I. THE PROBLEM

Any good book, any book that is wiser than yourself, will teach you some things.—Carlyle, to an unknown correspondent, March 13, 1843.

Therfore I pray that no man ReprehendeThis lytyl Book, the whiche for you I make;But where defaute ys, latte ylke man amende,And nouhte deme yt; [I] pray thaym for youre sake.—The Babees Book.

Therfore I pray that no man Reprehende

This lytyl Book, the whiche for you I make;

But where defaute ys, latte ylke man amende,

And nouhte deme yt; [I] pray thaym for youre sake.

—The Babees Book.

The field of children’s books is by no means an uninterrupted host of dancing daffodils; it is not yellow with imperishable gold. In fact, there is a deplorable preponderance of the sere and yellow leaf. Yet there is no fairer opportunity for the writer than that which offers itself in the voluntary spirit of a boy or girl reader. Here are to be met no crotchets or fads, no prejudices or unthinkable canons of art. Because the body is surcharged with surplus energy necessary to growth, because the mind is throwing out delicate tendrils that foreshadow its potential future, one realises how vital is the problem of children’s reading, how significant the manner in which it is being handled.

At the outset, it is essential for us to distinguish between theory, history, and practice. The field, with all its rich soil, is in need of weeding. Not so very long ago, it lay unrecognised by the library, as of sufficient importance for separate and specialised consideration. But now, with the prominence being given to children’s reading-rooms, the field needs to be furrowed. Let us not ignore the salubrious under-stratum of the past; it has served its mission in asserting the claims of childhood; it has both negatively and positively marked the individuality of childhood, in a distinctive juvenile literature. Perhaps the writers who were inspired by the Rousseau doctrine of education, and those who abetted the Sunday-school movement of the last century, were deceived in their attitude; for they considered the machinery by which they hoped to mould character, rather than the nature of the heart and soul upon which they were actually working. A right action, a large, human, melodramatic deed, are more healthy for boys and girls than all the reasons that could be given for them. In literature for children, as in life, the moralhabitshould be unquestioning. All leading educators and ethical teachers recognise this fact.

The whole matter simply resolves itself into a difference in viewpoint between the past and present. Smile as we must over the self-conscious piousness of early juvenile literature, it contained a great dealof sincerity; it did its pioneer work excellently well. To the writer of children’s books, to the home, where one essential duty is personal guidance, to the librarian whose work is not the science of numbers, but a profession of culture-distributing, some knowledge of the past harvests from this field would appear indispensable. For the forgotten tales of long ago, the old-fashioned stories represent something more than stained pages and crude woodcuts, than stilted manners and seeming priggishness; they stand for the personal effort and service of men and women striving with staunch purpose in the interests of childhood, however mistaken their estimates of this childhood may have been. These books, to the library, are so much fallow material as a practical circulating proposition, but they represent forces significant in the history of children’s books. I would much rather see a librarian fully equipped with a knowledge of Miss Edgeworth’s life, of her human associations, together with the inclinations prompting her to write “The Parent’s Assistant,” than have her read a whole list of moral tales of the same purport and tone.

The immediate problem, therefore, necessitates a glance at this field of children’s literature, and some knowledge of its essential details. It involves a contact with books of all grades; it calls into play, with the increasing number of libraries, and with the yearly addition of children’s rooms, a keen discerningjudgment on the part of the librarian, not only as to child nature, but as to the best methods of elimination, by which bad books may be separated from good, and by which the best may preponderate. But the librarian is not the only factor; the parent and the writer also come into account. They, too, must share a responsibility which will be more fully determined later on, but which now means that they both owe the child an indispensable duty; the one in giving to the growing boy or girl most intelligent guidance along the path of fullest development; the other in satisfying this need—not in deflecting juvenile taste by means of endless mediocrity and mild sentimentalism. It is an unfortunate circumstance that the effects of mediocrity are longer-lived than the immediate evil itself.

