THE LIVING AGE. No. 13.-10 AUGUST, 1844. From the Quarterly Review. 1. Early Lessons. By Miss Edgeworth. 3. The Fourth Book for Children. By J. White. 5. Juvenile Kaleidescope. 6. Sowing and Reaping. By Mary Howitt. 7. Who shall be greatest? By Mary Howitt. 8. Children's Friend. 9. Shanty the Blacksmith. By Mrs. Sherwood. 10. Juvenile Manual. 11. Aids to Development. 12. Dr. Mayo's Lessons on Objects. dren are vainly expecting good results, and to which many who know nothing about the matter are falsely attributing them. In this department the present times profess to have done more than any other; and it has become a habit, more perhaps of conventional phraseology than of actual conviction, to congratulate the rising generation on the devotion of so many writers to their service. Nevertheless there are some circumstances contingently connected with this very Iservice, which may warrant us in expressing doubts as to the unqualified philanthropy of those who enter it. Considering the sure sale which modern habits of universal education provide for 13. A Series of Lessons in Prose and Verse. By children's books-the immense outfit required by J. M'Culloch. schools and masters, and the incalculable number annually purchased as presents, it would be, upon the whole, matter of far more legitimate surprise if either the supplies were less abundant, or the suppliers, some of them, more conscientious. Ever since the days of Goldsmith the writing and editing of children's works has been a source of ready emolument-in no class of literature does the risk bear so small a proportion to the reward—and consequently in no class has the system of mere manufacture been carried to such an extent. After the bewilderment of ideas has somewhat subsided which inevitably attends the first entrance into a department of reading so overstocked, and where the minds of the writers are so differently actuated, and those of the readers so variously estima THE attention of our readers has already been called to a subject, to which, the more it is considered the more importance must be attachedwe mean that of children's books, which, no less in quality than in quantity, constitute one of the most peculiar literary features of the present day. The first obvious rule in writing for the amusement or instruction of childhood, is to bear in mind that it is not the extremes either of genius or dulness which we are to address-that it is of no use writing up to some minds or down to othersthat we have only to do with that large class of average ability, to be found in children of healthy mental and physical formation, among whom in after life the distinction consists not so much in ated, the one broad and general impression left with difference of gifts as in the mode in which they have been led to use them. In a recent article our remarks were chiefly confined to a set of books in which not only this but every other sense and humanity of juvenile writing had been so utterly defied, that the only consolation for all the misery they had inflicted, consisted in the reflection that however silly the infatuation which had given them vogue here-they were not of English origin. We now propose casting a sort of survey over that legion for which we are more responsible -taking first into consideration the general characteristics of those which we believe to be mistaken both as to means and end-from which many who are concerned in the education of chil us is that of the excessive ardor for teaching which prevails throughout. No matter how these authors may differ as to the mode, they all agree as to the necessity of presenting knowledge to the mind under what they conceive to be the most intelligible form, and in getting down as much as can be swallowed. With due judgment and moderation, this, generally speaking, is the course which all instructors would pursue; nevertheless, it is to the extreme to which it has been carried that parents and teachers have to attribute the stunted mental state of their little scholars, who either have been plied with a greater quantity of nourishment than the mind had strength or time to digest, or under the interdict laid on the imagi submitting his understanding and not exerting it -a very deplorable exchange. "The law of Nature," in Coleridge's words, "has irrevocably decreed that the way to knowl nation, in this mania for explanation, have been powers. In short, a child thus circumstanced is compelled to drag up the hill of knowledge with a wrong set of muscles. Doubtless the storing up of knowledge at an age when the powers of acquisition are most ductile and most tenacious, is of the utmost moment; but a child's head is a meas-edge shall be long, difficult, winding, and oftenure, holding only a given quantity at a time, and, times returning upon itself." Thus to a vulgar if overfilled, liable not to be carried steadily. apprehension, a child's mind will be apparently Also, it is one thing to stock the mind like a dead sailing away from its object, when in truth it is thing, and andther to make it forage for itself; only following the devious current which securely and of incalculably more value is one voluntary leads to it. Of all the errors in education that of act of acquirement, combination, or conclusion, overmuch dependence upon teaching is most to be than hundreds of passively accepted facts. Not dreaded, because least to be rectified. On this that the faculties can be said to lie inactive be- account it is, that, even under the most judicious neath this system of teaching-on the contrary, direction, regular series of lessons never do so the mere