Literature for Children

by Orton Lowe

This mad rush for the latest is largely aided and abetted by that invention of the devil, the literary section of many Sunday newspapers. Finding research a bit dull, the ambitious or needy doctor of philosophy launches into literary criticism for the reading public. He at once discovers that the college sophomore who wrote a particular story is another Thackeray in style. Then in turn a Dickens or a Balzac is found out. Finally the news is passed on the Rialto that there is being issued a story combining the delightful characteristics of the three old masters. And thus and thus it goes, with the whirligig of Sunday newspaper criticism spinning out the tastes of the reading public.

Now if these titled critics ever cease discovering great new books as regularly as the day of rest comes around, or if the paper reading public cease to take these critics as truthful, then the teacher may hope to find a more sympathetic field in which to work. Of course the teacher must shake off his pedantry and quit his foolishness in taking a classic beyond the years of the boy whose veins are full of red blood, and putting it on a dissecting table for the study of etymology and syntax. He must know fairly well the boy's likes and dislikes and remember that they are very strong. And he must also remember that the boy is joined to his idols, and these are not to be broken until better ones are substituted. Iconoclasm for its own sake is sheer waste. The teacher himself must be wedded to good literature, or his efforts will avail little. If he knows, from his own quiet reading, a few good books well, that is enough. Sympathetic appreciation, like good nature, is contagious. If the teacher does not appreciate the book, the boy will not—unless he does it out of pardonable perversity.

The teacher has more to do with shaping the boy's reading than he at first sees. He is apt to hesitate because the public library, ambitious for a circulation record, gives the boy what he will be likely to read; the Sunday school library, anxious to inculcate moral principles through stories false to life, gives him what he does not want; the home, eager to please him in every way, gives him anything he asks for. Yet in the face of this threefold condition, the wise and sympathetic teacher can direct an average course of reading that has in it more good than poor books. To do this, he must work along two lines: discourage overreading and encourage ownership in books. The practice of overreading is the worst reading practice in modern life. Like all extremism, it is hard to meet. It is as unpopular to oppose unlimited reading as it is to oppose unlimited charity or unlimited education; yet they all need to be carried out in moderation. The aim should be the mastery of a few good books and the discouragement of the passion for constant variety that indicates a lack of singleness of purpose through a lack of self-control and the power of sustained attention. The greatest aid to this will be the encouragement of small savings and the buying of good editions. When this is done, encourage the boy to read out loud to his family at home in the evenings the portions of his book he likes best. If he does this, he and his book are friends as long as he continues reading. Soon he will have a small, well-chosen, and much-used library. The boy who will buy a book with his own money, will read aloud from it to his family, will reread it, is safely started on the way to becoming a well-read man.

After feeling the need of good books in the home where they can be turned to as the fancy directs, and after feeling a desire to buy such books, the boy will next need to know what titles to select. And that is no easy question. Temperament, home circumstances, occupation, and many other factors enter into it. But the thing that helps out is the fact that the range of books of power is universal, embracing so many moods, that enough good titles may be found for any one, however whimsical his tastes may be. In fact the boy will find many more good books to his liking than he will ever find time to read, or than he needs to read. The problem will become one of exclusion. Two lists for two boys of different dispositions may vary widely and yet both be good literature. But in the range of English books there are a few that the common judgment of readers and the praise of critics have so generally classed as necessary to the shelves of a cultivated man, that they should be given first place and in some way or other a reading and a rereading of them be secured. It is not meant that reading is never to depart from this seemingly arbitrary standard. That would be at least prudish, to say nothing of its being impracticable. What is meant is that such things as comic supplements, at once stupid, silly, and debauching to both the intellectual and the artistic tastes, should be kept from all boys. The daily newspaper with its sensational head-lines telling of crimes is as bad, and the schoolboy has no business with it at all. But maybe the practice most widespread and fatal to an appreciation of books of real worth and power is the addiction to "juveniles" in the ever issuing series. If he has drunk to excess of these, the boy will have hopelessly weakened his ability ever to appreciate anything great. He will never be able to warm to the powerful deeds of Odysseus, Hector, or Joshua—he will be only a tolerable but proper grown-up. In the face of these and many more hindrances, reading will have to be rigidly directed, and in that directing, lines of appeal in the field of good literature can be drawn out. Generally the reason for a boy's revolting against a good book is the fact that whoever is in control of his reading presupposes that very thing. The book is often timidly handed out and with something of an apologetic air. By some peculiar piece of judgment it is believed that the boy prefers the book that is both insipid and stupid. This ineffectual effort arises from a lack of courage on the part of preceptor and parent: the old, old story of overindulgence. What may be sauce for the father should not always be sauce for the son. The theory that what is good for the one ought to be good for the other, even to food and drink, is only another sophism of a falsely sentimental age that is over-tolerant of what is called personal rights. The fact that Senator Hoar delighted in an occasional yellow back, is no reason why a boy should have such a story when he should be learning his catechism.

