III. THE OLD-FASHIONED LIBRARY

A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong. Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an undistinguished, painless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of gentleness, and honourable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with temptation, but in peace of heart, and armour of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appetites and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed.—John Ruskin, in an introduction to Grimm’s “German Popular Tales,” illustrated by Cruikshank.

I. The Rousseau Impetus.

Mr. E. V. Lucas has compiled two volumes of old-fashioned tales for modern readers. In his introductions he analyses the qualities of his selected stories, and it is generally the case that, except for incidental detail, what is said of one of a kind might just as appropriately be meant for the other. If, at moments, the editor is prone to confuse quaintness with interest, he makes full amends by the quick humour with which he deals with the moral purpose. Perhaps it was part of the game for our great-grandfathers to expect didacticism, but simply because children were then considered “the immature young of men” is no excuse, although it may be a reason, for the artificiality which subserved play to contemplation. Wherever he can escape the bonds of primness, Mr. Lucas never fails to take advantage; the character of his selections indicates this as well as such critical remarks as the following:

“The way toward a nice appreciation of the child’s own peculiar characteristics was, however, being sought by at least two writers of the eighteenth century, each of whom was before his time: Henry Brooke, who in ‘The Fool of Quality’ first drew a small boy with a sense of fun, and William Blake, who was the first to see how exquisitely worth study a child’s mind may be.”

Mr. Lucas brings together a number of stories by different persons, treating them as a group. Should you read them you will have a fairly distinct conception of early nineteenth century writing for children. But there is yet another way of approaching the subject, and that is by tracing influence from writer to writer, from group to group; by seeking for the impetus without which the story becomes even more of a husk than ever.

Let us conjure up the long row of theoretical children of a bygone age, painfully pathetic in their staidness, closely imprisoned. They began with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the iconoclast, who attacked civil society, the family, the state, the church, and from whose pen the school did not escape chastisement. His universal cry of “back to nature” frightened the conservative; even Voltaire could not refrain, on reading the essay dealing with the origin of inequality among men, to write him: “Never has any one employed so much genius to make us into beasts. When one reads your book he is seized at once with a desire to go down on all-fours.”

Rousseau’s “Émile, or Treatise on Education” (1762) was wholly revolutionary; it tore down ancient theories, such as those practised by Dr. Isaac Watts upon his “ideal” boy and girl; all existent educational strictures were ignored. Rousseau applied to childhood his belief in the free unfolding of man’s nature; however impracticable his methods, he loosed the chains that held fast the claims of childhood, and recognised their existence. He set the pendulum swinging in the human direction; he turned men’s minds upon the study of the child as a child, and, because of this, takes his place at the head of modern education. He opened the way for a self-conscious striving on the part of authors to meet the demands of a child’s nature, by furnishing the best literary diet—according to educational theories—for juvenile minds. Revolutionary in religious as well as in political and social ideals, Rousseau’s educational machinery was destined to be infused, by some of his zealous followers, with a piousness which he never would have sanctioned.

Training should be natural, says Rousseau; the child should discover beauty, not be told about it; should recognise spontaneously what he is now taught. Education should be progressive; at the same time it should be negative. This sounds contradictory, but Rousseau would keep his child a child until the age of twelve; he would prevent him from knowing through any mental effort; he would have him grow like “Topsy” in animal spirits, his mind unbridled and imbibing facts as his lungs breathe in air. Yet inconsistency is evident from the outset: the child must observe, at the same time he must not remember. Is it possible, as Professor Payne challenges, to form the mind before furnishing it?

Rousseau’s precepts are wise and brilliant. We hear him exclaiming: “It is less consequence to prevent him [the child] from dying than to teach him how to live;” “The man who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most years, but he who has had the keenest sense of life;” “The best bed is that which brings us the best sleep.” These aphorisms are as apt as those of Franklin; but in their exercise it is necessary to consider the concomitants brought into play.

Émile is made an orphan; thus Rousseau gives himself full sway; thus does he free himself from the necessity of constant consultation with parents. He is determined to love the boy, to encourage him in his sports, to develop his amiable instincts, his natural self. Émile must not cry for the sweets of life; he must have a need for all things rather than a joyful desire for some. Instead of teaching virtue to him, Rousseau will try to shield him from a knowledge of all vice. Where Plato recommends certain pastimes, he will train Émile to delight in himself—thus making of him something of a youthful egoist. This amœba state, endowed with all physical liberty, deprived of all dignity of childish memory, is to be the boyhood of Émile. He “shall never learn anything by heart, not even fables and not even those of La Fontaine, artless and charming as they are.” Though he does not possess the judgment to discriminate, he must be told the bare facts, and he must discover for himself the relations which these facts bear to each other. At the age of twelve, he shall hardly know a book when he sees it. Rousseau calls books “cheerless furniture.”

So much for the boy; the girl Sophie fares as ill. Being of the woman kind as well as of the child brand, she is to develop in even a more colourless fashion. Fortunately all theory is not human actuality, and Émile must have peopled his world in a way Rousseau could not prevent. We are given natural rights and hereditary endowments; even the savage has his standards and his dreams. Rousseau’s plan of existence ignored the social evolution of history. Yet Émile might by such training have been saved many wearisome explanations of the Mr. Barlow type, and it is ofttimes true, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton claims, that the mysteries of God are frequently more understandable than the solutions of man.

There was much in Rousseau’s book to rouse opposition; there was equally as much to appeal to those whose instinctive love of childhood was simply awaiting the flood gates to be opened. Like the Grimm fairy tales of suspended animation, on the instant, the paternal instinct began to be active, the maternal instinct to be motherly. Rousseau—emended, modified, accentuated—overran England, France, and Germany. Children were now recognised as children; it remained to be seen whether they were to be children.

The didactic era is in no way more fitly introduced than with the names of Madame de Genlis and Arnaud Berquin in France, together with the Edgeworth and Aikin families and Thomas Day in England. To each, small space may be allotted, but they are worthy of full and separate consideration.

Stéphanie Félicité [Ducrest de St. Aubin], Comtesse de Genlis (1746–1830), is represented upon the library shelves by nearly a hundred volumes. They were written during the course of a varied existence, at the court of Louis XV and at home. Her Mémoires are told in a facile and delightful style, and indicate how she so thoroughly balanced the many conflicting elements in her duties that she remains for those days a rare example of wife, mother, society woman, and student. Her discernment of people, as revealed in these pages, was penetrating and on the whole just; and, though a typical product of her time, her nature was chastened by a refined and noble spirit.

The first glimpse she affords of herself is as a child of six, when she was taken to Paris. There, her brother was placed at a seat of learning, where the master guaranteed within six weeks’ time to teach him reading and spelling by means of a system of counters. The little girl’s teeth were shedding—not a prepossessing phase of growth at best. But, in addition, she was encased in whalebone stays, her feet were squeezed into tight shoes, her curls done up in corkscrew papers, and she was forced to wear goggles. The height of cruelty now followed. Country-bred as she had been, her manner was not in accord with the best ideas; her awkwardness was a matter of some concern. In order to give better poise to her head, a thick iron collar was clapped upon her supple throat. Here she was then, ready for regular lessons in walking. To run was to court disfavour, for little girls, especially city ones, were not allowed to do such an improper thing; to leap was an unspeakable crime; and to ask questions was an unwarranted license. It is small wonder that later on she should utilise the memory of such abject slavery in “The Dove,” one of the numerous plays included in her “Theatre of Education.”

Her early years thus prepared Madame de Genlis for the willing acceptance of any new educational system, especially one which would advocate a constant companionship between parents and child. For she had been reared with but exceptional glimpses of her father and mother; during one of these times she relates how the former, in his desire to make her brave, forced her to catch spiders in her hands. Such a picture is worthy a place by the side of Little Miss Muffet.

Like all children, Madame de Genlis was superior to her limited pleasures; she possessed an imagination which expanded and placed her in a heroic world of her own making. There is peculiar pleasure in discovering under narrow circumstances the good, healthy spirit of youth. Madame de Genlis seemed proud to record a certain dare-devil rebellion in herself during this period. The pendulum that is made to swing to its unnatural bent brings with the downward stroke unexpected consequences. And so, when she married De Genlis, it is no surprise to read that she did so secretly—a union which is most charmingly traced in the Memoirs.