mental mechanism is frequently exerted much good as when a gap is left here and there to the utmost; but the case is much the same as for the mind's own operations. There is a selfin the present modern school of music, where, development in what is involuntarily preferred and while the instrument itself is made to do wonders, unconsciously chosen, which the regular habits of the real sense of harmony is sacrificed. For it is mechanical acquirement are indispensable to proa fact, confirmed both by reason and experience, mote, but insufficient to attain; there is a wisdom and one which can alone account for the great gained to the mind in being left to know both what deficiency of spontaneous and native power-that it can do for itself and what it needs from others, which comes under the denomination of genius- which a continuous form of instruction may assist in the schools, English and foreign, where these modes of instruction are pursued-that the very art with which children are taught exactly stifles that which no art can teach. but can never impart; and those parents or teachers can know but little of the real nature of education, or of the being they have to educate, who hesitate to confess that, after all they may have taught him, the nicest art consists in knowing where to leave him to teach himself. As regards also the excessive clearness of explanation, insisted upon now-a-days as the only road to sureness of apprehension, it is unquestion- Such views are far too humiliating to find favor ably necessary that a child should, in common par- in times when a presumptuous faith is placed alike lance, understand what it acquires. But this in the means and ends of mere lifeless acquisition; again must be taken with limitation; for Nature, when the value of knowledge is vulgarly comnot fond apparently of committing too much power puted only by the numbers of things known and into a teacher's hand, has decreed that unless a not by their influence on the spirit, and when a child be permitted to acquire beyond what it posi- melancholy disregard is shown for those higher tively understands, its intellectual progress shall departments of moral training, the necessity for be slow, if any. As Sir Walter Scott says, in which increases with the increase of attainment. his beautiful preface to the Tales of a Grand- Under these circumstances it is no wonder that father, "There is no harm, but, on the contrary, the province of external control should be by there is benefit in presenting a child with ideas many Mentors, directly reversed in applicationbeyond his easy and immediate comprehension. enforced where least beneficial, and suspended The difficulties thus offered, if not too great or too where most needful. If, accordingly, we have, frequent, stimulate curiosity and encourage exer- on the one hand, a set of books, whose greatest art tion." We are so constituted that even at the consists in reducing all the healthy portions of the maturest state of our minds-when length of ex- mind to a mere receptive machine, and furnishing perience has rendered the feeling of disappoint- every kind of splint and bandage for such distorted ment one almost unjustifiable in our own eyes-limbs as perfect liberty can alone restore-we find, we find the sense of interest for a given object, on the other, an equally voluminous class whose and feeling of its beauty to precede far more than highest aim is to encourage voluntary development to follow the sense of comprehension-or, it were where voluntary improvement is least to be exbetter said, the belief of fully comprehending ;-pected, and to emancipate those departments of the but with children, who only live in anticipation, will and the reason for which we know "service this is more conspicuously the case; in point of alone is perfect freedom." Nevertheless there will fact they delight most in what they do not compre- be times when this cross-purposed emancipation hend. Those therefore who insist on keeping the presses somewhat heavily on those who have ense of enjoyment rigidly back, till that of com- granted it; there must be seasons when it is good prehension has been forcibly urged forward--who for these little independents to be amenable to stipulate that the one shall not be indulged till the some authority and it is rather amusing to other be appeased-are in reality but retarding trace what provision has been made for such exwhat they most affect to promote: only inducing cessive emergencies. It stands to reason that a prostration, and not a development of the mental such enlightened theorists would never dream of tation to the minds and tastes of childhood, and profuse in examples of their beneficial influence: but how truly could their little readers retort with the fable of the "Lion and the Man!" They are delighted, it is true, with the romantic story of "Peter the Wild Boy," but they have not the slightest curiosity to know the natural history, or Linnean nomenclature, of the pig-nuts he ate. the old-fashioned slavery of implicit obedience, I did these, from a child's catechism?* The authors nor the old fashioned tyranny of absolute authority; of such works are loud in assurances of their adapinstead therefore of the former a host of arguments are resorted to in order to break to the infantine mind, in the most delicate manner possible, the expedience of some kind of submission-voluntary of course-while, instead of the latter, a host of apologies are put into the mouths of parents for the excessive liberty of requiring their children to do-how can we express what is so derogatory to their dignity?