Part 4

“To us who are nourished from childhood,” says Mr. Fiske again, “on the truths revealed by science, the sky is known to be merely an optical appearance, due to the partial absorption of the solar rays in passing through a thick stratum of atmospheric air; the clouds are known to be large masses of watery vapor, which descend in rain-drops when sufficiently condensed; and the lightning is known to be a flash of light accompanying an electric discharge.” But the blue sky-sea of Aryan folk-lore, in which the cloud-flakes floated as stately swans, drew many an eye to the contemplation of its loveliness, and touched many a heart with the sacred charm of beauty. On that mysterious sea strange vessels sailed from unknown shores, and once a mighty anchor was dropped by the sky mariners, and fell right into a little English graveyard, to the great amazement of the humble congregation just coming out from church. The sensation of freedom and space afforded by this conception of the heavens is a delicious contrast to the conceit of the Persian poet,--

“That inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die;”

or to the Semitic legend, which described the firmament as made of hammered plate, with little windows for rain,--a device so poor and barbaric, that we wonder how any man could look up into the melting blue and admit such a sordid fancy into his soul.

“Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest men,” confesses Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “has mingled with it something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind.” Such an admission from so genial and kindly a source should suffice to put us all on the defensive. It is not agreeable to be bullied even upon those matters which are commonly classed as facts; but when we come to the misty region of dreams and myths and superstitions, let us remember, with Lamb, that “we do not know the laws of that country,” and with him generously forbear to “set down our ancestors in the gross for fools.” We have lost forever the fantasies that enriched them. Not for us are the pink and white lions that gamboled in the land of Prester John, nor his onyx floors, imparting courage to all who trod on them. Not for us the Terrestrial Paradise, with its “Welle of Youthe, whereat thei that drynken semen alle weys yongly, and lyven withouten sykeness;”[7] nor the Fortunate Isles beyond the Western Sea, where spring was ever green; where youths and maidens danced hand in hand on the dewy grass, where the cows ungrudgingly gave milk enough to fill whole ponds instead of milking-pails, and where wizards and usurers could never hope to enter. The doors of these enchanted spots are closed upon us, and their key, like Excalibur, lies hidden where no hand can grasp it.

“The whole wide world is painted gray on gray, And Wonderland forever is gone past.”

All we can do is to realize our loss with becoming modesty, and now and then cast back a wistful glance

“where underneath The shelter of the quaint kiosk, there sigh A troup of Fancy’s little China Dolls, Who dream and dream, with damask round their loins, And in their hands a golden tulip flower.”

FOOTNOTES:

[2] _The Highlands of Central India._ By Captain James Forsyth.

[3] _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_. By Sir Walter Scott.

[4] _The Myth of Demeter and Persephone._ By Walter Pater.

[5] _Myths and Mythmakers._

[6] _Book of Were-Wolves._ By Baring-Gould.

[7] _Travels of Sir John Mandeville._

WHAT CHILDREN READ.

It is part of the irony of life that our discriminating taste for books should be built up on the ashes of an extinct enjoyment. We spend a great deal of our time in learning what literature is good, and a great deal more in attuning our minds to its reception, rightly convinced that, by the training of our intellectual faculties, we are unlocking one of the doors through which sweetness and light may enter. We are fond of reading, too, and have always maintained with Macaulay that we would rather be a poor man with books than a great king without, though luckily for our resolution, and perhaps for his, such a choice has never yet been offered. Books, we say, are our dearest friends, and so, with true friendly acuteness, we are prompt to discover their faults, and take great credit in our ingenuity. But all this time, somewhere about the house, curled up, may be, in a nursery window, or hidden in a freezing attic, a child is poring over The Three Musketeers, lost to any consciousness of his surroundings, incapable of analyzing his emotions, breathless with mingled fear and exultation over his heroes’ varying fortunes, and drinking in a host of vivid impressions that are absolutely ineffaceable from his mind. We cannot read in that fashion any longer, but we only wish we could. Thackeray used to sigh in middle age over the lost delights of five shillings’ worth of pastry; but what was the pleasure of eating tarts to the glamour cast over us by our first romance, to the enchanted hours we spent with Sintram by the sea-shore, or with Nydia in the darkened streets of Pompeii, or perhaps--if we were not too carefully watched--with Emily in those dreadful vaults beneath Udolpho’s walls!