In the problem of children’s reading we must consider two aspects; there is the bogey image of a theoretical or sociological or educational child, and also the book as a circulating commodity. There is the machinery of “The Child”; Dr. Isaac Watts shaped one; Jean Jacques Rousseau another; the Edgeworths still another, and now the psychologist’s framework of childhood, more subtle, more scientific, more interesting, threatens us everywhere. But no patent has so far supplanted the fundamental excellence of human nature. There are assuredly demarkations and successive steps in elementary education, but are not these becoming too specialised?Since we are dealing with the Boy and the Story rather than with the Scholar and the Text-book, with culture which is personal, and not with expediency, we needs must choose the human model in preference to all others.

And so it is with the choice of the librarian. In dealing with books in the bulk, there is a tendency to emphasise system above the humanising excellence of what the books contain. After all the mechanical detail is done, when the cover has been labelled, when the catalogue notation has been figured, when the class distribution has been determined, the librarian stands middleman in a threefold capacity. She is a purveyor, in the sense that she passes a book over the counter; she is a custodian, in so far as books need protection; she is the high priestess, since the library is a temple of treasures, a storehouse for our literary heritage. In any library, whether it be yours at home, with your own books upon the shelves, or the public’s, with volumes representing so much of your taxation on which you base your citizenship, the rare companionship of books is one of their humanising qualities. This is as much a truth for children as for grown-ups.

With the fear that there is an effort on the part of many to crystallise reading into a science, comes the necessity to foster a love of reading for its own sake. The democracy of books has grown larger with the cheapening process of manufacture; while the establishmentof public libraries offers to every one an equal privilege. In an assemblage of many books, a certain spiritual dignity should attach itself to the utilitarian fact.

There is no definition for children’s books; the essential point is appeal, interest. As far back as 1844, a writer in theQuarterly Reviewvery aptly claimed that “a genuine child’s book is as little like a book for grown people cut down, as the child himself is like a little old man.” Peculiarly, there is a popular misconception that an author of juveniles advances in art only when he or she leaves off penning stories or fairy tales, and begins publishing novels. On the face of it, this is absurd. Like any other gift, writing for children cannot be taught; it has to be born. If possible, with the exception of drama, it is the most difficult art to master, since its narrative will not stand imitation, since its simplicity must represent naturalness and not effort, since its meaning must be within reach, and without the tone of condescension.

Professor Richard Burton has written: “A piece of literature is an organism, and should, therefore, be put before the scholar, no matter how young, with its head on, and standing on both feet.” This injunction applies to all books. Where the classics excel is in their very fulness and honesty of narrative. Can the same be said of our “series” brand?

The writing of children’s books is more aptly phrasedthe writing of books for children. There was a time when such books, as a class by themselves, were unknown; yet boys and girls expanded, and perhaps remembered more of what they read than they do to-day, although they were not taught as much. There are some pessimists, not so unwise in their pessimism, who believe that if less emphasis was bestowed upon the wordchildren, and more upon the wordliterature, the situation would be materially bettered.

Can we recall any of our great men—literary, scientific, or otherwise—who were brought up on distinctively juvenile literature. A present-day boy who would read what Lamb or Wordsworth, Coleridge or Tennyson, Gladstone or Huxley devoured with gusto in their youth, would set the psychologists in a flutter, would become an object for head-lines in our papers. There is a mistaken conception regarding what are children’s books, in the best sense of the word. A standard which might have excellent conservative results, although it would be thoroughly one-sided and liable to false interpretation, could be based on the assertion that those books only are children’s classics which can be relished by a grown-up public. “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Water Babies,” “Peter Pan”—such stories have a universal appeal. And it is well to remember that at least five of the world’s classics, not originally written for children, have been appropriated by them: “TheArabian Nights”; “Pilgrim’s Progress”; “Robinson Crusoe”; “Gulliver’s Travels”; “Baron Münchausen.”

