Florence V. Barry

“ It is the strong point of Miss Edgeworth’s contrasts that her bad children are never attractive, and her good ones hardly ever impossible.
Hal is no villain; but there is no glamour about his naughtiness: he is greedy and boastful as well as improvident; a child is not moved to emulate him. The real villains are dishonest or cruel or insolent, never simply thoughtless or self-willed.
But the good children are a positive triumph. Only Miss Edgeworth could make a boy live that untied knots to save string, chose an overcoat instead of a gay uniform and had money to spare for good works. ”

“ In this play-humour, the outlaws themselves are children, as every child is by nature an outlaw. They know better than to take life for a serious business. To them, as to a child, it is one long and absorbing game of make-believe.
Robin, like Fulk Fitz-Warine or Hereward, could play at any trade—a potter, a beggar, a shepherd, a fisherman. His band were mostly men who had forsaken some dull craft for this great game of hiding and hunting and robbery. In the midst of active enjoyment, they set themselves to redress the unequal balance of fortune ”

“ Yet there is little of the fairy about Tom Thumb. He is a real child, mischievous, even thievish,—taking advantage of his size to creep into other boys’ cherry-bags and steal. His one poor trick of magic is to hang pots upon a sunbeam, his one adventure into romance, a mock-heroic episode at King Arthur’s court. ”

“ English folk-tales, compared with others more magical, are like the toys that a child will make for himself out of a stick, beside the fine inventions of a conjurer; they appeal chiefly to practical interests, and leave much to the imagination. Jack killed Cormoran and Blunderbore and the giant with two heads before anybody thought of giving him a cap of knowledge, or shoes of swiftness, or even a magic sword. ”

“ There is a magic in the simplest form of verse that may quicken the beat of a child’s heart, and endow little forgotten rules and prescriptions of the nursery with unexpected significance. If Blake could have alighted in the starlight outside a window and heard Ann Taylor putting one of her children to bed, he might have come in and acknowledged the existence of naughtiness, just for the pleasure of being forgiven. Some voices can sweeten the longest homily, and the culprit waits patiently for the kiss that must come when the sermon begins ”

“ The scene of his first visit (at five years old) to his parents, is a satire on Society, and the farcical turn of his adventures brings the romance of theory into touch with the novel of life and humour. This little Harry is the most natural child of fiction; like Emile at a later stage, he knows nothing of the respect due to people of rank, and is quite unmoved by his unusual surroundings; but as yet he has no philosophy; he values things as children do, for what they mean to him. ”

“ Berquin’s children were never so independent as these. His orphans were adopted; Miss Edgeworth’s keep house by themselves in a ruined castle, and ply their trades of knitting and spinning and shoe-making with the rhythm of a singing game. The finding of a treasure among the ruins is a freak of romance that holds the imagination even while the coins are being weighed and marked. ”

“ The city beyond the clouds, the underground country, all the enchantments of woods and islands are open to the little traveller. From The Water Babies to Peter Pan there has been little else in nursery tales but the stuff of dreams.
It is hard to believe that the child who read the story of Rosamond and the Purple Jar, less than a hundred years ago, had no curiosity about dream countries, no sense of poetry in nature; yet the first sign of a romantic movement in children’s books was the printing of unknown or forgotten fairy tales under the title of The Court of Oberon, in 1823. ”

“ With Words and Fables, Rousseau dismisses all the inventions of primitive imagination that find their natural place in a child’s mind.
At twelve, Emile hardly knows what a book is. He has spent his whole life in the country, with a tutor whom he regards as a playfellow. In climbing among rocks and trees and leaping over brooks, he has learnt to measure himself with his surroundings and has lost all sense of danger. No human will has ever opposed him, and since it is useless to fight against circumstance, he submits to necessary evils, and bears pain without complaining. ”

