings when there are

not enough bricks to cover or decorate your boxes. A good deal can be

done with haricot beans, tapioca, and sago. Fasten the beans round the

doorways and the windows with glue or seccotine or Plasticine. If you

use glue let the bean-work be quite cold before you do anything else

with it. "Next day" is an excellent rule. When the beans are quite

firmly fixed, glue the surface all over and sprinkle _thickly_ with

tapioca so that not a bit of the box shows. Leave the tapioca lying on

the surface till _next day_, then turn it up; the loose tapioca will

fall off and leave a pleasant rough-cast-looking surface. Round

cardboard boxes, such as muff-boxes or biscuit-boxes make splendid

towers treated in this way. If you cannot get the little round yellow

periwinkly shells, maize is very good if you cut each grain flat with a

sharp knife, and fix the grains with glue as pillars and arches. Tin

boxes or round tins polished to silvery brightness, with doors and

windows and crenellations of black _passe-partout_, can be built into

palaces of astonishing splendour, as you can see in the picture of the

silver towers. But always beware of too many windows. Other excellent

towers are jam-pots: you can paint them any colour you like, but I

advise you to stick to terra-cotta, cream colour, and dark brown. Very

pretty towers can be made of white jam-pots with windows and doors and

crenellation of gold paper. Only you should outline the gold with ink or

dark stain to make it show up against the white. Basins that are cracked

make good domes, and you can almost always get a cracked basin, however

poor you are; tea-cups that have lost their handles, or had a piece

bitten out of them, are also not hard to get, and the lids of teapots

that are broken, and of saucepans that have been burnt through, come

readily enough to the hand of the collector. Honey pots and the little

brown jugs that cream is sold in are easy to come by, and make

Moorish-looking domes for buildings.

When once you begin to build, you will find that all sorts of things

that before looked neither useful nor beautiful become both, when they

are built into your city. Look at the bedstead-knobs in the Elephant

Temple, and the pepper-pots and the tea-cups on the top of the tower of

pearl and red.

[Illustration: TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE.]

Those children who are lucky enough to go into the country for a holiday

can collect fir-cones and acorns; nicely shaped bits of wood are more

easily come by in a country village than in a London slum. Acorns are

most useful, both the acorn and the cup. A brown building with doors and

windows outlined in acorn cups with their flat side set on with glue

looks like a precious work of carved wood. If you can't get acorn cups,

the shells of Barcelona nuts are good, but they are difficult to cut

into the needed cup shape. The shells of pea-nuts on a stone-coloured

building look like carved stones, but always the nutshell must fit its

edges tightly and neatly to the surface and show as a little round neat

boss. Your own observation will supply you with other little and

valueless things, which will become valuable as soon as you stick them

evenly and closely on a foundation of their own colour. The periwinkly

shells and the maize grains look best on white wood. The shells of the

cocoanut have a value all their own. The larger ones, sawn neatly in

halves, make impressive domes for brown buildings, and half a small

cocoanut shell will roof a cardboard box that has held elastic bands,

and you can call it a thatched cottage or the hut of a savage chief. I

called mine Cocoanut Cottage, and the Curator of my Botanical Museum

lived there. The Chief Astrologer, of course, lived at the top of his

tower, which was a photographic enlarging apparatus. Ponds and rivers

can be made with the silver paper that comes off cigarettes, and I have

made a very impressive tower with match boxes, painted black and piled

one on another so that the blue side shows in front, with a touch of red

at each side. Black windows if you like. If you cannot get any chessmen

the pinnacles of your buildings must be clothes-pegs, acorns, and

fir-cones, with a very occasional piece of lead pencil or short piece of

brass tubing with an acorn or a fir-cone on the top. Fir-cones, too,

look quite baronial stuck upright on the posts of gates--and they are

good edging for paths and roads. Pill-boxes make nice little turrets,

and cotton reels, coloured to match the bricks and the boxes, are the

finest flower tubs in the world. With sprigs of evergreen stuck in them,

or a little made rose-tree, they look quite life-like and convincing,

especially if you paste a circle of brown paper on the top of the reel,

to look like mould, before you stick your shrub in the hole so

conveniently placed in the reel, apparently on purpose to have shrubs

planted in it. Cotton reels with acorns or fir-cones on them are good on

the top of gate-posts.

[Illustration: COTTON REELS.]