—to do as they are bid! The consequences of these measures may be easily foreseen; the mind to which we apply such means of conviction has unquestionably the right of remaining unconvinced; and children must be duller than we should wish them to be, who can-ficed all that is nourishing. There are some not discover that, however admirable the argument, they are still at perfect libery to dissent. There is, however, even in these days a section of works, the guiding principle of which is not so much what they shall put into the mind as what they shall keep out, and where the anxiety to exclude all that may be pernicious has also sacri writers by whom their young readers are treated rather as languid, listless invalids, than as healthy, hungry boys and girls-who know no medium between ardent spirits and barley-water—and, for fear of repletion and intoxication, put their readers on a diet on which they may exist, but can never thrive. Nothing truly has surprised us more, in our tour through little libraries, than to see the wishy-washy materials of which not a few are composed-the scanty allowance of ideas with which a narrative is held together, and the mere prate with which the intervals are filled up. There are some children doubtless who relish this barren fare, as there are plenty of older ones who devour the most vapid novels; and both cases are alike pitiable. We have known a boy of fifteen whose energies were so sapped as not to be at the trouble of finishing King Lear, and a girl of about the same age whose tastes were so rarefied that she stuck fast in the Heart of Mid-Lothian. Mere children especially may be brought so low as not to take interest in what most amuses others; nay, instances are not failing of unfortunate beings whose capacities, both for work and play, had been so desperately mismanaged that they had as little energy left for the one as for the other. But to return to that idolatry of teaching which we have designated as the broadest mark of the present juvenile school-we cannot proceed without slightly adverting to those books of compound instruction and amusement in which these tendencies are most carried out, and of the multifarious nature of which something was said on a former occasion. For though a further examination of the subject has the more acquainted us with the excessive ingenuity displayed in this amphibious race, it has also the more convinced us that the ingenuity is utterly wasted ;—that by a large class of grown-up readers, the works in question are upheld for those very qualities of amusement and interest in which they are most deficient. We admit that it is difficult for a matured mind, in all cases, to form a precise estimate of what is interesting to a child-that it is necessary to recover somewhat of their brightness of vision and keenness of appetite, before we can detect, like them, the schoolmaster beneath every modern variety of sheep's clothing, or feel, like them, what a complete kill-joy he must be to their tastes. But in some instances surely there can be no mistake in these can any one turn three pages without comprehending how odious it must be to a child to have his head, on all occasions, thrust before his heart to feel that, whatever path of enjoyment he may enter, an ambuscade of knowledge is lurking ready to rush down upon him and intercept it? What grown-up lady, for example, while engrossed in a beautiful poem, could bear to stop and be informed whether the verse were in iambics, or trochaics, dactylics, or anapastics, with a long dis-them. Nor can it be otherwise, since all wit and sertation upon the distinctions between the same? Who, while devouring an interesting tale, could tolerate, at the most stirring part, to be called off for a lesson upon the different terms of rhetoric-A practical joke is therefore the only species which to be taught that the urgent supplications for mercy, or disjointed ejaculations of despair of the dying hero or desperate heroine, were precise specimens of ecphonesis or aposiopesis, or any other tremendously learned word, to be picked up, as we Of course the quality of such works varies somewhat with the writer, though the principle of neutrality remains the same; and sometimes a little frothy liveliness of dialogue is exhibited, which might perhaps amuse an older generation, but is very much thrown away upon children. At best, their notions of smartness and repartee are very limited. They like the jingle of words which compose a pun, but the point is utterly lost upon irony necessarily derive their weapons from an acquaintance with the world; and therefore cannot exist in children, or is sure to disgust when it does. they thoroughly understand, and always like; but, in an abstract way, the fable-book is their only Joe Miller, and that as much from the marvellousness as the humor of its contents. They can see some *Pinnock's "Catechism of Rhetoric" ! fun in the connection of human speech and ideas moral, earnestly denied the fact of there being any at all, and brought up her book to prove it! Certain it is that if the moral does not find its way to the heart through the narrative itself, it will scarcely reach it in a subsequent set form; yet the present plan of general distribution is by far the worst of the two, inasmuch as, by the perpetual interruption to the sympathies, you lessen the effect of the tale, and with it the chance of edification. We should always bear in mind that the instruction, whether moral or intellectual, arising from works avowedly of amusement, can be only incidental. It is of no use endeavoring to teach in hours which children consider