She developed into a woman with deep religious sensibility; with forceful personality; with artistic talent, well exemplified by a masterly execution on the harp. Living in an atmosphere of court fêtes, the drama occupied no small part in her daily life. Whether at her Château Genlis or elsewhere, she was ever ready for her rôle in theatricals, as dramatist or as actress. She played in Molière, and was accounted excellent in her characters; naught pleased her better than a disguise; beneath it her vivacity always disported itself.

Her interest in teaching began early; no sooner was she a mother than she hastened to fix her opinions as to the duties that lay before her, in a written treatise called “Reflections of a Mother Twenty Years of Age,” views which in their first form were lost, but which were rehabilitated in the later “Adèle et Théodore,” consisting of a series of letters on education.

After her mind had been drawn to the style of Buffon—for Madame de Genlis was a widely read woman—she determined upon improving her own manner of literary expression. She burned her bridges behind her, and fed the flames with all of her early manuscripts. Then she started over again to reconstruct her views, and in her study she made careful notes of what she fancied of importance for her future use. She was on intimate terms with Rousseau, took him to the theatre, and conversed with him on education chiefly, and about diverse matters generally. If she did not agree with him, Madame de Genlis was told that she had not as yet reached the years of discretion when she would find his writings suited to her. But Rousseau enjoyed the vivacious lady, who was kind-hearted and worth while talking to, notwithstanding the fact that she had the courtier’s love of banter. She writes:

“Not to appear better than I am, I must admit that I have often been given to ridicule others, but I have never ridiculed anything but arrogance, folly, and pedantry.”

Madame de Genlis was not a hero-worshipper; on first meeting Rousseau, his coat, his maroon-coloured stockings, his round wig suggested comedy to her, rather than gravity. We wonder whether she asked his advice regarding the use of pictures in teaching history, a theory which she originated and which Mrs. Trimmer was to follow in her Bible lessons. Full as the days were, Madame de Genlis, nevertheless, seems to have been able to give to her children every care and attention. This must have won the unstinted commendation of Rousseau, who preached that a boy’s tutor should be his father, and not a hired person.

Madame de Genlis created her own theatre; she wrote little comedies of all kinds, which met with great success. Often these would be presented in the open air, upon platforms erected beneath the shade of forest trees; by means of the drama she sought to teach her daughters elementary lessons of life; the stage to her was an educational force. Through the plays her popularity and reputation increased to such an extent, that the Electress of Saxony demanded her friendship. She became instructress to the children of the Duke and Duchess of Chartres, and she prided herself upon being the first in France to adopt the foreign method of teaching language by conversation.[31] The rooms for her royal pupils were fitted according to her special indications. Rough sketches were made upon a wall of blue, representing medals, busts of kings and emperors of Rome. Dates and names were frescoed within easy view. Every object was utilised, even to the fire screens, which were made to represent the kings of France; and over the balustrades were flung maps, like banners upon the outer walls.

Up and down such staircases, and through such rooms wandered the cultivated flowers of royalty. They did not suffer, because their teacher was luckily human as well as theoretical; because she had a vein of humour as well as a large seriousness. Her whole educational scheme is described in her “Lessons of a Governess” and “Adèle et Théodore.” When she engaged a tutor to attend to the special studies of the young prince in her charge, she suggested the keeping of an hourly journal which would record the little fellow’s doings—each night she, herself, to write critical comments upon the margins of every page. In addition, she kept a faithful record of everything coming within her own observation; and this she read aloud each day to her pupils, who had to sign their names to the entries. But much to the chagrin of Madame de Genlis, the Duke and Duchess refused to take the time to read the voluminous manuscripts; they trusted to the wisdom and discretion of the teacher.

Not a moment was lost during these busy periods; history was played in the garden, and civic processions were given with ponies gaily caparisoned. Even a real theatre was built for them. Royalty was taught to weave, and was taken on instructive walks and on visits to instructive places. But, through all this artificiality, the woman in Madame de Genlis saved the teacher.

The latter part of her eventful life was filled with vexations, for the thunders of the French Revolution rolled about her. A short while before the storm broke, she went on a visit to England, where she came in contact with Fox and Sheridan, with Walpole and Reynolds; and where she paid a special visit to the House of Commons and was a guest at Windsor.

All told, here was a writer for children, self-conscious and yet ofttimes spontaneous in her style. She is interesting because of herself, and in spite of many of her literary attempts. She is little read to-day, in fact rarely mentioned among juvenile book lists; education killed a keen perception and vivacity by forcing them along prescribed lines. One glimpse of Madame de Genlis in old age is recorded by Maria Edgeworth, who called on her in 1803.

“She came forward, and we made our way towards her as well as we could, through a confusion of tables, chairs, and work-baskets, china, writing-desks and inkstands, and bird-cages and a harp.... She looked like the full-length picture of my great-great-grandmother Edgeworth you may have seen in the garret, very thin and melancholy, but her face not so handsome as my great-grandmother’s; dark eyes, long sallow cheeks, compressed, thin lips, two or three black ringlets on a high forehead, a cap that Mrs. Grier might wear,—altogether an appearance of fallen fortunes, worn-out health, and excessive but guarded irritability. To me there was nothing of that engaging, captivating manner which I had been taught to expect by many even of her enemies; she seemed to me to be alive only to literary quarrels and jealousies; the muscles of her face as she spoke, or as my father spoke to her, quickly and too easily expressed hatred and anger whenever any not of her own party were mentioned.”

A frontispiece to the 1802 edition of Arnaud Berquin’s (1749–1791) works represents his bust being garlanded and crowned, and his “L’Ami des Enfans” being regarded by a group of admirers, both young and old. But though this very volume was received with honours by the French Academy, and though by it Berquin claims his right to immortality, French children of the present refrain from reading him as systematically as we refrain from reading “Sandford and Merton,” which, as it happens, Berquin translated into French. There are popular editions of “L’Ami des Enfans,” but children do not relish the tameness of such moral literature. The editor detailed to write Berquin’s short life, which was spent in the study of letters, and in following up one “Ami” by another, sacrifices incident and fact for encomium. It is easy to claim for Berquin modesty and goodness during his residence in his native town near Bordeaux and after his arrival in Paris during 1772; it is interesting to know that he was encouraged to use his talents by the praise of his friends, but far more valuable would it have been to tell just in what manner he reached that ethical state which overflowed in his “L’Ami des Enfans,” published during the years 1782 and 1783. The full purport of the volume is summed up exuberantly in the following paragraph:

“Quelle aimable simplicité! quel naturel! quel sentiment naïf respirent dans cette ingénieuse production! Au lieu de ces fictions extravagantes, et de ce merveilleux bizarre dans lesquels on a si longtemps égaré l’imagination des enfans, Berquin ne leur présente que des aventures dont ils peuvent être témoins chaque jour dans leur famille.”

The tales and playlets written by Berquin are almost immoral in their morality. It is a question whether the interest of children will become absorbed by the constant iteration of virtue; whether goodness is best developed through the exploitation of deceit, of lying, of disobedience, and of wilful perverseness. To be kind means to be rewarded, to be bad is synonymous with punishment. Berquin and his followers might have drawn up a moral code book in pocket form, so stereotyped was their habit of exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. What are the punishments of vanity, what the outcome of playing when the afternoon task is to watch the sheep? The pictures made to illustrate the stories depict boys and girls kneeling in supplication, while the grown persons almost invariably stand in disdainful attitude. The children who would be their own masters and go out in a boat, despite parental warning, are upset: there is the algebraic formula. “Plainness the Dress of Use” is probably a worthy subject for a tale, and “A Good Heart Compensates for Many Indiscretions” a pathetic title for a play. But young people as a general rule are not maudlin in their feelings; even granting that there are some given that way, they should not be encouraged in holding a flabby standard of human, as well as of divine, justice. “L’Ami des Enfans” is filled with such sentimental mawkishness.

