Montrose Jonas Moses

“ The hungry, the lame, the halt, the blind turn unexpected corners, either to wince beneath the jeers of one type of mortal child, or to smile thanks to the other kind for a gentle word or a much-needed penny.
No one can wholly condemn the tale, typified by Miss Edgeworth’s “Parent’s Assistant.” Childhood is painted in quaint, old-fashioned colours, even though the staid little heroes and heroines have no interests. They take information into their minds as they would take physic into their bodies. ”

“ We should be made to face the future, but not to discount the present. We find ourselves defined by circumstances, but we need not remain slaves to them. To stigmatise a class in literature is to stigmatise a reader. Miss More and her contemporaries never questioned their social attitude—whether it was just or broad or transitory. Full of the pioneer work which they were doing, they did not recognise the right for the poor which was already the right for the rich. Juvenile literature was not for the heart of all youth, but for the benefaction of this one and of that. ”

“ The literature that does nothing more than amuse is not the literature [Pg 185] which, in future days, one is to fall back on as a maintaining force. Browning cries out:
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.
The man of culture is something more than an upstart; his is a slow but a steady growth; the smallest star that burns into the night is one whose rays have taken years to reach the earth. Out of the varied but unified elements, the personality evolves its view of life; it may not necessarily be a life among books ”

“ In any library, whether it be yours at home, with your own books upon the shelves, or the public’s, with volumes representing so much of your taxation on which you base your citizenship, the rare companionship of books is one of their humanising qualities. This is as much a truth for children as for grown-ups.
With the fear that there is an effort on the part of many to crystallise reading into a science, comes the necessity to foster a love of reading for its own sake. The democracy of books has grown larger with the cheapening process of manufacture ”

“ Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet are contradictions. The sustaining force in literature is no protector in the sense that it shields us from some impending danger. It settles behind us, pushes us, heart and soul, with a burning resolution, through the darkest night. The cultured man finds himself clinging to the sunnier side of doubt, not because Tennyson advises it, but because it has become part of his philosophy; he falls back upon a part of himself developed by literature. ”

“ Rousseau applied to childhood his belief in the free unfolding of man’s nature; however impracticable his methods, he loosed the chains that held fast the claims of childhood, and recognised their existence. He set the pendulum swinging in the human direction; he turned men’s minds upon the study of the child as a child, and, because of this, takes his place at the head of modern education. ”

“ Stevenson, the man, becomes the remembered boy.
The poetry for children that has lived is of that quality which appeals to the pristine sense of all that is fair and good and beautiful. Tender love, unfettered joy, protecting gentleness recognise no age; we, who are no longer young, look through the barred gates and up the gravel road, flanked by the dense freshness of green. Somewhere we hear the splash of water, far off we see the intense white of marble. Clinging to the iron bars outside, we watch the girl and boy, we count their footprints in the sand. ”

“ Children are entitled to their full heritage; education is paramount, culture is the saving grace. Your memory of a child is the healthy glow of the unfettered spirit. None of us want him with a book in his hand all the time. ”

“ In those days, if authors are to be believed, birds were in the habit of alighting on the hands of good children; they are more timid now, though children are not less good. The poor boy was made to feel how kind the good rich boy was to him throughout his shocking adversity; we are more considerate to-day. And so, Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford, products of a stilted age, are clad in uniforms similar to those worn by Miss Edgeworth’s children. They are endowed with no exceptional qualities, with no defined will power; they stand in a long row of similarly subjected slaves of theory. ”

“ There is nothing more variegated in its colour than a large assemblage of children’s books; the cover-designers revel in their rainbow conceits, sprinkling gold across the cloth as generously as fairies scatter star-dust; the artists fill their brushes with delicate tints of red and blue and orange, and sketch the progress of a story in spiral traceries of imagination. The mechanical perfection of book-making is genuinely pleasing ”

“ Perhaps the writers who were inspired by the Rousseau doctrine of education, and those who abetted the Sunday-school movement of the last century, were deceived in their attitude; for they considered the machinery by which they hoped to mould character, rather than the nature of the heart and soul upon which they were actually working. A right action, a large, human, melodramatic deed, are more healthy for boys and girls than all the reasons that could be given for them. In literature for children, as in life, the moral habit should be unquestioning. ”

“ A present-day boy who would read what Lamb or Wordsworth, Coleridge or Tennyson, Gladstone or Huxley devoured with gusto in their youth, would set the psychologists in a flutter, would become an object for head-lines in our papers. There is a mistaken conception regarding what are children’s books, in the best sense of the word. A standard which might have excellent conservative results, although it would be thoroughly one-sided and liable to false interpretation, could be based on the assertion that those books only are children’s classics which can be relished by a grown-up public. ”

“ The tales and playlets written by Berquin are almost immoral in their morality. It is a question whether the interest of children will become absorbed by the constant iteration of virtue; whether goodness is best developed through the exploitation of deceit, of lying, of disobedience, and of wilful perverseness. To be kind means to be rewarded, to be bad is synonymous with punishment. Berquin and his followers might have drawn up a moral code book in pocket form, so stereotyped was their habit of exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. ”

“ Like all children, Madame de Genlis was superior to her limited pleasures; she possessed an imagination which expanded and placed her in a heroic world of her own making. There is peculiar pleasure in discovering under narrow circumstances the good, healthy spirit of youth. Madame de Genlis seemed proud to record a certain dare-devil rebellion in herself during this period. The pendulum that is made to swing to its unnatural bent brings with the downward stroke unexpected consequences. ”

