should be built up on the ashes of an extinct enjoyment. We spend a
great deal of our time in learning what literature is good, and a great
deal more in attuning our minds to its reception, rightly convinced
that, by the training of our intellectual faculties, we are unlocking
one of the doors through which sweetness and light may enter. We are
fond of reading, too, and have always maintained with Macaulay that we
would rather be a poor man with books than a great king without, though
luckily for our resolution, and perhaps for his, such a choice has
never yet been offered. Books, we say, are our dearest friends, and so,
with true friendly acuteness, we are prompt to discover their faults,
and take great credit in our ingenuity. But all this time, somewhere
about the house, curled up, may be, in a nursery window, or hidden in
a freezing attic, a child is poring over The Three Musketeers, lost
to any consciousness of his surroundings, incapable of analyzing his
emotions, breathless with mingled fear and exultation over his heroes’
varying fortunes, and drinking in a host of vivid impressions that are
absolutely ineffaceable from his mind. We cannot read in that fashion
any longer, but we only wish we could. Thackeray used to sigh in middle
age over the lost delights of five shillings’ worth of pastry; but
what was the pleasure of eating tarts to the glamour cast over us by
our first romance, to the enchanted hours we spent with Sintram by
the sea-shore, or with Nydia in the darkened streets of Pompeii, or
perhaps--if we were not too carefully watched--with Emily in those
dreadful vaults beneath Udolpho’s walls!
Nor is it fiction only that strongly excites the imagination of a
child. History is not to him what it is to us, a tangle of disputed
facts, doubtful theories, and conflicting evidence. He grasps its
salient points with simple directness, absorbs them into his mind
with tolerable accuracy, and passes judgment on them with enviable
ease. To him, historical characters are at least as real as those of
romance, which they are very far from being to us, and he enters into
their impressions and motives with a facile sympathy which we rarely
feel. Not only does he firmly believe that Marcus Curtius leaped into
the gulf, but he has not yet learned to question the expediency of
the act; and, having never been enlightened by Mr. Grote, the black
broth of Lykurgus is as much a matter of fact to him as the bread and
butter upon his own breakfast table. Sir Walter Scott tells us that
even the dinner-bell--most welcome sound to boyish ears--failed to win
him from his rapt perusal of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry; but
Gibbon, as a lad, found the passage of the Goths over the Danube just
as engrossing, and, stifling the pangs of hunger, preferred to linger
fasting in their company. The great historian’s early love for history
has furnished Mr. Bagehot with one more proof of the fascination of
such records for the youthful mind, and he bids us at the same time
consider from what a firm and tangible standpoint it regards them.
“Youth,” he writes, “has a principle of consolidation. In history,
the whole comes in boyhood; the details later, and in manhood. The
wonderful series going far back to the times of old patriarchs with
their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the
watchful Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of
the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise
of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough, impetuous
Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home,--when did we
learn these? Not yesterday, nor to-day, but long ago, in the first dawn
of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn afterwards are
but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious
facts. Those who begin late learn only these; but the happy first feel
the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.”[8]
If this be true, and the child’s mind be not only singularly alive
to new impressions, but quick to concentrate its knowledge into a
consistent whole, the value and importance of his early reading can
hardly be overestimated. That much anxiety has been felt upon the
subject is proven by the cry of self-congratulation that rises on
every side of us to-day. We are on the right track at last, the press
and the publishers assure us; and with tons of healthy juvenile
literature flooding the markets every year, our American boys and girls
stand fully equipped for the intellectual battles of life. But if we
will consider the matter in a dispassionate and less boastful light, we
shall see that the good accomplished is mainly of a negative character.
By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly
succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad;
yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the
characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged
with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness. These little
volumes, nicely written, nicely printed, and nicely illustrated, are
very useful in their way; but they are powerless to awaken a child’s
imagination, or to stimulate his mental growth. If stories, they
merely introduce him to a phase of life with which he is already
familiar; if historical, they aim at showing him a series of detached
episodes, broken pictures of the mighty whole, shorn of its “mystic
associations,” and stirring within his soul no stronger impulse than
that of a cheaply gratified curiosity.
