LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.
Literature is that quality in books which affords delight and
nourishment to the soul. But this is a scientific and skeptical age,
insomuch that one hardly ventures to take for granted that every reader
will know what his soul is. It is not the intellect, though it gives
the intellect light; nor the emotions, though they receive their warmth
from it. It is the most catholic and constant element of human nature,
yet it bears no direct part in the practical affairs of life; it does
not struggle, it does not even suffer; but merely emerges or retires,
glows or congeals, according to the company in which it finds itself.
We might say that the soul is a name for man's innate sympathy with
goodness and truth in the abstract; for no man can have a bad soul,
though his heart may be evil, or his mind depraved, because the soul's
access to the mind or heart has been so obstructed as to leave the
moral consciousness cold and dark. The soul, in other words, is the
only conservative and peacemaker; it affords the only unalterable
ground upon which all men can always meet; it unselfishly identifies or
unites us with our fellows, in contradistinction to the selfish
intellect, which individualizes us and sets each man against every
other. Doubtless, then, the soul is an amiable and desirable
possession, and it would be a pity to deprive it of so much
encouragement as may be compatible with due attention to the serious
business of life. For there are moments, even in the most active
careers, when it seems agreeable to forget competition, rivalry,
jealousy; when it is a rest to think of one's self as a man rather than
a person;--moments when time and place appear impertinent, and that
most profitable which affords least palpable profit. At such seasons, a
man looks inward, or, as the American poet puts it, he loafs and
invites his soul, and then he is at a disadvantage if his soul, in
consequence of too persistent previous neglect, declines to respond to
the invitation, and remains immured in that secret place which, as
years pass by, becomes less and less accessible to so many of us.
When I say that literature nourishes the soul, I implicitly refuse the
title of literature to anything in books that either directly or
indirectly promotes any worldly or practical use. Of course, what is
literature to one man may be anything but literature to another, or to
the same man under different circumstances; Virgil to the schoolboy,
for instance, is a very different thing from the Virgil of the scholar.
But whatever you read with the design of improving yourself in some
profession, or of acquiring information likely to be of advantage to
you in any pursuit or contingency, or of enabling yourself to hold your
own with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable
nondescript, a person of culture,--whatever, in short, is read with any
assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may
be literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but
to Luther, Calvin, or the pupils of a Sunday-school, it is essentially
something else. Literature is the written communications of the soul of
mankind with itself; it is liable to appear in the most unexpected
places, and in the oddest company; it vanishes when we would grasp it,
and appears when we look not for it. Chairs of literature are
established in the great universities, and it is literature, no doubt,
that the professor discourses; but it ceases to be literature before it
reaches the student's ear; though, again, when the same students
stumble across it in the recesses of their memory ten or twenty years
later, it may have become literature once more. Finally, literature
may, upon occasion, avail a man more than the most thorough technical
information; but it will not be because it supplements or supplants
that information, but because it has so tempered and exalted his
general faculty that whatever he may do is done more clearly and
comprehensively than might otherwise be the case.
Having thus, in some measure, considered what is literature and what
the soul, let us note, further, that the literature proper to manhood
is not proper to childhood, though the reverse is not--or, at least,
never ought to be--true. In childhood, the soul and the mind act in
harmony; the mind has not become preoccupied or sophisticated by
so-called useful knowledge; it responds obediently to the soul's
impulses and intuitions. Children have no morality; they have not yet
descended to the level where morality suggests itself to them. For
morality is the outcome of spiritual pride, the most stubborn and
insidious of all sins; the pride which prompts each of us to declare
himself holier than his fellows, and to support that claim by parading
his docility to the Decalogue. Docility to any set of rules, no matter
of how divine authority, so long as it is inspired by hope of future
good or present advantage, is rather worse than useless: except our
