of human childhood, such as that joyous setting forth of the little
St. Theresa and her brother to convert the inhabitants of Morocco,
and be martyred for their faith; an enterprise as natural to keenly
imaginative children of the sixteenth century as was the expedition two
hundred years later of the six little Blue Coat boys, who, without map,
chart, or compass, without luggage, provisions, or money, started out
one bright spring morning to find Philip Quarll’s Island. Sunlight and
shadow are not farther apart than the wholesome love of adventure which
religion as well as history and fairy-lore can inspire in the childish
heart, and that morbid conscientiousness which impels the young to the
bitter task of self-analysis. The most depressing thing about pious
fiction for little people is that it so seldom takes human nature into
account. I read not long ago an English Sunday-school story in which a
serious aunt severely reproves her twelve-year-old niece for saying she
would like to go to India and have a Bible class of native children, by
telling her it is vain and foolish to talk in that way, and that what
she can do is to be a better child herself, and save up her money for
the mission-box. Now the dream of going to a far-off land and doing
good in a lavish, semi-miraculous fashion is as natural for a pious and
imaginative little girl, as is the dream of fighting savages for a less
pious but equally imaginative little boy. It is well, no doubt, that
all generous impulses should have some practical outlet; but the aunt’s
dreary counsel was too suggestive of those ethical verses, familiar to
my own infancy, which began:--
“‘A penny I have,’ little Mary said,
As she thoughtfully raised her hand to her head,”
and described the anxious musings of this weak child as to how the
money might be most profitably employed, until at length she relieved
herself of all moral obligation by putting it into the mission-box.
It is not possible for a real little girl to sympathize with such a
situation. She may give away her pennies impulsively, as Charles Lamb
gave away his plum-cake,--to his lasting regret and remorse,--but she
does not start out by worrying over her serious responsibility as a
capitalist.
The joyless literature provided for the children of Puritanism in the
New World was little less lugubrious than that which a century later,
in many a well-tended English nursery, made the art of reading a
thoroughly undesirable accomplishment. Happy the boy who could escape
into the air and sunshine with Robinson Crusoe. Happy the girl who
found a constant friend in Miss Edgeworth’s little Rosamond. For always
on the book-shelf sat, sombre and implacable, the unsmiling “Fairchild
Family,” ready to hurl texts at everybody’s head, and to prove at
a moment’s notice the utter depravity of the youthful heart. It is
inconceivable that such a book should have retained its place for many
years, and that thousands of little readers should have plodded their
weary way through its unwholesome pages. For combined wretchedness and
self-righteousness, for groveling fear and a total lack of charity,
the “Fairchild Family” are without equals in literature, and, I hope,
in life. Lucy Fairchild, at nine, comes to the conclusion “that there
are very few real Christians in the world, and that a great part of
the human race will be finally lost;” and modestly proposes to her
brother and sister that they should recite some verses “about mankind
having bad hearts.” This is alacritously done, the other children being
more than equal to the emergency; and each in turn quotes a text to
prove that “the nature of man, after the fall of Adam, is utterly and
entirely sinful.” Lest this fundamental truth should be occasionally
forgotten, a prayer is composed for Lucy, which she commits to memory,
and a portion of which runs thus:--
“My heart is so exceedingly wicked, so vile, so full of sin, that even
when I appear to be tolerably good, even then I am sinning. When I am
praying, or reading the Bible, or hearing other people read the Bible,
even then I sin. When I speak, I sin; when I am silent, I sin.”
In fact, an anxious alertness, a continual apprehension of ill-doing,
is the keynote of this extraordinary book; and that its author, Mrs.
Sherwood, considered the innocence of childhood and even of infancy
an insufficient barrier to evil, is proven by an anecdote which she
tells of herself in her memoirs. When she was in her fourth year, a
gentleman, a guest of her father’s, “who shall be nameless,” took her
on his knee, and said something to her which she could not understand,
but which she felt at once was not fit for female ears, “especially not
for the female ears of extreme youth.” Indignant at this outrage to
propriety, she exclaimed, “You are a naughty man!” whereupon he became
embarrassed, and put her down upon the floor. That a baby of three
should be so keen to comprehend, or rather not to comprehend, but to
suspect an indecorum, seems well-nigh incredible, and I confess that
ever since reading this incident I have been assailed with a hopeless,
an undying curiosity to know what it was the “nameless” gentleman said.
