🥀 The idea that dragons are not interesting characters in a romance for
grown-up people is a modern idea. It is not a good idea, for an interest
in dragons is quite as easy, and at least as pleasing, as a belief in
some of the characters in contemporary fiction. That adult readers of
the older romance were on easy and equal terms with dragons is clear
from the fact that those romances were written not for children, but for
their elders. Even the classic and undying fairy stories—before Hans
Christian Andersen—were written neither about children nor for them.
They have been rather left to children than given to them. The grown-up
dropped them, content that the children should believe (that is,
rightly, pretend to believe) in dragons, though we ourselves prefer to
pretend to believe in the detestable people of the annual plays.
Therefore we shed our ancient love-stories and the children pick them
up, with all their wizards, witches, transformations, and delights, and
thrive on them. One of the causes of their good fortune is that they
were composed without condescension.
🥀 But the condescension of the new story-book is an offence. Some of our
annual authors evidently think that the more nonsense they write for the
little ones the better, and the more “fancy” the author displays the
more flexible will he seem to be in his performance. What, we may
wonder, if we cannot remember, does the young child think of the
flexibility of the grown-up who perform? I think he knows all about that
grimace and the value of it. Mrs. Fenwick, Mrs. Turner, and the Misses
Taylor were at any rate not humorists. If they stimulate the sense of
comedy in the child of our times, they must have quelled it in the child
of their own. Whereas, of some of our later writers, in whose eyes Mrs.
Fenwick and her like are doubtless nothing but ridiculous, it is to be
feared that they have done worse than quell the sense of comedy in
children; that they have rather made it weak with the tension of their
use; they have “practised upon it,” as used to be said of unlawful arts.
They have worn it out by too persistent appeal. I would rather have
trusted to the recovery of a child’s comic spirit after the negative
operation of a Mrs. Fenwick—even in the days when she was taken
seriously—than I would hope for a healthy condition after a course of
reading among the newer Christmas story-books of a comic character. All
is not for self-congratulation as time brings its revenges.
🥀 I find, in nearly all the little books of the day, the repeated and
repeated stimulation of the spirit of fun in its thinnest shape; and
sometimes there is to be perceived the author’s courageous hope that the
child will think better of the fun than he himself has succeeded in
thinking, when all is done; now and then the flagging heart is easily to
be detected, and the misgiving that the wary little reader may find no
more laughter in the matter than moved the writer at his work of
humorous invention.
🥀 No such anxieties beset our Mrs. Fenwick. Her readers had to know
their place. She kept the upper hand, serenely. She had no waverings,
not she. But then she was doing straightforward work; she had no
occasion for secret thoughts, and she knew none. She made no appeal to
the chances of a child’s spirit; she curried not his favour; the child
had to take what was given him. But at the end of the account perhaps he
was no more ill served. If the elastic childish sense of humour should
fail in its spring and buoyancy by reason of so much straining by the
child’s authors, if it should grow lax and flaccid, there would be much
loss rather than gain by the work of a century.
🥀 Indeed the reaction against the “Cautionary Stories” of 1813 has
carried the modern author far; and it is a helpless and a weak thing to
be carried by reactions. In all the children’s books of a season you
shall hardly find one “moral” at the close. Now children with erect
minds like a moral. And the worst thing in all these happenings would
be—perhaps already is this: that a child of to-day would be afraid and
ashamed to own that he liked a moral; would be so aware of the light
mind in his father and mother and his aunts—yes, in his godfather and
godmother—so shy of their banter, so well-informed as to their habitual
irony, so educated in paltriness and burlesque, that he would not
confess that he likes a story with good people and bad in it, a story
with free-will in it, and duty. What a misfortune! A little honest
creature covertly compelled to deny the little simple lord of his
breast!
🥀 Too much common sense—and too common—was the fault of a hundred years
ago. And now the fault is too much common nonsense—and far too common.
Since we began to find children funny we seem unable to think them funny
enough. Miss Austen did not think them funny at all. See the conscious
Anne Elliot when an ungovernable nephew had her by the neck and Captain
Wentworth disengaged her. Other children in her novels are as
intolerable as those in Thackeray’s. The children in Charlotte Brontë’s
novels are objects of her sombre dislike; of anything except natural
comedy. But even in our altered times, children are not necessarily
farcical to themselves. They would not always be clowning.
🥀 Rossetti was harassed by the word “quaint” with which he was dogged.
If modern children had a sense of that word and of what it implies, and
were fully conscious of their own dignity, they too would find it
harassing.
🥀 But between the old ways and the new came Robert Louis Stevenson, some
of whose delightful verses have the sententiousness of Jane and Anne
Taylor and Mrs. Fenwick, with the important addition of genius;
sententiousness with an equal smile. He does not clown, he makes no
grimace, but looks steadily and intelligibly into the child’s eyes.