“ Lamb’s plea to Godwin is the plea of the man who would rather keep a child in the green fields than have him spend his time on wishy-washy matter.
The whole discussion resolves itself into the question: How much of the brute element, in which early literature abounds, is to be given to children? Shall they be made to fear unnecessarily, shall the ugly phases of life be allowed, simply because they come through the ages stamped as classic? All due consideration must be paid to the sensitiveness of childhood ”

“ 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. ”

“ The librarian has wisely mapped out for her story hour such a course, gleaned from the parables, and from the vast treasure houses of narrative abounding in both Testaments and in fables.
Turn to your colleges and your schools, and you will find that, generally speaking, there is dug a deep channel between literature and life, which has no right to be. We should study our ethics as one of the inherent elements in poetry and in prose. ”

“ But when the impetus toward the study, scientific and intensive, of adolescence was begun, the teacher lost sight of the free will by which that growth advanced; anxious to prove the child’s development to be but a series of stages marked by educational gradings, he reserved no place for the self-development through which the personality finds expression. In both cases an unconscious injustice was done juvenile nature. The moral questioning warped the spirit, the educational questioning chokes the imagination and fancy, starving the spirit altogether. ”

“ In the problem of children’s reading we must consider two aspects; there is the bogey image of a theoretical or sociological or educational child, and also the book as a circulating commodity. There is the machinery of “The Child”; Dr. Isaac Watts shaped one; Jean Jacques Rousseau another; the Edgeworths still another, and now the psychologist’s framework of childhood, more subtle, more scientific, more interesting, threatens us everywhere. But no patent has so far supplanted the fundamental excellence of human nature. ”

“ This infers that the library, as an institution, fully recognises that it has a function to perform in society, and that it will strive, in its several capacities, so to unify its activities that it will become a force as well as a convenience.
Through pleasure, we would train the child to future usefulness; physically we would let him find expression for all his surplus energy; but as a reader, we would so far guide him that none of his mental energy will go to waste. Intellectually, a boy or a girl should not be given what one library called “leisure hour reading” ”

“ For the forgotten tales of long ago, the old-fashioned stories represent something more than stained pages and crude woodcuts, than stilted manners and seeming priggishness; they stand for the personal effort and service of men and women striving with staunch purpose in the interests of childhood, however mistaken their estimates of this childhood may have been. These books, to the library, are so much fallow material as a practical circulating proposition, but they represent forces significant in the history of children’s books. ”

“ We must infer that all books upon the juvenile shelves are placed there because they are thought suitable for children. The librarian may reserve that prerogative of concealing a book and regarding it out, should a demand for it come from one who should not, for any apparent reason, have it. But the jurisdiction of the librarian over the child-taste, just as the jurisdiction of the teacher over the child-mind, ends where the home is expected to proclaim its effectiveness and its right. ”

“ We detect in Blake’s verses the apt blending of grown-up regard for childhood, with the ready response of childhood to grown-up love. By his exuberance, by his fancy, by his simple treatment he set a standard which is the same that dominates the best of Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti. Stevenson later carried forward the art, by adding thereto a touch as though youth, fearful of growing up, knew something of the heavy burden of man’s estate. ”

“ But the librarian is not the only factor; the parent and the writer also come into account. They, too, must share a responsibility which will be more fully determined later on, but which now means that they both owe the child an indispensable duty; the one in giving to the growing boy or girl most intelligent guidance along the path of fullest development; the other in satisfying this need—not in deflecting juvenile taste by means of endless mediocrity and mild sentimentalism. It is an unfortunate circumstance that the effects of mediocrity are longer-lived than the immediate evil itself. ”

“ We have always to return to the ultimate goal, to the final court of appeal. If there is too much brutal strength in a story intended for children, it had best be read or told to them, rather than place in their hands what is not literature but the mere husk.
Such a letter as Lamb wrote to Godwin leads us to feel that at times misgivings seized him as to his own mutilation of Homer and of his much-beloved Chapman. ”

“ Our Fiction [Pg 170] will become Stories; our Myths and Folk-lore and Fables simply Fairy Tales and Legends. Our arrangement now assumes a definite perspective, from the limitless past to ourselves as the fixed point. Our standard is one of interest; we will apply the test of excellence, not to books generally, but to each channel in which individual interest has a right to seek its own development. By a psychological consideration, we are able to hitch our wagon to a star, to span the distance separating the Present and the Past, the Real and the Ideal. Myth flows imperceptibly into legend ”

“ IV. John Newbery, Oliver Goldsmith, and Isaiah Thomas.
Wherever you wander in the land of children’s books, ramifications, with the vein of hidden gold, invite investigation,—rich gold for the student and for the critic, but less so for the general reader. Yet upon the general reader a book’s immortality depends. No librarian, no historian, need be crowded out; there are points still to be settled, not in the mere dry discussion of dates, but in the estimates of individual effect. The development of children’s books is consecutive, carried forward because of social reasons ”

“ In the biographies of these well-intentioned writers for children and for poor people, it is always satisfactory to linger, wherever opportunity presents, on the genial aspects of their lives; they are estimated in criticism so greatly by the weight, or by the lack of weight, of their ideas, that the human value which existed at the time is often lost sight of. However dry their preachments, their social lives were warmed by human intercourse and human service. It is hard to forget such a group as Scott, Maria and Patty Edgeworth, and others, listening to Patty while she sang Irish melodies. ”