Nor is it fiction only that strongly excites the imagination of a child. History is not to him what it is to us, a tangle of disputed facts, doubtful theories, and conflicting evidence. He grasps its salient points with simple directness, absorbs them into his mind with tolerable accuracy, and passes judgment on them with enviable ease. To him, historical characters are at least as real as those of romance, which they are very far from being to us, and he enters into their impressions and motives with a facile sympathy which we rarely feel. Not only does he firmly believe that Marcus Curtius leaped into the gulf, but he has not yet learned to question the expediency of the act; and, having never been enlightened by Mr. Grote, the black broth of Lykurgus is as much a matter of fact to him as the bread and butter upon his own breakfast table. Sir Walter Scott tells us that even the dinner-bell--most welcome sound to boyish ears--failed to win him from his rapt perusal of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry; but Gibbon, as a lad, found the passage of the Goths over the Danube just as engrossing, and, stifling the pangs of hunger, preferred to linger fasting in their company. The great historian’s early love for history has furnished Mr. Bagehot with one more proof of the fascination of such records for the youthful mind, and he bids us at the same time consider from what a firm and tangible standpoint it regards them. “Youth,” he writes, “has a principle of consolidation. In history, the whole comes in boyhood; the details later, and in manhood. The wonderful series going far back to the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the watchful Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough, impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home,--when did we learn these? Not yesterday, nor to-day, but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn only these; but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.”[8]

If this be true, and the child’s mind be not only singularly alive to new impressions, but quick to concentrate its knowledge into a consistent whole, the value and importance of his early reading can hardly be overestimated. That much anxiety has been felt upon the subject is proven by the cry of self-congratulation that rises on every side of us to-day. We are on the right track at last, the press and the publishers assure us; and with tons of healthy juvenile literature flooding the markets every year, our American boys and girls stand fully equipped for the intellectual battles of life. But if we will consider the matter in a dispassionate and less boastful light, we shall see that the good accomplished is mainly of a negative character. By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad; yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness. These little volumes, nicely written, nicely printed, and nicely illustrated, are very useful in their way; but they are powerless to awaken a child’s imagination, or to stimulate his mental growth. If stories, they merely introduce him to a phase of life with which he is already familiar; if historical, they aim at showing him a series of detached episodes, broken pictures of the mighty whole, shorn of its “mystic associations,” and stirring within his soul no stronger impulse than that of a cheaply gratified curiosity.

Not that children’s books are to be neglected or contemned. On the contrary, they are always helpful, and in the average nursery have grown to be a recognized necessity. But when supplied with a too lavish hand, a child is tempted to read nothing else, and his mind becomes shrunken for lack of a vigorous stimulant to excite and expand it. “Children,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “derive impulses of a powerful and important kind from hearing things that they cannot entirely comprehend. It is a mistake to write down to their understanding. Set them on the scent, and let them puzzle it out.” Sir Walter himself, be it observed, in common with most little people of genius, got along strikingly well without any juvenile literature at all. He shouted the ballad of Hardyknute, to the great annoyance of his aunt’s visitors, long before he knew how to read, and listened at his grandmother’s knee to her stirring tales about Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood, Jamie Telfer of the fair Dodhead, and a host of border heroes whose picturesque robberies were the glory of their sober and respectable descendants. Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat were explored for his amusement in the dreary winter days. Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany, a mutilated copy of Josephus, and Pope’s translation of the Iliad appear to have been his favorites, until, when about eight years old, a happy chance threw him under the spell of the two great poets who have swayed most powerfully the pliant imaginations of the young. “I found,” he writes in his early memoirs, “within my mother’s dressing-room (where I slept at one time) some odd volumes of Shakespeare; nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sate up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment, until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me it was time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely deposited since nine o’clock.” And a little later he adds, “Spenser I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights, and ladies, and dragons, and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and Heaven only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society!”

