Orton Lowe

“ Of course it is understood that we are to deal with the enduring literature of childhood, the literature of power. And it is also to be understood that reading is to be done in moderation and with care. Then again it is evident that a certain amount of reading must be prescribed and thoroughly mastered. Reading must be from what is standard down to the point of appeal, lest the point always hold the boy to the earth earthy. After a taste for onions has once been developed, little hope can be entertained of making the boy a judge of the delicate flavour of grapes—they will hang high. ”

“ If the glare of the arc light could be screened at times and the starry sky be read as a book wherein the constellations still hold their Greek names, some of the heroes that have been made permanent might inspire the observer with a feeling to read again their story. Yet let us have the sweetness of the rose, whatever be its name.
It is rather perplexing to know what myths to give the child when he first enters school and through the first four or five years of his school life. The taste and culture of the teacher have much to do with this. ”

“ It would be an almost unpardonable neglect on the part of a teacher if a boy were permitted to go through school and not be familiar with the heroic age. He should know the stories of the gods and heroes; know the Olympian council, the labours of Hercules, the adventures of Jason, of Perseus, of Achilles; he should know the Trojan War in its picturesque greatness and the wonderful exploits of Odysseus on his homeward journey; and he should know such stories as those of Apollo, of Œdipus, of Orpheus, of Admetus, of Proserpine, of Niobe, and of Psyche. ”

“ The habits of reading that measure the use of spare time, and in that way the character of the individual, will work for a more sane and less showy home life and through that for a community given to other than obtrusive and frivolous social life. What bundle of habits will serve its slave better than will this bundle? Or where is keener and more subdued pleasure to be found? Though books are a bloodless substitute for life, as Stevenson [17] has well pointed out, we need some substitute in our hours of ease, and a good book does passing well for such a substitute ”

“ It has greatly helped to keep us in some sense ever young, by preserving through our worldly ways one slender tract not overgrown with weeds, where we may walk with children sharing their delights." A good thing it is to keep that slender tract free from weeds. And the stronger the man, the more he needs to do it. Only a man who sees things out of their right proportions and who is without a sense of humour would scorn to renew his youth occasionally in the land of romance. If in life the strongest and wisest men are good at a fight, they are still better at a play. ”

“ For in the living out of the great story of securing shelter and food and raiment, the boy who has never felt the charm of a great book in chimney-corner days, or the man who has never pored over a "midnight darling" by candlelight, has missed one of the most refined and harmless pleasures of life. The very books themselves [4] are refining because they make up the art of literature, an art that is in its highest sense an expression and interpretation of life. This art deals with the beautiful. Its appeal is primarily to the feelings. ”

“ Immensity and Oriental mystery have taken the place of colloquial directness and humour, and we have almost pure romance. Their richness and splendour captivate the reader and transport him into a wonderland of powerful magicians and magnificent palaces. The book is elemental in its appeal and will always furnish royal entertainment for man or boy. And the man who is not too completely grown up will keep his Lane's translation within arm's reach against the hours when the dull cares of the world are weighing him down. ”

“ He wants much that he cannot understand and reason out; and the deeper things of life, things which touch him most vitally as a living creature, he looks on with reverence. If his imagination is alive to the experiences of great poetry, he cannot scoff at things felt in the soul but impossible of explanation. To him there are sacred things in the fireside life and at the altar that are not to be laid bare by the curiosity of the reasoner in his search for truth. ”

“ We trust our young readers will find it a source of entertainment; those more advanced, a useful companion in their reading; those who travel, and visit museums and galleries of art, an interpreter of paintings and sculptures; those who mingle in cultivated society, a key to allusions which are occasionally made; and, last of all, those in advanced life, pleasure in retracing a path of literature which leads them back to the days of their childhood, and revives at every step the associations of the morning of life. ”

“ If the boy's chum has a hungry mind and clean hands, he may be asked to drop in and read the book where it belongs, but not to carry it off elsewhere. Or better still: the owner of the book who knows its riches may fall into the habit of reading his favourite portions aloud to his boy friends who have gathered in for that purpose. No single thing will awaken such a love for good literature as the gathering of choice bits of it through the ear. ”

“ Both tastes and circumstances may lead to the buying of a cheap, modest-looking book. This may serve its owner well, and he may never miss what might be called the charm of a well-illustrated, well-printed, and well-bound edition—one pleasant to look into and to touch. He may be as little able to judge of the artistic make-up of a book as of the cut of his clothes or the quality of his food; what he wants is something to satisfy hunger and to cover nakedness, in whatever form it may be given. ”

“ Though America's contribution to children's literature of an enduring type has been limited, it is gratifying to know that America's most finished artist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has given to that literature two books that every boy must know, "Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys" and "Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys; a Second Wonder-Book." That every boy who is going to become a mature reader of good books needs to know the myths of Greece and Rome, goes without saying. Now he had better learn these from a book having a literary touch than from the ordinary telling of text-books. ”

