“This would be lessening the joy of the world and taking from generations yet unborn the capacity for wonder, the power to take a large unselfish interest in the spectacle of things, and putting them forever at the mercy of small private cares.
A Nursery Rhyme is the most sane, the most unselfish thing in the world. It calls up some delightful image,—a little nut-tree with a silver walnut and a golden pear; some romantic adventure only for the child's delight and liberation from the bondage of unseeing dulness: it brings before the mind the quintessence of some good thing:
'The little dog laughed to see such sport'—there is the soul of good humour, of sanity, of health in the laughter of that innocently wicked little dog. It is the laughter of pure frolic without unkindness. To have laughed with the little dog as a child is the best preservative against mirthless laughter in later years—the horse laughter of brutality, the ugly laughter of spite, the acrid laughter of fanaticism. The world of Nursery Rhymes, the old world of Mrs. Slipper-Slopper, is the world of natural things, of quick, healthy motion, of the joy of living.
In Nursery Rhymes the child is entertained with all the pageant of the world. It walks in Fairy Gardens, and for it the singing birds pass. All the King's horses and all the King's men pass before it in their glorious array. Craftsmen of all sorts, bakers, confectioners, silversmiths, blacksmiths are busy for it with all their arts and mysteries, as at the court of an Eastern King.”
In insisting on the value of this escape from the commonplace, I cannot prove the importance of it more clearly than by showing what may happen to a child who is deprived of his birthright by having none of the Fairy Tale element presented to him. In “Father and Son,” Mr. Edmund Gosse says:
“Meanwhile, capable as I was of reading, I found my greatest pleasure in the pages of books. The range of these was limited, for story-books of every description were sternly excluded. No fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted into the house. In this it was to my Mother, not to my Father, that the prohibition was due. She had a remarkable, I confess, to me somewhat unaccountable impression that to ‘tell a story,’ that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin.... Nor would she read the chivalrous tales in the verse of Sir Walter Scott, obstinately alleging that they were not true. She would read nothing but lyrical and subjective poetry.... As a child, however, she had possessed a passion for making up stories, and so considerable a skill in it, that she was constantly being begged to indulge others with its exercise.... ‘When I was a very little child,’ she says, ‘I used to amuse myself and my brothers with inventing stories such as I had read. Having, as I suppose, naturally a restless mind and busy imagination, this soon became the chief pleasure of my life. Unfortunately, my brothers were always fond of encouraging this propensity, and I found in Taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter. I had not known there was any harm in it, until Miss Shore (a Calvinistic governess), finding it out, lectured me severely and told me it was wicked. From that time forth I considered that to invent a story of any kind was a sin.... But the longing to invent stories grew with violence. The simplicity of Truth was not enough for me. I must needs embroider imagination upon it, and the folly and wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than I am able to express....’ This (the Author, her son, adds) is surely a very painful instance of the repression of an instinct.”
In contrast to the stifling of the imagination, it is good to recall the story of the great Hermits who, having listened to the discussion of the Monday sitting at the Académie des Sciences (Institut de France) as to the best way to teach the young how to shoot in the direction of mathematical genius, said: “Cultivez l'imagination, messieurs. Tout est là. Si vous voulez des mathématiciens, donnez à vos enfants à lire—des Contes de Fées.”
Another important effect of the story is to develop at an early age sympathy for children of other countries where conditions are different from our own. There is a book used in American schools called “Little Citizens of other Lands,” dealing with the clothes, the games and occupations of those little citizens. Stories of this kind are particularly necessary to prevent the development of insular notions, and are a check on that robust form of Philistinism, only too prevalent, alas! among grown-ups, which looks askance at new suggestions and makes the withering remark: “How un-English! How queer!”—the second comment being, it would seem, a natural corollary to the first.[40]
I have so constantly to deal with the question of confusion between Truth and Fiction in the mind of children that it might be useful to offer here an example of the way they make the distinction for themselves.