“How much of our poetry,” it has been asked, “owes its start to Spenser, when the Fairy Queen was a household book, and lay in the parlor window-seat?” And how many brilliant fancies have emanated from those same window-seats, which Montaigne so keenly despised? There, where the smallest child could climb with ease, lay piled up in a corner, within the reach of his little hands, the few precious volumes which perhaps comprised the literary wealth of the household. Those were not days when over-indulgence and a multiplicity of books robbed reading of its healthy zest. We know that in the window-seat of Cowley’s mother’s room lay a copy of the Fairy Queen, which to her little son was a source of unfailing delight, and Pope has recorded the ecstasy with which, as a lad, he pored over this wonderful poem; but then neither Cowley nor Pope had the advantage of following Oliver Optic through the slums of New York, or living with some adventurous “boy hunters” in the jungles of Central Africa. On the other hand, there is a delicious account of Bentham, in his early childhood, climbing to the height of a huge stool, and sitting there night after night reading Rapin’s history by the light of two candles; a weird little figure, whose only counterpart in literature is the small John Ruskin propped up solemnly in his niche, “like an idol,” and hemmed in from the family reach by the table on which his book reposed. It is quite evident that Bentham found the mental nutrition he wanted in Rapin’s rather dreary pages, just as Pope and Cowley found it in Spenser, Ruskin in the Iliad, and Burns in the marvelous stories told by that “most ignorant and superstitious old woman,” who made the poet afraid of his own shadow, and who, as he afterwards freely acknowledged, fanned within his soul the kindling flame of genius.

Look where we will, we find the author’s future work reflected in the intellectual pastimes of his childhood. Madame de Genlis, when but six years old, perused with unflagging interest the ten solid volumes of Clélie,--a task which would appall the most stout-hearted novel-reader of to-day. Gibbon turned as instinctively to facts as Scott and Burns to fiction. Macaulay surely learned from his beloved Æneid the art of presenting a dubious statement with all the vigorous coloring of truth. Wordsworth congratulated himself and Coleridge that, as children, they had ranged at will

“through vales Rich with indigenous produce, open grounds Of fancy;”

Coleridge, in his turn, was wont to express his sense of superiority over those who had not read fairy tales when they were young, and Charles Lamb, who was plainly of the same way of thinking, wrote to him hotly on the subject of the “cursed Barbauld crew,” and demanded how he would ever have become a poet, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in his infancy, he had been crammed with geography, natural history, and other useful information. What a picture we have of Cardinal Newman’s sensitive and flexible mind in these few words which bear witness to his childish musings! “I used to wish,” he says in the third chapter of the Apologia, “that the Arabian Nights were true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and talismans.... I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all the world a deception, my fellow angels, by a playful device, concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.” Alongside of this poetic revelation may be placed Cobbett’s sketch of himself: a sturdy country lad of eleven, in a blue smock and red garters, standing before the bookseller’s shop in Richmond, with an empty stomach, three pence in his pocket, and a certain little book called The Tale of a Tub contending with his hunger for the possession of that last bit of money. In the end, mind conquered matter: the threepence was invested in the volume, and the homeless little reader curled himself under a haystack, and forgot all about his supper in the strange, new pleasure he was enjoying. “The book was so different,” he writes, “from anything that I had ever read before, it was something so fresh to my mind, that, though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought of food or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds of Kew Gardens awakened me in the morning.... I carried that volume about with me wherever I went; and when I lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt at losing thousands of pounds.”