II. The Edgeworths; Thomas Day; Mrs. Barbauld; and Dr. Aikin.

At the early age of twenty-three, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817) decided to educate his son, Richard, according to the principles set down by Rousseau. He thrust the little fellow back into a state of nature by taking his shoes and stockings off and by cutting the arms from all his jackets. But, try as he did in every way to make a living Émile out of young Richard, the father found that the theories did not work. When he took the luckless boy to Paris and called upon Rousseau, there ensued an examination of results, and the sum-total was pronounced a failure. Hon. Emily Lawless writes in some glee:

“It is impossible to read without a smile of the eminently unphilosophic wrath expressed by the sage, because each time that a handsome horse or vehicle passed them on their walk, his temporary charge—a child of seven—invariably cried out, ‘That’s an English horse!’ ... a view which he solemnly pronounced to be due to a sadly early ‘propensity to party prejudice’!...”

Edgeworth lost entire faith in the practical application of the Rousseau scheme in after years; but the lasting effect it seems to have produced upon the unfortunate victim was to place him in the ranks of mediocrity, for he was hardly ever spoken of thereafter by his family; and in order to remove himself from further disturbance, as soon as he reached years of discretion, he hastened to place miles between himself and the scenes of his youth; Richard came to America.

Edgeworth’s love affairs—for four times he was married—are involved, and do not concern us, save as they effect Thomas Day. But, personally, he enters our plan as influencing his daughter, Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), with whom he wrote “Practical Education.” There are some men—and Edgeworth was bordering on the type—who assume an almost dreadful position in a household; who torture the mind of boy or girl by prying, and by wishing to emphasise hidden meaning in everything; who make children fear to ask questions lest a lecture, dry and unoriginal, be the penalty. Such men have a way of fixing youth with intense, severe gaze—of smiling with a fiendish self-complacency over their own superiority—of raising their eyebrows and reprimanding should the child be watching the flight of a sparrow instead of being ever alert for an unexpected question or bit of information which a grown person might put to him on earth. Such men are the kind who make presents of Cobbet’s “Advice to Young Men,” and who write mistaken sentiments of nobility on the fly-leaf of Samuel Smiles’s “Self-Help.”

Edgeworth’s redeeming trait was his earnest desire to bring the best within reach of his children, and he considered his severity the proper kind of guidance for them. Whatever sin of commission is to be laid to his charge, it is nevertheless true that it was not so great as to destroy the love Maria had for him. The literary critic has to reckon with the total amount of effect his teaching, his personal views had upon the writings of his daughter. That he did influence her is certain, and nowhere more thoroughly shown than in her work for children. In theory this work traces its origin to Rousseau, while in its modelling it bears a close relationship to Madame de Genlis and to Berquin.

Banish dolls is the cry in “Practical Education,” and if you have toys in the nursery at all, let them be of a useful character—not mechanical novelties, but cubes, cylinders, and the like. Place before children only those pictures which deal with familiar objects, and see to it that the pose of every figure, where there are figures, is natural; a boy once went with Sir Joshua Reynolds through an art gallery, and invariably he turned with displeasure away from any form represented in a constrained attitude. This is the general tone of the Edgeworths as teachers.

The set notions that fill the pages of “Practical Education” often border on the verge of bathos. They leave no room for the exercise of spontaneous inclination; by their limitations, they recognise no great amount of common sense in others. They create in one a desire at times to laugh, and again a desire to shake the authors who were in the frame of mind to hold such views. There are certain instincts which are active by reason of their own natures,—and one is the love of parent for offspring. We even accredit the wild animal with this quality. When the Edgeworths declare that “My dear, have you nothing to do?” should be spoken in sorrow, rather than in anger, the advice irritates; it is platitudinous; it must have irritated many naturally good mothers, even in those days when such a tone in writers was more the rule than the exception.

On the subject of books Miss Edgeworth and her father become more interesting, though none the less startling in their suggestions. One of Maria’s early tasks in 1782 had been to translate “Adèle et Théodore”; to her this book was worthy of every consideration. In the choice of reading for young folks, the two do not reach very much beyond their own contemporaries: Mrs. Barbauld’s “Lessons,” the Aikin’s “Evenings at Home,” Berquin’s “L’Ami des Enfans,” Day’s “Sandford and Merton” were recommended. And in addition there were mentioned Madame de Silleri’s stories, known as the “Theatre of Education,” Madame de la Fite’s “Tales” and “Conversations,” and Mrs. Smith’s “Rural Walks.” Despite the fact that fairy tales are at this period frowned upon as useless frivolities, “Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The Three Russian Sailors,” and the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainment” are suggested because of the interest and profit to be had in voyages and travels of all kinds. Fancy was thus held at a discount.

Two books of nature are mentioned, and curiously one is emphasised as of special value for children provided it is beforehand judiciously cut or blotted out here and there. The Edgeworths obtained this idea from an over-careful mother who was in the habit of acting as censor and editor of all juvenile books that found their way into her house. In Russia, the authorities take an ink pad and stamp out the condemned passages of any book officially examined. In the same summary manner, English parents were advised to treat their children’s stories. The Edgeworths went even further, suggesting that, besides striking out separate words with a pen, it would be well to cut the undesirable paragraphs from the page, provided by so doing the sense of the text on the reverse side was not materially interfered with. To mark the best thoughts for young readers was also strongly recommended.

The authors are never wanting in advice. If children are good, what need is there to introduce them to evil in their stories? Evil is here meant in its mildest sense. They should be kept from all contagion. But bad boys and girls should be told to read, in “The Children’s Friend,” tales like “The Little Gamblers” and “Honesty is the Best Policy,” which will teach them, by examples of wickedness, to correct their ways. Such strange classification suggests that literature was to be used as a species of moral reformatory. Two significant facts are to be noted in this chapter on books: there is an attempt to grade the literature by some age standard, bringing to light a gap between four and seven years which may be offset by a similar gap to-day; so, too, does there seem to have been, then as now, a great lack of history and biography.

The idea upon which the “Parent’s Assistant” was founded began to shape itself in Miss Edgeworth’s mind early in life. Left alone for a short period with her younger brothers and sisters, she manufactured tales for their edification, many of which, in after years, she utilised. In 1796 she gathered together and published some of her best stories, among them “The Purple Jar” and “Lazy Laurence.” “Simple Susan” would probably not be so widely emphasised were it not for the fact that Sir Walter Scott recorded “that when the boy brings back the lamb to the little girl, there is nothing for it but to put down the book and cry.”

Miss Edgeworth and her father had much preferred that the book be called “The Parent’s Friend,” for lodged in the former’s memory were disagreeable thoughts of an old-time arithmetic which had plagued her early years, and was named “The Tutor’s Assistant.”

The theatricals performed in the Edgeworth household afforded much pleasure. It is very likely that the custom was gleaned from Madame de Genlis. Plays were written for every festive season. The publication of the “Parent’s Assistant” suggested the acting of some of the playlets contained in the book. There seem to have been two theatres, one fitted up just over Richard Lovell’s study, and another temporary stage erected in the dining-room. Here, one evening, was enacted the exemplary dialogue of “Old Poz,” where a poor man is suspected, by a Justice, of stealing what a magpie has in reality secreted. Lucy, the good little daughter, clears the innocent fellow, upon whom her father sits in very stern, very unreasonable, and most unnatural judgment. Irritable to a degree, the Justice, who is positive about everything, shuts up any one who gainsays a word contrary to his obstinacy, but “Oh, darling,” he remarks to his daughter, after her excellent deed, “you shall contradict me as often as you please.” This method is neither more nor less than poisonous; it is polluted with a certain license which no good action ever sanctions. There is small doubt that children see the absurdity of it, for it cheapens right-doing in their eyes.

The compensating balance of good and bad is exercised to a monotonous degree in Miss Edgeworth’s tales. There are the meek, innocent girl, and the proud, overbearing girl in “The Bracelet”; the heedless, extravagant boy, and the thoughtful, thrifty boy in “Waste Not, Want Not.” Disaster follows disaster; reward courts reward. Not content with using these extremes of human nature in one story, Miss Edgeworth rings the changes, slightly altered in form, in others of her tales.

