The essential difference between the past and the present is not so
much a difference, after all; in both instances the same mistaken
emphasis is placed upon two separate phases of the child’s make-up.
The moral tale took no cognisance of those spiritual laws which are
above teaching, which act of themselves; it did not recognise the
existence of the child’s personality. But when the impetus toward the
study, scientific and intensive, of adolescence was begun, the teacher
lost sight of the free will by which that growth advanced; anxious to
prove the child’s development to be but a series of stages marked by
educational gradings, he reserved no place for the self-development
through which the personality finds expression. In both cases an
unconscious injustice was done juvenile nature. The moral questioning
warped the spirit, the educational questioning chokes the imagination
and fancy, starving the spirit altogether. How many will agree with
Emerson’s assertion that “what we do not call education is more
precious than that which we call so”? The pessimist who challenges
children’s books for children has reasons to doubt, after all.
Time changes not, ’tis we who change in time. Emerson speaks in terms
of evolution; by this very change from generation to generation, the
vitality of a book is tested. Again, in terms of our mentality, Emerson
says that when a thought of Plato becomes a thought to us, Time is
no more. Truth is thus an annihilator of the fleeting moment. The
survival of the fittest means the falling away of the mediocre. The
Sunday-school book was no permanent type; its content was no classic
expression. It filled a timely demand--that was its excuse for being.
Once this demand became modified, the book’s service was at an end;
hence Mr. Welsh’s indication of the decline of the Sunday-school
story through secularisation,--from sectarianism to broad religious
principles, thence to “example rather than direct teaching.”[46]
We still have the religious tract and the church story-paper; yet the
books of advice deal with the social and ethical spirit, rather than
with the denominational stricture. “The less a man thinks or knows
about his virtues, the better we like him,” wrote Emerson, while
Stevenson, in his “Lay Sermons,” placed the stress thus: “It is the
business of life to make excuses for others but not for ourselves.”
To-morrow new topics may be introduced into our juvenile literature,
but change takes longer than a day to become apparent. The student who
attempts to reach any scientific estimate of the present trend will
be disappointed; the mass is too conglomerate, and there are too many
authors writing children’s books for money rather than for children.
I have followed the course as carefully as I could, noting the slight
alterations in concepts to accord with the varying conditions. But
there is no principle that can be deduced, other than the educational
one. The changes are confined to points of external interest, not
of spiritual or mental significance. For instance, there was a time
when girls’ literature and boys’ literature were more clearly
differentiated, one from the other; their near approach has been due to
a common interest in outdoor exercises. Again, things practical, things
literal have crowded out the benignant figure of Santa Claus; and in
the stead, the comic supplement of the Sunday newspaper furnishes
pictures that well-nigh stifle the true domain once occupied by “Mother
Goose.”
What would a parent do, asked suddenly to deal with a promiscuous
collection of juvenile books? Would she unerringly reach forth for
the volume most likely to please her son’s or her daughter’s taste?
If she were to claim little difference between the one college story
she had read, and the several hundred she had not read, she would
not be far from wrong. But we cannot tell how deep an impression the
present activity among writers for children will have on the future.
Our temptation is to make the general statement that the energy is a
surface one, that no great writing is being done for children because
it has become an accessory rather than an end in itself. Education
saved us from the moral pose; it must not deny us the realm of
imagination and fancy.