III. The Present Situation.
The essential difference between the past and the present is not so much a difference, after all; in both instances the same mistaken emphasis is placed upon two separate phases of the child’s make-up. The moral tale took no cognisance of those spiritual laws which are above teaching, which act of themselves; it did not recognise the existence of the child’s personality. But when the impetus toward the study, scientific and intensive, of adolescence was begun, the teacher lost sight of the free will by which that growth advanced; anxious to prove the child’s development to be but a series of stages marked by educational gradings, he reserved no place for the self-development through which the personality finds expression. In both cases an unconscious injustice was done juvenile nature. The moral questioning warped the spirit, the educational questioning chokes the imagination and fancy, starving the spirit altogether. How many will agree with Emerson’s assertion that “what we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so”? The pessimist who challenges children’s books for children has reasons to doubt, after all.
Time changes not, ’tis we who change in time. Emerson speaks in terms of evolution; by this very change from generation to generation, the vitality of a book is tested. Again, in terms of our mentality, Emerson says that when a thought of Plato becomes a thought to us, Time is no more. Truth is thus an annihilator of the fleeting moment. The survival of the fittest means the falling away of the mediocre. The Sunday-school book was no permanent type; its content was no classic expression. It filled a timely demand—that was its excuse for being. Once this demand became modified, the book’s service was at an end; hence Mr. Welsh’s indication of the decline of the Sunday-school story through secularisation,—from sectarianism to broad religious principles, thence to “example rather than direct teaching.”[46]
We still have the religious tract and the church story-paper; yet the books of advice deal with the social and ethical spirit, rather than with the denominational stricture. “The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him,” wrote Emerson, while Stevenson, in his “Lay Sermons,” placed the stress thus: “It is the business of life to make excuses for others but not for ourselves.”
To-morrow new topics may be introduced into our juvenile literature, but change takes longer than a day to become apparent. The student who attempts to reach any scientific estimate of the present trend will be disappointed; the mass is too conglomerate, and there are too many authors writing children’s books for money rather than for children. I have followed the course as carefully as I could, noting the slight alterations in concepts to accord with the varying conditions. But there is no principle that can be deduced, other than the educational one. The changes are confined to points of external interest, not of spiritual or mental significance. For instance, there was a time when girls’ literature and boys’ literature were more clearly differentiated, one from the other; their near approach has been due to a common interest in outdoor exercises. Again, things practical, things literal have crowded out the benignant figure of Santa Claus; and in the stead, the comic supplement of the Sunday newspaper furnishes pictures that well-nigh stifle the true domain once occupied by “Mother Goose.”
What would a parent do, asked suddenly to deal with a promiscuous collection of juvenile books? Would she unerringly reach forth for the volume most likely to please her son’s or her daughter’s taste? If she were to claim little difference between the one college story she had read, and the several hundred she had not read, she would not be far from wrong. But we cannot tell how deep an impression the present activity among writers for children will have on the future. Our temptation is to make the general statement that the energy is a surface one, that no great writing is being done for children because it has become an accessory rather than an end in itself. Education saved us from the moral pose; it must not deny us the realm of imagination and fancy.
FOOTNOTES
[41] In education, the influence of Froebel, in direct descent from Rousseau, is to be considered.
[42] D. N. B.—Dictionary of National Biography.
[43] The student who desires to investigate the history of American school-books will find much valuable material in the Watkinson Library of Hartford, Conn., to which institution Dr. Henry Barnard’s entire collection of school-books was left. Vide Bibliotheca Americana, Catalogue of American Publications, including reprints and original works, from 1820 to 1852, inclusive, together with a list of periodicals published in the United States, compiled and arranged by Orville A. Roorbach, N. Y., Oct., 1852. Includes Supplement to 1849 ed., published in 1850.