CHILDREN'S BOOKS, OLD AND NEW.
WOULD it be possible to establish some kind of a standard Child's Library? Would it, that is, be a possible and a useful undertaking to collect together some dozen or twenty books which the verdict of time has pro- nounced to be good rather than merely exciting—a child's book can easily be, but not often is, both—and which a child would be the happier for reading ? The question is suggested by the enormous output of books for children which during the last few years has flooded the Christmas market. Their quality is undoubtedly different from that of the children's books of thirty and forty and fifty years ago; it is at least doubtful whether it is as good.
It would be interesting to take a census of the inhabitants of the schoolroom to-day, with the idea of finding out how many children had read, let us say, "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "Robinson Crusoe." The percentage probably would not be large. If the object of the census were a little wider, and an attempt were made to ascertain how many of the books which pleased children thirty or forty years ago are still on the nursery or schoolroom shelves, and what are the books which
have taken their places, a rather instructive conclusion might be drawn. You would have to begin, of course, by making out a list of the stories with which the modern child's parents were familiar. Nurseries and schoolrooms, natur- ally, differ ; but there used to be some books which were read by every child who read at all, and which, though as a rule there can be no question as to their intrinsic merits, are in some cases quite unknown, or, if known, dis- tasteful or uninteresting, to the child of to-day. What were the books with which, twenty years ago, a child of fourteen or so, fond of reading, would have been familiar P Of illustrated books, perhaps " Struwwelpeter " would be first in his affec- tions. He would know by heart the stories of Cruel Frederick, Johnny Head-in-air, and the chubby but moribund Augustus, —vaguely real illustrations of lessons inculcated every day in a properly managed nursery. Of books in which the illustra- tions do not come first and foremost, he had at least a dozen not easily matched in the modern child's book-market. " The Pilgrim's Progress" and " Robinson Crusoe " perhaps must begin the list; but there were others only slightly less familiar. There were Grimm's and Hans Andersen's fairy- tales—the first possibly illustrated by Cruikshank, that most delightful of portrayers of quaint fairy-land happenings, of dwarfs and princesses and kings and tailors and giants—why is it so often a little tailor who gets the better of immense people who devastate forests when they are angry P Grimm and Hans Andersen are, of course, more than fifty yearn old, and will last; but were they not more widely read by children thirty years ago than they are to-day P When you come to books which are not fairy-tales, undoubtedly you are con• fronted with some queer problems. How was it that "Sandford and Merton " ever attained so astonishing a popularity P No proper-minded English boy could possibly put up with Harry or Tommy or Mr. Barlow if he were to meet them alive ; yet " Sandford and Merton " used to be on every schoolroom bookshelf. Then, again, there was " The Swiss Family Robinson." That was a story of foolish impossibilities, never worth giving a child to read ; it was neither a fairy-tale nor a credible tale of adventure, yet it must have had scores of thousands of child readers. With " Sandford and Merton" and " The Swiss Family Robinson " ought to be placed, per- haps, " The Fairchild Family." Would children of to-day read that book with interest ? Possibly they would, though it is difficult to imagine a child wading through three volumes of the same story, with almost every chapter ending with a printed prayer and hymn. Still, "The Fairchild Family" has at all events some part of the root of the matter in it. In the main it is the story of naughty children, and that will always• fascinate a child, who is filled with a comforting sense of self- satisfaction when contemplating the iniquities and the splendid certainty of the punishment of other children.
These last three books undoubtedly in the past were immensely popular, though it cannot be claimed for any one of them that it is ideal literature for a child. But they by no means exhaust the list of books which were read in the school- room and the nursery thirty or forty years ago,—indeed, they could not properly be compared with many other books which, though perhaps less widely read, were yet the more worth reading. To take a random dozen besides those we have already mentioned—and Grimm and Hans Andersen could never be left out—what books that have been published in the last ten years could be set on the same shelf with, say, " Alice in Wonderland," " Through the Looking-glass," " The Heroes," " The Water Babies," " Masterman Ready," " The Children of the New Forest," " The Coral Island," " The Dog Crusoe," "The Prince and the Pauper," "Feats on the Fjord," " Dick Sands," and " Tom Brown,"—all of which were children's books twenty years ago ? Mr. Kipling's " Jungle Books " and the "Just So Stories," of course, would bear the comparison; so would Mr. Andrew Lang's series of fairy-tale books, with Mr. Henry Ford's charming illustrations, though these are mostly old tales retold. But when you come to the majority of children's illustrated books of to-day—at least, to those which appear to be popular—you get to a really curious comparison between what children like (or are supposed to like, now, and what was liked in the " sixties " and "seven- ties." To-day there is a queer tendency towards hideousness. Instead of being given stories and pictures of beautiful prin- cesses and knights and kings and fairies, children are pre-
seated with ugly distortions of human beings. The pictures,
which presumably are meant to amuse, are of men with enormous heads, ugly bodies, tiny legs; the nearer you can get to a conception of ugliness alive the better, apparently, for purposes of illustration. What is the reason for it? Do children really like looking at and thinking about pictures and stories of ugly creatures ? We do not believe it. All children have an appreciation of what is quaint and out of the way, and like to be told stories of queer beasts and beings.
But they do not naturally love what is ugly. If they did they would like ugly people and ugly animals in real life, and they do not like them. Suppose that children believed that the huge-headed animals and gaping monstrosities of the Christ- mas pantomime stage were actual live creatures, they would not be pleased or amused, but terrified. Stevenson's child dreamed of some day being able to see- " To where the roads on either hand Lead onward into fairyland, Where all the children dine at five And all the playthings come alive."
Had he any hideous playthings ?
The truth is that there is in reality a large ethical question— or perhaps, we should say, a broad educational problem—under- lying the simple question of the selection of a book to give a child. Is it a good thing or a bad thing for a child to look at —even if only to laugh at—what is ugly ? Is it not rather the fact that the more that ugliness is pointed out to a child, and the more often he is asked, as a child, to look at what is ugly,
the more inclined he will be to expect and to select what is Ugly when he is a man ? The men and women who take
the most charitable views of their fellow-creatures, who habitually look for and point out to others what is good rather than what is bad, are not those who can be imagined to have taken, as children, a delight in gazing at pictures of monsters. It is the child who is afraid of the bobbing and shrieking puppets of the Punch and Judy show who will grow up the kindliest of critics. But if it is admitted, as it surely must be, that it is better for children to see beautiful
rather than ugly things, how are we to account for the present tendency towards hideous books ? Certainly we can- not attribute it to a general desire on the part of children for ugliness,—a demand, that is, which is bound to be met with a supply. Children do not demand any particular kind of book : they take what they are given. They were delighted with Kate Greenaway twenty years ago : they could be taught to be delighted to-day. The responsibility for the continued existence of children's books crowded with uglinesses and distortions lies with the giver of the book, who is not a child. He is attracted, perhaps, by the novelty of grotesque illustrations, and thinks that children will be attracted also. Yet if he realised that children, like other people, see and look for what they are accustomed to see and have pointed out to them, would he not change his gift-book P A. child's book—a book belonging to the Child's Library—ought to have a certain nobility about it. The princes ought to be brave and the princesses beautiful; the men and women and children ought to do gracious things, not to clown through a hundred pages of knockabout tomfoolery and twisted ugliness. Yet that is undoubtedly a tendency of children's books of to-day,—to insist on what is bizarre, ridiculous, and monstrous. The tendency will disappear in time, when people realise that it is a bad thing to give children hideous things to play with and think about; but the strength of the contrast between the nursery and schoolroom books of to-day and thirty years ago is curiously noticeable.
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