Children's books and reading

by Montrose Jonas Moses

We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your manuscript, of which no man can think more highly than I do, what will the squeamish say to such expressions as these, ‘devoured their limbs, yet warm and trembling, lapping the blood,’ page 10. Or to the giant’s vomit, page 14, or to the minute and shocking description of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page following. You, I dare say, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that, if you have, you exclude one half of the human species.

Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please, and nothing, I think, is more indispensable....

The main argument here stated daily confronts the librarian and the author; it is one so often over-considered, that in its wake it leaves a diluted literature, mild in expression, faint in impression, weak in situation, and lacking in colour. There is a certain literary style that, through zealous regard for refinement, misses the rugged vitality which marks the old-time story, and which constitutes its chief hold upon life. On the other hand, children need very little stimulation, provided it is virile, to set them in active accord; and it is wise for publishers to consider the omissions of those unnecessary details, situations, or actions, without which the story is in no way harmed. But to curtail or to dilute the full meaning, to give a part for the whole, has resulted in producing so many versions of the same tale or legend as to make the young reader doubt which is the correct one; and in most cases leave in him no desire to turn to the original source. On your library shelves, are you to have five or six versions of the same story, issued by as many rival publishing houses, or are you to discard them all and take only that one which is nearest the original in spirit and in general excellence?

Lamb here brushed against the problem of writing for the popular taste. This is how he met it:

March 11, 1808.

Dear Godwin:

The giant’s vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you pointed it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I can find no objection but what you may bring to numberless passages besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc.,—that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things. If you want a book which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which is 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. But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous as to make them rather fine than disgusting. [Remember, this is spoken by one who in youth was sensitive and whose feelings are graphically set forth in “Witches, and Other Night Fears.”]... I only say that I will not consent to alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best in the book. As an author, I say to you, an author, Touch not my work. As to a bookseller I say, Take the work, such as it is, or refuse it. You are free to refuse it as when we first talked of it. As to a friend I say, Don’t plague yourself and me with nonsensical objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word.

Lamb’s critical genius often showed remarkable subtlety in the fine distinctions drawn between shades of effect which are produced by art. He established, through his careful analyses, an almost new critical attitude toward Shakespeare; and, in days when psychology as a study was unknown, when people witnessed the different phases of emotional life and judged them before formulæ were invented by which to test them scientifically, he saw, with rare discrimination, the part that the spiritual value of literature was to play in the development of culture. He here weighs in the balance a fine terror with a nauseous scene; such a difference presupposes a clear insight into the story and a power to arrive at the full meaning at once; it infers an instinctive knowledge of the whole gamut of possible effects. Lamb’s plea to Godwin is the plea of the man who would rather keep a child in the green fields than have him spend his time on wishy-washy matter.

The whole discussion resolves itself into the question: How much of the brute element, in which early literature abounds, is to be given to children? Shall they be made to fear unnecessarily, shall the ugly phases of life be allowed, simply because they come through the ages stamped as classic? All due consideration must be paid to the sensitiveness of childhood; but in what manner? Not by catering to it, not by eliminating the cause from the story without at the same time seeking to strengthen the inherent weakness of the child. Dr. Felix Adler[40] would remove from our folk-lore all the excrescences that denote a false superstition and that create prejudice of any kind; he would have bad stepmothers taken from the fairy tales, because an unjust hatred for a class is encouraged; he would prune away whatever is of no ornamental or ethical value. Assuredly it is best, as Dr. Adler points out, “to eliminate ... whatever is merely a relic of ancient animism.” Mr. Howells believes that it is our pedant pride which perpetuates the beast man in our classics, and it is true that some of our literature has lived in spite of that characteristic, and not because of it. But who is to point this beast man out for us, who is to judge whether this or that corrupts, who to eliminate and who to recreate? The classics would have to be rewritten whenever there was a shift in moral viewpoint.

A mushroom growth of story-writers, those who “tame” our fairy tales, who dilute fancy with sentimentalism, and who retell badly what has been told surpassing well, threatens to choke the flower. It is not the beast man in classic literature we have to fear so much as the small man of letters, enthused by the educational idea, who rewrites to order, and does not put into his text any of the invigorating spirit which marks all truly great literature. We have always to return to the ultimate goal, to the final court of appeal. If there is too much brutal strength in a story intended for children, it had best be read or told to them, rather than place in their hands what is not literature but the mere husk.