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.”