Juvenile literature

“ There should constantly be presented to him the books the boy likes best, yet always the books that will be best for the boy. As a matter of fact, however, the boy’s taste is being constantly vitiated and exploited by the great mass of cheap juvenile literature. ”

“ JUVENILE READING NEXT to environment and companions, books exercise the most powerful influence for good or evil on the life of the boy. His companionship with books is as intimate as his companionship with playmates and usually occupies as large a portion of his life, especially after puberty. The value of literature is two-fold: it molds the character and develops the taste, both of which processes are closely related. ”

“ The people who scorn the elementary literature of nursery rhymes, fairy tales and fables are the immature boys of thirteen or fourteen years to whom everything juvenile seems beneath their dignity and newly acquired independence.
The reader of Journeys will notice, however, that the quantity of matter that may be called really juvenile is small in comparison with the grand total. As a matter of fact, the selections of the last six volumes are worthy the reading by anyone, old or young, at any time, and to be fully appreciated they must be read with care and discrimination by everyone. ”

“ They said they would take the chances; and then he said that it was merely a notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth, but æsthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. ”

“ The book which furnishes entertainment as well as inspires interest commands the attention of the adolescent in the direct ratio that these elements conform to his psychological development. Juvenile fiction is usually interesting to the adult only when read from the juvenile viewpoint. ”

“ As soon as a child is old enough to follow the thread of a simple story, fables and folk-lore will lead him into the realm of the world’s earliest literature. These are the stories which delighted the race in its childhood, and they have delighted childhood in all succeeding generations. ”

“ Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and it may be in every family—unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace children—who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized imaginative whole ”

“ He is looking for thrills, excitement and adventure—something outside the domain of his everyday experience. [224] If he finds them he is satisfied with the book irrespective of its tendencies for good or bad. I am now speaking of the average red-blooded boy and not the halo-crowned youth of supernal goodness. As long as we supply him with the needed thrills coupled with good influence, he will not go after the thrills coupled with bad influence. Juvenile fiction which does not count for character-culture is worthless. ”

“ The danger to the child's culture, artistic, intellectual, and moral, of the ordinary juveniles lies just here, the heaping-up of sensations, the effort to provide a thrill for every page, throws the story out of balance, strains the child's nerves, and helps to produce a depraved taste. ”

“ Each expression by the child grows new impressions, gives him new sensory experiences. Perhaps if the high school would realize the possibilities in a fairy tale such as Beauty and the Beast, work it up into really good artistic form, and play it for the little children, much would be gained not only towards good form in dramatics, in both the elementary school and the high school, but towards unifying the entire course of literature from the kindergarten to the university. ”

“ The best of the stories produced by the childhood of the race have been bequeathed to the children of today, and to deprive children of the pleasure they would get from this inheritance of folklore seems as unjust as to deprive them of traditional games, which also help to make the first years of a person's life, the period of childhood, the period of imaginative play. The second kind of children's literature, that produced in modern times by individual authors, has likewise been bequeathed to children. ”

“ This habit of kindergarten play, with its joy and freedom and initiative, is the highest goal to be attained in the method of university work.
Fairy tales give the child a power of accurate observation. The habit of re-experiencing, of visualization, which they exercise, increases the ability to see, and is the contribution literature offers to nature study. In childhood acquaintance with the natural objects of everyday life is the central interest; and in its turn it furnishes those elements of experience upon which imagination builds. ”

“ If he be deprived of Fairy tales in childhood, he is likely, as an adult, to lack the creative imagination which makes big-visioned men and women, and leads to success in literature, art, invention, or in the practical things of business life. ”

“ The attempt to classify books into grades, to suit the supposed tastes and mental abilities of children of various ages whose minds are awakening to activity and acquiring powers of observation, is a complete mistake. So is the plan of separating books for boys and girls, or setting aside those of a low literary quality, but undeniably moral tone, for juvenile consumption. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies. Yet, the book itself is not by any means a success. Many of the loveliest child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and trivial poems are inserted. ”

“ Trivial as they undoubtedly are, they nevertheless often contain our best sketches of child-life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,—a life as different from that of a twentieth century child as was the adult society of those old days from that of the present time. They also enable us to mark as is possible in no other way, the gradual development of a body of writing which, though lagging much behind the adult literature, was yet also affected by the local and social conditions in America. ”

