Children's books and reading

by Montrose Jonas Moses

—Robert Louis Stevenson, in

“A Child’s Garden of Verses.”

I. Children’s Books: Their Classification; Their Characteristics.

There is nothing more variegated in its colour than a large assemblage of children’s books; the cover-designers revel in their rainbow conceits, sprinkling gold across the cloth as generously as fairies scatter star-dust; the artists fill their brushes with delicate tints of red and blue and orange, and sketch the progress of a story in spiral traceries of imagination. The mechanical perfection of book-making is genuinely pleasing; the form, like that of the glass-blown vase with its slender outlines, is fitted for the worthiest content. The excellence of binding, the distinctness of type, the spirit of the drawing—these points strike our senses, these are the subterfuges of the publishing trade, these the artistic features that hide the shallowness beneath. You may arrange your blue books together, and your red, your brown, your white or green in rows; you may mix them all up again, and marshal them in regiments of equal sizes; the persistent query stares you in the face,—the stinging fact of ignorance—what of the story you are about to buy?

In the public library, the shelves are empty; you are told, as the librarian, to fill them. Not for yourself alone is the choice to be made, or even for your own children, whom you are supposed to know; but for every one who wishes to read. You have little right to assume much homogeneity of taste or desire among young folks; you must balance your dreams with facts, your ideals with human accomplishment. We are all as grains of sand in the general scheme of the universe; we are all supposed to have equal chances before the law; but what we are is the measure of what we read. You are the custodian of a public trust, not of your private book-case. A row of children—the poor by the side of the rich, the newsboy by the side of the patrician—you are to supply them every one. Have you then the privilege of assuming an autocratic policy of exclusion? Can you say to yourself, The newsboy must read Homer!—and refrain from buying him his penny-dreadful?

Each man’s standard of excellence differs from his neighbour’s. Matthew Arnold’s idea of the best ignored your opinion and mine. The world has put a face value on certain books; they live because the universal in them and the universal in us is constant and persistent. And though we each stand upon a different pivot of existence, though the wind blows with less fury around you than around me, on calm nights we may each see the same star, however different the angle of vision.

So, are you not here furnished a starting-point in your purchases? Where you are concerned with children, your opportunity is richer by far than you first imagined. They have no preconceived notions; they stand in a general mystery of dawning experience; they know not how or why; all truth is a fable before them. Common things are apparelled in celestial light; nature is governed by omnipotence; creation is the first meeting with Aladdin’s lamp. The common law of growth tells us this; our knowledge of men is carved from such general mystery; our method of gaining this experience is higher than we wot of; the father is judged in terms of King Arthur before he is reckoned with as a man.

Therefore, it is your bounden duty to satisfy these several stages. You must have pictures for the little ones that will cater to a familiarity with common things, and will satisfy a tendency in them to make all nature animate.[47] You must find an artist capable of seeing the significance, the humour of the dish running after the spoon. There must be picture-books that will treat of these things with all the purity they deserve; high-mindedness is an essential part of elemental fun. The nursery claims a part in your plan. Place, then, first upon your list, the best picture-books and jingles. Let true art supplant the comic supplement sheet.

We will banish the use of baffling terms in speaking of the classes of juvenile books. Our Fiction will become Stories; our Myths and Folk-lore and Fables simply Fairy Tales and Legends. Our arrangement now assumes a definite perspective, from the limitless past to ourselves as the fixed point. Our standard is one of interest; we will apply the test of excellence, not to books generally, but to each channel in which individual interest has a right to seek its own development. By a psychological consideration, we are able to hitch our wagon to a star, to span the distance separating the Present and the Past, the Real and the Ideal. Myth flows imperceptibly into legend; and, with all the massive proportions of the heroic, legend enters and becomes part of history. And history is vitalised only when we present it to children in the form of biography. Is it not Carlyle who defines history as the biography of great men?

Thus, we add still more to the positive factors in our book selecting. We will not disguise for the child the true character of a volume by a nomenclature which is indefinite. Better the terms “How We Are Governed” than “Civics”; and “How to Make Things” than “Manual Training.” We will satisfy all tastes by the best to be had, and that rule shall be proverbial. The boy, deprived of his dime novel,[48] must be given something just as daring, just as redolent with sensationalism; but we will transfer his den of thieves from the areaway to the broad green forest, and his profession of robbery shall grow into outlawry; his Jesse James become Robin Hood. Some of the best literature contains the quality of sensationalism; it is the form that the dime novel has taken, and the cheap exploitation of filthy detail, that have obscured many of the most beneficial elements in melodrama. The Adventures of Ulysses, the Twelve Labours of Hercules, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Jonathan and David—the green lights are not far away.