righteousness exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees,--that is,
except it be spontaneous righteousness or morality, and, therefore, not
morality, but unconscious goodness,--we shall in no wise have benefited
either ourselves or others. Children, when left to themselves,
artlessly and innocently act out the nature that is common to saint and
sinner alike; they are selfish, angry, and foolish, because their state
is human; and they are loving, truthful, and sincere, because their
origin is divine. All that pleases or agrees with them is good; all
that opposes or offends them is evil, and this, without any reference
whatever to the moral code in vogue among their elders. But, on the
other hand, children cannot be tempted as we are, because they suppose
that everything is free and possible, and because they are as yet
uncontaminated by the artificial cravings which the artificial
prohibitions incident to our civilization create. Life is to them a
constantly widening circle of things to be had and enjoyed; nor does it
ever occur to them that their desires can conflict with those of
others, or with the laws of the universe. They cannot consciously do
wrong, nor understand that any one else can do so; untoward accidents
may happen, but inanimate nature is just as liable to be objectionable
in this respect as human beings: the stone that trips them up, the
thorn that scratches them, the snow that makes their flesh tingle, is
an object of their resentment in just the same kind and degree as are
the men and women who thwart or injure them. But of duty--that dreary
device to secure future reward by present suffering; of
conscientiousness--that fear of present good for the sake of future
punishment; of remorse--that disavowal of past pleasure for fear of the
sting in its tail; of ambition--that begrudging of all honorable
results that are not effected by one's self; of these, and all similar
politic and arbitrary masks of self-love and pusillanimity, these poor
children know and suspect nothing. Yet their eyes are much keener than
ours, for they see through the surface of nature and perceive its
symbolism; they see the living reality, of which nature is the veil,
and are continually at fault because this veil is not, after all, the
reality,--because it is fixed and unplastic. The "deep mind of
dauntless infancy" is, in fact, the only revelation we have, except
divine revelation itself, of that pure and natural life of man which we
dream of, and liken to heaven; but we, nevertheless, in our penny-wise,
pound-foolish way, insist upon regarding it as ignorance, and do our
best, from the earliest possible moment, to disenchant and dispel it.
We call the outrage education, understanding thereby the process of
exterminating in the child the higher order of faculties and the
intuitions, and substituting for them the external memory, timidity,
self-esteem, and all that armament of petty weapons and defences which
may enable us to get the better of our fellow-creatures in this world,
and receive the reward of our sagacity in the next. The success of our
efforts is pitiably complete; for though the child, if fairly engaged
in single combat, might make a formidable resistance against the
infliction of "lessons," it cannot long withstand our crafty device of
sending it to a place where it sees a score or a hundred of little
victims like itself, all being driven to the same Siberia. The spirit
of emulation is aroused, and lo! away they all scamper, each straining
its utmost to reach the barren goal ahead of all competitors. So do we
make the most ignoble passions of our children our allies in the unholy
task of divesting them of their childhood. And yet, who is not aware
that the best men the world has seen have been those who, throughout
their lives, retained the aroma of childlike simplicity which they
brought with them into existence? Learning--the acquisition of specific
facts--is not wisdom; it is almost incompatible with wisdom; indeed,
unless the mind be powerful enough not only to fuse its facts, but to
vaporize them,--to sublimate them into an impalpable atmosphere,--they
will stand in wisdom's way. Wisdom comes from the pondering and the
application to life of certain truths quite above the sphere of facts,
and of infinitely more moment and less complexity,--truths which are
often found to be in accordance with the spiritual instinct called
intuition, which children possess more fully than grown persons. The
wisdom of our children would often astonish us, if we would only
forbear the attempt to make them knowing, and submissively accept
instruction from them. Through all the imperfection of their inherited
infirmity, we shall ever and anon be conscious of the radiance of a
beautiful, unconscious intelligence, worth more than the smartness of
schools and the cleverness of colleges. But no; we abhor the very
notion of it, and generally succeed in extinguishing it long before the
Three R's are done with.
