_Any good book, any book that is wiser than yourself, will teach
you some things.--Carlyle, to an unknown correspondent, March 13,
1843._
_Therfore I pray that no man Reprehende
This lytyl Book, the whiche for you I make;
But where defaute ys, latte ylke man amende,
And nouhte deme yt; [I] pray thaym for youre sake._
--_The Babees Book._
The field of children’s books is by no means an uninterrupted host of
dancing daffodils; it is not yellow with imperishable gold. In fact,
there is a deplorable preponderance of the sere and yellow leaf. Yet
there is no fairer opportunity for the writer than that which offers
itself in the voluntary spirit of a boy or girl reader. Here are to be
met no crotchets or fads, no prejudices or unthinkable canons of art.
Because the body is surcharged with surplus energy necessary to growth,
because the mind is throwing out delicate tendrils that foreshadow its
potential future, one realises how vital is the problem of children’s
reading, how significant the manner in which it is being handled.
At the outset, it is essential for us to distinguish between theory,
history, and practice. The field, with all its rich soil, is in need of
weeding. Not so very long ago, it lay unrecognised by the library, as
of sufficient importance for separate and specialised consideration.
But now, with the prominence being given to children’s reading-rooms,
the field needs to be furrowed. Let us not ignore the salubrious
under-stratum of the past; it has served its mission in asserting the
claims of childhood; it has both negatively and positively marked the
individuality of childhood, in a distinctive juvenile literature.
Perhaps the writers who were inspired by the Rousseau doctrine of
education, and those who abetted the Sunday-school movement of the
last century, were deceived in their attitude; for they considered
the machinery by which they hoped to mould character, rather than the
nature of the heart and soul upon which they were actually working.
A right action, a large, human, melodramatic deed, are more healthy
for boys and girls than all the reasons that could be given for them.
In literature for children, as in life, the moral _habit_ should be
unquestioning. All leading educators and ethical teachers recognise
this fact.
The whole matter simply resolves itself into a difference in viewpoint
between the past and present. Smile as we must over the self-conscious
piousness of early juvenile literature, it contained a great deal of
sincerity; it did its pioneer work excellently well. To the writer of
children’s books, to the home, where one essential duty is personal
guidance, to the librarian whose work is not the science of numbers,
but a profession of culture-distributing, some knowledge of the past
harvests from this field would appear indispensable. For the forgotten
tales of long ago, the old-fashioned stories represent something more
than stained pages and crude woodcuts, than stilted manners and seeming
priggishness; they stand for the personal effort and service of men
and women striving with staunch purpose in the interests of childhood,
however mistaken their estimates of this childhood may have been. These
books, to the library, are so much fallow material as a practical
circulating proposition, but they represent forces significant in
the history of children’s books. I would much rather see a librarian
fully equipped with a knowledge of Miss Edgeworth’s life, of her human
associations, together with the inclinations prompting her to write
“The Parent’s Assistant,” than have her read a whole list of moral
tales of the same purport and tone.
The immediate problem, therefore, necessitates a glance at this field
of children’s literature, and some knowledge of its essential details.
It involves a contact with books of all grades; it calls into play,
with the increasing number of libraries, and with the yearly addition
of children’s rooms, a keen discerning judgment on the part of the
librarian, not only as to child nature, but as to the best methods of
elimination, by which bad books may be separated from good, and by
which the best may preponderate. But the librarian is not the only
factor; the parent and the writer also come into account. They, too,
must share a responsibility which will be more fully determined later
on, but which now means that they both owe the child an indispensable
duty; the one in giving to the growing boy or girl most intelligent
guidance along the path of fullest development; the other in satisfying
this need--not in deflecting juvenile taste by means of endless
mediocrity and mild sentimentalism. It is an unfortunate circumstance
that the effects of mediocrity are longer-lived than the immediate evil
itself.
In the problem of children’s reading we must consider two aspects;
there is the bogey image of a theoretical or sociological or
educational child, and also the book as a circulating commodity. There
is the machinery of “The Child”; Dr. Isaac Watts shaped one; Jean
Jacques Rousseau another; the Edgeworths still another, and now the
psychologist’s framework of childhood, more subtle, more scientific,
more interesting, threatens us everywhere. But no patent has so far
supplanted the fundamental excellence of human nature. There are
assuredly demarkations and successive steps in elementary education,
but are not these becoming too specialised? Since we are dealing with
the Boy and the Story rather than with the Scholar and the Text-book,
with culture which is personal, and not with expediency, we needs must
choose the human model in preference to all others.