“The Purple Jar” in substance is the same as “Waste Not, Want Not”; the moral applications are identical. One has but to glance through the pages of the latter story to note its didactic pattern. Yet Miss Edgeworth possessed her literary excellencies in human characterisation, in that power of narrative which gained effect, not through ornamentation, but through deep knowledge of the real qualities of common existence. The dominant fault is that she allowed her ultimate object to become crystallised into an overshadowing bulwark, a danger which always besets the “moral” writer, and produces the ethical teacher in a most obtruding form. When Miss Edgeworth’s little girl sprains her ankle and her father picks her up, she consciously covers her leg with her gown. Fate seems never to have worked so swiftly, so determinedly, as in those tales where thoughtless boys on their walks had the consequences of their bad acts visited upon them during the homeward journey. The hungry, the lame, the halt, the blind turn unexpected corners, either to wince beneath the jeers of one type of mortal child, or to smile thanks to the other kind for a gentle word or a much-needed penny.

No one can wholly condemn the tale, typified by Miss Edgeworth’s “Parent’s Assistant.” Childhood is painted in quaint, old-fashioned colours, even though the staid little heroes and heroines have no interests. They take information into their minds as they would take physic into their bodies. They are all normal types, subjected to abnormal and unnaturally successive temptations, and given very exacting consciences. A writer in Blackwood’s becomes indignant over such literary treatment:

“They [the girls] have good reason to expect from these pictures of life, that if they are very good and very pious, and very busy in doing grown-up work, when they reach the mature age of sixteen or so, some young gentleman, who has been in love with them all along, will declare himself at the very nick of time; and they may then look to find themselves, all the struggles of life over, reposing a weary head on his stalwart shoulder.... Mothers, never in great favour with novelists, are sinking deeper and deeper in their black books,—there is a positive jealousy of their influence; while the father in the religious tale, as opposed to the moral and sentimental, is commonly either a scamp or nowhere. The heroine has, so to say, to do her work single-handed.”

What is true of these young people is therefore likewise true of their grown-up associates. They have definite personalities, and they are either monstrosities of excellence or demons of vice and temper. But here also a careful distinction was preserved. Mr. Lucas says in his “Old-Fashioned Tales”:

“The parents who can do no wrong are very numerous; but they are, it should be pointed out, usually the parents of the central child. There are very often parents and relations of other and subsidiary children whose undesirable habits are exceedingly valuable by way of contrast.”

Despite the fact that there is so much to condemn in this genre of writing, Miss Edgeworth was endowed with that sober sense and inexhaustible power of invention claimed for her by critics of the period. Her care for detail, her exhibition of small actions that mark the manners of all people in different walks of life, were distinguishing features of her skill.

With her father Miss Edgeworth laboured on other things besides the “Practical Education”; while the two were preparing the essay on “Irish Bulls,” published in 1802, she plainly states that the first design was due to him, and that in her own share she was sedulously following the ideas suggested by him. Throughout her autobiographical data she offers us many glimpses of that family unity which existed—whether from voluntary desire or because of the domineering grip of Edgeworth, is not stated. She was continuously solicitous for his welfare, not through any forced sense of duty, but because of her desire to give pleasure in small ways; she found it agreeable to sit of an evening doing needle work, while Edgeworth “read out” Pope’s Homer. In the course of such hours she first became acquainted with Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” and “Waverley.”

The friendship between Miss Edgeworth and Scott was deep and cordial; one was not without abiding influence on the other. She describes with graphic pen the first sound of his voice at Abbotsford; and the biographer has no more agreeable material to work upon than her fortnight spent as a guest of the novelist, and his return visit to Edgeworthtown in 1825.

For a man whose avowed detestation of women was well known to every one, Thomas Day (1748–1789) succeeded in leading a life of romantic variety. Yet he was not a person of strong passion; in fact, was more inclined to brooding melancholy. His intimacy with the Edgeworth family began when he met Richard Lovell at Oxford; and it was when he saw the training of Émile applied to his friend’s son that his mind was seized with the idea of carrying out a similar scheme himself. He held a great contempt for dress; and his numerous vagaries regarding the conduct and duties of a wife were so pronounced that it is most likely they came between himself and Maria Edgeworth, with whom it is thought there was some romantic understanding.

Unlike Edgeworth, Day had no child to experiment upon. So he set about “breeding up” two girls, away from conflicting influences, and according to nature. One was obtained from an orphan asylum, and was known as Sabrina Sidney; the other, called Lucretia, was taken from a Foundling Hospital. In order to give a moral tone to the situation, these girls were bound out to Edgeworth, who was a married man. Not many knew that Day had hastened with both of the damsels to Avignon. Here he began to educate them with the intention of training one for his future wife.

Events did not progress smoothly, however; the girls quarrelled as saints would have quarrelled under the circumstances, and they occupied their time by falling out of boats and having smallpox. What their schooling consisted of may be imagined from the fragment of a letter written by Sabrina to Mr. Edgeworth:

“I hope I shall have more sense against I come to England—I know how to make a circle and an equilateral triangle—I know the cause of day and night, winter and summer.”

At the advanced age of twenty-two—even younger than Edgeworth when he first became imbued with the Rousseau doctrines—Day returned to Lichfield—the home of Johnson and of Dr. Charles Darwin—bringing with him his charges: Lucretia, who was hopelessly dull, and Sabrina, who proved the favourite and was by far the more attractive of the two, with her fetching auburn ringlets, her long amorous eyelashes, and her very melodious voice. The young ladies had failed to become thoroughly steeled against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In most respects they persisted in remaining like the average woman with sensibility. When hot sealing-wax was dropped upon the shapely arm of Sabrina, to harden her against the fear of pain, she refused to behave heroically; when a pistol was fired at her petticoats—a volley of lead for all she knew—her screams and frantic jumps indicated that her nerves were not impervious to the unexpected.

Day did not fail to show his disgust and disappointment. While Sabrina was at boarding-school, he hastened to forget all about her, and fell in love with Honora Sneyd, whose fame chiefly rests upon the fact that she was once courted by Major André. To make the situation more awkward, Edgeworth, despite his married state, likewise possessed strong affection for the same lady. She refused Day, and what followed contains the zest of a wicked little comedy. He fell ill, and had to be bled; then he summoned up sufficient strength to escape to France with Edgeworth, who felt it best to remove himself from temptation. It was during this trip that he visited Rousseau with poor little Richard. But before crossing the Channel, Day had succeeded in transferring his affections to Honora’s sister, Elizabeth.

“Go,” she said to him in substance, “try to assume some of the graces that you sorely lack. Learn to dress stylishly, and be taught the proper curl for a wig. Train yourself into a fashionable-looking husband, and come back to me.”

Thus commanded, Day spent many weary hours wielding the foil, and being carried through the intricacies of the dance. And those legs of his—how he put them into exercise, hoping against hope to straighten them ere he returned to England!

But there was evidently no improvement in the end, for when the lady saw him, she unhesitatingly refused him. It is sufficient to say that, in time, Edgeworth married both sisters, Death regarding kindly his love of novelty.

With affections thus left high and dry, Day turned once more to Sabrina. He had long ago discarded Lucretia, who apprenticed herself to a milliner, and later became the wife of an honest draper. But Sabrina was fair to look upon and Day saw no reason why she should not satisfy his ideas of wifehood, provided she would dress according to his tastes. We applaud the shake of those auburn ringlets as she refused his wishes, and thus escaped matrimony with him.[32] There was another lady upon whom this honour was to descend.

When Miss Milnes, of Wakefield, was approached by Day, she was informed of all his requirements, and was deceived as to none of his vagaries. It must have been somewhat of a surprise to him when she accepted him, outlandish attire and all; and it is a pleasant disappointment to know that the marriage was a happy one, despite the fact that Mrs. Day insisted upon holding opinions of her own.