Before venturing on a list of books that will serve the boy fairly well as he passes through the primary and the grammar grades of school, a few of the superior books that have stood the test of time must be noticed. They are fundamental in school and in general reading. The arguments of literary critics as to what constitutes this good literature have no place in a work of this nature that aims to aid teachers and parents in selecting books for their children. It is enough to know that the verdict of time has been rendered in favour of such books as "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments," "Robinson Crusoe," and "Gulliver's Travels." A knowledge of such books is fundamental to any one who is ambitious to master the elements of English literature. And the mere fact that he knows them well will give him a conscious strength and pardonable feeling of superiority that the unlettered youth cannot have. After this he can be trusted to browse pretty much as he chooses. He may occasionally find the bars down, or maybe later go over the fences; but he has learned to judge of what is worth while, and will surely return to the books that gave him happy hours, whatever other tasks were laid on him.

In selecting this list for schoolboys there is a temptation to take works too mature for school age. This may come from that lingering instinct that supposes every one, no matter what the age, to be interested in the same things in which you are interested. The very best things for manhood are to be reserved for that time of life. Grammar school boys cannot appreciate the playful humour of Lamb, the prophetic scolding of Carlyle, or Thackeray's keen analysis of human weaknesses and foibles; neither can a high school boy do it, and it is foolish to insist that it be done. Schoolboys are not men, and they might be told to reserve the greater part of Carlyle and Thackeray until two or three years after they have cast their first vote. Neither author is adapted to a beardless youth. But then we have that wonderful pair of story-tellers, Scott and Stevenson! What boy can resist them or would ever think of trying to do so? If Margaret Ogilvy would not lay down a book of "that Stevenson man" until she had found out how the laddie got out of the barrel, do you suppose that a boy with adventurous blood in his veins could do so? Though the best test for a child's book is the fact that it has charms for the grown-up, he would certainly be foolish who would insist that the great books for mature men and women be read in youth. It is after all school days are ended and the boy has become a man well started in the actual affairs of life that he can read and appreciate "Vanity Fair," "Adam Bede," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," or "Anna Karénina." The tendency to take great books for mature readers, abridge and overedit them, and then present them to adventurous boys by a laboratory method of minute dissection, is annoying and foolish. Boys who still enjoy harnessing a dog to a wagon are neither university students nor good literary critics. But they do like to find out how Robinson Crusoe made a canoe, Tom Canty ate his first royal dinner, or David Balfour helped Alan Breck defend the roundhouse.

