I address you with all humility, because I know you to be _tenax
propositi_. Hear me, I entreat you, with patience.
It is strange with what different feelings an author and a
bookseller look at the same manuscript. I know this by experience:
I was an author, I am a bookseller. The author thinks what will
conduce to his honour; the bookseller, what will cause his
commodities to sell.
You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say [it was Johnson]:
It is children that read children’s books, when they are read,
but it is parents that choose them. The critical thought of the
tradesman puts itself therefore into the place of the parent, and
what the parent will condemn.
We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your manuscript,
of which no man can think more highly than I do, what will the
squeamish say to such expressions as these, ‘devoured their limbs,
yet warm and trembling, lapping the blood,’ page 10. Or to the
giant’s vomit, page 14, or to the minute and shocking description
of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page following. You,
I dare say, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from
among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that, if
you have, you exclude one half of the human species.
Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please, and
nothing, I think, is more indispensable....
The main argument here stated daily confronts the librarian and the
author; it is one so often over-considered, that in its wake it leaves
a diluted literature, mild in expression, faint in impression, weak in
situation, and lacking in colour. There is a certain literary style
that, through zealous regard for refinement, misses the rugged vitality
which marks the old-time story, and which constitutes its chief hold
upon life. On the other hand, children need very little stimulation,
provided it is virile, to set them in active accord; and it is wise
for publishers to consider the omissions of those unnecessary details,
situations, or actions, without which the story is in no way harmed.
But to curtail or to dilute the full meaning, to give a part for the
whole, has resulted in producing so many versions of the same tale or
legend as to make the young reader doubt which is the correct one; and
in most cases leave in him no desire to turn to the original source.
On your library shelves, are you to have five or six versions of the
same story, issued by as many rival publishing houses, or are you to
discard them all and take only that one which is _nearest_ the original
in spirit and in general excellence?
Lamb here brushed against the problem of writing for the popular taste.
This is how he met it:
MARCH 11, 1808.
DEAR GODWIN:
The giant’s vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you pointed
it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I can
find no objection but what you may bring to numberless passages
besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc.,--that is
to say, they are lively images of _shocking_ things. If you want
a book which is not occasionally to _shock_, you should not have
thought of a tale which is so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I
cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will
not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London
booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I
must say that I think _the terrible_ in those two passages seems
to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous as to make them
rather fine than disgusting. [Remember, this is spoken by one who
in youth was sensitive and whose feelings are graphically set forth
in “Witches, and Other Night Fears.”]... I only say that I will not
consent to alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best
in the book. As an author, I say to you, an author, Touch not my
work. As to a bookseller I say, Take the work, such as it is, or
refuse it. You are free to refuse it as when we first talked of it.
As to a friend I say, Don’t plague yourself and me with nonsensical
objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word.
Lamb’s critical genius often showed remarkable subtlety in the fine
distinctions drawn between shades of effect which are produced by art.
He established, through his careful analyses, an almost new critical
attitude toward Shakespeare; and, in days when psychology as a study
was unknown, when people witnessed the different phases of emotional
life and judged them before formulæ were invented by which to test
them scientifically, he saw, with rare discrimination, the part that
the spiritual value of literature was to play in the development of
culture. He here weighs in the balance a fine terror with a nauseous
scene; such a difference presupposes a clear insight into the story and
a power to arrive at the full meaning at once; it infers an instinctive
knowledge of the whole gamut of possible effects. Lamb’s plea to Godwin
is the plea of the man who would rather keep a child in the green
fields than have him spend his time on wishy-washy matter.
The whole discussion resolves itself into the question: How much of
the brute element, in which early literature abounds, is to be given
to children? Shall they be made to fear unnecessarily, shall the
ugly phases of life be allowed, simply because they come through the
ages stamped as classic? All due consideration must be paid to the
sensitiveness of childhood; but in what manner? Not by catering to it,
not by eliminating the cause from the story without at the same time
seeking to strengthen the inherent weakness of the child. Dr. Felix
Adler[40] would remove from our folk-lore all the excrescences that
denote a false superstition and that create prejudice of any kind;
he would have bad stepmothers taken from the fairy tales, because an
unjust hatred for a class is encouraged; he would prune away whatever
is of no ornamental or ethical value. Assuredly it is best, as Dr.
