For the Young

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

IT was only a century ago, as everybody remembers, that literary sucklings were nurtured on the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, and Fox’s Book of Martyrs. This was not in all respects an admirable diet for readers of any age, but it had its good points. There is a chance that an imaginative child may be helped toward a taste for good literature by having to amuse himself with that or nothing; he may delight in the rhythm of great poetry or the stately march of great prose before he can get an inkling as to what it is all about. But the situation is hardly imaginable nowadays, since children have plenty of reading to amuse themselves with besides the best. They are no longer required to be seen and not heard, or to put up with the scraps of literature which may fall from the wholesome (that is, tiresome) table of their elders. A much pleasanter bill of fare is being provided for them, and it is confidently expected that the early courses of sugarwater and lollipop will gently and kindergartenly induce an appetite for the ensuing roast. The fact is, our guilt has come home to us. We have not been treating the child properly for the past ten thousand years or so, and we are in a creditable hurry to make it up to him, at the expense of our own rights if necessary ; and we do books, among other things, in his honor, by way of propitiating him.

I.

Our earlier attempts were pretty clumsy, we must admit. When it occurred to us that the child was a person, we perceived first that he must be worth preaching to. We hastened to provide him with Guides for the Young Christian, and Maiden Monitors, and such; and later, relenting a little, we declined to the secular frivolity of the Rollo books and Sandford and Merton. There is no doubt that the child, or a considerable part of him, enjoyed this concession, paltry as it now seems; and presently his dutifulness was rewarded by such books as Water Babies, Tom Brown at Rugby, and Alice in Wonderland, which perfectly established his right to be amused as well as instructed. Since then affairs have gone very smoothly for him; the rill of literature for children has grown to a torrent, and there is no saying that it may not soon develop into a deluge. The number and character of current books advertised to be for the young is a little appalling; but there is no use in grumbling about such a condition; probably the wisest course for the observer is to cultivate an attitude of resigned and friendly speculation.

What are collectively known as books for the young appear to be pretty easily classifiable. There are books for urchins and books for striplings, to begin with; there are, further, books about adults for the young, books about the young for the young, books about the young for adults, and books which, whatever they are about, are equally good for readers of all ages. Most of the best books nominally awarded to childish readers evidently belong to this final class. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Robinson Crusoe, the wonder tales of Hans Andersen and Hawthorne, the Child’s Garden of Verses, Alice in Wonderland,— books like these obviously belong not simply to the nursery but to literature, and are not made worthless by the addition even of a cubit to the stature of the reader. It must be an object of interest in judging current books for the young to hazard a guess as to their eligibility for this class.

Mr. Kipling’s Just So Stories ¹ is the only recent original book for children whose standing in this connection appears to be fairly sure. It does for very little children much what the Jungle Books did for older ones. It is artfully artless, in its themes, in its repetitions, in its habitual limitation, and occasional abeyance, of adult humor. It strikes a child as the kind of yarn his father or uncle might have spun if he had just happened to think of it; and it has, like all good fairy-business, a sound core of philosophy. Children might like the book just as well, at first, if it lacked this mellowness of tone, but grown people would not like it at all; and when a book for children bores grown people, its days are numbered. One of the dangerous things about giving children unguided indulgence in child-books is that they are prepared to relish, for the moment, such inferior stuff. A normal child has no difficulty in making what seem to him to be bricks out of the scantiest and mouldiest of straw-heaps. He will listen to some maudlin rambling mammy’s tale with the same rapture which a proud father may have fancied could be produced only by his own ingenious and imaginative fictions. All stories are grist to the mill of infancy; but it is true, nevertheless, that very few of them are worth grinding.

