THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD.*
Tars is a work well worth doing and well done. It is scientific enough to command confidence, and not too scientific to be readable. It is a thoroughly engaging inquiry into the bringing-up of English children in the past. The child is the chief subject of man's experiments. The father has always experimented on his children, and always will, whether he does it unknowingly and through careless- ness, or—to go to the other extreme—with the deliberateness of those superior persons with whom child-study becomes the science of paedology. Mrs. Godfrey describes many experiments—without using that word—and we laugh at some of them, pull a wry face of grim sympathy with the victims of others, and discover that in some cases we have come back in our wisdom to very old practices, because experiments in children go in a cycle like everything else. To-day we think we are on the right track ; but though it is pretty safe to flatter ourselves that our experiments are made with more knowledge and more careful thought, we still run into contrary dangers and err sometimes in being fantastic. What will some Mrs. Godfrey of a hundred yeari3 hence think ? She will not accuse us of souring and boring children with well-meaning, yet meaningless, Puritanical' rigidity. But will she be able to congratulate us on encouraging 'each imagina- tion and romance as the "Puritanised" child very often had along with his Puritanism ? We may have saved children in a very proper and rational way from being terrified of bogies, but do we not often snuff out simultaneously the dreams which are made of the same stuff as the heroic qualities ? We pity children who lived in an age when there were no little books which make lessons indistinguishable from amusement, but now that parents depend more and more on these genial manuals which cost next to nothing, the oral traditions of the nursery necessarily count for a good deal less. In nearly every family to-day grown-up people and children alike bungle through games which a bookless age played with perfect • English Children in the Olden Time. By Elizabeth Godfrey. Londoni Methuen and Co. [7s. ed. netj
readiness and skill. We are not trying. to write as obscurantist's; but only with the openness to believe that though children—in the well-to-do classes at least—are happier and healthier than ever before, they may be deprived of something which even greater wisdom than ours will restore to them. We are still experimenting.
Mrs. Godfrey has found in her researches that records are extremely scanty before Stuart times. That kind of conscious pleasure in children which must . express itself in writing
did not set in fully till the eighteenth century; and till the seventeenth century no one thought of writing stories expressly about children. Before that time there was,
however, a large supply of rhymes and stories to meet the children's demands. The point is rather that the children were the judges; their elders gave them what pleased them without applying themselves seriously to psychological ex- periment. Many nursery rhymes and tales are immemorial. "The House that Jack Built" is supposed to go back to Chaldean origins; "Jack the Giant Killer," "Tom Thumb," and " Childe Roland " belong to the Arthurian cycle of legends ; and " Beauty and the Beast " in its earliest form (" The Red Bull of Norroway ") probably came over with the Saxon invaders. Readers of Lamb will remember that he chaffingly declared that the MS. of " Goody Two Shoes " was in the Vatican and was illustrated by Michelangelo. Books for children there always were, no doubt, in mediaeval England; bUt mediaeval books of instruction, though they were books for children, were not children's books. For all the thoughts that made life beautiful to him the mediaeval child depended on such sources as glee-men, and on family tradition. In these days few children have heard the nick- names of their toes and fingers,—to that extent oral learning has lost its force. The toes used to be called Harry Whistle, Tommy Thistle, Harry Whible, Tommy Thible, and Little Oker Bell. The fingers were Tom Thumbkin, Bess Bumpkin, Bill Winkin, Long Linkin, and Little Dick.
For writing for children, just as in talking and playing with children, one has the right instinct or one has not. There is no middle way. A notable example of the failure of genius because the right instinct was wanting is Bunyan. One can hardly believe that Bunyan seriously thought the book described in the passage we are about to quote was better
suited to children than The Pilgrim's Progress, and yet his preposterous mistake was characteristic of his age :- "Finding that the young folk so highly appreciated a book not primarily intended for them, Bunyan bethought him that he would write something really suited to their capacities, and pro- duced his Book for Boys and Girls, a volume which now reposes on the dustiest and most forgotten shelves of the old book shops, and must be sought diligendy by those who have a curiosity about dead and gone literature. It is indeed a dreary production : it begins with the ABC, a column or so of spelling, and a list of the more ordinary Christian names, that the reader might learn to spell his own name correctly. This is followed by the Ten Commandments in doggerel verse, with the idea that they would be the more easily committed to memory, and the Lord's Prayer rendered in the same form. The next poetical item is The Awakened Child's Lament, beginning thus- . When Adam was deceived I was of life bereaved. Of late too I perceived I was in sin conceived.'