exempt from learning: they like neither lessons nor lectures in their wrong places, or they cease to be children if they do. with the nose of the fox or the bill of the raven, while the far-fetched wit of a fellow-child will strike them as great nonsense. Children are sharp casuists as to what is put into a child's mouth. They detect intuitively what is absurd, or what is unnatural; and could we see into their hearts we should find a secret contempt for, or grudge against, the little pedantic spokesman whose perorations form the greater part of such volumes. Under the best of circumstances, we doubt whether children, who are beyond mere babyhood, enjoy the histories and pictures of their own "life and times" as much as their elders suppose. For us these scenes of childhood, described as some of our modern writers can describe-for us these scenes have an ineffable charm; but we must remember that we stand in direct contrary position to their ostensible readers. We look fondly back to childhood-they, ardently forward to maturity; we magnify the happiness that is past-they, that alone which is to come. For them, men and women are gods and goddesses; and no description of the Paradise they now occupy interests them half as much as a peep into that Olympus which they hope one day to climb. We pass on to another description of juvenile works, which, considering all the parade of protection implied in those we have quitted, have rather puzzled us. It would seem that parents who would on no account permit their children to wander among the absurd extravagances of fictitious life, will not hesitate to introduce them to the pitiful meanness of real life-would far rather they should dwell on the vulgarities of mere fashionthe nonsenses of mere convention, or the behindthe-scenes of what is most contemptible in the world that is about them-than on the high-flown exag which they have nothing to do. With a certain class of writers facts are truth, and fable falsehood-no matter what either may be in themselves. Children are welcome therefore to know all about the petty hopes and contrivances of a modern dasher But to return to this very circumspect generation of little books. Connected with them may be mentioned a kindred class of mediocrity which, if they do not absolutely tie the mind to their apron-gerations and impossible atrocities of a world with strings, are always reminding it of the length of its tether. The obvious intention of these writers is to do good, but the very officiousness of their services renders them unpalatable. The truth is, there is no getting rid of them. From the moment you open the book the moral treads so close upon the vanities and flirtations of a modern coquette; your heels as to be absolutely in the way. Chil- but Heaven forbid their being tempted to imitate dren have no sooner begun to enjoy, than they are the cabals of the grand vizier, or the loves and incalled upon to reflect; they have no sooner begun trigues of Shelsemnihar and the Prince of Persia. to forget that there exists in the world such a little Accordingly we have the mean calculations of being as themselves, than they are pulled back to mushroom manufacturers, the dirty tricks of low remember not only what they are, but what they lawyers, the personal animosities and emulations will one day infallibly become. In short, the of their wives and families, and the eventual smash young idea is not left to shoot one moment in of all parties, with other scenes of domestic and peace, but is twitted and snubbed the whole way professional degradation, put into a familiarity of through with a pertinacity of admonition, injunc-form which is ten times more disgusting as remindtion, and advice, which, from its studious incorpo- ing us for whose eyes it is especially intended. ration with the tale itself, is more than usually God knows, parents need be in no hurry to give difficult to elude. In this respect the old school their children this kind of information-the world was far more considerate. You were allowed to will help them to it soon enough; and who likes have the story part all to yourself, while the good it when he has got it? There is no degree of advice and personalities were carefully summed up ignorance so unbecoming to a child as the least in three awfully dry lines at the conclusion, la- premature knowledge. At best, an acquaintance belled, for fear of mistake, "MORAL," which you with the melancholy truths of this world is only a treated at will, and either swallowed whole or defensive weapon: why, then, seek to put it into skipped altogether. The consequence, it is true, of the hands of those who are, or ought to be, under this plan was, that children became accustomed to the protection of others? And it were well if such look on tale and moral as two utterly distinct con-writers stopped here; but in their fear lest the omiscerns, in no way connected except by conventional sion of any of the wickednesses, as well as the weakproximity; and the little girl of ten years old, who had just been devouring a story where this usual appendage was failing, on being questioned as to the nesses, of mankind should be laid to their charge, or in the anxiety to supply constant novelties for dainty palates, they lay open a side of human life which it might be thought the particular privilege | tistically speaking, can be more contemptible than and purpose of parental protection to conceal. For the construction of such tales; which are genercan anybody suppose that it is necessary to ac-ally as grossly unnatural as may be consistent quaint children with those scenes of violence