Adler points out, “to eliminate ... whatever is merely a relic of
ancient animism.” Mr. Howells believes that it is our pedant pride
which perpetuates the beast man in our classics, and it is true that
some of our literature has lived in spite of that characteristic, and
not because of it. But who is to point this beast man out for us, who
is to judge whether this or that corrupts, who to eliminate and who to
recreate? The classics would have to be rewritten whenever there was a
shift in moral viewpoint.
A mushroom growth of story-writers, those who “tame” our fairy tales,
who dilute fancy with sentimentalism, and who retell badly what has
been told surpassing well, threatens to choke the flower. It is not
the beast man in classic literature we have to fear so much as the
small man of letters, enthused by the educational idea, who rewrites
to order, and does not put into his text any of the invigorating
spirit which marks all truly great literature. We have always to return
to the ultimate goal, to the final court of appeal. If there is too
much brutal strength in a story intended for children, it had best be
read or told to them, rather than place in their hands what is not
literature but the mere husk.
Such a letter as Lamb wrote to Godwin leads us to feel that at times
misgivings seized him as to his own mutilation of Homer and of his
much-beloved Chapman. But such hesitancy is the exception and not the
rule to-day.
As poets for children the Lambs strike their most artificial note; the
verses are forced and written according to prescribed formulæ. There
is a mechanical effort in them to appear youthful, as though before
setting to the task--for so the two called it--a memorandum of childish
deeds and thoughts and expressions had been drawn up, from which each
was to extract inspiration. But inspiration is sorely lacking; to
most of the poems you can apply the stigma of “old maids” children;
there is little that is naturally playful or spontaneously appealing
in sentiment. Such lines as “Crumbs to the Birds” are unaffected and
simple, and the paraphrase “On the Lord’s Prayer” aptly interpretative.
But on the whole, the verses are stilted; the feeling in them comes not
from the authors so much as it indicates how carefully it was thought
out by them. We find Lamb making excuses to Coleridge in June, 1809:
“Our little poems are ... humble, but they have no name. You must read
them, remembering they were task-work; and perhaps you will admire the
number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old bachelor and
an old maid. Many parents would not have found so many.”
It is this utmost sincerity and such a naïve confession which make
Charles Lamb one of the most lovable figures in English literature.
=Bibliographical Note=
LUCAS, E. V.--Old-Fashioned Tales. Selected by. London, Wells, Gardner,
Darton & Co.; New York, Stokes.
LUCAS, E. V.--Forgotten Tales of Long Ago. Selected by. London, Wells,
Gardner, Darton & Co.; New York, Stokes, 1906.
MORLEY, JOHN--Jean Jacques Rousseau. Macmillan.
ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES--Émile; or, Treatise on Education. Abridged and
Translated by W. H. Payne. (International Educational Series.) New
York, Appleton, 1893.
* * * * *
DE GENLIS, COMTESSE, As an Educator. _Nation_, 73: 183 (Sept. 5, ’01).
DE GENLIS, COUNTESS, Memoirs of the. Illustrative of the History of
the 18th and 19th Century. Written by herself. (2 vols.) [English
translation.] New York, Wilder & Campbell, 1825.
DE GENLIS, COMTESSE--Théâtre d’Éducation. (5 vols.) Paris, 1825.
DE GENLIS, COMTESSE--Adelaide and Theodore. Letters on
Education,--containing all the principles relative to three
different plans of education; to that of princes, and to those of
young persons of both sexes. Translated from the French. (3 vols.)
London, 1788.
BERQUIN, ARNAUD--The Children’s Friend, Being a Selection from the
Works of. Montrose, 1798.
BERQUIN, ARNAUD--L’Ami des Enfants. Paris, 1792.
* * * * *
EDGEWORTH, MARIA--The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children. (3
vols.)
EDGEWORTH, MARIA, AND RICHARD LOVELL--Practical Education. (1st
American ed., 2 vols.) New York, 1801.
EDGEWORTH, RICHARD LOVELL, Memoirs of. Begun by himself and concluded
by his daughter, Maria Edgeworth. (2 vols.) London, Hunter, 1820.
