This element is necessary in response to the demand of the child who expressed the needs of his fellow-playmates when he said: “I want to go to the place where the shadows are real.” This is the true definition of “Faerie” lands, and is the first sign of real mental development in the child when he is no longer content with the stories of his own little deeds and experiences, when his ear begins to appreciate sounds different from the words in his own everyday language, and when he begins to separate his own personality from the action of the story.
George Goschen says[26]:
“What I want for the young are books and stories which do not simply deal with our daily life. I like the fancy (even) of little children to have some larger food than images of their own little lives, and I confess I am sorry for the children whose imaginations are not sometimes stimulated by beautiful Fairy Tales which carry them to worlds different from those in which their future will be passed.... I hold that what removes them more or less from their daily life is better than what reminds them of it at every step.”
It is because of the great value of leading children to something beyond the limited circle of their own lives that I deplore the twaddling boarding-school stories written for girls and the artificially-prepared Public School stories for boys. Why not give them the dramatic interest of a larger stage? No account of a cricket match, or a football triumph, could present a finer appeal to boys and girls than the description of the Peacestead in the “Heroes of Asgaard”:
“This was the playground of the Æsir, where they practised trials of skill one with another and held tournaments and sham fights. These last were always conducted in the gentlest and most honourable manner; for the strongest law of the Peacestead was, that no angry blow should be struck, or spiteful word spoken upon the sacred field.”
For my part, I would unhesitatingly give to boys and girls an element of strong romance in the stories which are told them even before they are twelve. Miss Sewell says:
“The system that keeps girls in the schoolroom reading simple stories, without reading Scott and Shakespeare and Spenser, and then hands them over to the unexplored recesses of the Circulating Library, has been shown to be the most frivolizing that can be devised.” She sets forward the result of her experience that a good novel, especially a romantic one, read at twelve or fourteen, is really a beneficial thing.
At present many of the children from the elementary schools get their first idea of love (if one can give it such a name) from vulgar pictures displayed in the shop windows, or jokes on marriage culled from the lowest type of paper, or the proceedings of a divorce-court.
What an antidote to such representation might be found in the story of