The Contested Kingdom, Art and Ideology in Childrens Literature

“ But the young patrons of the library ought not to be encouraged in confining their reading to juveniles, of no matter how good quality. It is the one great evil of this era of juvenile books, good and bad, that by supplying mental food in the form fit for mere children, they postpone the attainment of a taste for the strong meat of real literature; and the public library ought to be influential in exalting this real literature and keeping it before the people, stemming with it the current of trash which is so eagerly welcomed because it is new or because it is interesting. ”

“ May we not, as if it were a new idea, rouse to the seriousness of the mediocre habit indulged in by young people capable of better things? Should not our work with children reach out more to work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make books for the young? Is it not time for the successful teller of stories to children to use her gifts in audiences of grown people, persuading these molders of the children's future of the reasonableness of our objection to the third rate since it is the enemy of the best? ”

“ The practical is crowding everything else out of their courses of study. The kind of knowledge that will help in the future struggle for existence and material betterment is being demanded more and more and is being taught to the exclusion of much that is only ethical or cultural.
“As a continual protest against this materialistic tendency the school library takes its position and marshals its books. Its first purpose is to create a love for good literature and beautiful pictures as soon as the child has mastered the mechanics of reading; its ultimate aim is culture. ”

“ I have no shame in acknowledging that I, who wrote it, am also a child; for since I can remember my eyes have always grown big at tales of the marvelous, and my heart is still accustomed to go pit-a-pat when I read of impossible adventures. It is the nature of children to scorn realities, which crowd into their lives all too quickly with advancing years. Childhood is the time for fables, for dreams, for joy. ”

“ In an assemblage of many books, a certain spiritual dignity should attach itself to the utilitarian fact.
There is no definition for children’s books; the essential point is appeal, interest. As far back as 1844, a writer in the Quarterly Review very aptly claimed that “a genuine child’s book is as little like a book for grown people cut down, as the child himself is like a little old man.” Peculiarly, there is a popular misconception that an author of juveniles advances in art only when he or she leaves off penning stories or fairy tales, and begins publishing novels. ”

“ How wonderful it is, this instinct for play, and how worthy of our careful and serious study! It is the key to the whole philosophy of juvenile literature: for we take it for granted that books for children belong to the easy play, rather than to the hard work of life; and that they are an utter failure, if they do not win their way by their own charms. Here, in fact, we distinguish between juvenile literature and school-books. School-books are for children, indeed, but not for them alone, but for the teacher also, and they are to be as interesting as possible ”

“ The most common error in this connection is to suppose that children need an especial sort of literature different from that suited to adults. As far, certainly, as serious education is concerned, there is neither adult literature nor juvenile literature; there is simply literature. Speaking broadly, the literature best for grown persons is the literature best for children. The limitations of youth have, and should have, the same effects in literature as in life. They restrict the comprehension and appreciation of the facts of life ”

“ One gathers certainty and power for the choice and teaching of the merest folk-tale, if he is able to see in it the working of the great and simple laws of all art. And more specifically he must imbue himself with the spirit of the childlike literature. He must know and love the wonderful old folk and fairy tales, not regarding them as matter for the nursery and the kindergarten, merely, but learning to love them as great but simple art. ”

“ There will be a generous number of books so fine in point of matter and makeup that we shall lament having been born too late to read these in our childhood. The information and the taste acquired by children who have read the best juvenile publications of the past ten years is perfectly amazing, and those extremists who decry the buying of any books especially written for children are nearly as nonsensical as the ones who would buy everything the child wishes. ”

“ Those that survived the use of their first owners,—a little company in old sheepskin or flowered paper covers,—are either treasured by collectors or hidden away in some old library; but some of the best are still to be had in reprints and collections of “Old-fashioned” or “Forgotten” children’s books.
The new generation, pressing forward to discover more of the dream country, cares little for tales that reflect the quiet schooling of its ancestors; yet the most moral and instructive of these books mark the child’s escape from a sterner school. ”

“ The children should never see comic illustrations of their nursery rhymes and stories. They are all banal as wit and trashy as art, substituting an ugly and distorted image for the possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. After they have passed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories. The black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text. ”

“ The pencil of the artist seems almost necessary to give the right touch to a child's book that is great literature. Not in that they enable the boy to get the story more easily are illustrations valuable, but in the fact that they lend an artistic touch to a thing that is of itself a work of art. A guess, however, at the kind of illustrations needed for children's books would be very arbitrary. No one could hold that the present-day coloured illustrations, with what is termed life in action instead of decoration and convention, are the only right ones for children. ”

“ They tell their stories without explanations and without applications, with the real direct feeling of the child for grasping the subject. Everything which disturbs the smooth flow of the narrative, above all, when the narrator puts himself outside of it by indulging in a joke, strikes the child as a profound incongruity. Children are always more or less artistic in their nature, in the sense [Pg 222] that they desire to receive an impression in its purity, not as a means to something else. They wish through the story to go through a real experience ”

“ This is what we wish to do for children in teaching them to draw--to cause the eye to rest, not unconsciously, but consciously, on some object of beauty which will leave in their minds an image of delight for all their lives to come. Children of six and seven draw budding twigs of oak and ash, beech and larch, with such tender fidelity to colour, tone, and gesture, that the crude little drawings are in themselves things of beauty.
Children have 'Art' in them.--With art, as with so many other things in a child, we must believe that it is there, or we shall never find it. ”