HARE, AUGUSTUS J. C.--Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth. (2 vols.)
London, Arnold, 1894.
EDGEWORTH, MARIA--Tales from. With an Introduction by Austin Dobson.
New York, Stokes, $1.50.
PANCOAST, H. S.--Forgotten Patriot. _Atlantic_, 91: 758 (June, ’03).
RAY, A. C.--Philosopher’s Wooing. _Book-buyer_, 24: 287 (May, ’02).
FYVIE, JOHN--Literary Eccentricities. London, Constable, 1906. [_Vide_
p. 35: The author of “Sandford and Merton.”]
DAY, THOMAS--Life of. (In the British Poets, Vol. lviii.) [By R. A.
Davenport, Esq.]
DAY, THOMAS--Sandford and Merton. London, George Routledge & Sons, 3s.
6d.
* * * * *
BARBAULD, ANNA LETITIA--A Legacy for Young Ladies.... By the late Mrs.
B. London, 1826. [Morality leaps from every page, but the book is
agreeably written.]
BARBAULD AND AIKIN--Evenings at Home. London, Routledge, 2s. 6d.
MURCH, JEROM--Mrs. Barbauld and Her Contemporaries: Sketches of Some
Eminent Literary and Scientific English Women. London, Longmans,
1877. [_Vide_ also Memoir and Letters, ed. Grace A. Ellis; also
Memoir by Anna Letitia LeBreton.]
BARBAULD, MRS.--Hymns in Prose. London, Routledge, 2s.
RAIKES, ROBERT--The Man and His Work. Biographical Notes Collected
by Josiah Harris. Unpublished Letters by Robert Raikes. Letters
from the Raikes family. Opinions on Influence of Sunday Schools.
(Specially Contributed.) Ed. J. Henry Harris. Introduction by Dean
Farrar, D.D. Bristol, London. [Illustrated; frontispiece of Raikes.]
RAIKES, ROBERT--Memoir of the Founder of Sunday Schools. [Pamphlet.] G.
Webster. Nottingham, 1873.
TRIMMER, MRS.--Some Account of the Life and Writings of, with original
letters, and meditations and prayers, selected from her Journal.
London, 1825.
TRIMMER, MRS. SARAH--The History of the Robins. (Ed. Edward Everett
Hale.) Heath, 1903. [In its day, this book was illustrated by many
well-known artists.]
MORE, HANNAH, Life of. [Famous Women Series.] Charlotte M. Yonge.
Boston, Roberts, 1890.
MORE, HANNAH, Life of, with Notices of her Sisters. Henry Thompson,
M.A. (2 vols.) Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1838.
MORE, HANNAH, The Works of. (1st Complete American ed.) Harper, 1852.
[_Vide_ also Memoirs by W. Roberts and Mrs. H. C. Knight; Mrs.
Elwood’s Memoirs of Literary Ladies; _Monthly Review_, Feb., 1809;
April, 1813, Feb., 1820. _Vide_ London: Nurimo, for publication of
many of Miss More’s, Mrs. Sherwood’s and Jane Taylor’s stories.]
* * * * *
BLAKE, WILLIAM, The Lyric Poems of. Ed. John Sampson. Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1905.
BLAKE, WILLIAM, The Works of. Ed. E. J. Ellis and William Butler Yeats.
(3 vols.) London, 1893.
LAMB, CHARLES AND MARY--Works. Ed. E. V. Lucas. (Putnam.) Works. Ed.
Canon Ainger. (Macmillan.)
TAYLOR, ANN AND JANE--The “Original Poems” and Others. Ed. E. V. Lucas.
New York, Stokes, $1.50.
TAYLOR, JANE AND ANN--Greedy Dick, and Other Stories in Verse. Stokes,
$0.50.
WATTS, DR. ISAAC--London, Houlston. The same publishing house prints
volumes by Mrs. Sherwood, Mrs. Cameron, Miss Edgeworth, H.
Martineau, the Taylors, etc.
WATTS, DR. ISAAC--Divine and Moral Songs. London, Elkin Mathews, 1s.
6d. net.