Naturally, the first book to put into the hands of the primary school child to be called his own is a good illustrated edition of the Mother Goose rhymes. There is nothing to take the place of that accumulated wisdom of the nursery that is so charming to the ear. He has learned many of the jingles by word of mouth before his school age; but he now needs to own the book himself, read the words, and look at the pictures. The whole thing must be in one volume for him. But what volume? It is hardly safe to presuppose the possession of these nursery rhyme books before the school age, though that is exactly where they belong. Maybe for this reason it is better to start with the edition of Kate Greenaway that makes up in refinement and delicacy for what it lacks in power and intensity. It is unfortunate that there is no available reprint of the original edition of "Mother Goose's Melody" compiled by Oliver Goldsmith for John Newbery about 1765, which contained the "most celebrated songs and lullabies of the old British nurses, calculated to amuse children and incite them to sleep." To own such a quaint edition would surely be a delight. Nearly as quaint and delightful, especially the illustrations, is the "Only True Mother Goose Melodies" now reprinted from the Boston edition of 1839. Of the editions of recent years there are many good ones, the one appearing under the title of "National Rhymes of the Nursery" having superior illustrations by Leslie Brooke, but being marred by an artificial arrangement. If some artist with the genius of Cruikshank would give a few of the best years of his life to illustrating a complete collection of these rhymes, he would become a benefactor of childhood. And if such an edition were well made mechanically, printed on good unglazed linen paper from large type and good woodcuts, well sewed, and bound in linen or leather, the boy might consider himself favoured of the gods if he could call such a book his own. These "things that are old and pretty" deserve to be well arrayed. Yet they deserve to be read for their own sake, an enduring charm of sound. Professor Saintsbury has clearly pointed out that they should never be twisted into an authentic meaning according to the spirit of severest "scientism"; but they should be made "to serve as anthems and doxologies to the goddess whom in this context it is not satirical to call 'Divine Nonsensia,' who still in all lands and times condescends now and then to unbind the burden of meaning from the backs and brains of men, and lets them rejoice once more in pure, natural, senseless sound."

After the nursery rhymes, the next volumes for the boy's book shelf will be collections of fables and fairy tales. The animal fable is easiest to start with, and children like it best as a rule. Talking beasts kindle their imagination and stimulate their awakening powers. Fables are direct, simple, wise, and have a universal appeal. In the delightful first chapter of "The Newcomes," Thackeray tells us that long ages before Æsop, asses under lions' manes roared in Hebrew, sly foxes flattered in Etruscan, and wolves in sheep's clothing gnashed their teeth in Sanscrit. They are a common inheritance for childhood. The English-speaking child has a number of very good collections at his command, among them being the one recently issued with illustrations by Arthur Rackham and another in the New Cranford series illustrated by Richard Heighway, and he should surely own the one or the other. But in neither is the drawing quite so charming as is that of Boutet de Monvel for the French fables of La Fontaine.

What a pity that there is no single volume of fairy tales to meet the child's demands! It should contain the best of the English folk tales, the best of Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Andersen, and others; should have illustrations of the merit of Cruikshank's; should be artistically printed and bound—and it should be a big book. Children love big books. A child's book on thin paper and bound in limp leather would not be a child's book. Coloured illustrations are not necessary; children like a few lines in black and white; but it is necessary to have the book a kind of "ponderous tome." Then it can be read on the floor while it rests on the boy's knees as he sits cross-legged before the fire; or, better still, while he lies on his belly, his chin in his hands and his feet swaying in the air. While he is small, no real boy was ever designed to sit upright on a chair and hold a small book ten inches from his eyes, with the light coming over his left shoulder. Maybe some philanthropic publisher will some day issue a big book of tales to be owned by the boy and read at his ease. But the lack of it to-day necessitates the building up of a fairy library.

The first book to be put into the fairy library might be the charming "Golden Goose Book" of Leslie Brooke, followed by Cruikshank's "Fairy Book." The Mother Goose tales as first collected by Perrault should now be owned in a well-illustrated English translation. On account of their humour and their common everyday tone, the English household and folk tales will make a strong appeal. Scudder's "Folk Stories," S. Baring-Gould's "Old English Fairy Tales," and "Fairy-Gold" by Ernest Rhys are all good in their way; but "English Fairy Tales" by Joseph Jacobs, with its amusing illustrations by John Batton, is told in the simplest and most dramatic way, and it should be owned by every boy.