And so it is with the choice of the librarian. In dealing with books in
the bulk, there is a tendency to emphasise system above the humanising
excellence of what the books contain. After all the mechanical detail
is done, when the cover has been labelled, when the catalogue notation
has been figured, when the class distribution has been determined,
the librarian stands middleman in a threefold capacity. She is a
purveyor, in the sense that she passes a book over the counter; she
is a custodian, in so far as books need protection; she is the high
priestess, since the library is a temple of treasures, a storehouse
for our literary heritage. In any library, whether it be yours at
home, with your own books upon the shelves, or the public’s, with
volumes representing so much of your taxation on which you base your
citizenship, the rare companionship of books is one of their humanising
qualities. This is as much a truth for children as for grown-ups.
With the fear that there is an effort on the part of many to
crystallise reading into a science, comes the necessity to foster
a love of reading for its own sake. The democracy of books has
grown larger with the cheapening process of manufacture; while the
establishment of public libraries offers to every one an equal
privilege. In an assemblage of many books, a certain spiritual dignity
should attach itself to the utilitarian fact.
There is no definition for children’s books; the essential point is
appeal, interest. As far back as 1844, a writer in the _Quarterly
Review_ very aptly claimed that “a genuine child’s book is as little
like a book for grown people cut down, as the child himself is like
a little old man.” Peculiarly, there is a popular misconception that
an author of juveniles advances in art only when he or she leaves off
penning stories or fairy tales, and begins publishing novels. On the
face of it, this is absurd. Like any other gift, writing for children
cannot be taught; it has to be born. If possible, with the exception of
drama, it is the most difficult art to master, since its narrative will
not stand imitation, since its simplicity must represent naturalness
and not effort, since its meaning must be within reach, and without the
tone of condescension.
Professor Richard Burton has written: “A piece of literature is
an organism, and should, therefore, be put before the scholar, no
matter how young, with its head on, and standing on both feet.” This
injunction applies to all books. Where the classics excel is in their
very fulness and honesty of narrative. Can the same be said of our
“series” brand?
The writing of children’s books is more aptly phrased the writing of
books for children. There was a time when such books, as a class by
themselves, were unknown; yet boys and girls expanded, and perhaps
remembered more of what they read than they do to-day, although they
were not taught as much. There are some pessimists, not so unwise in
their pessimism, who believe that if less emphasis was bestowed upon
the word _children_, and more upon the word _literature_, the situation
would be materially bettered.
Can we recall any of our great men--literary, scientific, or
otherwise--who were brought up on distinctively juvenile literature.
A present-day boy who would read what Lamb or Wordsworth, Coleridge
or Tennyson, Gladstone or Huxley devoured with gusto in their youth,
would set the psychologists in a flutter, would become an object for
head-lines in our papers. There is a mistaken conception regarding
what are children’s books, in the best sense of the word. A standard
which might have excellent conservative results, although it would
be thoroughly one-sided and liable to false interpretation, could be
based on the assertion that those books only are children’s classics
which can be relished by a grown-up public. “Alice in Wonderland,” “The
Water Babies,” “Peter Pan”--such stories have a universal appeal. And
it is well to remember that at least five of the world’s classics, not
originally written for children, have been appropriated by them: “The
Arabian Nights”; “Pilgrim’s Progress”; “Robinson Crusoe”; “Gulliver’s
Travels”; “Baron Münchausen.”
With the reading democracy created by public libraries, there has
developed the need for this special kind of writing. Excesses have
unfortunately arisen such as made a critic once exclaim in disgust,
“Froissart is cut into spoon-meat, and Josephus put into swaddling
clothes.” While we shall, in the following pages, find many odd
theories and statements regarding simplification of style, it is as
well to be forearmed against this species of writing. Democracy in
literature is falsely associated with mediocrity. When one reads the
vitiating “series” class of story-book, the colourless college record,
the diluted historical narrative, there is cause for despair. But there
is no need for such cheapening. The wrong impression is being created
in the popular mind that literature is synonymous with dulness; that
only current fiction is worth while. And we find children confessing
that they rarely read non-fiction, a term they only dimly comprehend.
It is not right that a middle-class population should have relegated
to it a middle-class literature. Such, however, at the present moment,
seems to be the situation. And as a consequence all departments suffer.
