“A story of adventure in which the interest of the reader is directly excited through the keeping up of a succession of extraordinary events. The characterisation is utterly superficial and contradictory. The style, hard to understand on account of the numerous technical nautical terms, is full of indistinct and distorted metaphors and expressions. The pictures are crude and badly drawn. Upon these grounds the book is rejected.”
By the German method, a poor book would find small chances of surviving. Already this test has met with opposition from the German “Union of Booksellers, Selling on a Commission.” But the crusade is steadily gaining ground and the influence having effect.
The academic tone detected in this plan is its one objection. Were the same policy adopted in America, it would only add to an already over-conscious education-getting process. As we seem to be obsessed by the idea, far better it would be simply to trust to a general impression of a book, than to have it squeezed and analysed out of existence. A teacher who served on such a board would be obliged to cut herself completely adrift from the school-room atmosphere, and to criticise from a cultural standpoint, tempered by her educational experience.
We have our own children to consider; European States are sending us theirs. It is no small matter to decide what they should read. In the library, the juvenile member is to find a full and free development. Russian and Polish, French, German and Italian, Yiddish and English—all these must be satisfied. But there is one thing positive; however conglomerate the membership, a library for children must assume as a fundamental maxim that the best books alone will create the best taste.
We shall be obliged to come to it sooner or later,—a guillotine method—the wholesale eviction of all literature which is an outgrowth of this attempt to drag our classics down, in order to appeal condescendingly to youthful intellects, and to foreshorten our fiction so as to satisfy a trivial mood. Wisely, the librarian is moving by degrees; a sudden adoption of a rigorous standard would find an army of readers wholly unprepared; the ideal must be made to suit the needs of different environments. Whatever rules are formulated to hasten the improvement, they must be pliable and not fixed; for, though all localities may be improving, this betterment will be found to vary in degree with each section.
Having stacked the shelves, the next step is to appeal to the child through suggestion; to find out, as well as opportunity will permit, wherein his tastes lie, and what class of book dominates his card, as seen by the catalogue notation stamped upon it. The librarian must seek to divert any miscarriage of energy; to lead away from undesirable tendencies by gradual substitution of something a little higher in motive and much stronger in style. She must resort to exciting subterfuges: the bulletin accessory, the book-lists, the story hour—in fact, whatever her inventive mind can shape to awaken interest, to foster a desire for something above the average taste.
There are some who approve of closing the shelves to children, and in this way of directing the distribution of books to the individual. Not only is this impracticable, but it deprives a child of that personal contact with all kinds of books by means of which he is to learn his own inclination. We must infer that all books upon the juvenile shelves are placed there because they are thought suitable for children. The librarian may reserve that prerogative of concealing a book and regarding it out, should a demand for it come from one who should not, for any apparent reason, have it. But the jurisdiction of the librarian over the child-taste, just as the jurisdiction of the teacher over the child-mind, ends where the home is expected to proclaim its effectiveness and its right.
IV. The Experimental Temptation.
Many attempts have been made to treat statistically the reading tastes of children, but the results are significant only in a few details, and even these vary from locality to locality, as they differ from child to child. The psychology of sex becomes apparent by the manner in which boys and girls respond to the same stimulus. But we ought not to place much value upon a canvass of this kind, for the answers that are sent to any class of questions are more or less artificial, in many cases reflecting some grown person’s estimate of a book. It is important for the librarian to know the proportions in which fiction and non-fiction are circulated, and what books are in greatest demand. The temperature changes of taste need thus to be followed. But history deals with crucial moments.
Every one interested in the subject of juvenile reading has tried to experiment and has received quaint answers to stereotyped questions—answers filled with humour, now and then with a spontaneous exclamation of appreciation. In my own case, some four hundred letters were sent to me from children, North and South. They showed me local variations in reading tastes; they showed me educational weaknesses, such as a general mechanical study of a few hackneyed poems; they showed me an indiscriminate reading, by the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl, of fiction such as Besant’s “Children of Gideon” and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “Fenwick’s Career.” Furthermore, they pointed in some instances to individual tastes; and most of them indicated a dire confusion as to the meaning of the terms fiction and non-fiction.