Day was most content when he was theorising; at the same time, it must not be lost sight of that he had timely interests. His feelings were strongly aroused against the state of negro slavery in America, and he was earnest in his advocacy of parliamentary reform. His great fault was that he was always carried to extremes whenever good motives prompted him. His earnest concern for the poor, during 1781, was accompanied by stern denials of pleasures for himself,—well-nigh of the necessities of life.

Day realised the failures of his theories as applied to grown people; had he not done so, we most likely would not have had “Sandford and Merton.” His attention was soon attracted to the infant mind as an unworked field; the Edgeworths were meeting success with their children’s books; he would attempt the same thing, and so, during 1783, 1787, and 1789, the three successive volumes of his famous story appeared—an elongated “Waste Not, Want Not.”

Day had heretofore suggested a certain effeminate bearing in his character; he recognised it, and was now suddenly beset with a consuming desire to supplant this manner by an overtowering manliness, by the exercise of firmness and strength. But the new policy was to prove his undoing. On the afternoon of September 28, 1789, he went to ride on an unbroken horse, believing to curb him by the discipline of command rather than of the stock. The animal took fright and threw him; he received injuries from which he almost immediately died. On the evidence of Miss Seward, it is recorded that Mrs. Day thereafter “lay in bed, into the curtains of which no light was admitted, ... and only rose to stray alone through her garden when night gave her sorrows congenial gloom.”

The estimate of such a work as “Sandford and Merton” cannot be based upon modern standards; all of the factors characteristic of the didactic writers for children, such as persistent questioning, the encyclopædic grown person in the shape of Mr. Barlow, and the monotonous interchange of narrative and dialogue, are employed as vehicles for knowledge. The book is unique, inasmuch as it sought to supply a variety of stories suitable in style and content for the beginner.

“The only method I could invent,” writes Day, “was to select such passages of different books as were most adapted to their experience and understanding. The least exceptionable that I could find for this purpose were Plutarch’s Lives, and Zenophon’s History of the Institution of Cyrus, in English translations; with some part of Robinson Crusoe, and a few passages in the first volume of Mr. Brook’s Fool of Quality.”

In those days, if authors are to be believed, birds were in the habit of alighting on the hands of good children; they are more timid now, though children are not less good. The poor boy was made to feel how kind the good rich boy was to him throughout his shocking adversity; we are more considerate to-day. And so, Tommy Merton and Harry Sandford, products of a stilted age, are clad in uniforms similar to those worn by Miss Edgeworth’s children. They are endowed with no exceptional qualities, with no defined will power; they stand in a long row of similarly subjected slaves of theory.

Miss Agnes Repplier calls this story one of her early moral pitfalls. She read it at a period when information was being forced down her, and “which,” so she writes, “I received as responsively as does a Strassburg goose its daily share of provender.”

Among the writers of this period, none are more important than Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld (1743–1825). Her position is a unique one, for, being acquainted with all of her literary contemporaries and subject to their influence, she stands in a transition stage. Through her mental independence, she succeeded partially in breaking from the introspective method of motive-hunting, and foreshadowed the possibilities of Mrs. Hemans, the Brontés, and Mrs. Browning. She was reared in an atmosphere of intellectuality by her father, John Aikin, a professor and a man of advanced opinions regarding female instruction, two points which argued for her less conventional mind and for her less stilted manner.

When she married Rochemont Barbauld, who had been a student under her father, and who was a non-conformist, she was well versed in Greek and Latin, and in every way was equipped to do literary work. She was more or less influenced by her husband’s religious independence; he changed his congregation from English Presbyterianism to Unitarianism, and it is not surprising to find the English public looking somewhat askance at Mrs. Barbauld’s fitness to write for children. Madame de Genlis was in like fashion criticised for the religious views she held, and we shall find Miss More subject to the same scrutiny. The Aikins were the first to introduce the material lines in children’s literature, “but the more anxiously religious mothers felt a certain distrust of the absence of direct lessons in Christian doctrines; and Mrs. Trimmer was incited to begin a course of writing for young people that might give the one thing in which, with all their far superior brilliancy, the Aikins were felt to be deficient.”

We are not concerned with all of Mrs. Barbauld’s work; she used to write poetry, some of it in repartee vein which struck the acute fancy of Charles Lamb; her essays were of an exceptional order, in a few instances expressed in imitation of Johnson; he himself had to acknowledge that of all who tried to ape him, she was most successful. Her educational opinions, sent from time to time in letters to Mrs. Montague, marked her ability as a teacher; but the method that she believed in was well nigh Socratic and ofttimes wearisome in its persistency; history and geography were given to infant minds in the form of lectures. Around 1802 William Godwin, of whom we shall have something to say later in his connection with the Lambs, wrote:

“I think Mrs. Barbauld’s little books admirably adapted, upon the whole, to the capacity and amusement of young children.... As far as Mrs. Barbauld’s books are concerned, I have no difficulty. But here my judgment and the ruling passion of my contemporaries divide. They aim at cultivating one faculty; I should aim at cultivating another.... Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardour in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination there can be no genuine morality, in profound feeling of other men’s sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests. This is the faculty which makes the man, and not the miserable minuteness of detail about which the present age is so uneasy.”

Childless herself, Charles Aikin was adopted by Mrs. Barbauld, the little Charles of “Early Lessons for Children,” composed especially for him. The latter work was followed by “Hymns in Prose for Children,” consisting of translations from all tongues, put into simple language, and not into verse, for fear they might fail to reach the comprehension otherwise. These hymns are probably most representative of Mrs. Barbauld’s individual writings, for the work by which she is best known, the “Evenings at Home,” was written in collaboration with her brother, Dr. Aikin.

In the “Evenings” a new tone is detected; despite a stilted style, the two authors aroused an interest in external objects, and, by their descriptions and suggestions, attempted to infuse meaning into the world surrounding the child. This small departure from the sectarian tendency prevailing in so much of the literature of that period, imperceptible though it may be, was due to a shifting of attitude toward women which was taking place in England. Mrs. Barbauld might be considered a “bold” example of feminine intellect reaching out for a larger sphere. We read that Fox was surprised that a woman could exhibit such clearness and consistency of viewpoint as were to be discovered in such of her essays as “Monastic Institutions”; and there were others who wondered at the alertness and interest she manifested in all matters pertaining to public affairs. Her force of intellect pleased some, her manner others. Scott confessed that her public reading of poetry inspired him to court the muse; Wordsworth unfolded so far as to envy the beauty of her stanzas on “Life,” which toward the end contain these attractive, hopeful, and faith-abiding lines:

Mrs. Barbauld was one of a group of women writers, seeking through the force of their opinions to destroy the conventional barriers which kept the exercise of feminine minds within prescribed bounds. Harriet Martineau has outlined the tyrannical limitations which beset a young girl of the early nineteenth century; decorum stood for mental annihilation. When genteel persons came to call at the home of Jane Austen, the latter, out of regard for family feeling, and for fear of being thought forward and unmaidenly, was constrained to cover her manuscript with a muslin scarf.

Mrs. Barbauld did not make any revolutionary declaration, nor attempt any public defiance of custom; however, she did, by her reaching toward the manifest facts of life, secularise our concern for the common things about us. She encouraged, through her plea for the freedom of thought, the movement which resulted in the emancipation of her sex, and which found vent, on the one hand, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s[33] “The Right of Woman” (1792) and, on the other, with more determined force, in John Stuart Mill’s “On the Subjection of Women” (1869). As this freedom became more and more assured, there underwent a change in the educational attitude; a girl’s mind had something more to work on than the motto of a sampler; her occupations became somewhat altered. And the women writers began to emphasise, in their stories for children, the individual inclinations of hero and heroine.

Wherever Charles Lamb discourses upon books, he assumes the critical attitude that deals with literature as a living force, as something built for human appeal. He met Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer on several occasions, and we can imagine the delight he took in shocking their ladylike senses by his witty and sudden remarks. At one period some dispute and ill-feeling existed between himself and Mrs. Barbauld, due to a false report that she had lampooned his drama, “John Woodvil.”