Not that children’s books are to be neglected or contemned. On the
contrary, they are always helpful, and in the average nursery have
grown to be a recognized necessity. But when supplied with a too lavish
hand, a child is tempted to read nothing else, and his mind becomes
shrunken for lack of a vigorous stimulant to excite and expand it.
“Children,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “derive impulses of a powerful
and important kind from hearing things that they cannot entirely
comprehend. It is a mistake to write down to their understanding. Set
them on the scent, and let them puzzle it out.” Sir Walter himself, be
it observed, in common with most little people of genius, got along
strikingly well without any juvenile literature at all. He shouted the
ballad of Hardyknute, to the great annoyance of his aunt’s visitors,
long before he knew how to read, and listened at his grandmother’s knee
to her stirring tales about Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood,
Jamie Telfer of the fair Dodhead, and a host of border heroes whose
picturesque robberies were the glory of their sober and respectable
descendants. Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat
were explored for his amusement in the dreary winter days. Ramsay’s
Tea-Table Miscellany, a mutilated copy of Josephus, and Pope’s
translation of the Iliad appear to have been his favorites, until, when
about eight years old, a happy chance threw him under the spell of the
two great poets who have swayed most powerfully the pliant imaginations
of the young. “I found,” he writes in his early memoirs, “within my
mother’s dressing-room (where I slept at one time) some odd volumes
of Shakespeare; nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sate
up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment,
until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me it was
time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely
deposited since nine o’clock.” And a little later he adds, “Spenser
I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the
allegory, I considered all the knights, and ladies, and dragons, and
giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and Heaven only knows how
delighted I was to find myself in such society!”
“How much of our poetry,” it has been asked, “owes its start to
Spenser, when the Fairy Queen was a household book, and lay in the
parlor window-seat?” And how many brilliant fancies have emanated
from those same window-seats, which Montaigne so keenly despised?
There, where the smallest child could climb with ease, lay piled up
in a corner, within the reach of his little hands, the few precious
volumes which perhaps comprised the literary wealth of the household.
Those were not days when over-indulgence and a multiplicity of books
robbed reading of its healthy zest. We know that in the window-seat
of Cowley’s mother’s room lay a copy of the Fairy Queen, which to her
little son was a source of unfailing delight, and Pope has recorded
the ecstasy with which, as a lad, he pored over this wonderful poem;
but then neither Cowley nor Pope had the advantage of following Oliver
Optic through the slums of New York, or living with some adventurous
“boy hunters” in the jungles of Central Africa. On the other hand,
there is a delicious account of Bentham, in his early childhood,
climbing to the height of a huge stool, and sitting there night after
night reading Rapin’s history by the light of two candles; a weird
little figure, whose only counterpart in literature is the small John
Ruskin propped up solemnly in his niche, “like an idol,” and hemmed
in from the family reach by the table on which his book reposed. It
is quite evident that Bentham found the mental nutrition he wanted
in Rapin’s rather dreary pages, just as Pope and Cowley found it in
Spenser, Ruskin in the Iliad, and Burns in the marvelous stories
told by that “most ignorant and superstitious old woman,” who made
the poet afraid of his own shadow, and who, as he afterwards freely
acknowledged, fanned within his soul the kindling flame of genius.
Look where we will, we find the author’s future work reflected in the
intellectual pastimes of his childhood. Madame de Genlis, when but six
years old, perused with unflagging interest the ten solid volumes of
Clélie,--a task which would appall the most stout-hearted novel-reader
of to-day. Gibbon turned as instinctively to facts as Scott and Burns
to fiction. Macaulay surely learned from his beloved Æneid the art of
presenting a dubious statement with all the vigorous coloring of truth.