With the reading democracy created by public libraries, there has developed the need for this special kind of writing. Excesses have unfortunately arisen such as made a critic once exclaim in disgust, “Froissart is cut into spoon-meat, and Josephus put into swaddling clothes.” While we shall, in the following pages, find many odd theories and statements regarding simplification of style, it is as well to be forearmed against this species of writing. Democracy in literature is falsely associated with mediocrity. When one reads the vitiating “series” class of story-book, the colourless college record, the diluted historical narrative, there is cause for despair. But there is no need for such cheapening. The wrong impression is being created in the popular mind that literature is synonymous with dulness; that only current fiction is worth while. And we find children confessing that they rarely read non-fiction, a term they only dimly comprehend. It is not right that a middle-class population should have relegated to it a middle-class literature. Such, however, at the present moment, seems to be the situation. And as a consequence all departments suffer. Except for a very few volumes, there is no biography for children that is worthy of endorsement, for the simple reason that the dignity of a whole life,its meaning and growth, are subordinated to the accentuation of a single incident. History becomes a handmaiden to the slender story. Let those writers who are looking for an unworked vein ponder this. The fictionising of all things is one of the causes for this poverty; the text-book habit another.

The poet Blake sings:

“Thou hast a lap full of seed,And this is a fine country.Why dost thou not cast thy seed,And live in it merrily?”

“Thou hast a lap full of seed,

And this is a fine country.

Why dost thou not cast thy seed,

And live in it merrily?”

But, though we are repeatedly casting our seed in the field of juvenile literature, we are not reaping the full harvest, because we are not living in the land of childhood merrily.

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 theBreakfast Table,” condemning the little meek sufferers with their spiritual exercises, and those of Emerson ending in his cry of “What right have you toonevirtue!” 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 strengthor 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 moralhabitis 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 bestridedby 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 naturalhistory, 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 willfind 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.”

What thinks the teacher of such riches, what the librarian with her catalogue number? A book is a fact, nay, a friend, a dream. Is there not a creedfor us all in the wisdom of that crazy man? Here was one with clear vision, to whom fact was as nothing before the essential of one’s nature—a prophet, a seer, one to whom the tragedy of growing up had been no tragedy, but whose memory of childhood had produced a chastening effect upon his manhood. Are we surprised to find him adding:

“I give to good fathers and mothers, in trust for their children, all good little words of praise and encouragement, and all quaint pet names and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly and generously, as the needs of their children may require.”

And so, we ask, more especially the parent than the librarian, is there not excitement in the very drawing out from a child his heart’s desire? Imperative it is in all cases that book-buying should not be a lottery, but more persistently apparent does it become that a child’soneindividual book upon the Christmas-tree or for a birthday should not represent a grown-up’s after-thought.

The articles referred to in this chapter are:

Burton, Richard—Literature for Children.No. Amer.167:278 (Sept., 1898).

Children’s Books—[From theQuarterly Review.]Liv. Age, 2:1–12 (Aug. 10, 1841).

Thwing, Charles F.—Significant Ignorance About the Bible as Shown Among College Students of Both Sexes.Century, 60:123–128 (May, 1900).

FOOTNOTES[1]Mr. Jenks, besides editing forSt. Nicholas Magazineduring many years a unique department known as “Books and Reading,” has written widely on the subject of juvenile literature. See his “The Modern Child as a Reader.”The Book-buyer, August, 1901, p. 17.[2]An interesting field for research is that of the illustration of children’s books. Note Thomas Bewick, John Bewick, etc. Of a later period, Tenniel, Cruikshank, Doré, Herr Richter.Vide“The Child and His Book,” Mrs. E. M. Field, chap. xiv; “Some Illustrators of Children’s Books.” Also “Children’s Books and their Illustrators.” Gleeson White,The International Studio. Special Winter No., 1897–98.

[1]Mr. Jenks, besides editing forSt. Nicholas Magazineduring many years a unique department known as “Books and Reading,” has written widely on the subject of juvenile literature. See his “The Modern Child as a Reader.”The Book-buyer, August, 1901, p. 17.

[2]An interesting field for research is that of the illustration of children’s books. Note Thomas Bewick, John Bewick, etc. Of a later period, Tenniel, Cruikshank, Doré, Herr Richter.Vide“The Child and His Book,” Mrs. E. M. Field, chap. xiv; “Some Illustrators of Children’s Books.” Also “Children’s Books and their Illustrators.” Gleeson White,The International Studio. Special Winter No., 1897–98.

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