As for Lamb’s views on the subject of early reading, they are best expressed in his triumphant vindication of Bridget Elia’s happily neglected education: “She was tumbled by accident or design into a spacious closet of good old English books, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls they should be brought up exactly in this fashion.” It is natural that but few parents are anxious to risk so hazardous an experiment, especially as the training of “incomparable old maids” is hardly the recognized summit of maternal ambition; but Bridget Elia at least ran no danger of intellectual starvation, while, if we pursue a modern school-girl along the track of her self-chosen reading, we shall be astonished that so much printed matter can yield so little mental nourishment. She has begun, no doubt, with childish stories, bright and well-written, probably, but following each other in such quick succession that none of them have left any distinct impression on her mind. Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves. At ten or twelve the little girl aspires to something partly grown-up, to those nondescript tales which, trembling ever on the brink of sentiment, seem afraid to risk the plunge; and with her appetite whetted by a course of this unsatisfying diet, she is soon ripe for a little more excitement and a great deal more love-making, so graduates into Rhoda Broughton and the “Duchess,” at which point her intellectual career is closed. She has no idea, even, of what she has missed in the world of books. She tells you that she “don’t care for Dickens,” and “can’t get interested in Scott,” with a placidity that plainly shows she lays the blame for this state of affairs on the two great masters who have amused and charmed the world. As for Northanger Abbey, or Emma, she would as soon think of finding entertainment in Henry Esmond. She has probably never read a single masterpiece of our language; she has never been moved by a noble poem, or stirred to the quick by a well-told page of history; she has never opened the pores of her mind for the reception of a vigorous thought, or the solution of a mental problem; yet she may be found daily in the circulating library, and is seldom visible on the street without a book or two under her arm.

“In the love-novels all the heroines are very desperate,” wrote little Marjorie Fleming in her diary, nearly eighty years ago, and added somewhat plaintively, “Isabella will not allow me to speak of lovers and heroins,”--yearning, as we can see, over the forbidden topic, and mutable in her spelling, as befits her tender age. But what books had _she_ read, this bright-eyed, healthy, winsome little girl,--eight years old when she died,--the favorite companion of Sir Walter Scott, and his comfort in many a moment of fatigue and depression? We can follow her path easily enough, thanks to those delicious, misspelt scrawls in which she has recorded her childish verdicts. “Thomson is a beautiful author,” she writes at six, “and Pope, but nothing to Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege. Macbeth is a pretty composition, but awful one.... The Newgate Calender is very instructive.” And again, “Tom Jones and Grey’s Elegy in a country churchyard,” surely never classed together before, “are both excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men.... Doctor Swift’s works are very funny; I got some of them by heart.... Miss Egward’s [Edgeworth’s] tails are very good, particularly some that are much adapted for youth, as Laz Lawrance and Tarleton.” Then with a sudden jump, “I am reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much interested in the fate of poor poor Emily.... Morehead’s sermons are, I hear, much praised, but I never read sermons of any kind; but I read novelettes and my Bible, and I never forget it or my prayers.”

It is apparent that she read a great deal which would now hardly be considered desirable for little girls, but who can quarrel with the result? Had the bright young mind been starved on Dotty Dimple and Little Prudy books, we might have missed the quaintest bit of autobiography in the English tongue, those few scattered pages which, with her scraps of verse and tender little letters, were so carefully preserved by a loving sister after Pet Maidie’s death. Far too young and innocent to be harmed by Tom Jones or the “funny” Doctor Swift, we may perhaps doubt whether she had penetrated very deeply into the Newgate Calendar, notwithstanding a further assertion on her part that “the history of all the malcontents as ever was hanged is amusing.” But that she had the “little knolege” she boasted of Shakespeare is proven by the fact that her recitations from King John affected Scott, to use his own words, “as nothing else could do.” He would sob outright when the little creature on his knee repeated, quivering with suppressed emotion, those heart-breaking words of Constance:--

“For I am sick and capable of fears, Oppressed with wrong, and therefore full of fears;”

and, knowing the necessity of relaxing a mind so highly wrought, he took good care that she should not be without healthy childish reading. We have an amusing picture of her consoling herself with fairy tales, when exiled, for her restlessness, to the foot of her sister’s bed; and one of the first copies of Rosamond, and Harry and Lucy found its way to Marjorie Fleming, with Sir Walter Scott’s name written on the fly-leaf.