LITERATURE OUT OF SCHOOL AND READING OTHER THAN LITERATURE
Were it not for appearing captious or extravagant, one would like to say
that in these days of cheap and easy books, and amidst the temptations
of the free libraries, the problem is that of keeping the children from
reading too much, rather than of inducing them to read enough. This is
particularly true of children in our large American cities, whom we
must, in our first generation of city-dwelling, guard against
eye-strain, and nerve-strain, and library-air, and physical inactivity
of all sorts. Luckily, our generation has learned some things about the
educational processes that have tended to lessen materially the danger
of over-reading. In many homes, and to many children out of school,
books and magazines have hitherto been a sort of opiate, from the point
of view of the child deadening the hungry sensibilities and lulling the
stifled activities; and from the point of view of the parent securing
silence and providing an apparently innocuous occupation. This is all
too little changed now, though more and more homes are providing
opportunity and encouragement for other occupations: shop and studio,
and more abundant material and opportunity for play. In the cities the
public playgrounds and gymnasiums--and all too rarely the public
workshop and studio for children--begin to share with the public library
the task of safely taking care of the children out of school.
But there will always be time for reading, and by all means the
legitimate share of the children's time should be given to it. The
so-called supplementary reading given them by the school is largely, I
take it, a question of the much reading that will make the process
easier, and not a matter of accumulating facts, or of acquiring a wider
knowledge of literature. In many schools that I have observed it is
often unwisely and carelessly chosen, so far as the literary share of it
is concerned. It should be selected partly for its bearing upon the
fact-studies, and not wholly made up of things of the literary kind. The
bearings of the question of the school's supplementary reading are not
literary, or, so far as they are, they have been discussed in other
connections.
Every child should ideally have free access to a collection of books got
together with reference to his needs and tastes. It may be serviceable
to indicate the kind and number of books that might be included in such
a library of a child up to his fourteenth year.
There should be in such a collection several biographies. On the whole,
let them be of the older, idealizing type, not of the modern young
university instructor's virtuously iconoclastic type. Children get at
their history first through heroic and dramatic figures and events. In
their earlier years it is the imagination that appropriates the images
and events of history. It is therefore only good pedagogy to present the
figures on their heroic and ideal side. Let these biographies include
the record of different sorts of men--a statesman, a pioneer, a
preacher, a soldier, an explorer, an inventor, a missionary, a business
man, a man of letters--so that many types of character and kinds of
experience may be reflected.
As the children grow older, they will dip into history for the
images--the persons and detachable events. The search for facts and
philosophy will come many years later. Some tempting books of history
should appear on their shelves; _The Dutch Republic_, _The Conquest of
Mexico_, Parkman's romantic narratives, and John Fiske's; if possible
the illustrated edition of _Green's History of the English People_. Most
of the history they get from their own reading, however, should be what
they get from the biographies of the central figures in the
events--Columbus, William of Orange, Francis Drake, and all the other
picturesque and heroic persons. Other historical reading would best be
done under guidance and in connection with the work in school.
There should be a few books of travel and exploration. Among these there
should be some of the original sources, if possible the _Bradford
Journal_, the _Jesuit Relations_, the _Lewis and Clark Journals_.
Froissart and Marco Polo should be included; the fable-making travelers
perform a very useful function. To these may be added a few most recent
explorations--African, Arctic, Andean, Thibetan.
Children, barring the exceptional child, will not read formal science;
but it may develop or help on a desirable taste and interest to have
some of the many pretty out-door books in their collection--not romances
of the wild, but simpler treatises about the things to be found in the
door-yard and the home woodland. And when a child develops a taste or a
gift in any scientific direction, he should have access, as easy as
possible, to some good reference books suited to his needs. All children
should have access to some of the more popular technical and scientific
journals which give interesting accounts of current discoveries and
inventions.
By way of nature and animal books we will include the _Jungle Books_, an
expurgated edition of _Reynard the Fox_, _Aesop's Fables_, and, of
course, _Uncle Remus_. Other semi-scientific nature-writers will
doubtless appear in most collections of children's books--and may do no
harm.
A book of Greek myth seriously and beautifully told should be
accessible. No other myth is so beautiful or so imaginative, or so
artistically put together. The children do not need to have to do with
many myths until they know something about interpreting them. Of course,
they should have access to the Bible in some attractive form. A large
illustrated edition--Dore's or Tissot's--will please and instruct them
from their earliest days. This is one of the cases in which
pictures--good and imaginative pictures--form a desirable gateway into a
realm where the children are not naturally at home, and where they need
the help of a great and serious artist in finding their way. Of course,
poor and materialistic pictures are a misfortune, especially those that
attempt to body forth preternatural events and supernatural beings.
Dore's pictures are not undesirable, because they often help a child to
a noble and imaginative conception of a thing he is himself powerless to
construct; while Tissot's are good because they set forth with beauty
and richness of detail the many phases of life which the child must try
to image in reading the Hebrew stories--from the nomadic simplicity of
the saga of pastoral Abraham to the luxurious refinements of the
Romanized and cosmopolitan Jerusalem.