And yet, by wisely directing the child's use of the first of the Three,
much of the ill effects of the trio and their offspring might be
counteracted. If we believed--if the great mass of people known as the
civilized world did actually and livingly believe--that there was
really anything beyond or above the physical order of nature, our
children's literature, wrongly so called, would not be what it is. We
believe what we can see and touch; we teach them to believe the same,
and, not satisfied with that, we sedulously warn them not to believe
anything else. The child, let us suppose, has heard from some
unauthorized person that there are fairies--little magical creatures an
inch high, up to all manner of delightful feats. He comprehends the
whole matter at half a word, feels that he had known it already, and
half thinks that he sees one or two on his way home. He runs up to his
mother and tells her about it; and has she ever seen fairies? Alas! His
mother tells him that the existence of such a being as a fairy is
impossible. In old times, when the world was very ignorant and
superstitious, they used to ascribe everything that happened to
supernatural agency; even the trifling daily accidents of one's life,
such as tumbling down stairs, or putting the right shoe on the left
foot, were thought or fancied to be the work of some mysterious power;
and since ignorant people are very apt to imagine they see what they
believe [proceeds this mother] instead of only believing what they see;
and since, furthermore, ignorance disposes to exaggeration and thus to
untruth, these people ended by asserting that they saw fairies. "Now,
my child," continues the parent, "it would grieve me to see you the
victim of such folly. Do not read fairy stories. They are not true to
life; they fill your mind with idle notions; they cannot form your
understanding, or aid you to do your work in the world. If you should
happen to fall in with such fables, be careful as you read to bear in
mind that they are pure inventions--pretty, sometimes, perhaps, but
essentially frivolous, if not immoral. You have, however, thanks to the
enlightened enterprise of writers and publishers, an endless assortment
of juvenile books and periodicals which combine legitimate amusement
with sound and trustworthy instruction. Here are stories about little
children, just like yourself, who talk and act just as you do, and to
whom nothing supernatural or outlandish ever happens; and whose
adventures, when you have read them, convey to you some salutary moral
lesson. What more can you want? Yes, very likely 'Grimm's Tales' and
'The Arabian Nights' may seem more attractive; but in this world many
harmful things put on an inviting guise, which deceives the
inexperienced eye. May my child remember that all is not gold that
glitters, and desire, not what is diverting merely, but what is useful
and ... and conventional!"
Let us admit that, things being as they are, it is necessary to develop
the practical side of the child's nature, to ground him in moral
principles, and to make him comprehend and fear--nominally God, but
really--society. But why, in addition to doing this, should we strangle
the unpractical side of his nature,--the ideal, imaginative, spiritual
side,--the side which alone can determine his value or worthlessness in
eternity? If our minds were visible as our bodies are, we should behold
on every side of us, and in our own private looking-glasses, such
abortions, cripples, and monstrosities as all the slums of Europe and
the East could not parallel. We pretend to make little men and women
out of our children, and we make little dwarfs and hobgoblins out of
them. Moreover, we should not diminish even the practical efficiency of
the coming generation by rejecting their unpractical side. Whether this
boy's worldly destination be to clean a stable or to represent his
country at a foreign court, he will do his work all the better, instead
of worse, for having been allowed freedom of expansion on the ideal
plane. He will do it comprehensively, or as from above downward,
instead of blindly, or as from below upward. To a certain extent, this
position is very generally admitted by instructors nowadays; but the
admission bears little or no fruit. The ideality and imagination which
they have in mind are but a partial and feeble imitation of what is
really signified by those terms. Ideality and imagination are
themselves merely the symptom or expression of the faculty and habit of
spiritual or subjective intuition--a faculty of paramount value in
life, though of late years, in the rush of rational knowledge and
discovery, it has fallen into neglect. But it is by means of this
faculty alone that the great religion of India was constructed--the
most elaborate and seductive of all systems; and although as a faith
Buddhism is also the most treacherous and dangerous attack ever made
upon the immortal welfare of mankind, that circumstance certainly does
not discredit or invalidate the claim to importance of spiritual
intuition itself. It may be objected that spiritual intuition is a
vague term. It undoubtedly belongs to an abstruse region of psychology;
but its meaning for our present purpose is simply the act of testing
questions of the moral consciousness by an inward touchstone of truth,
instead of by external experience or information. That the existence of
such a touchstone should be ridiculed by those who are accustomed to
depend for their belief upon palpable or logical evidence, goes without
saying; but, on the other hand, there need be no collision or argument
on the point, since no question with which intuition is concerned can
ever present itself to persons who pin their faith to the other sort of
demonstration. The reverse of this statement is by no means true; but
it would lead us out of our present path to discuss the matter.
