The spell of prohibition, of repression, lies so strong upon these authors that when they try to break away from it, to appeal to something better than fear in the child, and essay to amuse, they become merely silly. For an example in verse:
If Human Beings only knew
What sorrows little birds go through,
I think that even boys
Would never think it sport or fun
To stand and fire a frightful gun
For nothing but the noise.
For another (instructional and quite a good memoria technica so far as it goes):
William and Mary came next to the throne:
When Mary died, there was William alone.
Now for a story of incident.—It comes from the book Reading Without Tears, that made my small sister weep. She did not weep over the story, because she did not claim to be an angel.
Did you ever hear of the donkey that went into the sea with the little cart? … A lady drove the cart down to the beach. She had six children with her. Three little ones sat in the cart by her side. Three bigger girls ran before the cart. When they came to the beach the lady and the children got out.
Very good so far. It opens like the story of Nausicaa.3
The lady wished the donkey to bathe its legs in the sea, to make it strong and clean. But the donkey did not like to go near the sea. So the lady bound a brown shawl over its eyes, and she bade the big girls lead it close to the waves. Suddenly a big wave rushed to the land. The girls started back to avoid the wave, and they let go the donkey’s rein.
The donkey was alarmed by the noise the girls made, and it went into the sea, not knowing where it was going because it was not able to see. The girls ran screaming to the lady, crying out, “The donkey is in the sea!”
There it was, going further and further into the sea, till the cart was hidden by the billows. The donkey sank lower and lower every moment, till no part of it was seen but the ears; for the brown shawl was over its nose and mouth. Now the children began to bawl and to bellow! But no one halloed so loud as the little boy of four. His name was Merty. He feared that the donkey was drowned. …
Two fishermen were in a boat far away. They said “We hear howls and shrieks on the shore. Perhaps a boy or girl is drowning. Let us go and save him.” So they rowed hard, and they soon came to the poor donkey, and saw its ears peeping out of the sea. The donkey was just going to sink when they lifted it up by the jaws, and seized the bridle and dragged it along. The children on the shore shouted aloud for joy. The donkey with the cart came safe to land. The poor creature was weak and dripping wet. The fishermen unbound its eyes, and said to the lady, “We cannot think how this thing came to be over its eyes.” The lady said she wished she had not bound up its eyes, and she gave the shillings in her purse to the fishermen who had saved her donkey.
Now every child knows that a donkey may change into a Fairy Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But to be polite and say nothing of the lady, every child knows that so donkey would be ass enough to behave as in this narrative. And the good parents who, throughout the later 18th century and the 19th, inflicted this stuff upon children, were sinning against the light. Perrault’s Fairy Tales, and Madame D’Aulnoy’s were to their hand in translations; Le Cabinet des Fées, which includes these and M. Galland’s Arabian Nights and many another collection of delectable stories, extends on my shelves to forty-one volumes (the last volume appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). The brothers Grimm published the first volume of their immortal tales in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital selection from them, charmingly rendered, was edited by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and drew from Sir Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are worth our pondering.
He writes:
There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales] which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them. In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put into the stocks … and the moral always consists in good moral conduct being crowned with temporal success. Truth is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Jemmy Goodchild.
Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. She has been ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the Grimms’ Household Tales. But turning back, the other day, to the old volume for the old sake’s sake (as we say in the West) I came on the Preface—no child troubles with a Preface—and on these wise words:
Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.
And that admirable sentence, Gentlemen, is the real text of my discourse today. I lay no sentimental stress upon Wordsworth’s Ode and its doctrine that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” It was, as you know, a favourite doctrine with our Platonists of the 17th century: and critics who trace back the