The painful precocity of children anent matters profane and spiritual
is insisted upon so perseveringly by writers of Sunday-school
literature that Mrs. Sherwood’s infancy appears to have been the
recognized model for them all. In one of these stories, which claims
to be the veracious history of a very young child, compared with whom,
however, the “fairy babes of tombs and graves” are soberly natural
and realistic, I found I was expected to believe that an infant a
year old loved to hear her father read the Bible, and would lie in
her cot with clasped hands, listening to the precious words. Though
she could say but little,--at twelve months,--yet when she saw her
parents sitting down to breakfast without either prayers or reading,
she would put out her hands, and cry “No, no!” and look wistfully at
the Bible on the shelf. When two years old, “she was never weary at
church,” nor at Sunday-school, where she sat gazing rapturously in
her teacher’s face. It is unnecessary for any one familiar with such
tales to be assured that as soon as she could speak plainly she went
about correcting, not only all the children in the neighborhood, but
all the adults as well. A friend of her father’s was in the habit of
petting and caressing her, though Heaven knows how he had the temerity,
and she showed him every mark of affection until she heard of some
serious wrong-doing--drunkenness, I think--on his part. The next time
he came to the house she refused sadly to sit on his knee, “but told
him earnestly her feelings about all that he had done.” Finally she
fell ill, and after taking bitter medicines with delight, and using her
last breath to reproach her father for “not coming up to prayers,” she
died at the age of four and a half years, to the unexpressed, because
inexpressible, relief of everybody. The standard of infant death-beds
has reached a difficult point of perfection since Cotton Mather’s baby
set the example by making its “edifying end in praise and prayer,”
before it was three years old.
The enormous circulation of Sunday-school books, both in England
and America, has resulted in a constant exchange of commodities.
For many years we have given as freely as we have received; and if
English reviewers from the first were disposed to look askance upon
our contributions, English nurseries absorbed them unhesitatingly,
and English children read them, if not with interest, at least with
meekness and docility. When the “Fairchild Family” and the “Lady of the
Manor” crossed the Atlantic to our hospitable shores, we sent back,
returning evil for evil, the “Youth’s Book of Natural Theology,” in
which small boys and girls argue their way, with some kind preceptor’s
help, from the existence of a chicken to the existence of God, thus
learning at a tender age the first lessons of religious doubt. At
the same time that the “Leila” books and “Mary and Florence” found
their way to legions of young Americans, “The Wide, Wide World,”
“Queechy,” and “Melbourne House,”--with its intolerable little prig
of a heroine--were, if possible, more immoderately read in England
than at home. And in this case, the serious wrong-doing lies at our
doors. If the “Leila” books be rather too full of sermons and pious
conversations, long conversations of an uncompromisingly didactic
order, they are nevertheless interesting and wholesome, brimming with
adventures, and humanized by a very agreeable sense of fun. Moreover,
these English children, although incredibly good, have the grace to be
unconscious of their goodness. Even Selina, who, like young Wackford
Squeers, is “next door but one to a cherubim,” is apparently unaware
of the fact. Leila does not instruct her father. She receives counsel
quite humbly from his lips, though she is full eight years old when
the first volume opens. Matilda has never any occasion to remonstrate
gently with her mother; and little Alfred fails, in the whole course of
his infant life, to once awaken in his parents’ friends an acute sense
of their own unworthiness.