“ A child’s taste in reading is formed, as a rule, in the first ten or twelve years of its life, and experience has shown that the childish mind will prefer good literature to any other, if access to it is made easy, and will develop far better on literature of proved merit than on trivial or transitory material. ”

“ Now and then a boy is born with the taste and appreciation of poetry, and of course even in these days, when a literary atmosphere in the home is unhappily so rare, an occasional student appears from time to time who has been taught to care for poetry where every child should learn to love it, in the nursery. ”

“ The page of modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child-love and our child-admiration.
Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back admiringly to childhood. The æsthetic charm of the infant which draws us so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions is, like everything else which moves the modern mind, highly complex. ”

“ When one knows their origin and something of their social and literary history, they take on new dignity and importance. One ceases to look upon them as mere nonsense to be rattled off for the amusement of the baby, and learns to see them as little treasures of primitive art, miraculously preserved and passed down from baby to baby through these many generations: bits of old song and ballad, games and charms, riddles and incantations, tales of charming incidents and episodes—a gallery of unmatchable portraits, sallies of wit just witty enough for the four-year-old, mild but adequate nonsense ”

“ At last, weary of the goody-goody and artificial school of juvenile books, which had been produced for generations, until a surfeit of it led to something like a nausea in the public mind, there came a new type of writers for the young, who at least began to speak the language of reason. The dry bones took on some semblance of life and of human nature, and boys and girls were painted as real boys and genuine girls, instead of lifeless dolls and manikins. The reformation went on, until we now have a world of books for the young to choose from, very many of which are fresh and entertaining. ”

“ If literature reflects contemporary life with fidelity, we may well marvel that for so many hundreds of years the boys and girls of their generation were so little regarded that they are rarely mentioned in song or story. When they are, we are afforded glimpses of a curious attitude of aloofness or of harshness. Nowhere do we meet the artlessness of childhood. ”

“ It is not my idea that in actual practice a formal division is to be made, and still less that what I have called inspirational consideration of literature is ever to be discontinued. In the growth of a child's mind comes naturally a simple and unreflecting pleasure in literature, beginning, as has been said, with unsophisticated delight in the marked rhythms of Mother Goose or in the wholesome joy of the fairy-story. ”

“ And because of this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a classic form and therefore have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form. The tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man. They will be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description. ”

“ In nothing is this more the case than in the very class of works in which of all others accuracy and truth are most requisite—are, indeed, indispensable—we mean what are now called juvenile books, school-books for the use of the young. ”

“ The boy whose reading has been properly directed graduates from tales of adventure into the better forms of literature, including standard fiction, imaginative narration, history, historical novels, essays, and poetry. Few children, unaided, develop a taste for good literature; it must be cultivated by judicious direction. The best literature is as potent in its influence for good as trashy reading is for evil. ”

“ And we know that our hearers understand the whole situation.
The consideration of such familiar types and expressions as that of the ugly duckling suggests immediately another good reason for giving the child his due of fairy lore. The reason is that to omit it is to deprive him of one important element in the full appreciation of mature literature. If one thinks of it, one sees that nearly all adult literature is made by people who, in their beginnings, were bred on the wonder tale. ”

“ In brief, this literature of the youngest generation is a literature of revolt, which is not surprising, but also a literature characterized by a minute and painful examination of environment. Youth, in the old days, when it rebelled, escaped to romantic climes or adventurous experience from a world which some one else had made for it. That is what the hacks of the movies and the grown-up children who write certain kinds of novels are still doing. ”

“ It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be recognized as a class by itself, and have a place of its own in the history of letters and in criticism. Much of it should be individually prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life now has what might almost be called a school of its own. Here the young appeal to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the latter have failed to appreciate. ”

“ To even the casual reader of English literature the answer is plain, if this subject of toy-books be regarded as of near kin to the larger body of writing. It has been somewhat the custom to consider children’s literature as a thing wholly apart from that of adults, probably because the majority of the authors of these little tales have so generally lacked the qualities indispensable for any true literary work. ”

“ There had been no "children's literature" to speak of before, except for the oral and "popular" tradition, including lullabies and Mother Goose, some of which go back as far as Tudor and even medieval times.
Children's literature today is an immense and complex domain; and leaving aside for the present the works composed by children themselves, what remains varies tremendously in skill and delight, as well as in subtlety and intention. ”