Elia was not the sort of literary devotee to sanction anemic literature for children; his plea was for the vitalising of the nursery book. On October 23, 1802, he wrote to Coleridge:

“Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics, ... and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deign’d to reach them off an exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary ask’d for them. Mrs. B’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which made the child a man while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.”

He saw the penalty that lay in cramming the child with natural history instead of furnishing him with some creative appeal. We can forgive Elia all his pranks when he thus pleads the genial claim of imagination; if, in a witty vein, he called Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Inchbald the “bald” old women, we must understand that Lamb had his petulant hours, and that children’s literature of the day was sufficient to increase them!

The purport of “Evenings at Home” is instruction. Within the compass of a few pages, objects crowd one upon the other as thick and as fast as virtues do in Miss Edgeworth. Such keenness and alertness in observing common things, as are cultivated in “Eyes and No Eyes,” stagger the intellect. It is well to teach your young companions to feel the hidden possibilities of nature and to cultivate within them a careful observation; but there is a vacation time for the mind, and the world, though it may be a school-room, is also a very healthy place to play in. Mr. Andrews, the immaculate teacher, is represented by the artist, in my copy of the book, as seated in a chair, with a compass in one hand resting upon a book, while behind him stretches the outline of a map; the two boys stand in front of him like prisoners before the bar. Here then is a new algebraic formula in the literature for the young.

Mrs. Barbauld thus represents a transition stage in juvenile writing; education and narrative walk side by side. She made it possible, in the future, for Peter Parley and for Rollo to thrive. Thomas Day foreshadowed the method of retelling incidents from the classics and from standard history and travel,—a form which is practised to a great extent by our present writers, who thread diverse materials on a slender wire of subsidiary story, and who, like Butterworth and Knox, invent untiring families of travellers who go to foreign parts, who see things, and then who talk out loud about them.

But before this secularisation gained marked hold, a new tributary is to be noted, which flowed into the moral stream,—a tributary which afforded the moral impulse a definite field to work in, which centred its purpose upon a distinct class. For heretofore the writers of juvenile literature had aimed for a general appeal. The struggle was now to be between the Sunday-school and the text-book.

III. The Sunday-school; Raikes; Hannah More; Mrs. Trimmer.

If the Sunday-school movement had not assumed some proportions about this time, it would have been necessary to create a practical outlet for the moral energy which dominated the authors of whom we have been writing. Had Robert Raikes not conceived his plan when he did, the ethical impulse would have run riot in a much wilder fashion, and would have done no good at all. For, whatever may be said against the old-time Sunday-school in a critical vein, one cannot ignore that its establishment brought immediate benefit. As it was, the new institution furnished the objective point for which the didactic school was blindly groping, and developed the idea of personal service. The social ideal was beginning to germinate.

Robert Raikes (1735 or 6–1811) was by profession a printer. He was of benevolent disposition and met with much to arouse his sympathy for the lower classes, whom he found indifferent to religion and hopelessly uncouth in their daily living. With the religious revival which swept through England around 1770, caused by the preaching of George Whitefield, Raikes began his work in earnest, first among the city prisons, where he was brought in contact with surprising conditions which had long lain in obscurity because of a wide-spread public indifference.

His observation thus trained to follow along this particular social line, he soon became attracted toward the children apprenticed to a certain pin factory. He saw that the discipline of work, however exacting, however it denied them the care and attention due to all young persons, was the only restrictive guidance they had. When Sunday came, they ran wild, relieved of duty, and not imbued with any idea of personal control. Their elders were living immoral lives; they had no opportunity or incentive to improve; and their natural inclination was to follow animal impulse and blind desire. To such a religious man as Raikes, the mandate, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” was most naturally suggested by such circumstances. Some means of occupying these children on the Sabbath day must be devised.

So it was that on January 26, 1781, the first Sunday-school was opened. Raikes poured his whole energy into organization, and, through the medium of his own paper, the Gloucester Journal, spread broadcast his written suggestions about the work to be done, and his descriptions of the particular localities which most needed attention. He was in a position to gain publicity, and his own personal earnestness counted for a great deal. Already we have noted his relationship to Newbery, whose literary connections probably afforded Raikes some assistance.

The movement had been of five years’ growth, when, in 1786, Raikes was summoned before King George III. Their Majesties, both the King and Queen, were interested by what they had heard, and wished to know something more. The Queen was being almost daily enthused through the intensity of Mrs. Trimmer’s pleadings. This good lady, already known for her children’s books, had put into operation a Sunday-school of her own at Brentwood, and it was to this that the King had paid a memorable visit, leaving behind him a reputation for “kind and condescending behaviour,” which won the hearts of all the children. In this way was the official sanction placed upon Christianity as a practical force; there was even every prospect of starting a Sunday-school at Windsor. “A general joy reigns among the conductors,” cried the enthusiastic Mrs. Trimmer, when she realised what interest was being shown in every quarter.

The programme framed for Raikes’s little protégés was indeed sufficiently full to keep them from the highways. He writes:

“The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church. After Church, they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise.”

Lamb and Leigh Hunt, when together at Christ Hospital, were regarded as veritable monks in their knowledge of the Bible; but these little waifs were slaves of a rigorous order; there was nothing voluntary in their desire for spiritual light. The time was to arrive when more sunshine was to be mixed with the teaching, but in the beginning it was necessary for Raikes to keep the Sabbath forcibly observed rather than to devise a less exacting routine. He went about, untiring in his efforts; he plead personally with parents, besides hoping that, through the moral instruction being given to their children, they might be made to see the outlet for their own salvation.

Years after, testimony was obtained from the survivors of Raikes’s discipline. One William Brick had been a scholar of his, and the memory of those days was vivid—perhaps a little too much so, but none the less picturesque:

“I can remember Mr. Raikes well enough,” he said. “I remember his caning me. I don’t suppose I minded it much. He used to cane boys on the back of a chair. Some terrible bad chaps went to school when I first went.... I know the parents of one or two of them used to walk them to school with 14-lb. weights tied to their legs, to keep them from running away.... When a boy was very bad, he would take him out of the school, and march him home and get his parents to ‘wallop’ him. He’d stop and see it done, and then bring the young urchin back, rubbing his eyes and other places.... Every one in the city loved and feared him.”

Such a scene is not prepossessing; nor does moral suasion appear to have been as efficacious as the rod. Besides which, Raikes had a way of looking at a trembling victim through his reading-glass, and exclaiming in thunderous voice: “Ah, I can see you did not say your prayers this morning.” An old man of eighty spoke of this circumstance with deep feeling; and, in awe-stricken tones, he ended by saying: “The boys believed he could see through stone walls with that glass; and it magnified his eye, so that they were sometimes frightened, and told wonderful stories about what Mr. Raikes could do with his wonderful glass.”

The immediate influence this movement had upon children’s books was to create a demand for tracts. Later on, after Thomas Carlyle, in 1839, had plead the cause of London public libraries, it suggested a special class of library as a part of the Sunday-school machinery. A general call was raised for juvenile books of a strictly religious nature, with an appeal intended for a poorer class of readers. Miss Hannah More represents the chief exponent of this grade of writing. “All service ranks alike with God,” says Browning. But these ladies, who were untiring in their devotion to the cause, who were, in their parochial character, forerunners of the social worker of to-day, each was known through her special interest. We speak of Miss Catherine Sinclair, author of “Holiday House,” as the first to introduce benches in the parks of Edinburgh, as the originator of drinking-fountains, as the founder of cooking-depots; of Priscilla Wakefield as the originator of savings-banks for the poor; of Miss More as the author of tracts; and of Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, one of the forgotten New-England writers, as the first to draw attention to the condition of the newsboys. Mrs. Trimmer, therefore, is justly connected with the history of the development of Sunday-schools.