This conservative attitude is due, perhaps, to the rigid prejudices
of the Old World. In our freer air, children, released from thraldom,
develop swiftly into guides and teachers. We first introduced into the
literature of the Sunday-school the offensively pious little Christian
who makes her father and mother, her uncles and aunts, even her
venerable grandparents, the subjects of her spiritual ministrations. We
first taught her to confront, Bible in hand, the harmless adults who
had given her birth, and to annihilate their feeble arguments with
denunciatory texts. We first surrounded her with the persecutions of
the worldly-minded, that her virtues might shine more glaringly in
the gloom, and disquisitions on duty be never out of place. Daisy,
in “Melbourne House,” is an example of a perniciously good child who
has the conversion of her family on her hands, and is well aware of
the dignity of her position. Her trials and triumphs, her tears and
prayers, her sufferings and rewards, fill two portly volumes, and have
doubtless inspired many a young reader to set immediately about the
correction of her parents’ faults. The same lesson is taught with even
greater emphasis by a more recent writer, whose works, I am told, are
so exceedingly popular that she is not permitted to lay down her pen.
Hundreds of letters reach her every year, begging for a new “Elsie”
book; and the amiability with which she responds to the demand has
resulted in a fair-sized library,--twice as many volumes probably as
Sir Walter Scott ever read in the whole course of his childish life.
Now if, as the “Ladies’ Home Journal” informs us, “there has been
no character in American juvenile fiction who has attained more
widespread interest and affection than Elsie Dinsmore,” then children
have altered strangely since I was young, and “skipping the moral” was
a recognized habit of the nursery. It would be impossible to skip the
moral of the “Elsie” books, because the residuum would be nothingness.
Lucy Fairchild and Daisy Randolph are hardened reprobates compared with
Elsie Dinsmore. It is true we are told when the first book opens that
she is “not yet perfect;” but when we find her taking her well-worn
Bible out of her desk--she is eight years old--and consoling herself
with texts for the injustice of grown-up people, we begin to doubt
the assertion. When we hear her say to a visitor old enough to be her
father: “Surely you know that there is no such thing as a little sin.
Don’t you remember about the man who picked up sticks on the Sabbath
day?” the last lingering hope as to her possible fallibility dies in
our dejected bosoms. We are not surprised after this to hear that she
is unwilling to wear a new frock on Sunday, lest she should be tempted
to think of it in church; and we are fully prepared for the assurance
that she knows her father “is not a Christian,” and that she “listens
with pain” to his unprincipled conjecture that when a man leads an
honest, upright, moral life, is regular in his attendance at church,
and observes all the laws, he probably goes to heaven. This sanguine
statement is as reprehensible to Elsie as it would have been to the
Fairchild family; and when Mr. Dinsmore--a harmless, but very foolish
and consequential person--is taken ill, his little daughter pours out
her heart “in agonizing supplication that her dear, dear papa might be
spared, _at least until he was fit to go to Heaven_.”
A few old-fashioned people will consider this mental attitude an
unwholesome one for a child, and will perhaps be of the opinion that
it is better for a little girl to do something moderately naughty
herself than to judge her parents so severely. But Elsie is a young
Rhadamanthus, from whose verdicts there is no appeal. She sees with
dismay her father amusing himself with a novel on Sunday, and begs
at once that she may recite to him some verses. Forgetful of her
principles, he asks her, when convalescing from his tedious illness,
to read aloud to him for an hour. Alas! “The book her father bade
her read was simply a fictitious moral tale, without a particle of
religious truth in it, and, Elsie’s conscience told her, entirely unfit
for the Sabbath.” In vain Mr. Dinsmore reminds her that he is somewhat
older than she is, and assures her he would not ask her to do anything
he thought was wrong. “‘But, papa,’ she replied timidly,”--she is
now nine,--“‘you know the Bible says, “They measuring themselves by
themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”’”
This text failing to convince Mr. Dinsmore, he endeavors, through
wearisome chapter after chapter, to break Elsie’s heroic resolution,
until, as a final resource, she becomes ill in her turn, makes her
last will and testament, and is only induced to remain upon a sinful
earth when her father, contrite and humbled, implores her forgiveness,
and promises amendment. It never seems to occur to the author of these
remarkable stories that a child’s most precious privilege is to be
exempt from serious moral responsibility; that a supreme confidence in
the wisdom and goodness of his parents is his best safeguard; and that
to shake this innocent belief, this natural and holy creed of infancy,
is to destroy childhood itself, and to substitute the precocious
melancholy of a prig.