“ They are pictures of childhood, rather than of children, representing those phases of thought and emotion which are peculiar to the child as such, and which all children possess in common. In their presence every mother spontaneously exclaims, “How like my own little one!” because the artist has interpreted the real child nature. Such pictures may justly take rank among the highest productions of creative art, having proven their claim to greatness by their unquestioned appeal to universal admiration. ”

“ The child is an artist; and the artist is always a child. The greatest periods of art have always been those in which artists had the direct, naïve, unspoiled vision of the child. The aim of our best artists today is to recover that vision. ”

“ Study of Pictures.--The art training of children should proceed on two lines. The six-year-old child should begin both to express himself and to appreciate, and his appreciation should be well in advance of his power to express what he sees or imagines. Therefore it is a lamentable thing when the appreciation of children is exercised only upon the coloured lithographs of their picture-books or of the 'Christmas number.' But the reader will say, 'A young child cannot appreciate art; it is only the colour and sentiment of a picture that reach him. ”

“ The illustrations are as artistic as if made for older and more critical readers. We have got away from the old idea that anything is good enough for children and now demand for them the best in art and literature. ”

“ All will be illustrated, but not after the usual fashion of children's books, in which it seems to be assumed that the lowest kind of art is good enough to give the first impressions to a child. In the present series, though the statement may perhaps excite a smile, the illustrations will be selected from the works of Raffaelle, Titian, Hans Holbein, and other old masters. Some of the best modern Artists have kindly promised their aid in creating a taste for beauty in little children. ”

“ It will be found, I think, that the first crude drawings are valuable as throwing light on the workings of children's minds Perhaps, indeed, it may turn out that these spontaneous efforts of the childish hand to figure objects are for the psychologist a medium of expression of the whole of child-nature hardly less instructive than that of early speech.
In carrying out our investigation of children's drawings we shall need to make a somewhat full reference to the related phenomena, the drawings of modern savages and those of early art. ”

“ In selecting books for the use of boys and girls, or, in other words, forming a small juvenile library, it is well to avoid most of the literature professedly written for youth, and published at preposterous prices by discerning publishers, who manufacture this gilded rubbish with an eye to the rich uncle rather than to the poor parent or still poorer child. Why children's books should be so expensive, and in proportion to their utility, such a costly class of literature, is one of those puzzles which only publishers can answer. ”

“ The best books that were ever produced, from an artistic point of view, were inspired and designed by students of art and letters, men removed from the commercial scramble of life, and to whom an advertisement was a thing unknown! The ordinary art education of a publisher, and the multitude of affairs requiring his attention, unfit him generally, for the task of deciding whether an illustration is good or bad, or how far—when he cheapens the production of his book by using photographic illustrations (“snap-shots” from nature) —he is justified in calling them “art.” ”

“ If the teacher examines the juvenile books offered for sale by the book dealers of her town or city, she probably will discover that most of them are trash not fit to be read by anyone, and she will realize the importance of directing parents in the selection of gift books for children. A good way to get better books into the book stores and into the hands of children is to give the pupils a list of good books, with the suggestion that they ask their parents to buy one of them the next time a book is to be bought as a present. ”

“ And yet, while teachers tell us that the opening of every new library witnesses a substitution of wholesome books for "yellow" novels in pupils' hands; while men in their prime remark their infrequent sight of the sensational periodicals left on every doorstep twenty years ago; while publishers of children's books are trying to give us a clean, safe, juvenile literature, and while some nickel novel publishers are even admitting a decline in the sale of their wares; in spite of these evidences of success, a warfare is still on, though its character is changing. ”

“ To apply this to the principle of the selection of children's books—and nothing in work with children, except the personality of the worker with them is so important as this, we cannot buy everything, we must buy the best, and we therefore have an argument that must have a show of reasonableness to those borrowers who advocate large purchases of books you tell them your income will not cover. ”

“ And I feel that the public library has but skirmished along the outposts while the great field of influencing the reading of American children remains unconquered. Until we affect production to the extent that the book stores circulate as good books as the best libraries we cannot be too complacent about our position as a force in citizen making. ”

“ In particular I would say, do not take children to galleries and museums; still less, of course, send them to art schools to be taught high-toned commercialism. Do not encourage them to join guilds of art and crafts, where, though they may learn a craft, they will lose their sense of art. In those respectable institutions reigns a high conception of sound work and honest workmanship. ”

“ As it is impossible in a school to train a man so as to make a religious teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a man how to become an artist.
Art schools are thus doubly destructive of art: first, in that they destroy the capacity to produce real art in those who have the misfortune to enter them and go through a seven or eight years' course; secondly, in that they generate enormous quantities of that counterfeit art which perverts the taste of the masses and overflows our world. ”

“ Emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent of the new tendencies in American education and social life, when he says: "Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." That sentence is the inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman. But how slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education! ”

“ What should you say was that effect?—Nearly nugatory: exceedingly painful in this respect, that the teaching of the Academy separates, as the whole idea of the country separates, the notion of art-education from other education, and when you have made that one fundamental mistake, all others follow. You teach a young man to manage his chalk and his brush—not always that—but having done that, you suppose you have made a painter of him ”