A Club for Little Hercules

— If the babes must have battles waged over them, they are fortunate in having such a champion as the; Contributor who stood up for them in the Club, recently. I rejoice with that Contributor in the belief that a defensive warfare is not necessary. The Philistines are unborn who are strong enough, either in numbers or in individual prowess, to kill the characters in the nursery classic drama. My attack, if I could organize one, would be upon the swarm of figures that infest modern literature for the young ; and yet they are such creatures of a day that I am almost willing to let them die the death of ephemera. Now and then one of these figures has a momentary vogue, but the fashion is so clearly a reflection of some temporary sentiment that one can scarcely believe such characters have any permanent hold upon the affections of the young. We have all met Lord Fauntleroy on the street,—almost enough of him to make a company of infantry ; but he is already fading away in real life, thanks to the innate sanity of boyhood, which will not let the youngster contemplate himself and his costume so long as there is a hall for him to fix his eye on, or a mechanical toy for him to pull to pieces. Not so offensive is this offshoot of the peerage as the mincing miss who lias carefully framed her conduct upon a pattern which she has drawn from such inspiring literature as Polly Belittle and Her Friends, or Four Little Girls of Dull Haven. I have shed gentle, pleasant tears over Mrs. Burnett’s charming creation, and often have found books with titles similar to the above-mentioned amusing and not unprofitable reading for one interested in studying child life. But then I have drawn this nutriment from them by virtue of my age and experience ; if I were an innocent child, they would have done me the harm they do inflict upon actual children. How can the poor clears help growing artificial, if they are nourished on a realistic literature which their bewildered brains mistake for real life, and come to prefer to it? Why should they be asked to study child life ? The proper study of mankind may be man, but no Pope, temporal, spiritual, or literary, will ever persuade me that the critical analysis of childhood is the proper study of children.

The best results of fiction for the young are to be found in the enrichment of the imagination, not in the cultivation of the moral faculties ; and the genuine nursery literature is so clearly imaginative that no healthy-minded child mistakes such moral lessons as may be drawn from it. For my part, I should rather trust the morals of the young to the most improbable nursery tales than to the lifelike, hateful narratives of real life in which the daughter-in-la w is set against her mother-in-law. Is it worse lor an impressionable youth to contemplate the ingenuous depravity of the wicked uncle in The Babes in the Wood than to imbibe from the latest, most improved fiction the insidious poison which makes him critical of his own parents’ disciplinary methods with him, because they differ from those of an ideally charming mamma in a storybook ?

To draw upon my own recollections, my childhood was haunted by bears. They were not bears out of books, so far as I can remember, but a childish formula for the Dark Unknown which is apt to frighten every little stranger who comes alone into this great world of ours. Many an hour have I lain awake in an ecstasy of trembling lest the sonorous breathing of the sister asleep at my side should be loud enough to rouse the dire beasts from their lurking-places. Yet those hours did not “embitter my infancy,” nor do they now in retrospect cause me poignant grief. What does shame me is the remembrance of other hours of that same period when I was trying to adjust my emotions and actions to an agreement, with those of the particular heroine out of liction who happened to be my nearest acquaintance at the time,

I am aware that there is another side to this subject. There are ignorant nurserymaids capable of embittering’ any infancy by their manner of introducing hobgoblins to it ; but so long as there is mother love in the world, there will be mothers wise and eloquent enough to act as the guides and interpreters of childhood in its excursions into Fairyland, and children who will rejoice to their latest day in the goodly heritage they possess in the realm which is ruled by an aristocracy of Red Riding-Hood and her peers.