For nothing can be more dreary than the recital of Elsie’s sorrows and
persecutions. Every page is drenched with tears. She goes about with
“tear-swollen eyes,” she rushes to her room “shaken with sobs,” her
grief is “deep and despairing,” she “cries and sobs dreadfully,” she
“stifles her sobs,”--but this is rare,--she is “blinded with welling
tears.” In her more buoyant moments, a tear merely “trickles down her
cheek,” and on comparatively cheerful nights she is content to shed “a
few quiet tears upon her pillow.” On more serious occasions, “a low
cry of utter despair broke from her lips,” and when spoken to harshly
by her father, “with a low cry of anguish, she fell forward in a deep
swoon.” And yet I am asked to believe that this dismal, tear-soaked,
sobbing, hysterical little girl has been adopted by healthy children as
one of the favorite heroines of “American juvenile fiction.”
In all these books, the lesson of self-esteem and self-confidence
is taught on every page. Childish faults and childish virtues are
over-emphasized until they appear the only important things on earth.
Captain Raymond, a son-in-law of the grown-up Elsie, hearing that
his daughter Lulu has had trouble with her music-teacher, decides
immediately that it is his duty to leave the navy, and devote himself
to the training and discipline of his young family; a notion which, if
generally accepted, would soon leave our country without defenders.
On one occasion, Lulu, who is an unlucky girl, kicks--under sore
provocation--what she thinks is the dog, but what turns out, awkwardly
enough, to be the baby. The incident is considered sufficiently tragic
to fill most of the volume, and this is the way it is discussed by the
other children,--children who belong to an order of beings as extinct,
I believe and hope, as the dodo:--
“‘If Lu had only controlled her temper yesterday,’ said Max, ‘what a
happy family we would be.’
“‘Yes,’ sighed Grace. ‘Papa is punishing her very hard and very long;
but of course he knows best, and he loves her.’
“‘Yes, I am sure he does,’ assented Max. ‘So he won’t give her any more
punishment than he thinks she needs. It will be a fine thing for her,
and all the rest of us, too, if this hard lesson teaches her never to
get into a passion again.’”
Better surely to kick a wilderness of babies than to wallow in
self-righteousness like this!
One more serious charge must be brought against these popular
Sunday-school stories. They are controversial, and, like most
controversial tales, they exhibit an abundance of ignorance and a lack
of charity that are equally hurtful to a child. It is curious to see
women handle theology as if it were knitting, and one no longer wonders
at Ruskin’s passionate protest against such temerity. “Strange and
miserably strange,” he cries, “that while they are modest enough to
doubt their powers and pause at the threshold of sciences, where every
step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong and without
one thought of incompetency into that science at which the greatest men
have trembled, and in which the wisest have erred.” But then Ruskin, as
we all know, was equally impatient of “converted children who teach
their parents, and converted convicts who teach honest men,” and these
two classes form valuable ingredients in Sunday-school literature.
The theological arguments of the “Elsie” books would be infinitely
diverting if they were not so infinitely acrimonious. One of them,
however, is such a masterpiece of feminine pleading that its absurdity
must win forgiveness for its unkindness. A young girl, having entered
the church of Rome, is told with confidence that her hierarchy is
spoken of in the seventeenth chapter of Revelations as “Babylon the
Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” “But how
do you know,” she asks, not unnaturally, “that my church is meant by
these lines?”
“‘Because,’ is the triumphant and unassailable reply, ‘_she and she
alone answers to the description_.’”
