Children's books and reading

by Montrose Jonas Moses

Start as you will to treat of children’s books as the mere vehicle for giving joy, and education will pursue you. Acknowledging all the benefits that the moral tale and the instructive walk have bestowed, we know not which to pity most—the child in a moral strait-jacket, or the child observing nature! The terms we use in describing these writers of a past generation are always the same; they are not prepossessing, though they may sound quaint. We turn from such critical phrases as “flabby treatment of the Bible,” “dear, didactic, deadly dull” Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth’s “overplus of sublime purpose,” to definite terms of protest such as those of the “Professor at the Breakfast Table,” condemning the little meek sufferers with their spiritual exercises, and those of Emerson ending in his cry of “What right have you to one virtue!” The mistaken attitude, which has slipped from the moral to the educational sphere, seems to be that self-development is not just as important as prescribed courses. While the latter are necessary to the school, the librarian must reckon differently; for, to her, the child is not so much a class as a unit.

Elementary education is marked by the compulsory factor; in reading, a child’s interest is voluntary. On the other hand, the severity of a Puritan Sunday, the grimness of a New England Primer, developed in childhood sound principles of righteousness; they erected a high fence between heaven and hell. But the moral tale utilised “little meannesses of conventional life,” suggested sly deceit and trivial pettiness; it quibbled and its ethics were often doubtful. The reaction that followed let slip a valuable adjunct in culture; to-day the knowledge of the Bible in schools and colleges is appallingly shallow; this fact was revealed in the results of an examination or test held by President Thwing some years ago. Dr. Felix Adler, pleading from the non-sectarian platform, asks for the re-establishment of ethics in our schools as a study of social relations, and for the extended use of Bible stories, shorn of religious meaning, yet robbed of none of their essential strength or beauty or truth. The librarian has wisely mapped out for her story hour such a course, gleaned from the parables, and from the vast treasure houses of narrative abounding in both Testaments and in fables.

Turn to your colleges and your schools, and you will find that, generally speaking, there is dug a deep channel between literature and life, which has no right to be. We should study our ethics as one of the inherent elements in poetry and in prose. The moral habit is part of the structure of the Arthurian legends.

Since the time of Rousseau the emancipation of the child has steadily advanced; in society, he has taken his place. No longer is it incumbent upon him to be seen and not heard, no longer are his answers written out for him to memorise. Mr. E. V. Lucas, in the preface to his “Forgotten Tales of Long Ago,” calls attention to one story, “Ellen and George; or, The Game at Cricket,” culled from “Tales for Ellen,” by Alicia Catherine Mant, and in a characteristically droll manner he says, “Ellen’s very sensible question (as it really was) on p. 184, ‘Then why don’t you send the cat away?’ is one of the first examples of independent—almost revolutionary—thought in a child, recorded by a writer for children in the early days.”

But the chains that have fallen from one door have been threatening to shackle another. Where once children could scarcely escape the moral, their imaginations now have no room for flight. Fancy is bestrided by fact. We must give reasons for everything. When Artemus Ward was asked why the summer flowers fade, he exclaimed, “Because it’s their biz, let ’em fade.” In nature study for children the general effect leaves a deeper impression than the technical structure. We do not know whether it is necessary to have Mr. Seton’s “Story of Wahb” vouched for as to accuracy in every detail. The scientific naturalists and story-writers are constantly wrangling, but there is not so much harm done to nature after all. An author who wilfully perverts fact, who states as true for the class what he knows to be a variant in the one coming under his observation, should be called to account. Otherwise a human interest attached to animals creates a wide appeal. But to use this vehicle for exploiting the commonplace, and what properly belongs to the text-book, should be condemned by the librarian. Mr. Tudor Jenks[1] humorously declares: “We ask our little ones to weep over the tribulations of a destitute cock-roach or a bankrupt tumble-bug.” And another critic of an earlier age writes of those same children—“They are delighted, it is true, with the romantic story of ‘Peter, the wild boy,’ but they have not the slightest curiosity to know the natural history, or Linnæan nomenclature of the pig-nuts he ate.”

The following pages have been written after some extensive investigation. Within the past few years, about fifteen hundred of the latest books for children have come to my desk; they have not been without meaning for the present, or without connection with the past. While it has not been the intention to write a full history of children’s books, some idea is given of the extent and possibilities of the field; the historical development is sketched in outline. There is need for a comprehensive volume. In addition, an attempt is here made to reconcile system with culture; to discover what the library is aiming to do with juvenile readers in the community; to show the relation which the Library, the School, and the Home, bear, one to the other, and all to the child. Having carefully examined lists of books recommended by libraries for children of all ages and grades, a limited number of volumes, marked by an excellence which makes them worthy of preservation, is recommended as suitable for boys and girls. These titles are given in an appendix. The fault with most lists of this character is that they too often represent the choice of one person. To counteract this one-sidedness, the co-operation of an advisory board was obtained, marked by wide experience, by an intimate contact with and knowledge of the books considered, and by a desire to show a human respect for the tastes of children.

There are certain phases in the consideration of the departments that have been suggested by young readers themselves. The desire for books about musicians, and for piano and violin scores, brought to light the lack of any guaranteed assemblage of songs which, in variety, in quality, in sentiment and imagination, might be called distinctive. The interest in a certain type of drawing as shown by the juvenile demand for Boutet de Monvel, Kate Greenaway, and Caldecott picture-books, suggested the advisability of including a full list of these publications.[2] One cannot approach the subject with any ironclad rules, yet it is always profitable to heed experiments based on common sense. The results of such experiments are but mileposts in the general advance; they must not be taken as final. Yet it is well to experiment in order to avoid crystallisation.

Children are entitled to their full heritage; education is paramount, culture is the saving grace. Your memory of a child is the healthy glow of the unfettered spirit. None of us want him with a book in his hand all the time. We wish him to take the freshness of life as his nature, to run with hair tossing to the wind. But glance into his eyes and you will find a craving look that a ball will not satisfy, a far-away expression that no shout from the roadside will change. It is the placid gleam of sunset after physical storm, the moment of rest after the overflow of animal energy. Children have their hero moments when they are not of the present, but are part of that perennial truth which is clearer-visioned in the past, since we have to dream of it. Kate Douglas Wiggin claims that the book is a fact to a child. It should be an idealising fact.

Not long ago a crazy man died, after having drawn up a will: his world’s goods consisted of the wide, wide world; his legatees were every living soul. He said:

“I leave to children, inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely, according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. And I devise to children the banks of the brooks, and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows that dip therein, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees. And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the night and the moon and the train of the milky way to wonder at.”