Wordsworth congratulated himself and Coleridge that, as children, they
had ranged at will
“through vales
Rich with indigenous produce, open grounds
Of fancy;”
Coleridge, in his turn, was wont to express his sense of superiority
over those who had not read fairy tales when they were young, and
Charles Lamb, who was plainly of the same way of thinking, wrote to him
hotly on the subject of the “cursed Barbauld crew,” and demanded how he
would ever have become a poet, if, instead of being fed with tales and
old wives’ fables in his infancy, he had been crammed with geography,
natural history, and other useful information. What a picture we have
of Cardinal Newman’s sensitive and flexible mind in these few words
which bear witness to his childish musings! “I used to wish,” he says
in the third chapter of the Apologia, “that the Arabian Nights were
true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers
and talismans.... I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and
all the world a deception, my fellow angels, by a playful device,
concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of
a material world.” Alongside of this poetic revelation may be placed
Cobbett’s sketch of himself: a sturdy country lad of eleven, in a
blue smock and red garters, standing before the bookseller’s shop
in Richmond, with an empty stomach, three pence in his pocket, and
a certain little book called The Tale of a Tub contending with his
hunger for the possession of that last bit of money. In the end, mind
conquered matter: the threepence was invested in the volume, and the
homeless little reader curled himself under a haystack, and forgot all
about his supper in the strange, new pleasure he was enjoying. “The
book was so different,” he writes, “from anything that I had ever read
before, it was something so fresh to my mind, that, though I could not
understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and
produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I
read on till it was dark, without any thought of food or bed. When I
could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down
by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds of Kew Gardens
awakened me in the morning.... I carried that volume about with me
wherever I went; and when I lost it in a box that fell overboard in the
Bay of Fundy, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt at
losing thousands of pounds.”
As for Lamb’s views on the subject of early reading, they are best
expressed in his triumphant vindication of Bridget Elia’s happily
neglected education: “She was tumbled by accident or design into a
spacious closet of good old English books, without much selection
or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome
pasturage. Had I twenty girls they should be brought up exactly in this
fashion.” It is natural that but few parents are anxious to risk so
hazardous an experiment, especially as the training of “incomparable
old maids” is hardly the recognized summit of maternal ambition; but
Bridget Elia at least ran no danger of intellectual starvation, while,
if we pursue a modern school-girl along the track of her self-chosen
reading, we shall be astonished that so much printed matter can yield
so little mental nourishment. She has begun, no doubt, with childish
stories, bright and well-written, probably, but following each other
in such quick succession that none of them have left any distinct
impression on her mind. Books that children read but once are of scant
service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations
and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that
they have become a portion of our thinking selves. At ten or twelve the
little girl aspires to something partly grown-up, to those nondescript
tales which, trembling ever on the brink of sentiment, seem afraid to
risk the plunge; and with her appetite whetted by a course of this
unsatisfying diet, she is soon ripe for a little more excitement and a
great deal more love-making, so graduates into Rhoda Broughton and the
“Duchess,” at which point her intellectual career is closed. She has
no idea, even, of what she has missed in the world of books. She tells
you that she “don’t care for Dickens,” and “can’t get interested in
Scott,” with a placidity that plainly shows she lays the blame for this
state of affairs on the two great masters who have amused and charmed
the world. As for Northanger Abbey, or Emma, she would as soon think
of finding entertainment in Henry Esmond. She has probably never read
a single masterpiece of our language; she has never been moved by a
noble poem, or stirred to the quick by a well-told page of history; she
has never opened the pores of her mind for the reception of a vigorous
thought, or the solution of a mental problem; yet she may be found
daily in the circulating library, and is seldom visible on the street
without a book or two under her arm.