Assuming, however, that intuition is possible, it is evident that it
should exist in children in an extremely pure, if not in its most
potent state; and to deny it opportunity of development might fairly be
called a barbarity. It will hardly be disputed that children are an
important element in society. Without them we should lose the memory of
our youth, and all opportunity for the exercise of unselfish and
disinterested affection. Life would become arid and mechanical to a
degree now scarcely conceivable; chastity and all the human virtues
would cease to exist; marriage would be an aimless and absurd
transaction; and the brotherhood of man, even in the nominal sense that
it now exists, would speedily be abjured. Political economy and
sociology neglect to make children an element in their arguments and
deductions, and no small part of their error is attributable to that
circumstance. But although children still are born, and all the world
acknowledges their paramount moral and social value, the general
tendency of what we are forced to call education at the present day is
to shorten as much as possible the period of childhood. In America and
Germany especially--but more in America than in Germany--children are
urged and stimulated to "grow up" almost before they have been
short-coated. That conceptions of order and discipline should be early
instilled into them is proper enough; but no other order and discipline
seems to be contemplated by educators than the forcing them to stand
and be stuffed full of indigestible and incongruous knowledge, than
which proceeding nothing more disorderly could be devised. It looks as
if we felt the innocence and naturalness of our children to be a rebuke
to us, and wished to do away with it in short order. There is something
in the New Testament about offending the little ones, and the preferred
alternative thereto; and really we are outraging not only the objective
child, but the subjective one also--that in ourselves, namely, which is
innocent and pure, and without which we had better not be at all. Now I
do not mean to say that the only medicine that can cure this malady is
legitimate children's literature; wise parents are also very useful,
though not perhaps so generally available. My present contention is
that the right sort of literature is an agent of great efficiency, and
may be very easily come by. Children derive more genuine enjoyment and
profit from a good book than most grown people are susceptible of: they
see what is described, and themselves enact and perfect the characters
of the story as it goes along.
Nor is it indispensable that literature of the kind required should
forthwith be produced; a great deal, of admirable quality, is already
on hand. There are a few great poems----Spenser's "Faërie Queene" is
one--which no well regulated child should be without; but poetry in
general is not exactly what we want. Children--healthy children--never
have the poetic genius; but they are born mystics, and they have the
sense of humor. The best way to speak to them is in prose, and the best
kind of prose is the symbolic. The hermetic philosophers of the Middle
Ages are probably the authors of some of the best children's stories
extant. In these tales, disguised beneath what is apparently the
simplest and most artless flow of narrative, profound truths are
discussed and explained. The child reads the narrative, and certainly
cannot be accused of comprehending the hidden philosophical problem;
yet that also has its share in charming him. The reason is partly that
true symbolic or figurative writing is the simplest form known to
literature. The simplest, that is to say, in outward form,--it may be
indefinitely abstruse as to its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause
of its formal simplicity is its interior profundity. The principle of
hermetic writing was, as we know, to disguise philosophical
propositions and results under a form of words which should ostensibly
signify some very ordinary and trivial thing. It was a secret language,
in the vocabulary of which material facts are used to represent
spiritual truths. But it differed from ordinary secret language in
this, that not only were the truths represented in the symbols, but the
philosophical development of the truth, in its ramifications, was
completely evolved under the cover of a logically consistent tale.
This, evidently, is a far higher achievement of ingenuity than merely
to string together a series of unrelated parts of speech, which, on
being tested by the "key," shall discover the message or information
really intended. It is, in fact, a practical application of the
philosophical discovery, made by or communicated to the hermetic
philosophers, that every material object in nature answers to or
corresponds with a certain one or group of philosophical truths. Viewed
in this light, the science of symbols or of correspondences ceases to
be an arbitrary device, susceptible of alteration according to fancy,
and avouches itself an essential and consistent relation between the
things of the mind and the things of the senses. There is a complete
mental creation, answering to the material creation, not continuously
evolved from it, but on a different or detached plane. The sun,--to
take an example,--the source of light and heat, and thereby of physical
nature, is in these fables always the symbol of God, of love and
wisdom, by which the spirit of man is created. Light, then, answers to
wisdom, and heat to love. And since all physical substances are the
result of the combined action of light and heat, we may easily perceive
how these hermetic sages were enabled to use every physical object as a
cloak of its corresponding philosophical truth,--with no other
liability to error than might result from the imperfect condition of
their knowledge of physical laws.
To return, however, to the children, I need scarcely remark that the
cause of children's taking so kindly to hermetic writing is that it is
actually a living writing; it is alive in precisely the same way that
nature, or man himself, is alive. Matter is dead; life organizes and
animates it. And all writing is essentially dead which is a mere
transcript of fact, and is not inwardly organized and vivified by a
spiritual significance. Children do not know what it is that makes a
human being smile, move, and talk; but they know that such a phenomenon
is infinitely more interesting than a doll; and they prove it by
themselves supplying the doll with speech and motions out of their own
minds, so as to make it as much like a real person as possible. In the
same way, they do not perceive the philosophical truth which is the
cause of existence of the hermetic fable; but they find that fable far
more juicy and substantial than the ordinary narrative of every-day
facts, because, however fine the surface of the latter may be, it has,
after all, nothing but its surface to recommend it. It has no soul; it
is not alive; and, though they cannot explain why, they feel the
difference between that thin, fixed grimace and the changing smile of
the living countenance.