Except for a very few volumes, there is no biography for children
that is worthy of endorsement, for the simple reason that the dignity
of a whole life, its meaning and growth, are subordinated to the
accentuation of a single incident. History becomes a handmaiden to the
slender story. Let those writers who are looking for an unworked vein
ponder this. The fictionising of all things is one of the causes for
this poverty; the text-book habit another.
The poet Blake sings:
“Thou hast a lap full of seed,
And this is a fine country.
Why dost thou not cast thy seed,
And live in it merrily?”
But, though we are repeatedly casting our seed in the field of juvenile
literature, we are not reaping the full harvest, because we are not
living in the land of childhood merrily.
Start as you will to treat of children’s books as the mere vehicle
for giving joy, and education will pursue you. Acknowledging all the
benefits that the moral tale and the instructive walk have bestowed, we
know not which to pity most--the child in a moral strait-jacket, or the
child observing nature! The terms we use in describing these writers
of a past generation are always the same; they are not prepossessing,
though they may sound quaint. We turn from such critical phrases as
“flabby treatment of the Bible,” “dear, didactic, deadly dull” Mrs.
Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth’s “overplus of sublime purpose,” to definite
terms of protest such as those of the “Professor at the Breakfast
Table,” condemning the little meek sufferers with their spiritual
exercises, and those of Emerson ending in his cry of “What right have
you to _one_ virtue!” The mistaken attitude, which has slipped from
the moral to the educational sphere, seems to be that self-development
is not just as important as prescribed courses. While the latter are
necessary to the school, the librarian must reckon differently; for, to
her, the child is not so much a class as a unit.
Elementary education is marked by the compulsory factor; in reading,
a child’s interest is voluntary. On the other hand, the severity of
a Puritan Sunday, the grimness of a New England Primer, developed in
childhood sound principles of righteousness; they erected a high fence
between heaven and hell. But the moral tale utilised “little meannesses
of conventional life,” suggested sly deceit and trivial pettiness; it
quibbled and its ethics were often doubtful. The reaction that followed
let slip a valuable adjunct in culture; to-day the knowledge of the
Bible in schools and colleges is appallingly shallow; this fact was
revealed in the results of an examination or test held by President
Thwing some years ago. Dr. Felix Adler, pleading from the non-sectarian
platform, asks for the re-establishment of ethics in our schools as a
study of social relations, and for the extended use of Bible stories,
shorn of religious meaning, yet robbed of none of their essential
strength or beauty or truth. The librarian has wisely mapped out for
her story hour such a course, gleaned from the parables, and from the
vast treasure houses of narrative abounding in both Testaments and in
fables.
Turn to your colleges and your schools, and you will find that,
generally speaking, there is dug a deep channel between literature and
life, which has no right to be. We should study our ethics as one of
the inherent elements in poetry and in prose. The moral _habit_ is part
of the structure of the Arthurian legends.
Since the time of Rousseau the emancipation of the child has steadily
advanced; in society, he has taken his place. No longer is it incumbent
upon him to be seen and not heard, no longer are his answers written
out for him to memorise. Mr. E. V. Lucas, in the preface to his
“Forgotten Tales of Long Ago,” calls attention to one story, “Ellen
and George; or, The Game at Cricket,” culled from “Tales for Ellen,”
by Alicia Catherine Mant, and in a characteristically droll manner he
says, “Ellen’s very sensible question (as it really was) on p. 184,
‘Then why don’t you send the cat away?’ is one of the first examples of
independent--almost revolutionary--thought in a child, recorded by a
writer for children in the early days.”
But the chains that have fallen from one door have been threatening to
shackle another. Where once children could scarcely escape the moral,
their imaginations now have no room for flight. Fancy is bestrided by
fact. We must give reasons for everything. When Artemus Ward was asked
why the summer flowers fade, he exclaimed, “Because it’s their biz, let
’em fade.” In nature study for children the general effect leaves a
deeper impression than the technical structure. We do not know whether
it is necessary to have Mr. Seton’s “Story of Wahb” vouched for as to
accuracy in every detail. The scientific naturalists and story-writers
are constantly wrangling, but there is not so much harm done to nature
after all. An author who wilfully perverts fact, who states as true for
the class what he knows to be a variant in the one coming under his
observation, should be called to account. Otherwise a human interest
attached to animals creates a wide appeal. But to use this vehicle for
exploiting the commonplace, and what properly belongs to the text-book,
should be condemned by the librarian. Mr. Tudor Jenks[1] humorously
declares: “We ask our little ones to weep over the tribulations of a
destitute cock-roach or a bankrupt tumble-bug.” And another critic of
an earlier age writes of those same children--“They are delighted, it
is true, with the romantic story of ‘Peter, the wild boy,’ but they
have not the slightest curiosity to know the natural history, or
Linnæan nomenclature of the pig-nuts he ate.”