“In the love-novels all the heroines are very desperate,” wrote
little Marjorie Fleming in her diary, nearly eighty years ago, and
added somewhat plaintively, “Isabella will not allow me to speak of
lovers and heroins,”--yearning, as we can see, over the forbidden
topic, and mutable in her spelling, as befits her tender age. But
what books had _she_ read, this bright-eyed, healthy, winsome little
girl,--eight years old when she died,--the favorite companion of
Sir Walter Scott, and his comfort in many a moment of fatigue and
depression? We can follow her path easily enough, thanks to those
delicious, misspelt scrawls in which she has recorded her childish
verdicts. “Thomson is a beautiful author,” she writes at six, “and
Pope, but nothing to Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege.
Macbeth is a pretty composition, but awful one.... The Newgate Calender
is very instructive.” And again, “Tom Jones and Grey’s Elegy in a
country churchyard,” surely never classed together before, “are both
excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men....
Doctor Swift’s works are very funny; I got some of them by heart....
Miss Egward’s [Edgeworth’s] tails are very good, particularly some
that are much adapted for youth, as Laz Lawrance and Tarleton.” Then
with a sudden jump, “I am reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much
interested in the fate of poor poor Emily.... Morehead’s sermons are,
I hear, much praised, but I never read sermons of any kind; but I read
novelettes and my Bible, and I never forget it or my prayers.”
It is apparent that she read a great deal which would now hardly
be considered desirable for little girls, but who can quarrel with
the result? Had the bright young mind been starved on Dotty Dimple
and Little Prudy books, we might have missed the quaintest bit of
autobiography in the English tongue, those few scattered pages which,
with her scraps of verse and tender little letters, were so carefully
preserved by a loving sister after Pet Maidie’s death. Far too young
and innocent to be harmed by Tom Jones or the “funny” Doctor Swift,
we may perhaps doubt whether she had penetrated very deeply into the
Newgate Calendar, notwithstanding a further assertion on her part that
“the history of all the malcontents as ever was hanged is amusing.” But
that she had the “little knolege” she boasted of Shakespeare is proven
by the fact that her recitations from King John affected Scott, to use
his own words, “as nothing else could do.” He would sob outright when
the little creature on his knee repeated, quivering with suppressed
emotion, those heart-breaking words of Constance:--
“For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrong, and therefore full of fears;”
and, knowing the necessity of relaxing a mind so highly wrought, he
took good care that she should not be without healthy childish reading.
We have an amusing picture of her consoling herself with fairy tales,
when exiled, for her restlessness, to the foot of her sister’s bed;
and one of the first copies of Rosamond, and Harry and Lucy found its
way to Marjorie Fleming, with Sir Walter Scott’s name written on the
fly-leaf.
Fairy tales, and Harry and Lucy! But the real, old-fashioned, earnest,
half-sombre fairy tales of our youth have slipped from the hands of
children into those of folk-lore students, who are busy explaining
all their flavor out of them; while as for Miss Edgeworth, the little
people of to-day cannot be persuaded that she is not dull and prosy.
Yet what keen pleasure have her stories given to generations of boys
and girls, who in their time have grown to be clever men and women!
Hear what Miss Thackeray, that loving student of children and of
childish ways, has to record about them. “When I look back,” she
writes, “upon my own youth, I seem to have lived in company with a
delightful host of little play-mates, bright, busy children, whose
cheerful presence remains more vividly in my mind than that of many
of the real little boys and girls who used to appear and disappear
disconnectedly, as children do in childhood, when friendship and
companionship depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up
people. Now and again came little cousins or friends to share our
games, but day by day, constant and unchanging, ever to be relied
upon, smiled our most lovable and friendly companions: simple Susan,
lame Jervas, the dear little merchants, Jem, the widow’s son, with his
arms around old Lightfoot’s neck, the generous Ben, with his whip-cord
and his useful proverb of ‘Waste not, want not,’--all of these were
there in the window corner waiting our pleasure. After Parents’
Assistant, to which familiar words we attached no meaning whatever,
came Popular Tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room
of an apartment in an old house in Paris; and as we opened the books,
lo! creation widened to our view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey,
the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travelers,
governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life were all laid
under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum
nursery corner.”[9]
And have these bright and varied pictures, “these immortal tales,”
as Mr. Matthew Arnold termed them, lost their power to charm, that
they are banished from our modern nursery corners; or is it because
their didactic purpose is too thinly veiled, or--as I have sometimes
fancied--because their authoress took so moderate a view of children’s
functions and importance? If we place Miss Edgeworth’s and Miss
Alcott’s stories side by side, we shall see that the contrast between
them lies not so much in the expected dissimilarity of style and
incident as in the utterly different standpoint from which their
writers regard the aspirations and responsibilities of childhood.
