Part 12
But would it not be just as well to centre this concentration directly on Scott? The librarian will doubtless claim that the boy turns more readily to the one than to the other, and I believe that this is largely due to the over-emphasis of Scott as a standard author, and of Henty as a popular writer for boys. Scott has never been issued in form to catch the young reader’s eye. Given as many illustrations as Henty, relegating the preface to the appendix, or omitting it altogether, and the author of “Waverley” would be found to have lost none of his grip. You will receive from any librarian the unfailing statement that one of the most constant ambitions is to reduce the proportion of fiction in circulation, and, in that proportion, to preserve what is of true worth in place of the mediocre average of the modern story-books.
Mr. Tomlinson’s analysis of the qualities in a child’s book may be indicated by seven divisions:
_a._ There must be a story.
_b._ There must be vigorous action with little contemplation. “Analysis and introspection are words outside of his [the child’s] vocabulary,” says Mr. Tomlinson.
_c._ Fancy is more to be sought for than pure imagination.
_d._ The writer must regard the moral character of boys: a lack of mercy, a strict sense of justice; he must regard their faith which is credulity; their sentiment of reverence; their power of being convinced.
_e._ The writer must likewise consider the differences between the sexes in the point of moral faculties, even though in many respects they are the same. For girls have tender consciences, though not so tenacious; they are quick to promise, and as quick to forget; they are easily stirred to pity, their sympathy easily appealed to. Bringing it down to an animalistic basis, Mr. Tomlinson believes that though the ancestral cruelty in girls is not so evident as in boys, when it does flash forth it is sharper in every way. “To both, right and wrong are absolute, not relative terms, and a youthful misanthrope is as much of an anomaly as a youthful grandfather.”
_f._ The sentiments must be directed in channels of usefulness and power, hence the story of patriotism, the situation of courage, the incident of tenderness.
_g._ Since the faculties in action are receptive, rather than perceptive, since the memory is keen to hold, the writer must bear this psychological status in mind.
In fine, recognising that even in his play the boy takes things seriously, and believing that the juvenile intellect “seeks the reasonable more than the process of reasoning,” Mr. Tomlinson shapes a dicta of criticism, a standard by which the child’s book may be recognised in terms of vital characteristics. Apply them to recent juvenile books, if you will, and you will find the majority wanting. But will not the classics meet these requirements? Are we to relegate the best we have to the back shelves, and buy nothing that smacks of good style? Instead of putting tight bands of expectancy about our minds, and of making us bow down before a throne of iced classics, let the librarian treat the “Iliad” genially, let her represent “Siegfried” with the broad heavens above him. The classics have _yielding_ power.
It is characteristic of every age that a discontent is always manifest with the conditions as they exist at the time. As early as 1844, the child’s book, _per se_, was brought under rigourous scrutiny by an unnamed critic in the _Quarterly Review_, and what was said then applies equally as well to the state of affairs to-day. But this very entertaining writer, talking in terms of judgment founded upon a keen understanding of what such a book should be, attempts a list of juvenile books which bears all the ear-marks of his age; he finds it necessary to select from the immediate supply; he knows that there is the author of his own era whom he cannot discard. We have a lurking suspicion that, with his canons of criticism, he would have altered his list, could he have looked in perspective. But there was very little range in children’s books of that day; the species was just becoming accentuated, and his element of _timeliness_ had to be regarded. Therefore, while we are pleading with the librarian for a high choice in the selection of books, we know that were the _timely_ volume omitted, simply on the basis that it did not conform with one’s idea of the best, the library would become fixed, like a dead language. The _Quarterly_ article was written at a time when the secularisation of juvenile literature was just beginning to take place; the moral and the educational factors were looking askance, the one at the other, both claiming the boy and girl for instruction, but each from a different basis. Our author pleads for the healthy, normal reader, in whom “still-born” knowledge--mere lifeless acquisition--were a curse indeed! He cries out against the educational catechism, as he does against the moral one. His discriminating thesis advances in threefold manner, for he writes:
“Those who insist on keeping the sense of enjoyment rigidly back, till that of comprehension has been forcibly urged forward--who stipulate that the one shall not be indulged till the other be appeased--are in reality but retarding what they most affect to promote.”
And again:
“Children have no sooner begun to enjoy than they are called upon to reflect; they have no sooner begun to forget that there exists in the world such a little being as themselves than they are pulled back to remember, not only what they are, but what they will one day infallibly become.”
And still again:
“Children seem to possess an inherent conviction that when the hole is big enough for the cat, no smaller one at the side is needed for the kitten. They do not really care for ‘Glimpses’ of this, or ‘Gleanings’ of that, or ‘Footsteps’ to the other--they would rather stretch and pull....”
From a desert of dust-covered magazines, this comes to us like a hidden spring bubbling with energy which no outer crust of years can quell.[51] Then as now, they had the pernicious school-book--instance Peter Parley;[52] then as now, they had the flippant tale. Our unknown author recommended “Puss in Boots,” with designs by Otto Specker, as the beau ideal of nursery books, and the Grimm Tales with Cruikshank’s illustrations; he recognised the admirable qualities in the verses by the Taylor sisters. Miss Edgeworth, Miss Tytler, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Hofland, Mary Howitt (although some of her books are questioned), Catherine Sinclair, Mrs. Marcet, and a host of others, now dead to the circulating shelves, received their quota of commendation. The list is a curious example of existing circumstances; it illustrates the futility of crystallising the library system; it demonstrates that the library, as an institution, must reflect the aspirations of its age, not overreaching its full capacity of usefulness and of average excellence.
II. THE LIBRARY, THE SCHOOL, THE HOME: A PLEA FOR CULTURE.
“Criticism,” says Matthew Arnold, “must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting.” Still, not for a moment are we able to lose sight of the active working conditions of the library. Speculation as to the functions of such an institution in a community may lead to the formulation of certain ideals which are to guide the practical machinery in the future. But, on the instant, there is the urgent necessity of supply and demand; the theorist must cope with the actual reader calling for a book.
It is, however, only proper to expect that human activity be directed, not along the lines of least resistance, but along the lines of best results. 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”; a book should not mean, for either, a vehicle for frittering the time away, but their training should lead to the finding of “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
An essential purpose is a most important element in the future history of children’s rooms, and at the present initial stage it were unwise to criticise the methods by which the library is trying to state this purpose in definite terms. But whether we regard its activity in the direction of the home, the school, the settlement, or the city at large, we may safely claim that its main duty in all directions is to supply the best books to be had on any stated line. And herein we discover the connection that ought to exist between our schools as educational, and our libraries as cultural centres. In Buffalo, Mr. Melvil Dewey, during an address given to teachers, said:
“By law, the children are put under your influence in their earlier years, when, if ever, they can be taught to love good books so well that in all their lives thereafter they will seize on every opportunity to read them. If the librarians, with their wing of the educational army, can select and catalogue and provide free of cost the best on every subject, the schoolmen, with their wing and with their immensely larger resources both of money and men--and still better, of devoted women--must send out from the schools, year by year, boys and girls who will be lifelong patrons of the public library, and will, in due time, help to send their own children along the paths which have proved for them so profitable and pleasant; ... but its great work should be the partial recognition that education is no longer for youth and for a limited course, in a school to which they give most of their time, but that it is really a matter for adults as well as youth, for life and not for the course, to be carried on at home as well as in the schools, and to be taken up in the hours or minutes of leisure, as the proper accompaniment of their regular business or labour. This means that education must be carried on by means of reading, and that, if the librarians are to furnish the books and give all necessary help in their proper field, the schools must furnish the readers.”
It is, therefore, the supreme function of a supervisor of school libraries to reconcile culture with knowledge-getting--taste and desire with mental training--quite as much as it is his official duty to furnish supplementary books for the class-rooms. In fact, the former should become his chief business, for in the other capacity he slightly encroaches upon, rather than aids--duplicates in expense, rather than enforces by supplying a need--the work being done by the neighbourhood library.
Between the school and the library there should thus be a reciprocal interchange of courtesies, the sum total of which tends toward culture.[53] For the child is the potential man, and in our reading, despite the opportunities for education, we are not made to understand, at the early age when habits are most readily formed, the real import of the sustaining power of art.
The reading of novels is a delightful recreation; it is not the reading which should be questioned; it is the power to stop. Periods of rest are a psychological necessity, but it is the power of returning from the side issue to the life issue, which, in so many cases, is the missing element. The literature that does nothing more than amuse is not the literature 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; 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.
Our neighbour is but a composite picture of numberless developments, all working toward a definite goal. We call him the cultured man. Our neighbour is one who tries to show us as many pictures of himself, working in different directions, as he thinks will clothe him in a mist of thought. We call him the dilettante. Dilettanteism does not sustain; we either have to be perfectly honest with ourselves, or else be discovered by others in the end.
The habit of association with good books is, therefore, one which our school systems need to inculcate. The supervisor of class-room libraries should strive to supplement the text-book with something that is not a text-book; the outlines of history should be strengthened by _bona fide_ biography instead of by the hybrid type of fiction. A committee in Germany, after working some years over the recommendations of books for children, finally printed a list of 637 volumes--calling attention to a weakness in travel, popular science, and biography. This condition is as true in England and America; and one of the causes for the deficiency may be accounted for by the substitution of the text-book style for the dignified narrative. The writer of juvenile books, other than fiction, has not realised, up to the present time, that the direct treatment is capable of being understood by young people.
Conscious of this weakness, the librarian in time will banish from the circulating shelves the text-book, _per se_; and the school child should be prepared to meet the change. If he is given instruction in the uses of a dictionary,[54] and of a card catalogue; if he is trained by degrees to hunt up references--he should as well be familiarized with the transition from text-book to authority, from selection to source, from part to whole. From the mere usefulness of books he should be taught the attractive power of books. This, it would seem, is one of the fundamental relations existing between the library and the school.
With the increase of facilities, with the specialised consideration paid to children’s reading by librarian and by teacher, there arises the factor of the parent in connection with the two. What part, in the general plan, does the home occupy? It furnishes the scholar; it furnishes the reader. In private instruction, it may dictate what shall be taught to the boy or girl; in public instruction, the individual becomes part of the system. The home may purchase books for the particular taste of this child or of that, but the public library must attend to _all_ demands. Because of its democratic mission, it partially discourages the private ownership of books by the average person. Therefore, in most essentials, the State furnishes the means of instruction and indicates what that instruction shall be in its elementary stages; the State likewise supports the library, a repository where the regulation and censorship are minimised as far as the reader is concerned.
Let us acknowledge the peculiar social and economic conditions that conduce to deprive the home of the means or of the time to give to the proper training of children: the crowded tenement, the isolated mountain cabin are alike in this denial. But the school and the library are counteracting the deficiency. The mental condition in the tenement is more in a state of ferment than in the mountains; the second generation of the ignorant emigrant in New York or Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburg is far more fortunate than the new generation peopling our Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Yet the school and the library are penetrating the dense maze--they are defying isolation, and we will doubtless discover, before long, that the stagnation throughout the Tennessee ranges, and bordering the northern line of the Shenandoah Valley, has beneath it a great potential future of intellectual development. Until the social settlement passes through its experimental stage,--perhaps its very existence is dependent upon its experimental character--it were not safe to speculate on how largely it will aid in making the home so far independent of consuming necessity that it will respect the refinements of life, and will recognise that, in so doing, each individual raises his own self-respect. Should the settlement accomplish this, however little, it will justify its existence.
The home, none the less, remains a factor, and its responsibility is none the less urgent. The story hour is one of its legacies from the past, and through it, the parent should cater wisely to a child’s desire for a tale. If the library is also adopting the same means, this in no way should relieve the parent of the prerogative; it should only afford her an opportunity of improving upon her own idea as to how a story should be told. Home influence should direct this juvenile desire, this individual taste; for no one has the close knowledge of a boy or girl possessed by the father or mother.
The habit of good reading, mentioned before, should be the joint product of the library, the school, and the home. Yet, in many instances, the library card of the child is of small consideration to the parent. This is more likely due to indifference than to an absolute confidence in the library’s effort to bring juvenile readers in contact with the best books. The woman’s club that will study the problem of children’s reading, as sedulously as it analyses the pathologic significance of Ibsen’s heroines, will be rendering a service to the library, as well as fitting its members to pass some judgment on the publisher’s yearly output of juvenile books.
