IV. The Experimental Temptation.
Many attempts have been made to treat statistically the reading tastes of children, but the results are significant only in a few details, and even these vary from locality to locality, as they differ from child to child. The psychology of sex becomes apparent by the manner in which boys and girls respond to the same stimulus. But we ought not to place much value upon a canvass of this kind, for the answers that are sent to any class of questions are more or less artificial, in many cases reflecting some grown person’s estimate of a book. It is important for the librarian to know the proportions in which fiction and non-fiction are circulated, and what books are in greatest demand. The temperature changes of taste need thus to be followed. But history deals with crucial moments.
Every one interested in the subject of juvenile reading has tried to experiment and has received quaint answers to stereotyped questions—answers filled with humour, now and then with a spontaneous exclamation of appreciation. In my own case, some four hundred letters were sent to me from children, North and South. They showed me local variations in reading tastes; they showed me educational weaknesses, such as a general mechanical study of a few hackneyed poems; they showed me an indiscriminate reading, by the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl, of fiction such as Besant’s “Children of Gideon” and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Fenwick’s Career.” Furthermore, they pointed in some instances to individual tastes; and most of them indicated a dire confusion as to the meaning of the terms fiction and non-fiction.
By such an experiment, however, one begins to realise how rich the field of juvenile energy is—a stream of voluntary desire seeking some course to the sea. From a multitude of such letters one may comprehend why the librarian insists on proceeding slowly in order to counteract deficiencies. The newsboy, without his five-cent weekly, still must have his penny-dreadful classic; the girl, too old for the juvenile book, must be furnished with a transitional book on the way to the grown-up shelves; our foreign children must be encouraged to read, according to the librarian’s idea, something different from themselves, something not of their own environment.[57]
We were warned by the writer in the Quarterly Review not to regard the extremes of genius or of dulness, in estimating children. And yet, biography is filled with that appealing detail of juvenile taste, which the grown person delights in recording. Lamb’s remembrance of the Stackhouse Bible, Coleridge’s dreamy dread of the Arabian Nights, Scott’s lusty shouting of the ballad of Hardy Knute, Tennyson’s spreading his arms to the sky and chanting, “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind,” Stevenson’s crooning to himself in the dark his “songstries”[58]—these touches do not betoken the genius of men, but the genius of childhood. Whenever we find such young people brought in contact with children’s literature, they do not relish the experience; they recognise as of value only that which they can but partially comprehend, yet which is told out of the depths of a writer’s heart and understanding. They respond to the spirit of great literature from their earliest moments; for its sake, they overcome the sensitiveness of temperament which nowadays must be in so far reckoned with that all causes for fear are rejected from a story. To them, there is a certain educative value in fear. Coleridge, timourous as he was when not more than six, devoured the gilt-covered books of Jack-the-Giant-Killer and of Tom Hickathrift, whom Thackeray delighted in, not because he was so tall, but because he was so thick; and though it is said that his father burnt many of these nerve-exacting tales, we hear Coleridge exclaiming during the course of a lecture delivered in 1811:
“Give me the works which delighted my youth! Give me the History of St. George and the Seven Champions of Christendom, which at every leisure moment I used to hide myself in a corner to read! Give me the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, which I used to watch, till the sun shining on the book-case approached, and, glowing full upon it, gave me the courage to take it from the shelf.”[59]
We interpret these remarks in terms of genius, without giving the average mind credit for such opinions, just because they are left unrecorded. Every child has his night fears and his day dreams, however regulated they may be by his social environment. These vary in degree according to the intellectual energy and spiritual refinement fostered in each one of us. The librarian’s problem is based upon an acknowledgment of this potential energy and refinement; she reckons with the child’s voluntary interest. For all childhood is seeking to find expression in numberless ways; its eye for the first time sees the outline of life, its voice expresses for the first time the rhythm of its nature in song. Its compass in all things is small, but its timbre is pure.