This I consider the finest piece of reasoning that even Sunday-school
books have ever yielded me. It is simply perfect; but there are other
passages equally objectionable, and a little less amusing. In one of
the stories, Captain Raymond undertakes to convert a Scotch female
Mormon, which he does with astonishing facility, a single conversation
being sufficient to bring her to a proper frame of mind. His most
powerful argument is that Mormonism must be a false religion because it
so closely resembles Popery, which, he tolerantly adds, “has been well
called Satan’s masterpiece.” The Scotch woman who, unlike most of her
race, is extremely vague in her theology, hazards the assertion that
Popery “forbids men to marry,” while Mormonism commands it.
“‘The difference in regard to that,’ said Captain Raymond, ‘is not so
great as may appear at first sight. Both pander to men’s lusts; both
train children to forsake their parents; both teach lying and murder,
when by such crimes they are expected to advance the cause of their
church.’”
“Alas for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!”
I would the pious women who so wantonly and wickedly assail the creeds
in which their fellow creatures find help and hope, would learn at
least to express themselves--especially when their words are intended
for little children to read--with some approach to decency and
propriety.
“Gin I thocht Papistry a fause thing, _which I do_,” says the sturdy,
gentle Ettrick Shepherd, “I wadna scruple to say sae, in sic terms
as were consistent wi’ gude manners, and wi’ charity and humility of
heart. But I wad ca’ nae man a leear.” A simple lesson in Christianity
and forbearance which might be advantageously studied to-day.
There is no reason why the literature of the Sunday-school, since
it represents an important element in modern bookmaking, should be
uniformly and consistently bad. There is no reason why all the children
who figure in its pages should be such impossible little prigs; or why
all parents should be either incredibly foolish and worldly minded,
or so inflexibly serious that they never open their lips without
preaching. There is no reason why people, because they are virtuous
or repentant, should converse in stilted and unnatural language. A
contrite burglar in one of these edifying stories confesses poetically,
“My sins are more numerous than the hairs of my head or the sands of
the seashore,”--which was probably true, but not precisely the way in
which the Bill Sykeses of real life are wont to acknowledge the fact.
In another tale, an English one this time, a little girl named Helen
rashly asks her father for some trifling information. He gives it with
the usual grandiloquence, and then adds, by way of commendation: “Many
children are so foolish as to be ashamed to let those they converse
with discover that they do not comprehend everything that is said to
them, by which means they often imbibe erroneous ideas, and perhaps
remain in ignorance on many essential subjects, when, by questioning
their friends, they might easily have obtained correct and useful
knowledge.” If Helen ever ventured on another query after that, she
deserved her fate.
Above all, there is no reason why books intended for the pleasure as
well as for the profit of young children should be so melancholy and
dismal in their character. Nothing is more unwholesome than dejection,
nothing more pernicious for any of us than to fix our considerations
stedfastly upon the seamy side of life. Crippled lads, consumptive
mothers, angelic little girls with spinal complaint, infidel fathers,
lingering death-beds, famished families, innocent convicts, persecuted
schoolboys, and friendless children wrongfully accused of theft, have
held their own mournfully for many years. It is time we admitted,
even into religious fiction, some of the conscious joys of a not
altogether miserable world. I had recently in my service a pretty
little house-maid barely nineteen years old, neat, capable, and
good-tempered, but so perpetually down-cast that she threw a cloud over
our unreasonably cheerful household. I grew melancholy watching her at
work. One day, going into the kitchen, I saw lying open on her chair
a book she had just been reading. It purported to be the experience
of a missionary in one of our large cities, and was divided into nine
separate stories. These were their titles, copied verbatim on the
spot:--
The Infidel.
The Dying Banker.
The Drunkard’s Death.
The Miser’s Death.
The Hospital.
The Wanderer’s Death.
The Dying Shirt-Maker.
The Broken Heart.
The Destitute Poor.
What wonder that my little maid was sad and solemn when she recreated
herself with such chronicles as these? What wonder that, like the
Scotchman’s famous dog, “life was full o’ sairiousness” for her, when
religion and literature, the two things which should make up the sum of
our happiness, had conspired, under the guise of Sunday-school fiction,
to destroy her gayety of heart?
THE FÊTE DE GAYANT.