[Illustration: LATTICE WINDOW.]

These are just a few of the things that poor children can get and the

way they can use them. The moment you begin to build you will think of

a hundred things that I have not thought of, and a hundred ways of using

them that I should not have thought of trying.

If you can so arrange the site of your city that it need not be

disturbed, it will grow in beauty day by day, and you will presently

have to name a day to satisfy the children who will want to bring their

parents to see it. If you give a school party no other attraction will

be needed, and you will find that neither children nor parents will tire

of examining your city as a whole and in detail, exclaiming at its

beauty and marvelling at its ingenuity. And the children will love it.

And so will you.

If you are disposed to take a little more trouble with your towers, you

can cover them with cement, and mould the crenellations and windows with

your fingers. The cement is made of newspaper, size, and whitening. Tear

up two newspapers and boil them in four quarts of water for three hours.

Then pound the paper in a large mortar, or squeeze it in your hands till

it is all pulp. It will have an unpleasing grey colour at this stage,

but in the end it will be creamy white. Then add equal quantities of

size and whitening and a pinch of yellow ochre, mix thoroughly and let

the mixture get cold, when it is ready for use. If it is too thin warm

it again, and add more whitening, but do not let the mixture _boil_

after the size has been added. When the mixture with which you have

covered your tower is dry,--it takes some days--it will be as hard as

stone. A cocoa tin set on a treacle tin makes a very neat tower, as you

will see by the picture. Square towers can also be made in this way, by

covering square tins with the cement. In fact, with a little trouble and

some tins of different sizes and shapes you could build a whole palace

in this way. Doors can be made of black paper, and lattices of paper cut

and folded, with black paper behind it, as you can see for yourself by

the picture.

CHAPTER VIII

The End

YOU will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children

differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character

and temperament of one child are not the character and temperament of

another, yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of the child as

though the needs of all children were the same. That is because, in the

body of this work, I have been dealing with the needs of children as a

genus, and not with those of the individual or species. There are

certain needs common to all children, needs as universal as the need for

food, raiment, warmth, and light. Such are the needs for sympathy and

justice, leisure and liberty. These things are admitted by all but the

driest economists to be the rights of adults, but not, alas! always

admitted as the rights of children. And I have tried to show a little

what it is that is essential to the true well-being of all children. The

hungers and thirsts of the individual spirit cannot be dealt with by

any but those in close relation to the individual child. I have tried to

lay down broad outlines--to make suggestions, to point out pleasant ways

leading to pleasant places. Parents, teachers, pastors and masters will

make the application--or the variation--in every individual case.

One of the things that is the matter with modern education is the

absence of the conception of personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, character

and temperament. For the matter of that it is this indifference to

personality which makes the whole of our civilisation vulgar and vain.

Our education treats children as though they were all cast in one mould;

it treats men and women as though they, in their sphere, differed not at

all one from another. You will say that it is impossible, in a great

country and a great school, to find out the personal tastes and wishes,

hopes, dreams, powers, and possibilities of individuals, and you are

quite right. That is why large schools and large communities fail so

detestably in the very objects of their existence. Schools are intended

to educate, and they merely instruct. Communities are, at least I

suppose they are, intended to enable their members to live happy and

useful lives as free citizens, and they only succeed in making slaves

of the many and tyrants of the few. The machinery of government and the

machinery of so-called education is too big--what it has to deal with is

too big--for any fine result to be possible. If we are ever to get out

of children, and men and women, anything like the best of which they are

capable, we shall have to have much smaller schools and much smaller

communities. Some sort of beautiful and useful corporate life is

possible in a place the size of Bedford; it is not possible in a place

the size of London. Ten or twenty children in a class can be treated as

individual human beings, and the best that is in them drawn out by a

sympathetic understanding of personal traits and characteristics. But a

class of seventy or eighty must be treated as a machine of which the

little live units are but wheels and cogs. It can, as a machine, be made

to do certain things; the component parts of it can be made to

contribute their share to the general result, even as the bright and

helpless parts of a machine contribute to its activity. But you can

never get out of the children composing such a class anything

approaching the fine result which can be achieved by an education based

on the broad lines of what is good for _children_, with a superstructure

of delicate perception of what is good for the _individual child_.

Dick, Tom, and Harry can join in certain lessons and certain games, but

there will always be some matters in which Dick is not in the least like

Tom, and Harry is quite different from both the others.