It would scarcely be practicable, however, to confine the children's
reading to hermetic literature; for not much of it is extant in its
pure state. But it is hardly too much to say that all fairy stories,
and derivations from these, trace their descent from an hermetic
ancestry. They are often unaware of their genealogy; but the sparks of
that primal vitality are in them. The fairy is itself a symbol for the
expression of a more complex and abstract idea; but, once having come
into existence, and being, not a pure symbol, but a hybrid between the
symbol and that for which it stands, it presently began an independent
career of its own. The mediaeval imagination went to work with it,
found it singularly and delightfully plastic to its touch and
requirements, and soon made it the centre of a new and charming world,
in which a whole army of graceful and romantic fancies, which are
always in quest of an arena in which to disport themselves before the
mind, found abundant accommodation and nourishment. The fairy land of
mediaeval Christianity seems to us the most satisfactory of all fairy
lands, probably because it is more in accord with our genius and
prejudices than those of the East; and it fitted in so aptly with the
popular mediaeval ignorance on the subject of natural phenomena, that
it became actually an article of belief with the mass of men, who
trembled at it while they invented it, in the most delicious imaginable
state of enchanted alarm. All this is prime reading for children;
because, though it does not carry an orderly spiritual meaning within
it, it is more spiritual than material, and is constructed entirely
according to the dictates of an exuberant and richly colored, but,
nevertheless, in its own sphere, legitimate imagination. Indeed, fairy
land, though as it were accidentally created, has the same permanent
right to be that Beauty has; it agrees with a genuine aspect of human
nature, albeit one much discountenanced just at present. The sequel to
it, in which romantic human personages are accredited with fairy-like
attributes, as in the "Faërie Queene," already alluded to, is a step in
the wrong direction, but not a step long enough to carry us altogether
outside of the charmed circle. The child's instinct of selection being
vast and cordial,--he will make a grain of true imagination suffuse and
glorify a whole acre of twaddle,---we may with security leave him in
that fantastic society. Moreover, some children being less imaginative
than others, and all children being less imaginative in some moods and
conditions than at other seasons, the elaborate compositions of Tasso,
Cervantes, and the others, though on the boundary line between what is
meat for babes and the other sort of meat, have also their abiding use.
The "Arabian Nights" introduced us to the domain of the Oriental
imagination, and has done more than all the books of travel in the East
to make us acquainted with the Asiatic character and its differences
from our own. From what has already been said on the subject of
spiritual intuition in relation to these races, one is prepared to find
that all the Eastern literature that has any value is hermetic writing,
and therefore, in so far, proper for children. But the incorrigible
subtlety of the Oriental intellect has vitiated much of their
symbology, and the sentiment of sheer wonder is stimulated rather than
that of orderly imagination. To read the "Arabian Nights" or the
"Bhagavad-Gita" is a sort of dissipation; upon the unhackneyed mind of
the child it leaves a reactionary sense of depression. The life which
it embodies is distorted, over-colored, and exciting; it has not the
serene and balanced power of the Western productions. Moreover, these
books were not written with the grave philosophic purpose that animated
our own hermetic school; it is rather a sort of jugglery practised with
the subject---an exercise of ingenuity and invention for their own
sake. It indicates a lack of the feeling of responsibility on the
writers' part,--a result, doubtless, of the prevailing fatalism that
underlies all their thought. It is not essentially wholesome, in short;
but it is immeasurably superior to the best of the productions called
forth by our modern notions of what should be given to children to read.