The little scholar should find on his shelves Lanier's _King Arthur_,
Pyle's _Robin Hood_, Palmer's _Odyssey_, some translation of the
_Iliad_; in short, some form of each of the great hero-tales; a selected
few of Scott's romances--_Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, _Guy Mannering_,
_Anne of Geierstein_; a few of Cooper's; _Robinson Crusoe_, _Don
Quixote_, William Morris' prose tales, a pair of Quiller-Couch's, and as
many of Joseph Conrad's; these might constitute his romances. But unless
he is a very unusual child, he will never read in these masters, if he
is given masses of cheap and easy reading, such as the Henty books and
the Alger series; or if he finds in his mother's sitting-room a stack of
"the season's best sellers" and the ten-cent magazines. The cheap and
easy style and the commonplace material of this sort of books offer the
line of least resistance to the young reader. They flow into his mind
without effort on his part, while, if he would apprehend the masters,
he must actively co-operate with them at every step, arousing his best
powers to comprehend their expressions and to grasp their ideas. One
would hesitate to say that there is absolutely no use for books of the
Henty and Alger type. One can imagine a child whose every bent was
against reading, being enticed to begin by some such easy and
commonplace experience. And one can imagine their being useful to wean
children away from really vicious books. In a certain boys' club I know,
organized in a social settlement, which was really a reorganization of a
gang, these particular books were for a year or so an acceptable
substitute for the bloody romances they had been reading. Many of those
boys have never passed beyond them; but to many others they were, as was
hoped, stepping-stones to better things. There is no place for them in
the ideal collection of children's books. Certain books, harmless and as
recreation even desirable, will inevitably make their appearance on the
children's shelves--Miss Alcott's, Mrs. Richards', and others of the
many series of girls' books and boys' books; they are doubtless innocent
enough, and to be discouraged only when they keep the children from
something better worth while; to be encouraged, on the other hand, only
for those children who must be tempted by easy reading into any habit of
using books. To be sure, you will probably find that your child has
found one of them, perhaps a whole series, to which for a certain period
she seems to have given her whole heart; but if treated with wisdom this
symptom will disappear, and you will find her at some surprisingly early
day re-reading the tournament at Ashby, and patronizingly alluding to
the time when she was enslaved to "The Little General" series, or the
"Under the Roses" or the "Eight Half-Sisters" series, or any other
particular juveniles, as "when I was a child."
In the matter of fairy-tales one must discriminate and renounce quite
resolutely. It is not good for a child who has early mastered that edged
tool of reading to have access to all fairy-tales and all kinds of
fairy-tales. Eschew all the modern ones. Of course, if you have a
personal friend who has written a book of them, for reasons other than
literary your children will read them. But as to those you choose freely
for them let them have Grimm and Perrault, and the _Arabian Nights_, and
after a while Andersen; which, together with what they will pick up here
and there in magazines and in their friends' houses, will be enough.
For poetry, the child should have on his own shelves some pretty
edition of the _Nursery Rhymes_, _The Child's Garden_, some really good
collection of little things--_The Posy Ring_, for example, Henley's
_Lyra Heroica_, Lang's _The Blue Poetry Book_, Allingham's _Book of
Ballads_. For the rest he should be read to from the poets themselves,
and as soon as he is old enough, sent to the volumes of the poets for
his reading. As in school so at home the children should hear their
poetry read until they acquire some real degree of expertness as
readers. Children who can not understand at all, poetry which they read
silently, will delight in it read aloud.
This little collection should contain the classic nonsense, but not all
kinds of inartistic fooling and rude fun. There should be _Alice in
Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking-Glass_ (always the one with
Tenniel's pictures). We must remember that _Alice_ is very delicate art,
and that its final and deepest appeal is to the mature person. Certain
very imaginative children take to it as a fanciful tale at the moment of
ripeness; others miss it then, and must wait until the wonderful
dream-psychology of it, and the delicate satire of its parodies can make
their appeal to them as older persons. Lear's _Nonsense Rhymes_ in
judicious doses every child should have; "John Gilpin's Ride;" certain
of the _Bab Ballads_; a little of Oliver Heresford's delightful
foolishness. Among the folk- and fairy-tales he will find many comic
bits whose kind or degree of humor will suit him admirably in his
younger years. In Clouston's _Book of Noodles_ may be found a mine of
such funny tales. _The Peterkin Papers_ is the best of modern
noodle-tales. No family can be brought up without the help of _Strewel
Peter_, nor should they miss _Little Black Sambo_. Most American
children are enchanted with the fun of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn though
one must sadly acknowledge that it is woven into back-grounds of a
sensational kind not at all improving to an unformed taste.
One cannot feel that parodies are in general good for children; though,
after they have had a good share of serious enjoyment out of their
fairy-tales, and especially if they seem too much or too long absorbed
in them, they ought to have _The Rose and the Ring_ and _Prince Prigio_.