The following pages have been written after some extensive
investigation. Within the past few years, about fifteen hundred of
the latest books for children have come to my desk; they have not
been without meaning for the present, or without connection with the
past. While it has not been the intention to write a full history of
children’s books, some idea is given of the extent and possibilities
of the field; the historical development is sketched in outline. There
is need for a comprehensive volume. In addition, an attempt is here
made to reconcile system with culture; to discover what the library
is aiming to do with juvenile readers in the community; to show the
relation which the Library, the School, and the Home, bear, one to the
other, and all to the child. Having carefully examined lists of books
recommended by libraries for children of all ages and grades, a limited
number of volumes, marked by an excellence which makes them worthy of
preservation, is recommended as suitable for boys and girls. These
titles are given in an appendix. The fault with most lists of this
character is that they too often represent the choice of one person. To
counteract this one-sidedness, the co-operation of an advisory board
was obtained, marked by wide experience, by an intimate contact with
and knowledge of the books considered, and by a desire to show a human
respect for the tastes of children.
There are certain phases in the consideration of the departments that
have been suggested by young readers themselves. The desire for books
about musicians, and for piano and violin scores, brought to light
the lack of any guaranteed assemblage of songs which, in variety, in
quality, in sentiment and imagination, might be called distinctive. The
interest in a certain type of drawing as shown by the juvenile demand
for Boutet de Monvel, Kate Greenaway, and Caldecott picture-books,
suggested the advisability of including a full list of these
publications.[2] One cannot approach the subject with any ironclad
rules, yet it is always profitable to heed experiments based on common
sense. The results of such experiments are but mileposts in the general
advance; they must not be taken as final. Yet it is well to experiment
in order to avoid crystallisation.
Children are entitled to their full heritage; education is paramount,
culture is the saving grace. Your memory of a child is the healthy glow
of the unfettered spirit. None of us want him with a book in his hand
all the time. We wish him to take the freshness of life as his nature,
to run with hair tossing to the wind. But glance into his eyes and you
will find a craving look that a ball will not satisfy, a far-away
expression that no shout from the roadside will change. It is the
placid gleam of sunset after physical storm, the moment of rest after
the overflow of animal energy. Children have their hero moments when
they are not of the present, but are part of that perennial truth which
is clearer-visioned in the past, since we have to dream of it. Kate
Douglas Wiggin claims that the book is a fact to a child. It should be
an idealising fact.
Not long ago a crazy man died, after having drawn up a will: his
world’s goods consisted of the wide, wide world; his legatees were
every living soul. He said:
“I leave to children, inclusively, but only for the term of their
childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms
of the woods, with the right to play among them freely, according to
the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles
and thorns. And I devise to children the banks of the brooks, and the
golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows
that dip therein, and the white clouds that float high over the giant
trees. And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in, in
a thousand ways, and the night and the moon and the train of the milky
way to wonder at.”
What thinks the teacher of such riches, what the librarian with her
catalogue number? A book is a fact, nay, a friend, a dream. Is there
not a creed for us all in the wisdom of that crazy man? Here was one
with clear vision, to whom fact was as nothing before the essential of
one’s nature--a prophet, a seer, one to whom the tragedy of growing
up had been no tragedy, but whose memory of childhood had produced a
chastening effect upon his manhood. Are we surprised to find him adding:
“I give to good fathers and mothers, in trust for their children, all
good little words of praise and encouragement, and all quaint pet names
and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly and
generously, as the needs of their children may require.”
And so, we ask, more especially the parent than the librarian, is there
not excitement in the very drawing out from a child his heart’s desire?
Imperative it is in all cases that book-buying should not be a lottery,
but more persistently apparent does it become that a child’s _one_
individual book upon the Christmas-tree or for a birthday should not
represent a grown-up’s after-thought.
=Bibliographical Note=
_The articles referred to in this chapter are:_
BURTON, RICHARD--Literature for Children. _No. Amer._ 167:278 (Sept.,
1898).
CHILDREN’S BOOKS--[From the _Quarterly Review_.] _Liv. Age_, 2:1–12
(Aug. 10, 1841).
THWING, CHARLES F.--Significant Ignorance About the Bible as Shown
Among College Students of Both Sexes. _Century_, 60:123–128 (May,
1900).