Take, for instance, Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond and Miss Alcott’s Eight
Cousins, both of them books purporting to show the gradual development
of a little girl’s character under kindly and stimulating influences.
Rosamond, who is said to be a portrait of Maria Edgeworth herself,
is from first to last the undisputed heroine of the volume which
bears her name. Laura may be much wiser, Godfrey far more clever; but
neither of them usurps for a moment their sister’s place as the central
figure of the narrative, round whom our interest clings. But when we
come to consider her position in her own family, we find it strangely
insignificant. The foolish, warm-hearted, impetuous little girl is of
importance to the household only through the love they bear her. It is
plain her opinions do not carry much weight, and she is never called
on to act as an especial providence to any one. We do not behold her
winning Godfrey away from his cigar, or Orlando from fast companions,
or correcting anybody’s faults, in fact, except her own, which are
numerous enough, and give her plenty of concern.
Now with Rose, the bright little heroine of Eight Cousins, and of its
sequel A Rose in Bloom, everything is vastly different. She is of the
utmost importance to all the grown-up people in the book, most of
whom, it must be acknowledged, are extremely silly and incapable.
Her aunts set the very highest value upon her society, and receive
it with gratified rapture; while among her male cousins she is from
the first like a missionary in the Feejees. It is she who cures them
of their boyish vices, obtaining in return from their supine mothers
“a vote of thanks, which made her feel as if she had done a service
to her country.” At thirteen she discovers that “girls are made to
take care of boys,” and with dauntless assurance sets about her
self-appointed task. “You boys need somebody to look after you,” she
modestly announces,--most of them are her seniors, by the way, and all
have parents,--“so I’m going to do it; for girls are nice peacemakers,
and know how to manage people.” Naturally, to a young person holding
these advanced views of life, Miss Edgeworth’s limited field of action
seems a very spiritless affair, and we find Rose expressing herself
with characteristic energy on the subject of the purple jar, declaring
that Rosamond’s mother was “regularly mean,” and that she “always
wanted to shake that woman, though she was a model mamma”! As we read
the audacious words, we half expect to see, rising from the mists
of story-book land, the indignant ghost of little English Rosamond,
burning to defend, with all her old impetuosity, the mother whom she
so dearly loved. It is true, she had no sense of a “mission,” this
commonplace but very amusing little girl. She never, like Rose, adopted
a pauper infant, or made friends with a workhouse orphan; she never
vetoed pretty frocks in favor of philanthropy, or announced that she
would “have nothing to do with love until she could prove that she was
something beside a housekeeper and a baby-tender.” In fact, she was
probably taught that love and matrimony and babies were not proper
subjects for discussion in the polite society for which she was so
carefully reared. The hints that are given her now and then on such
matters by no means encourage a free expression of any unconventional
views. “It is particularly amiable in a woman to be ready to yield, and
avoid disputing about trifles,” says Rosamond’s father, who plainly
does not consider his child in the light of a beneficent genius; while,
when she reaches her teens, she is described as being “just at that age
when girls do not join in conversation, but when they sit modestly
silent, and have leisure, if they have sense, to judge of what others
say, and to form by choice, and not by chance, their opinions of what
goes on in that great world into which they have not yet entered.”