There is, in short, no separate standard of taste by which to determine the value of books written for children. To be of permanent use, they must possess literary quality; that is, they must be whole-souled, broad, mature in temper, however simple they may need to be in theme or manner. This truth is not always observed by the fond adult buyer. The given book seems, he admits, rather silly, but he supposes that to be a part of its character as a “juvenile.” A theory seems to be building up that the attribute of ripe humor which is wisdom is rather wasted upon a book for children; that a boy knows a parson and recognizes a clown, but is only puzzled by the betwixts and betweens of the class to which most of humanity belongs. It is often asserted that a child’s sense of humor is mainly confined to a sense of the ridiculous. That is true of his sense of a joke ; but children have never been proved insusceptible to the warmth of true humor, though they may have been quite unconscious of susceptibility. In the meantime, they are ready enough to put up with its absence; and they find at hand a type of fiction built upon an artificial code of sentiment and morals. Children’s magazines and libraries are full of stories written according to this code, the beginning and the end of which is the prescription of certain things to do and not to do: never to cheat in examination, always to be grateful to your parents, never to pretend to have money when you have n’t, and always to knock under to authority. By way of making up for all these deprivations, you are (if you are a genuine school hero or heroine) allowed to make precocious love to the prettiest girl or the handsomest boy in school. It cannot be denied that there is something of this in Miss Alcott, though her successors and imitators have, according to the habit of imitators, exaggerated the defects of her method and her work. Her books are, in the main, not only interesting to girls, but wholesome, and deserve to be handsomely reprinted, as two of them have just been,² for the benefit of the rising generation of Beths and Megs and Pollies. Those old little heroines have had their own literary descendants, — Emmy Lou,³ for example, who might be a granddaughter of any one of them. This is a delightful little story, a sympathetic (because humorous) interpretation of childhood merging into girlhood; and if it interests daughters and mothers rather than fathers and sons, that will be the fault of the theme rather than of the treatment.

II.

It is odd, by the way, that we should now have not only books for children and books for grown-ups, but books for boys and books for girls. Why not, by the same token, novels for men and novels for women? The truth is, there is a sad season, between “the codling and the apple, ” when the interests of youths and maidens do so diverge that they prefer to go, for a time, their several ways. If a boy of twelve, for instance, is going to read about persons of his own age, he wants to hear about interesting persons, — that is, other boys. Moreover, he will wish it understood that they are to be real boys, — boys’ boys. When Miss Alcott wrote Eight Cousins, she spoiled the whole thing from the masculine point of view by making the one girl-cousin the leader of “the bunch.” It is pleasant, doubtless, to behold seven able-bodied boys dancing attendance upon one slender red-cheeked girl; but any boy can imagine a hundred pleasanter things than that. What’s the matter with war, or life on the plains, or getting after buried treasure ? Those are the things a fellow would like to do, while the red-cheeked girls are playing with their paper dolls and making eyes at each other, for practice.

With this bias lingering in their minds, those who have not been boys too long ago must note with satisfaction that the story of daring adventure and hairbreadth escape continues to be written and read. They will wonder fondly, too, whether the latest book of the prolific Henty⁴ compares favorably with the Oliver Optic yarn of twenty years ago: —

“Two men were sitting in the smoking-room of a London club. The room was almost empty, and as they occupied armchairs in one corner of it, they were able to talk freely without fear of being overheard. One of them was a man of sixty, the other some five or six and twenty.

“‘ I must do something,’ the younger man said, ‘ for I have been kicking my heels about London ever since my ship was paid off two years ago. At first, of course, it didn’t matter, for I have enough to live upon; but recently I have been fool enough to fall in love with a girl whose parents would never dream of allowing her to marry a halfpay lieutenant, ’ ” etc. From this promising, if somewhat familiar, beginning, it is only a step to Peru, the hidden treasure of the Incas, and “ a wedding in Bedford Square.” Mr. Henty lived long enough to produce something like forty tales of this type. They are said to be historically correct, but they possess not the slightest literary merit. Yet so responsible a journal as the London Academy is quoted as saying, “Among writers of stories of adventures for boys Mr. Henty stands in the very first rank; ” and an American reviewer remarks, with unconscious irony, “Mr. Henty might with entire propriety be called the boys’ Sir Walter Scott, ” — a conception which might fitly be capped by defining Sir Walter (surely greatest of all writers for boys) as the adult’s Mr. Henty. It is reassuring to know that Scott and Cooper are still read in the sitting-room in spite of the fact that they have to be “studied” in the classroom, and in spite of all the modern “Restaurateurs,” as Carlyle would have called them.

Three great favorites of the boy of twenty years ago, Captain Mayne Reid, Oliver Optic, and Jules Verne, are now, for whatever reason, no longer writing stories (the first two, we suspect, were of the direct Henty ancestry). A fourth has just published a new volume ⁵ which takes us back to the pre-Stanley days when the Dark Continent was a name of mystery that rhymed somehow with Du Chaillu. It is pleasant to find that the veteran story-teller has still a savage king or two up his sleeve. This narrative, like the older ones by the same author, is simple and direct, and has the advantage of possessing some foundation in the actual experience of a probable man, instead of being constructed to display the mythical exploits of an impossible boy.