“ By and by the boy will fall into the habit of reading aloud to some one else, and this may now be trusted to carry him along. Wise suggestion on the part of the teacher will direct him in getting a few good volumes that he can call his own. A fairy library, not large but well selected, will become a comfort to him in later years when the lamp is getting dim. For the man who finds himself unable to read with pleasure a fairy tale that charmed him in youth proclaims himself a slave either to relentless materialism or to cold and dignified egotism. ”

“ There is a field of reading very much akin to the field of mythology in which there is no single book that the boy can read that is so permanent in its form as is the "Wonder-Book," yet it is a field in which the boy should feel at home. That is the field that includes the Arthurian legends and the Robin Hood stories. Among the many books that have appeared, the excellent work done by the poet Lanier in his "Boy's King Arthur" and by the late artist Howard Pyle should surely find a place on every boy's book shelf. ”

“ Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. When Byron calls Rome 'the Niobe of nations,' or says of Venice, 'she looks a Sea-Cybele fresh from ocean,' he calls up to the mind of one familiar with our subject illustrations more vivid and striking than the pencil could furnish, but which are lost to the reader ignorant of mythology. ”

“ No sooner had the founders of our nation succeeded in giving men their long-coveted political freedom than science, cock-sure of being able to solve the riddle of existence, strode upon the scene and smote the favourite creatures of the imagination hip and thigh. It not only played havoc with the fairies of our fathers, but it came perilously near doing the same with their faith. And as a result, a material and utilitarian tone has taken hold of education in most places, and boys must be practical, scientific, and wear old heads on young shoulders. ”

“ She spins no web from the threads of her imagination. The warp and woof of her fabric are drawn from facts; and it comes from the loom all wool, a yard wide, and used to cover the nakedness of real men and women. She has never felt the free abandon of fairy land. Her heart has never leap'd up at beholding a rainbow in the sky, a rainbow with the fabled pot of gold—though she has toiled and sweat many a day for nothing more than a mess of pottage. ”

“ Some teacher may wonder if books other than stories and verse are not to be read. Of course they are, and they will be anyhow. Yet they are not books of power, fundamental to the growth of personality; [214] they are books of knowledge of one kind or another. Just where the division line is to be drawn and which is the right class for this book and that, is hard to say, and matters little when it is determined; but the place of a few has been definitely fixed by experience, and they happen to be stories. That great literary field of comfort to men, the personal essay, is beyond the schoolboy. ”

“ The memory must not be cumbered with dead matter if the boy can reason on experiments for practical business demands. And are not the myths of these Greek and Latin languages too imaginative and impractical, covered with too much of academic dust, to serve a purpose in a practical age? This is heralded from educational convention to educational convention, and whilst the breaking of idols goes merrily on, a few brave teachers who speak Greek are regularly taking a Spartan stand to preserve what yet remains of the classic structure. In a boastful age they are not going to forget. ”

“ In accordance with this fashion it seems the easiest way to take the privilege of the day and without more ado assume that books of literature are necessary in the education of a boy, and conclude therefrom that a principal business of the teacher is to train the boy to read books intelligently and to form a substantial taste for them. And why should not a schoolmaster who dotes on a few old favourites have an unshaken faith in his assumption and go merrily on to the business of the literature itself and what may be done toward developing among school children a taste for it? ”

“ 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. ”

“ If some artist with the genius of Cruikshank would give a few of the best years of his life to illustrating a complete collection of these rhymes, he would become a benefactor of childhood. And if such an edition were well made mechanically, printed on good unglazed linen paper from large type and good woodcuts, well sewed, and bound in linen or leather, the boy might consider himself favoured of the gods if he could call such a book his own. These "things that are old and pretty" deserve to be well arrayed. Yet [200] they deserve to be read for their own sake, an enduring charm of sound. ”

“ When the dramatic colloquialism and humour of the English tales, the superior grace, elegance, and beauty of the French tales, and the light, airy fancy of the German tales have been presented to the boy, the Scandinavian tales of Hans Christian Andersen will give him a refinement in fairy life that he has not found before. They do not have, save in a few [171] such cases as "Holger the Dane," the quality of appealing to grown-ups as well as to children—the test of a child's book that is literature, or rather the test of a man yet on good terms with the world. ”

“ Then to persuade the reading public that the pure taste for the healthful story is much more worth while will try the resources of the teacher. Yet that is exactly what should be expected of him—a Herculean task and a most thankless one.
To secure a stable as well as a pure taste for things worth while in books should be an aim of the teacher. He must do this in an age when the vaudeville idea is deep-rooted. Variety takes the place of sustained attention. This begets the mood for profligacy. [7] Something new and good is expected to turn up in the shape of a book. ”

“ A distinct service could have been rendered to children if Andrew Lang had selected the best of the stories from his voluminous and unequally good colour fairy books and had issued them in one large, well-made volume with artistic illustrations.
And yet there remains the greatest and most wonderful of all fairy tales, the "Tales of a Thousand and One Nights," to be begun with the easier tales now, but only to be enjoyed thoroughly in the upper grammar grades. No other book is so romantic or so entrancing, nor does anybody ever get too old to read it. ”