The people who govern us talk about education--they talk greatly, and a

little they do. But they will not do the one simple, straightforward

thing which is as essential to the growth of the mind as vital religion

is to the growth of the soul. Any teacher in any elementary school knows

what is needed, but those in power do not know it. They will make

scholarships as plentiful as blackberries, they will do all sorts of

fine things for secondary education. The one thing they will not do is

to _reduce the size of the classes_ in elementary schools. And so long

as this is not done the millions we spend yearly on education are, to a

pitiably great extent, millions wasted. We might almost as well take at

least half the money, put it in bags, tie it up with red tape, and drop

it over London Bridge, or, still better, spend the money in monthly

exhibitions of free fireworks, which would at least give the children

and the grown-ups one jolly evening in thirty.

A small class can be taught, and taught well, by a teacher of as

average ability as ever tumbled head over heels from London to York, but

a large class your average teacher will never get at at all. It takes a

genius and an orator to speak intelligibly to more than fifteen people.

I sometimes wonder if teachers know how much of their teaching their

scholars miss altogether--fail to see, fail to grasp, do not know is

there. Between the careless or overworked teacher and the timid and

rather stupid child there is a great gulf fixed. To such a child the

voice of the teacher is the voice of one crying in the wilderness,

crying quite aimlessly, in a wilderness of unintelligible jargon. Many

boys--in public as well as elementary schools by the way--go through

their whole school life "scraping through somehow," and never once

having a clear idea of anything that they are doing, hardly ever a

glimpse of what anything is about or that anything has any reasonable

relation to anything else. It is rather like a miracle, whichever way

you take it, but there it is, and a miracle which might be made

impossible and unnecessary by a little sensible commonplace legislation.

We want smaller classes, and we want those classes better taught. That

is to say, we want more teachers, and better-paid teachers; we want our

teachers to be placed in a position of certain comfort, that they shall

not be living in the House of Poverty with the wolf of Worry always

nosing round the door, distracting their attention from what should be

their chief thought--for most of the months of the year. We want longer

holidays, and a better provision for happiness in those holidays, both

for teachers and children. We want every teacher and every child to have

a real holiday, not merely an absence from school. In a word, we want

more money spent on schools and less on gaols and reformatories. It

cannot be put too plainly that the nation which will not pay for her

schools must pay for her prisons and asylums. People don't seem to mind

so much paying for prisons and workhouses. What they really hate seems

to be paying for schools. And yet how well, in the end, such spending

would pay us! "There is no darkness but ignorance," and we have now such

a chance as has never been the lot of men since Time began, a chance to

light enough lamps to dispel that darkness. If only we would take that

chance! Even from the meanest point of view we ought to take it. It

would be cheaper in the end. Schools are cheaper than prisons.

Now that I have written the words I don't like the look of them; and

looking back through this book, I see that most of what I have written

applies to the kind of children who are in little danger of going to

prison, children in comfortable homes, with enough of, at any rate,

material well-being. Most of my book refers to the class that is not

taught in Council Schools, and that will not be sent to a reformatory if

the eighth commandment is not learnt in one lesson. This class is called

the upper middle-class, and it does not go to the Council Schools

because it has money to go elsewhere. The children of this class are, in

brain and heart, not superior to the children of what are called the

working classes. Place the middle-class children in the surroundings of

the slum child, and thereupon the middle-class child would grow as the

slum child grows, as the plant debarred from light grows--_not

straight_. What we want is that there should be a distribution of wealth

so changed from the one that now destroys the nation's balance as to put

every parent in a position to pay for his child's education, and that

the nation's schools should be so superlatively better than all other

schools that no parent would dream of sending his child to any school

but that provided by the nation for the nation's children.

And now that it comes to good-bye, I am sorry to say it. I feel that I

have only been touching the fringe of the greatest problem in the world:

that there is very much which I have left unsaid, or which I might have

said differently, and better. One might go on for all one's life

thinking and writing about children and their needs, and always there

would be more unsaid than said, less thought than food for thought. If

the thoughts which I have striven to set forth give food for thought in

others, if my little candle may help to kindle a great torch, I shall

look back on the writing of this book as a great privilege and the

memory of the hours spent on it I shall treasure with a glad and

grateful heart.

_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Varried hyphenation retained. Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

End of Project Gutenberg's Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit