[30] An interesting field of investigation: Early New England Printers. Mr. Welsh mentions a few in article referred to, p.60. A full list of Printers and Publishers (North and South) given in Evans’s American Bibliography.
III. THE OLD-FASHIONED LIBRARY
A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong. Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an undistinguished, painless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of gentleness, and honourable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with temptation, but in peace of heart, and armour of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appetites and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed.—John Ruskin, in an introduction to Grimm’s “German Popular Tales,” illustrated by Cruikshank.
I. The Rousseau Impetus.
Mr. E. V. Lucas has compiled two volumes of old-fashioned tales for modern readers. In his introductions he analyses the qualities of his selected stories, and it is generally the case that, except for incidental detail, what is said of one of a kind might just as appropriately be meant for the other. If, at moments, the editor is prone to confuse quaintness with interest, he makes full amends by the quick humour with which he deals with the moral purpose. Perhaps it was part of the game for our great-grandfathers to expect didacticism, but simply because children were then considered “the immature young of men” is no excuse, although it may be a reason, for the artificiality which subserved play to contemplation. Wherever he can escape the bonds of primness, Mr. Lucas never fails to take advantage; the character of his selections indicates this as well as such critical remarks as the following:
“The way toward a nice appreciation of the child’s own peculiar characteristics was, however, being sought by at least two writers of the eighteenth century, each of whom was before his time: Henry Brooke, who in ‘The Fool of Quality’ first drew a small boy with a sense of fun, and William Blake, who was the first to see how exquisitely worth study a child’s mind may be.”
Mr. Lucas brings together a number of stories by different persons, treating them as a group. Should you read them you will have a fairly distinct conception of early nineteenth century writing for children. But there is yet another way of approaching the subject, and that is by tracing influence from writer to writer, from group to group; by seeking for the impetus without which the story becomes even more of a husk than ever.
Let us conjure up the long row of theoretical children of a bygone age, painfully pathetic in their staidness, closely imprisoned. They began with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the iconoclast, who attacked civil society, the family, the state, the church, and from whose pen the school did not escape chastisement. His universal cry of “back to nature” frightened the conservative; even Voltaire could not refrain, on reading the essay dealing with the origin of inequality among men, to write him: “Never has any one employed so much genius to make us into beasts. When one reads your book he is seized at once with a desire to go down on all-fours.”
Rousseau’s “Émile, or Treatise on Education” (1762) was wholly revolutionary; it tore down ancient theories, such as those practised by Dr. Isaac Watts upon his “ideal” boy and girl; all existent educational strictures were ignored. Rousseau applied to childhood his belief in the free unfolding of man’s nature; however impracticable his methods, he loosed the chains that held fast the claims of childhood, and recognised their existence. He set the pendulum swinging in the human direction; he turned men’s minds upon the study of the child as a child, and, because of this, takes his place at the head of modern education. He opened the way for a self-conscious striving on the part of authors to meet the demands of a child’s nature, by furnishing the best literary diet—according to educational theories—for juvenile minds. Revolutionary in religious as well as in political and social ideals, Rousseau’s educational machinery was destined to be infused, by some of his zealous followers, with a piousness which he never would have sanctioned.
Training should be natural, says Rousseau; the child should discover beauty, not be told about it; should recognise spontaneously what he is now taught. Education should be progressive; at the same time it should be negative. This sounds contradictory, but Rousseau would keep his child a child until the age of twelve; he would prevent him from knowing through any mental effort; he would have him grow like “Topsy” in animal spirits, his mind unbridled and imbibing facts as his lungs breathe in air. Yet inconsistency is evident from the outset: the child must observe, at the same time he must not remember. Is it possible, as Professor Payne challenges, to form the mind before furnishing it?