with the strictest common-place. Such indeed, in between man and wife which generally terminate some, is the boldness of non-connexion between in one of the parties being bound over to keep the plot and dénouement, such the utter unconcern peace? Does anybody imagine it can be edifying with which an individual is made one character in for a child to know that there exists in this world description and another in action, that were it not so vile a creature as the grown man son who can for the constant interference of Scripture, no delift up his hand against a mother? Children do ficiency in one source of amusement would be not require to be shocked into the avoidance of felt. crimes like these; if they are not shocked at such representations, the idea of affecting them in any other way is hopeless; and yet these, and similar occurrences, are by no means uncommon in a set of books which have been admitted into families in lieu of the much vilified fairy tale. So much for the secular part of this little tribe -as for their religious side, were we not convinced that children, who are children indeed, will never have the patience of perusal requisite to be much influenced by them, we should stigmatize in no lenient terms that style of writing where they are represented as lisping over all that is most only lessen their respect for it, and confessing the wickedness of the human heart, upon the most trivial occasions, with an off-hand frequency that can only dull their sense of it -where children preach to their elders and betters, without the slightest regard for their being such, and end by keeping an open death-bed for the edification and And now that we are on the subject of talewriting, we must allude to a department of juve-solemn in Revelation with a flippancy that can nile literature to which it has been much applied a department so extensive in a numerical amount as to forbid all close analysis, though, from its uniformity of character, it may well permit of a few general remarks. We mean the juvenile religious reading of the day, which, under one shape or another, frequently engrosses the larger share of a child's book-case. We trust there is no dan-applause of a crowd of strangers. In the words ger of our being misunderstood. The high reli- of one of their own writers, "it is so horrid to gious tone which pervades some of the best of the make religion a matter of show-off, which I really modern children's books, we regard as the greatest think these stories could teach children to be boon which these times of nominal improvement guilty of."* And here again much of this evil have bestowed on them; we might almost add the may be attributed to the dismissal of the imaginaonly one just as the mere deistical morality tion as a means of assistance. Everything now-awhich pervaded so many beautifully-written books days is to be brought home to a child's mind; his of the last generation might be said to be their eyes are to be opened at any cost, regardless of only deficiency. The works to which we point the film which has been designedly cast over them. are that herd of second and third-rate publications Instead, therefore, of taking advantage of that which, having religion ostensibly as their theme, sphere of fictitious or allegorical life, in which his are indiscriminately put into the hands of child-ardent feelings may expatiate freely without risk hood, but which, in point of fact, supply motives of wrong personal application, he is intruded into as little calculated for the regulation of the heart a field of reality where no other result can possias the unchristianized elegance of those just men-bly ensue. On this account we hail with the more tioned. The usual form is that of a tale; but this satisfaction a rising class of religious books where seems in general to be adopted not as conveying in itself an illustration of the writer's doctrines, but merely as providing the necessary foundation work, mechanically speaking, to which they may be affixed-a kind of scaffolding by which the expounder holds on-and intended, like any other temporary support or connexion, to be cut away and cast aside as soon as the purpose has been effected. No scruple, therefore, seems to exist as to the clumsiness or flimsiness of materials which are not wanted for any use or beauty of their own, and which, moreover, no usefulness nor beauty could save from neglect. For the pious reader is evidently expected to be far too impatient to get to the religious parts, to care to look close into a story which only serves to hold them together. Renouncing, therefore, equally from expedience and principle, all the pomps of composition, and vanities of invention, nothing, ar the fancifulness of the story or the remoteness of the times does away with that so-called truth for which a child's mind is not ripe. Personalities are never more dangerous than when pressed into the service of religion; and who can question that it is infinitely safer for a child to read of the conversion of a pagan king or queen than of that of his father, mother, or next-door neighbor? Another very reprehensible feature in these books is the little tenderness for the sensitive feelings of childhood evinced in their choice of illus tration. In order to impress them with the vices and miseries attendant on an ignorance or disregard of the lessons of Christianity, all the worst abominations of idolatry and tortures of slavery are brought into requisition. Wretched Hindoo mothers in whom the voice of nature is perverted, and execrable slave-drivers to whom the dictates * Children's Friend, for 1841. |