III. BOOK-LISTS AND BOOK-SELECTING.
“Shall we permit our children,” wrote Plato in the “Republic,” “without scruple to hear any fables composed by any authors indifferently, and so to receive into their minds opinions generally the reverse of those which, when they are grown to manhood, we shall think they ought to entertain?” To a negative reply from Adeimantus, Glaucon’s brother, Plato continued: “Then apparently our first duty will be to exercise a superintendence over the authors of fables, selecting their good productions, and rejecting the bad. And the selected fables we shall advise our nurses and mothers to repeat to their children, that they may thus mould their minds with the fables, even more than they shape their bodies with the hand.”
Upon the broad principles here formulated the value of the children’s rooms depends. For it will be conceded that the two requisites of a library are to place good books upon the shelves and to see that they are read.
In the first section of this chapter, the individual promptings of a conscientious person were suggested; but a more systematic method of book-selection should be adopted, whereby a book is chosen because it has passed scrutiny of a committee elected for the special purpose. In order to protect the average demand, such a board should, of necessity, be a body catholic in taste, and not wholly academic in tone. It should bear in mind that a consulting library is different in function and in appeal from the general circulating branches; that the specialised critic must pass, not always upon whether there is sufficient fact in the book, but upon whether what fact there is has been dealt with truly, rather than fully.
As early as 1893, Paul Ziegler established a German monthly, the _Jugendschriftenwarte_, in which he purposed to teach the German people how to examine children’s books, classical and modern. He believed firmly that he would be able to reach some scientific basis, some consistent standard, which would be founded upon psychological, pedagogical, and æsthetic experience. This ambitious beginning by Ziegler led to the organisation of committees for the same purpose. In 1900, there were twenty-six centres throughout the Empire engaged in the study, and they were soon gathered together by Heinrich Wolgast,[55] a specialist on the subject of children’s reading, into a “union” called “Die vereinigten deutschen Prüfungsausschüsse für Jugendschriften.”
By 1906, the movement had so grown that seventy-eight local committees, with a common interest and a strong organisation, were working in twenty-six German States, their energy being felt and their example being followed in Austria, Switzerland, and France.
These committees have been weeding out, according to their æsthetic, educational, and national ideals, all undesirable literature for children, leaving nothing but the best. It would appear that in the course of their examination they called into account the opinions of parent, teacher, librarian, author, illustrator, and publisher. The local committees, working in hearty sympathy with the local libraries, had but one watchword, _excellent_; the book was read three times by a number of committees--sometimes as many as six, when the book would pass through eighteen hands. If a committee’s decision was unanimous, the result was sent to the central office of the confederation; if there was a difference of opinion, an arbitrator was called in.
Miss Isabel Chadburn, in a suggestive article,[56] quotes fully some of the final reports which are always sent to the _Jugendschriftenwarte_ for publication. Here is one dealing summarily with a book:
“‘The Lifeboat,’ Ballantyne (From the English of). Four pictures in colour, black-and-white illustrations in the text; second edition; 8vo, 122 pages. Leipzig: Otto Spamer, 1892. Price 1 m.
“Tested by: Berlin (no); Breslau (no); Halle (no); Königsberg (yes); Posen (no); Stettin (yes).
“A story of adventure in which the interest of the reader is directly excited through the keeping up of a succession of extraordinary events. The characterisation is utterly superficial and contradictory. The style, hard to understand on account of the numerous technical nautical terms, is full of indistinct and distorted metaphors and expressions. The pictures are crude and badly drawn. Upon these grounds the book is rejected.”
By the German method, a poor book would find small chances of surviving. Already this test has met with opposition from the German “Union of Booksellers, Selling on a Commission.” But the crusade is steadily gaining ground and the influence having effect.
The academic tone detected in this plan is its one objection. Were the same policy adopted in America, it would only add to an already over-conscious education-getting process. As we seem to be obsessed by the idea, far better it would be simply to trust to a general impression of a book, than to have it squeezed and analysed out of existence. A teacher who served on such a board would be obliged to cut herself completely adrift from the school-room atmosphere, and to criticise from a cultural standpoint, tempered by her educational experience.