“Did you ever read my Adventures of Ulysses,[130] founded on Chapman’s old translation of it?” he asks in a letter to Barton, “for children or men. Chapman is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity.”
A prose version of Homer, if he had gone straight to the Greek, would have been still better; there was no good reason for turning Chapman into prose, although Lamb could do it gently.
But Mrs. Barbauld’s “nonsense” fades into insignificance beside the matter of this book, and her remarks about “wonder and delight” have not half the meaning of Lamb’s phrase “for children or men.”
These were “adventures” that had been told in the childhood of the Greek people. Lamb knew they were a natural food for children, trusted his instinct and defied his publisher.
In the matter of catering for children, Godwin was constrained on the one side by his theories, on the other by the parents who bought the books.
Not every parent professed his hard and cold philosophy, but they were mostly concerned for morals, and if any lacked interest in the more serious problems of education, they were the more likely to be caught by some prevailing pose of “Sensibility”. It did not follow, if they allowed their children to read “Othello”, that they would approve of the primitive survivals in Homer; nor did these in the least agree with Godwin’s exalted theories of the uncivilised mind. He would have had Lamb soften his account of the Cyclops devouring his victims, and the putting out of the monster’s eye, which Lamb called “lively images of shocking things”. This is the point where Art and Theory must part company.
“If you want a book which is not occasionally to shock”, wrote Lamb, “you should not have thought of a tale which was so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London Booksellers should refuse it.”
Lamb had good reason to trust his sister’s judgment where children were concerned. Their partnership in the making of little books was one-sided, and in a letter to Barton, Charles confessed that he wrote only three of the stories in Mrs. Leicester’s School:[131] “I wrote only the Witch Aunt, the First Going to Church and the final story about a little Indian girl in a ship”. But there are many subtle touches in the rest which suggest his hand, and if one may hazard a guess at their manner of working, Mary wrote little that they did not first discuss together, and revised much with his help. The framework of the book is all that connects it with Miss Fielding’s Governess; there is nothing of her bright objective treatment.
This, indeed, is not a child’s book at all, but a book of child-thought and experience, full of insight and tenderness, revealing everywhere the pathos of childhood.