This poem consists of twenty-nine verses in the same penitential strain. Imagine the whiny voice, the weary distaste of a child condemned to get this stuff by heart I" Locke wrote many chapters of sound stuff about the treat- ment of children. It has nearly all been proved true by experience, and passes now for common-sense, but it was by no means common thought when he uttered it. The doctrines which J. J. Rousseau preached—the man who left his babies on a doorstep lectured mothers pretty severely !—are not quite so discredited as Mrs. Godfrey appears to think. Of course Rousseau rode his ideas to death. If a child broke a window, he was to be. allowed to sit in the draught and catch cold, and thus learn the value of whole window-panes. If he was greedy, he was to be allowed to overeat himself. Then he would be sick, and would learn discretion. As Mrs. Godfrey says, the parents in Miss Edgeworth's books acted broadly on these principles. She also quotes the case of Mrs. Raskin, who suffered her little boy to hold his finger against the bar of &grate in order that he might learn that fire burns. But in his essays on education Herbert Spencer still adhered to the.seme doctrine, and we remember a passage in which he recommends that a child who wishes to play with a candle
should be allowed to touch the flame, and thus be cured of, all further desire to do so. Nor is the principle to be condemned entirely. Obedience is a good thing, and experi- ence is a good thing, but neither is efficacious alone. The two should be mingled. By the way, Mrs. Godfrey's chapter, " The Superior Parent," contains a repetition of much that has been said in the chapter on " Educational Theories." The eighteenth century gave us the spoilt child, says Mrs. Godfrey. The end of that century and the beginning of the next gave us the child-prig. We must end with a quotation in which the author is seen, without any perversity we think, as the critic of our own generation :-
" No one who had read much about the children of our fore- fathers could give utterance to the sentiment so often heard, especially on the lips of those who praise the past indiscrimi- nately, that the little folks of to-day are so precocious ! If there is one thing that distinguishes the modern child from all who went before him, it is his extraordinary immaturity and back- wardness, compared with the development of his ancestors at the same age. Forward,' indeed, he often is, but it is in the other sense. Boys and girls, especially girls, will thrust themselves into notice, make their voices heard at table, rush at their elders, pull them about, call them by their Christian names, act as if they thought themselves—as, indeed, they have been taught to do—the principal persons in the company ; but in knowledge, sense, capacity, self-command, they are years behind their fore- fathers. What boy of five can speak Latin ? far less would weep, like little Richard Evelyn, because he was thought too young to read the Greek dramatists ? He, of course, was a prodigy, but the speaking of Latin is frequently referred to as a by no means uncommon accomplishment at that age : in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was customary to teach a child to read as soon as he could speak, and to read Latin concur- rently with English With us many things have tended to prolong the age of childhood. The enormous in- crease of the things to be learned, keeping either boy or girl much longer in a state of pupillage ; the great absorption in games, narrowing the children's interest in actual life ; and not least the flood of children's books, filling the mind with childish things, and keeping it from caring for the wider interest of real literature, so that in very truth our riches have tended to poverty. Perhaps, too, the preoccupation of the adult with childhood in itself, as if it were something more than a mere phase leading to manhood, but almost as if children were a race apart, has helped to this result. I have observed, as doubtless many have done, that whereas in the old days boys and girls, too, were eager to be grown-up, to be thought older than they were, now the contrary feeling is gaining ground ; they are unwilling to leave school, reluctant to take up the responsibilities of life, by no means eager to play their part in the world."
This is a most thoughtful book, written with studiousness and grace, and wholly without affectation.
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