In a tabular indication of the trend of juvenile literature, Sarah Kirby Trimmer (1741–1810) may be said to have been a disciple of Madame de Genlis and of Mrs. Barbauld, quite as much as a follower of Rousseau and of Raikes; she inherited from her father an overweening religious inclination, and several glimpses of her in the society of the day reveal how deeply seated her serious nature was. In London she talked with Dr. Johnson, Mr. Gainsborough, and Mr. Hogarth, and, through recognised powers of reading aloud, she charmed many of her friends. But it was a hopeless situation to cope with in a young girl, when, a dispute having arisen between Sir Joshua Reynolds and one of his friends, Sarah, being called upon to settle the point—a doubtful passage in “Paradise Lost”—drew the volume from the pocket of her skirt! At twenty-one she was married, destined to be the mother of six sons and six daughters, and no sooner was the first child born than she directed all of her attention, as Madame de Genlis did, to the subject of education.

Wearisome it is to come in contact with a person of one idea. Mrs. Trimmer naïvely confesses in her journal that she must have worn out the patience of many a visitor with her views upon education. As the years advanced, her opinions became more narrowed and more sectarian.

Mrs. Trimmer exhibited piety which was of the emotional, almost of the hysterical kind, yet sincere in its whole-souled acceptance of Bible truths. She questioned nothing; she believed with a simple faith that lacked proportion. One has to view her entirely from the standpoint of this single interest which had her under complete control. In her “Guardian of Education” she dwelt much upon the dangerous matter contained in children’s books; in her “New Plan of Education” she condemned any attempt to extend the scope of education for the poor. Her chief motive in both cases was to keep away from faith any cause of its possible undoing. The earnestness put into her charity work, her untiring devotion to the Sunday-school, a certain gentle charm of conversation won for Mrs. Trimmer wide-spread attention. Her life was guided by the belief in a divine mission; her days were well ordered, from the hours before breakfast, which she reserved for the learning of poetry, to the evenings, when she would give herself up to meditation and prayer. In fact, during twenty-five years, she kept a diary, penned in secret moments of retreat, a curious display of over-welling feeling—pietistical neurasthenia. These pages are hardly to be considered interpretative—they are outpourings, giving one an awful sense of unworthiness, if life consists simply in submitting to biblical strictures and in uttering biblical paraphrases.

But Mrs. Trimmer was withal an active little woman, whose three hours, spent every Sunday over her journal, represented meditation only: in her practise of Christianity she was zealous; and her pen was employed in preparing the kind of food to foster a proper feeling among children and cottagers and servants. In this latter respect there was a change indeed from Miss Edgeworth, who considered the advisability of separating young people entirely from any possible contact with servants.

Among her children and her grandchildren, Mrs. Trimmer exerted profound influence; the Sabbath day was observed with great strictness; toys set aside while Stackhouse’s “Commentary on the Bible”[34] was brought forth to look at; stories were told, and the progress of Bible heroes traced upon maps of the Holy Land. The spirit of rest and peace followed Mrs. Trimmer, who was averse to reading books of controversy. We are given a picture of her in her venerable old age, walking with her grandson among the plants and flowers, while she explained, with a certain lyric simplicity, the truths, as she saw them with her meek spirit, underlying the growth of the grass; and described the flight of a sparrow which escaped not the notice of God. There was thus unfolded to this little boy the holiness of all things in nature, permeated with a divine grace; he was made to consider the lilies of the field, and not a bush but might become to him a burning flame, not a stone but might be rent asunder by the resurrection of a dried-up seed.

Mrs. Trimmer’s “Easy Lessons for Children,” her “Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature,” her “Sacred History for Young Persons,” and her works explaining the catechism, were among the rare books available for the purposes of Raikes’s followers. They were easily understood; they explained satisfactorily for children, according to grown-up standards, certain religious teachings. In the Catholic church to-day, Mother Loyola is said to possess that same ability to unfold the meaning of the most difficult doctrine so that Catholic children can understand. Priests turn to her books rather than trust to their own interpretations. The general interest aroused for the poor, for the lower classes, appealed to Mrs. Trimmer; she became wholly absorbed; she wrote “The Servant’s Friend” and edited a “Family Magazine,” intended for their special instruction and amusement. Adopting Madame de Genlis’s idea of using prints as a factor in nursery education, she prepared a series of illustrations from ancient history and from the Old Testament; and was further engaged in the simplification of Roman and English history for young readers.

The book that has come down to us as representing Mrs. Trimmer’s work, “The History of the Robins,” is a nature story of no mean value, easy in narrative and full of appeal for very young persons who are interested in simple incident. To American readers it is now available in a cut-up state, for Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in editing it, called the style “stilted” and diffuse, and thought that its unity could better be preserved by dealing only with the robins, and not at all with the extraneous doings of the Benson family.

When the Lambs removed to Enfield in 1827, Thomas Westwood, a boy of thirteen, lived near them. It was not long before he and Elia were on intimate terms, and he must have had exceptional merit for Lamb to give him free entrée to his books. “Lamb,” so he has recorded, “initiated me into a school of literature which Mrs. Trimmer might not have considered the most salutary under the circumstances. Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Farquhar, Defoe, Fielding,—these were the pastures in which I delighted to graze in those early years; and which, in spite of Trimmer, I believe did me less evil than good.”

An alteration in attitude appears to have been going on in several directions; the social strata were readjusting themselves. For Hannah More (1745–1833), it is claimed, stood at the parting of the roadways, where clergymen and schoolmasters, once frowned upon as quite inferior beings, now took positions of a higher nature. Had Miss More not thrown herself so heartily into the moral movement, she might have occupied a much more important position in English letters than she does. One cannot help feeling that, by the part she took in the Sunday-school development, she sacrificed her genius to a cause. In the biographies of these well-intentioned writers for children and for poor people, it is always satisfactory to linger, wherever opportunity presents, on the genial aspects of their lives; they are estimated in criticism so greatly by the weight, or by the lack of weight, of their ideas, that the human value which existed at the time is often lost sight of. However dry their preachments, their social lives were warmed by human intercourse and human service. It is hard to forget such a group as Scott, Maria and Patty Edgeworth, and others, listening to Patty while she sang Irish melodies. A similar scene is associated with Sally and Hannah More when they went to call on Dr. Johnson. He was not at home, and the two, left together in the autocrat’s sanctum, disported themselves in mock humour. Hannah approached his great chair, and sat pompously in it, hoping to catch some of his genius. Can you not hear Johnson’s laughter as he bluntly told her, when he was informed of the incident, that he rarely sat in that particular chair?

Mrs. Barbauld was no less clever than Hannah More in the handling of witty verse; in fact, the latter was ever ready with her gifts in the drawing-room, and added generously her share to the circle gathered around the actor, David Garrick. He it was who had sufficient faith in Miss More’s dramatic ability to present two of her plays. Even at that time she had a reputation among her associates for being very strict in her religious observances; for one evening, it being Sunday, and Garrick not averse to piano-playing, he turned to “Nine,” as he called her, thus indicating that she was a favoured one among the muses, and told her to leave the room, promising to call her back when the music was over.

Hannah More’s social work is to be considered from the year (1789) that Mr. Wilberforce, one of her close friends, discovered the deplorable conditions existing in the districts around Cheddarcliff. Her long intercourse with the Garricks, and her various literary endeavours which took form during 1782 in her “Sacred Dramas” for the young, have no direct bearing upon her connection with the religious movement which places her in the general scheme with Robert Raikes and Mrs. Trimmer. Patty More had had, at an earlier period, large experience in school-teaching, and this was to prove of inestimable service, for it was with her assistance that Hannah carried on the work in the Mendip mining districts. The two met with some opposition, not only from the classes for whom they were specially striving, but from those who, less broad than themselves, held views regarding the Sunday-school that placed spirituality above the actual needs of the poverty-stricken communities. But, throughout, the Mores never swerved from their set purpose, even though illness overtook them and made the situation still harder than it was. For they were forced to ride many miles from their home, at first unknown in the region they had elected to benefit, a region cursed by ignorance, plagued by license, and wherein assault was a common incident.

“Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked,” writes Hannah More, “could she have seen the petty tyrants whose insolence we stroked, the ugly children we fondled, the pointers and spaniels we caressed, the cider we commended, and the wine we swallowed.”