Picture-books and illustrated books are another independent little
problem. It is a curious fact that it is not the beautiful lithographs
of birds and animals, flocks and landscapes, children in irreproachable
Russian dresses and short socks, seated in the corner of ancestral
mahogany sofas, refreshing themselves from antique silver porringers,
that the little living heads hang over by the hour on the nursery floor.
It is much more likely to be the thunderous landscapes of the old Dutch
woodcuts in Great-grandmama's Bible, the queer, chaotic, symbolistic
plates of the _Mother-Play_; the wonderful prints of Comenius' _Orbis
Pictus_; the casualties of John Leech's hunting fields. True, they
delight in the charming details of all Kate Greenaway's books; and
Walter Crane's pictures so rich in color and beautiful detail give
ceaseless joy; but one must confess that they are a bit inclined to
"shy" at pictures they know to be intended for them. Every nursery that
can compass it should have as many as possible of the books illustrated
in color by Boutet de Monvel. The children should never see comic
illustrations of their nursery rhymes and stories. They are all banal as
wit and trashy as art, substituting an ugly and distorted image for the
possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. After they
have passed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories.
The black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should
be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of
relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text.
There should also be in the "little library," or accessible to the
little readers in the big one, beside the illustrated Bible, the one
big volume of Shakespeare with Gilbert's pictures--an inexhaustible mine
of life and art; Engelmann and Anderson's _Atlas of the Homeric Poems_,
a _Dictionary of Classical Antiquities_, and an encyclopedia that the
older children can use, should have a place on these shelves.
It is so often said as to amount to a mere convention that the best
possible literary experience for a child is to be turned loose to browse
(they always say "browse") in a grown-up library. One always finds a
malicious pleasure in detecting in these people (and they are always to
be found in great plenty) those baby impressions, still uncorrected that
they got of many books in the course of their browsing. Of course, in a
house where there are many books the children will experiment, will
taste of many dishes, and possibly devour many things not intended for
them. From some of these they will take no serious harm, while in many
other cases they will get a permanent warp of judgment or of feeling. It
would seem to me wise to guide the child in his explorations, giving him
plenty of those grown-up things that you believe to be good for him, and
heading him off as long as possible from the others. For all your
caution, however, children will be found buried in _Tom Jones_, mousing
about in Montaigne, chuckling over _Tristram Shandy_, and befuddling
themselves with _Ghosts_ and _Anna Karenina_. In these cases we can only
hope that nature has mercifully ordained that, not having the necessary
apperception experience, they will not get at the real truth of these
books, and that they will have the luck--rare, to be sure--to remove and
correct their mistaken impressions in some subsequent reading.
The ideal co-operation between home, school, Sunday school, and library
is yet to be brought about; teacher and parents can do much to promote
it. As a step toward this co-operation they should provide every child
who reads in a library with a list of books. The imaginative books in
the list given out by the public libraries are practically all
juveniles, apparently chosen mainly for the purpose of amusing children
who have no books in their homes. These things are undoubtedly amusing;
they are superficially appetizing; and they have the same effect that
the soda fountain at the corner drug-shop has upon the children's
appetite for true nourishment--they take the edge off his hunger so that
he has no relish for his bread and butter, though he has had nothing to
eat but a hint of cheap flavor, a dash of formaldehyde, a spoonful of
poor milk, and a glassful of effervescence. The lists given by parents
and teachers may change all this, but only if they include good things,
beautiful and interesting enough to make these wasteful juveniles seem
unattractive.
Every schoolroom in which the children are old enough to be interested,
and every family should devise a method of digesting the news of the
world every day or every week, so that the children may have some
knowledge of current events. Of course, there are children who cannot be
kept from reading the morning paper--crimes, sports, and all. Such a
child's family should choose its newspaper with all possible care Every
self-respecting family where there are children should be willing to
submit to the very small sacrifice of foregoing the Sunday paper, to
save the little people from the flood of commonplace, of triviality, and
of ribaldry that overwhelms them from these monstrous productions.
Perhaps no well-brought-up child would be quite well equipped if he has
not had _The Youth's Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_ in his childhood; but
it is a mistake to let them linger too long in these periodicals, whose
contents are somewhat fragmentary as literature, and not quite large
enough or full enough as to current events and interests. It is wise to
turn the children as soon as possible to the mature and more thorough
magazines, among which should be included a technical and scientific
journal. By all means do not subject them to the temptation of the
various story-magazines--those cheap and easy chronicles of the
questionable affairs of undergraduates and chorus girls, of Nietzschean
superhumanity gone to seed, of imitations of the imitated psychology of
the wild, all rendered in the English of third-year college themes. If
the adult members of the family must have these things, let them be
kept, along with "the season's best sellers," out of easy reach of the
children.
It should not need to be said that there has been no attempt in the
foregoing discussion to recommend every good thing, or to give an
exhaustive list of such things in any one line; no more has there been
an effort to give warning of all things undesirable, but merely, as in
the whole book, to state the underlying principles of choice, with just
enough specific examples to make clear their application.