“ There is a grim shadow on her nursery wall, and in the midst of the most innocent employments, her little people shrink and cower. This spectre stood over her when she tampered with a book which children of all ages understand and enjoy. She accepted The Pilgrim’s Progress as a part of her creed; her knowledge of it accounts for the fine simplicity of her style. Yet in her Infant’s Progress from the Valley of Destruction to Everlasting Glory, [144] there is not a giant nor a castle to atone for her bane on “toys” which the strictest philosopher would pass as harmless and instructive. ”

“ A child might suspect that it was a literary rather than a practical idea, and the few parents who, after a vigorous course of self-discipline, felt equal to the part, would find it easier to sustain by proxy in a moral tale. They decided, at any rate, to ignore Rousseau’s veto upon books for children under twelve, and writers quickly rose to the demand for a new sort of Fables, wherein the Child of Nature, walking in the shadow of the Perfect Parent, acquired a measure of wisdom and philanthropy beyond his years. ”

“ Wizards and fairies simply move among the natural inhabitants of bazaars or palaces,—a thing in no way surprising to a child; and forms of enchantment surpassing the illusions of a dream rise up in existing cities.
In a realistic age, such a setting would atone for the elements of unreality; yet the authors of the Tatler and Spectator (those gentle schoolmasters of grown-up children) held it of less account than the aptness of the stories to “reflection” and philosophy. For this they could forgive “that Oriental extravagance which is mixed with it” ”

“ This, indeed, is not a child’s book at all, but a book of child-thought and experience, full of insight and tenderness, revealing everywhere the pathos of childhood.
Charles and Mary lived their childish days over again in these stories. They forgot that as children they had not seen things in the same light. They forgot (those days had been short for them) that children, however precocious, are not concerned with their own thought-process, but with life and movement and adventure. ”

“ She held that children’s thoughts should be led from the beauty of the flower to the wonder of creation.
“A child”, she says, “to feel the full force of the idea of God, ought never to remember when he had no such idea.” It must come early, with no insistence upon dogma, in association with “all that a child sees, all that he hears, all that affects his mind with wonder or delight.” ”

“ The greater number of moral tales owe their very existence to Rousseau’s inconsistency; for although he had exposed the fallacy of maxims and fables, he found no better substitute than the Example of a perfect Parent or Tutor—a man without passion or prejudice, detached and colourless, who, without seeming to guide or correct, should watch the child’s every movement and on occasion teach Nature herself how to go about her business. ”

“ Satire in Children’s books is apt to miss its mark. Some parents who bought this Picture of Youth must have felt like the old gentleman of the story, who was furious at a clever caricature of himself until somebody assured him that it was intended for his neighbour. Restored to good humour by similar means, they would doubtless enjoy these burlesques: the foolish indulgent mother, the sporting squire who laughs at his son’s escapades, the parents who teach their boy “to recite passages with tragic effect from our best poets”. ”

“ In the lane outside, the pedlar hawked his wares; the old ballads could still be heard, the seven lamps of enchantment burnt bright at nightfall.
But inside the garden there were curious knots, with flowers of the older sort and fragrant herbs. As time went on, some of the trees were allowed to grow as they would; [195] the open country could be seen through gaps in the hedge, and the children began to make friends with travellers upon the road.
Good counsels had run into rhyme from the beginning, that they might hang together among wandering thoughts. ”

“ A child needs no other teacher than Experience, no schoolroom but the open country which is also his playground; all that the tutor need do is to enter into his interests and amusements as an equal, and watch over him while he educates himself. This marks a revolutionary change in the attitude of the Philosopher to the Child. Locke’s theory of habit, his practice of reasoning with children, have no place in the new scheme. Rousseau would as soon have a child be five feet in height as to have judgment at the age of ten. ”

“ But this image of the monstrous beard, a piece of pure myth, if it were not the addition of some imaginative teller, came down from a time when childlike men invented it to explain the giant shapes of trees. A child, recognizing the analogy, feels the same shock of surprise and pleasure as his forest-dwelling ancestors, and finds in this play of likeness and contrast, the source and sustaining interest of all giant tales. For there never was a giant without dwarfs to measure him, nor a dwarf that had not his giant ”