I remember, on one occasion, when I went to say good-night to a little girl of my acquaintance, I found her sitting up in bed, very wide awake. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks were flushed, and when I asked her what had excited her so much, she said:
“I know I have done something wrong to-day, but I cannot quite remember what it was.”
I said: “But Phyllis, if you put your hand, which is really quite small, in front of your eyes, you could not see the shape of anything else, however large it might be. Now, what you have done to-day appears very large because it is so close, but when it is a little further off, you will be able to see better and know more about it. So let us wait till to-morrow morning.”
I am happy to say that she took my advice. She was soon fast asleep, and the next morning she had forgotten the wrong over which she had been unhealthily brooding the night before.[18]
II.—Stories dealing too much with sarcasm and satire. These are weapons which are too sharply polished, and therefore too dangerous, to place in the hands of children. For here again, as in the case of analysis, they can only have a very incomplete conception of the case. They do not know the real cause which produces the apparently ridiculous situation: it is experience and knowledge which lead to the discovery of the pathos and sadness which often underlie the ridiculous appearance, and it is only the abnormally gifted child or grown-up person who discovers this by instinct. It takes a lifetime to arrive at the position described in Sterne's words: “I would not have let fallen an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of misery to be entitled to all the Wit which Rabelais has ever scattered.”
I will hasten to add that I should not wish children to have their sympathy too much drawn out, or their emotions kindled too much to pity, because this would be neither healthy nor helpful to themselves or others. I only want to protect the children from the dangerous critical attitude induced by the use of satire: it sacrifices too much of the atmosphere of trust and belief in human beings which ought to be an essential of child-life. If we indulge in satire, the sense of kindness in children tends to become perverted, their sympathy cramped, and they themselves to become old before their time. We have an excellent example of this in Hans C. Andersen's “Snow Queen.”
When Kay gets the piece of broken mirror into his eye, he no longer sees the world from the normal child's point of view: he can no longer see anything but the foibles of those about him—a condition usually only reached by a course of pessimistic experience.
Andersen sums up the unnatural point of view in these words:
“When Kay tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer, he could only remember the multiplication table.” Now, without taking these words in any literal sense, we can admit that they represent the development of the head at the expense of the heart.
An example of this kind of story to avoid is Andersen's “Story of the Butterfly.” The bitterness of the Anemones, the sentimentality of the Violets, the schoolgirlishness of the Snowdrops, the domesticity of the Sweet-peas—all this tickles the palate of the adult, but does not belong to the plane of the normal child. Again I repeat that the unusual child may take all this in and even preserve its kindly attitude towards the world, but it is a dangerous atmosphere for the ordinary child.