Outside of fiction, a great deal of valuable work has been done recently in the way of providing simple biography and historical narrative for boys. Ambition is a form of selfishness, no doubt, and war is a curse, or whatever; but we like to have our sons know about Achilles and Nelson and Ethan Allen, for all that. An excellent book of tales of real danger and daring is Border Fights and Fighters,⁶ a series of “stories of the pioneers between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi and in the Texan Republic.” In style it is not picturesque or eloquent, but simple and vigorous and likely to wear well. Altogether, these books go to show that the strenuous taste of boyhood is being quite as conscientiously catered to as the sentimental taste of girlhood. It is awkward to be a miss or a hobbledehoy, for all concerned, but these are experiences of the moment; a little while, and one has become more strenuous and the other more sentimental, and lo ! they are man and woman, ready to accept life and art upon approximately equal terms.

ill.

If among books for the young some are unpalatable to grown people on account of their total lack of humor, others (and there are many of them) are too sharply humorous or too subtly sentimental to appeal to children. Their only claim to classification among children’s books consists in the fact that they are about children. This of course does not really qualify them. There are many grown-ups who will be able to heave a sigh and may be able to drop a tear over certain verses in The Book of Joyous Children.⁷ It is a characteristic product of Mr. Riley’s favorite mood, not exactly a joyous mood, for he may fairly be called the threnodist of departed childhood. One grows, perhaps, a little tired of this mourning for lost joys; manhood has its compensations, after all, and the state of innocence is an excellent point of departure, rather than a goal, to “ such a being as man, in such a world as the present.” Of course there is humor as well as sentiment in these reminiscences: —

Most of this verse is written in the peculiar child dialect which Mr. Riley discovered, or evolved, long ago; a speech in which “just ” becomes “ist, ” “that” becomes “ ’at, ” “was ” becomes “wuz, ” and so on. Experiment does not indicate that either the form or the mood of such verse appeals strongly to children. A similar exception must be taken to much of Eugene Field’s poetry about children, though in a few of his songs he does really speak directly to the young, and not merely to lovers of the young.

The classic book of English verse for children is of course the Child’s Garden, probably the purest and ripest expression of Stevenson’s genius. No one has written so like a child or more like a man; and consequently no book about children (except Alice in Wonderland) is so acceptable to all ages. It is curious to see how a child feels the gentle irony of many of these verses, though he listens with a serious face; what a clear sense he has of the delicious priggishness of The Whole Duty of Children : —

or of the whimsical vagueness of the Happy Thought: —

There is hardly a poem in the collection which does not express some true childish mood, as the child himself feels it, and not as it looks in retrospect. A dainty and cheap illustrated edition of the book has been published recently, which it is a pleasure to name here.⁸

Some of the best verses in A Pocketful of Posies ⁹ are in the Stevensonian manner —

The verse is accompanied by a few good pictures by Miss Cory, and an amusing marginal gloss — amusing, that is, to the adult reader.

Happily not even the best of juvenile poetry can do for children everything which poetry can do. Several admirable collections of great verse which is intelligible to young people have been made in the past,collections like Mr. Henley’s Lyra Heroica and the Heart of Oak Series edited by Professor Norton. Last year appeared Golden Numbers,¹⁰ a remarkably good collection of poetry for youth, and now comes The Posy Ring,¹¹ by the same editors, an equally good book for younger children. Some work of most of the great English poets will be found in the collection, and a cursory examination of the volume has discovered nothing which is either trifling or merely edifying; it contains poetry that is and will be used gratefully by many people who have believed in reading good verse to children, but have distrusted their own judgment in selecting the right thing.

IV.

One is surprised in looking over the most popular books about children to see how few of them are really capable of being enjoyed by children. There, to be sure, was Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was fit for the enjoyment of the sentimental and the humorless of any age; perhaps we had better speak of the best rather than the most popular books. Mrs. Ewing in Jackanapes and The Story of a Short Life, and Mrs. Wiggin in Timothy’s Quest and The Birds’ Christmas Carol, seem to have achieved the better sort of balance. Miss Daskam has solved, or avoided, the problem of her audience by producing two kinds of story about children, a variety like The Madness of Philip for grown-ups, and a variety like The Imp and the Angel for babes.