But I can do no more than touch upon this branch of the subject; nor
will it be possible to linger long over the department of our own
literature which came into being with "Robinson Crusoe." No theory as
to children's books would be worth much attention which found itself
obliged to exclude that memorable work. Although it submits in a
certain measure to classification, it is almost _sui generis_; no book
of its kind, approaching it in merit, has ever been written. In what,
then, does its fascination consist? There is certainly nothing hermetic
about it; it is the simplest and most studiously matter-of-fact
narrative of events, comprehensible without the slightest effort, and
having no meaning that is not apparent on the face of it. And yet
children, and grown people also, read it again and again, and cannot
find it uninteresting. I think the phenomenon may largely be due to the
nature of the subject, which is really of primary and universal
interest to mankind. It is the story of the struggle of man with wild
and hostile nature,--in the larger sense an elementary theme,--his
shifts, his failures, his perils, his fears, his hopes, his successes.
The character of Robinson is so artfully generalized or universalized,
and sympathy for him is so powerfully aroused and maintained, that the
reader, especially the child reader, inevitably identifies himself with
him, and feels his emotions and struggles as his own. The ingredient of
suspense is never absent from the story, and the absence of any plot
prevents us from perceiving its artificiality. It is, in fact, a type
of the history of the human race, not on the higher plane, but on the
physical one; the history of man's contest with and final victory over
physical nature. The very simplicity and obviousness of the details
give them grandeur and comprehensiveness: no part of man's character
which his contact with nature can affect or develop is left untried in
Robinson. He manifests in little all historical earthly experiences of
the race; such is the scheme of the book; and its permanence in
literature is due to the sobriety and veracity with which that scheme
is carried out. To speak succinctly, it does for the body what the
hermetic and cognate literature does for the soul; and for the healthy
man, the body is not less important than the soul in its own place and
degree. It is not the work of the Creator, but it is contingent upon
creation.
But poor Robinson has been most unfortunate in his progeny, which at
this day overrun the whole earth, and render it a worse wilderness than
ever was the immortal Crusoe Island. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, might
fairly pose as the most persistently malignant of all sources of error
in the design of children's literature; but it is to be feared that it
was Defoe who first made her aware of the availability of her own
venom. She foisted her prim and narrow moral code upon the commonplace
adventures of a priggish little boy and his companions; and straightway
the whole dreary and disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took
up the cry, and have been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever
since. There is really no estimating the mortal wrong that has been
done to childhood by Maria Edgeworth's "Frank" and "The Parent's
Assistant"; and, for my part, I derive a melancholy joy in availing
myself of this opportunity to express my sense of my personal share in
the injury. I believe that my affection for the human race is as
genuine as the average; but I am sure it would have been greater had
Miss Edgeworth never been born; and were I to come across any
philosophical system whereby I could persuade myself that she belonged
to some other order of beings than the human, I should be strongly
tempted to embrace that system on that ground alone.
After what has been advanced in the preceding pages, it does not need
that I should state how earnestly I deprecate the kind of literary food
which we are now furnishing to the coming generation in such sinister
abundance. I am sure it is written and published with good and
honorable motives; but at the very best it can only do no harm.
Moreover, however well intentioned, it is bad as literature; it is
poorly conceived and written, and, what is worse, it is saturated with
affectation. For an impression prevails that one needs to talk down to
children;--to keep them constantly reminded that they are innocent,
ignorant little things, whose consuming wish it is to be good and go to
Sunday-school, and who will be all gratitude and docility to whomsoever
provides them with the latest fashion of moral sugarplums; whereas, so
far as my experience and information goes, children are the most
formidable literary critics in the world. Matthew Arnold himself has
not so sure an instinct for what is sound and good in a book as any
intelligent little boy or girl of eight years old. They judge
absolutely; they are hampered by no comparisons or relative
considerations. They cannot give chapter and verse for their opinion;
but about the opinion itself there is no doubt. They have no theories;
they judge in a white light. They have no prejudices nor traditions;
they come straight from the simple source of life. But, on the other
hand, they are readily hocussed and made morbid by improper drugs, and
presently, no doubt, lose their appetite for what is wholesome. Now, we
cannot hope that an army of hermetic philosophers or Mother-Gooses will
arise at need and remedy all abuses; but at least we might refrain from
moralizing and instruction, and, if we can do nothing more, confine
ourselves to plain stories of adventure, say, with no ulterior object
whatever. There still remains the genuine literature of the past to
draw upon; but let us beware, as we would of forgery and perjury, of
serving it up, as has been done too often, medicated and modified to
suit the foolish dogmatism of the moment. Hans Christian Andersen was
the last writer of children's stories, properly so called; though,
considering how well married to his muse he was, it is a wonder as well
as a calamity that he left no descendants.