Elsewhere the question has been decided frankly in favor of the adult reader, though there are cases in which children manage to enjoy in some manner what was meant for their elders. A boy, for instance, will devour tales like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, though he cannot understand their real merit as studies of boy-character. As narratives of delightfully meaningless depravity they have been excluded, not unreasonably, from more than one public library. The adult intelligence is necessary to understand them, far more necessary than with many books commonly read by adults which have nothing whatever to do with children. In the Huck Finn class one might include Mr. Kipling’s Stalky, if one were sure that the disagreeable little rascals who figure in that tale can be supposed to mean anything even to the full-grown intelligence.

There is no doubt on this score as to the value of Mr. How ells’s books about boys. In his A Boy’s Town he registered, professedly for young readers, a series of minute and sharply defined after-impressions of boyhood as he had in his own person experienced it. His latest book ¹² is the story of a particular boy in the Boy’s Town. It has an admirable moral (if that were important), but I doubt if an ordinary boy would be quite sure what it is. He would enjoy the book, but the very subtlest, finest merit of it would be beyond him. The writer, in short, employs his favorite instrument of cool and dry irony to excellent effect, for grown-up readers. The style is happily colloquial, now and then slipping into boy syntax and vocabulary. A brief quotation will illustrate both the simplicity and the subtlety of the narrative. It is taken from the chapter called The Right Pony Had to Run Off: —

“As soon as they sat down at the table his father began to ask what the trouble was. Pony answered very haughtily, and said that old Archer had put him back into the second reader, and he was not going to stand it, and he had left school.

“ ‘ Then, ’ said his father, ‘ you expect to stay in the second reader the rest of your life? ’

“This was something that Pony had never thought of before; but he said he did not care, and he was not going to have old Archer put him back, anyway, and he began to cry.

“It was then that his mother showed herself a good mother, if ever she was one, and said she thought it was a shame to put Pony back and mortify him before the other boys, and she knew that it must just have happened that he did not read very well that afternoon because he was sick, or something, for usually he read perfectly.

“His father said, ‘ My dear girl, my dear girl!' and his mother hushed up and did not say anything more; but Pony could see what she thought, and he accused old Archer of always putting on him and always trying to mortify him.

“ ‘That ’s all very well, ’ said his father, ‘ but I think we ought to give him one more trial; and I advise you to take your books back to school this afternoon, and read so well that he will put you into the fourth reader to-morrow morning. ’ ”

It would be hard to find elsewhere so veracious a picture of the whimsical contrarieties and unwilling compunctions of boy-nature, unless in that remarkable and, it is to be hoped, unforgotten series of boy-studies, The Court of Boyville. Tiie books of Mr. Kenneth Grahame, which have now been given what might well be their final form,¹³ are in a different vein. Mr. Grahame has the advantage of writing confessedly for his contemporaries. His style is rather ornate than simple, and he remembei’s his childhood with a tenderness of personal association which he does not try to hide. His memory has more subtlety than that of Mr. Riley, and more warmth than that of Mr. Howells. In Dream Days the amusing, and better than amusing, group of children who figured in The Golden Age reappear, a little older, a little nearer in sympathy to the grownup people whom they feel themselves to be perilously approaching, while still incapable of fancying for themselves so dull a future as appears to have fallen to the lot of the men and women they know best. Mr. Grahame’s work is imaginatively rather than literally true, and is in various moods, now romantic as in Its Walls Were as of Jasper, now whimsical as in The Magic Ring: —

“We gripped the red cloth in front of us, and our souls sped round and round with Coralie, leaping with her, prone with her, swung by mane or tail with her. It was not only the ravishment of her delirious feats, nor her cream-colored horse of fairy breed, longtailed, roe-footed, an enchanted prince surely, if ever there was one ! It was her more than mortal beauty — displayed, too, under conditions never vouchsafed to us before — that held us spellbound. What princess had arms so dazzlingly white, or went delicately clothed in such pink and spangles ? Hitherto we had known the outward woman as but a drab thing, hour-glass shaped, nearly legless, bunched here, constricted there ; slow of movement and given to deprecating lusty action of limb. Here was a revelation! From henceforth our imaginations would have to be revised and corrected up to date. In one of those swift rushes the mind makes in highstrung moments, I saw myself and Coralie, close enfolded, facing the world together, o’er hill and plain, through storied cities, past rows of applauding relations, — I in my Sunday knickerbockers, she in her pink and spangles.”

If this is the writing of a man for men, so much the better for men, and, indirectly at least, for the children of men.

H. W. Boynton.

Dream Days. By KENNETH GRAHAME. London and New York: John Lane. 1902.