A study of the centres established by these sisters, and which gradually exerted an influence over twenty-eight miles of territory, a distance traversed in a manner not unlike the journey of the circuit-riders who are to be met with throughout the mountain districts of the South, would throw considerable light on English labour conditions as they then existed. The setting is an isolated wild land, thus described by Miss More:

“Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes; three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged; many thieves,—all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti, we have enlisted 170; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling around us, whom he had seldom seen but to commit, or punish in some way, he burst into tears.”

The work grew with the months, and mention is soon made of nine hundred children flocking to a Mendip feast—little ones whose brightest moments were centred in the regular visits of these ministering ladies.

Miss More’s powers were exerted toward counteracting the ideas being spread by the French Revolution; both high and low were struggling against them; they nearly swamped the genius of Wordsworth. Though she rejoiced in the fall of the Bastille, she deplored the deification of Nature and the reign of Reason, and vented her sarcasm on the philosophy of Paine. Her chief alarm was felt for the effect such opinions might have upon the middle class of England. But, despite her conservatism, Miss More was regarded as too strong-minded for religious work; the High Church accused her of too marked an independence. She was advised, much to her own amusement, to publish a confession of her faith. The discussion which ensued need not occupy us; it may, perhaps, have infused into her juvenile tracts a more determined tone, but it did not originally encourage her in their composition.

This was brought about through a desire to give the children of the poor districts religious literature as soon as they were able to read. Mrs. Trimmer was the only author then available, and her books were too expensive for the masses. The More sisters, therefore, soliciting the interest of the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III, began the publication of the tracts, three a month, containing short talks, ballads, and moral tales. These were scattered broadcast over the country. The scheme lasted from 1794 to 1797, when they were forced to discontinue it, for lack of pecuniary backing. But, during the time, collections of “Repository Tracts” had been brought into existence, which, for at least a quarter of a century, were to stand representative of the best kind of reading for the poor.

A long list of books comprises the literary activity of Hannah More,[35] but it is by such volumes as her “Christian Morals,” “Hints toward Forming the Character of a Young Princess [Charlotte, Princess of Wales],” “Practical Piety,” “The Spirit of Prayer,” “Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,” and “Thoughts on the Importance of Manners” that her genuine art is overclouded. In her “Repository Tracts,” she was content to approach the poor as a class, nor was she willing to allow herself to forget for an instant that, because of their poverty, they were a type of inferior being. Her object was to make them content with their lot in life, and to have them feel comfortable and worthy within their particular sphere. They were potential with the strength that might place them at the head of their class, but could not carry them outside of it. An insurmountable barrier was thought to stretch between the high and low.

“The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” is considered the most famous of Miss More’s tracts. They all are redolent with the common moral ideal, but the local colour in them is real and the glimpses of the poor people, their homes, customs, beliefs, hopes, and despairs are described with minute vividness and with much feeling. Whatever brightness they contain is the sort that is gained by way of contrast,—an ethical resolve to show that things are not so bad that they may not still be worse. “Father,” says the little girl, “I wish I was big enough to say grace. I am sure I would say it heartily to-day; for I was thinking what poor people do who have no salt to their potatoes.”

The standard is a narrow one; the child who does not go to church is the bad child; the lack of a new gown fades before the delights over owning a new Bible. Instead of marking books, as the Edgeworths advised, Miss More italicised the passages worthy of memorising. Honest toil is the subject-matter of these stories; the village is the scene of many a vexation. The gaining of knowledge is only a means toward a better understanding of the catechism; one’s duty is to learn to read, else the Holy Writ is a closed subject. There is no aim to carry the children outside of themselves by means of the highest imagination; they are told how they are to cope with their own environment, how to remain satisfied with their own station. They must be rich Christians, but still remain poor people.

Although Walpole retracted some of the harsh censure which he at first heaped upon Hannah More, he was not far wrong in his condemnation of her “ill-natured strictures.” The person who does not recognise a tendency, in all this literature, “to protract the imbecility of childhood,” “to arrest the understanding instead of advancing it,” “to give forwardness without strength” has failed to understand the true function of a child’s book—to afford the nursery a good time, is the way Mr. Lucas expresses it.

Was there not something in this religious one-sidedness to belittle the true dignity of the spirit?[36] Heaven lies about us in our infancy, and we find ourselves in a beautiful land of promise; we are placed therein to face the years; by experience, by training, by guidance along the lines of our own natures, we are prepared to understand something of the character of the way we shall have to tread alone. We should be made to face the future, but not to discount the present. We find ourselves defined by circumstances, but we need not remain slaves to them. To stigmatise a class in literature is to stigmatise a reader. Miss More and her contemporaries never questioned their social attitude—whether it was just or broad or transitory. Full of the pioneer work which they were doing, they did not recognise the right for the poor which was already the right for the rich. Juvenile literature was not for the heart of all youth, but for the benefaction of this one and of that. And while the educational idea broadened and was to advance with the scientific spirit on the one hand, on the other, it had narrowed and was destined for a long, monotonous struggle with the conscious Sunday-school tale. This character of story was flat and void, and, because removed from the reality of nature, it was robbed of the inherent spirit of truth. It identified religion with literary meekness.

IV. The Poets: Watts; Jane and Ann Taylor; William Blake.

Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious.—Matthew Arnold, in “The Study of Poetry.”

We have progressed sufficiently in our outline to begin showing the links that bind the past with the present. To dwell upon more writers of the generation just treated is simply to repeat the same essential characteristics of the type. These authors all used the medium of prose in their desire to give young people books suitable to their comprehension. But there were a few poets who braved the intricacies of verse, and who wrote some very simple and pleasing lyrics, which have survived the change in spirit, and form some of the most agreeable pages in our children’s anthologies. It will be recollected that Mrs. Barbauld feared poetry would not be understood, and so she wrote her volume of prose pieces which acted as a substitute.

Wordsworth himself could not have demanded a more careful attention to the simplicity of word selection than that paid by Dr. Isaac Watts (1674–1748), who, though not first in the field of hymn-writers, for his immediate predecessor was Bishop Thomas Ken[37] (1637–1711), author of “Morning and Daily Hymns,” was nevertheless one of the very first consciously to pen a book of verse for a juvenile public.

Not only was he actively engaged in the interests of education, but, during his famous thirty-six years’ spent as visitor in the household of Sir Thomas Abney, of Newington, he crystallised his ideas on education, and incorporated them in his “The Improvement of the Mind: To which is added A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth.”

This treatise may be regarded as a fair example of the pre-Rousseau style of pedagogy. The child was measured in terms of sectarian standards, it being assumed that the first step was to impress him with the truth that his very nature was sinful, and that it could be shrived only by having the mind centred always upon holy thoughts. The religion of the closet must be held above every pleasure. Yet Dr. Watts notices that such pleasures are increasing to an alarming state; that children are rebelling against Puritan principles. His sternness relents, in so far as he would allow children to play draughts and chess, and to amuse themselves with games which might instruct them in the rudiments of grammar and geometry.

Though there are not many who would discountenance his diatribe against the gaming table, the dangers besetting midnight revellers, and the freedom which results in immorality, one cannot but view with distrust the strictures which would turn girls into dowdy creatures and boys into prigs. The theoretical predecessors of Rousseau’s Émile were the two creations of Dr. Watts,—Eugenio and Phronissa—his ideal children, combining those qualities which rob youth of all charm. Theirs must have been wearisome lives. The boy, we are told, “is an entertaining companion to the gay young gentlemen, his equals; and yet divines and philosophers take pleasure to have Eugenio amongst them.” Dr. Watts never deigned to tell us what requirements Eugenio set for the staid divines, or whether he tried to get away from them. And Phronissa: she stands before us now, in attitude betokening detestation of the stage, and we hear her proclaiming the song and the dance as her meanest pleasures—talents not to be proud of!

Two points are worthy of note in Dr. Watts’s book. Despite his many limitations which argued for piousness and for the composure of the youthful spirit; despite his disapproval of all exercise which might turn one’s thoughts away from the prescribed paths, he was nevertheless a pleader in the cause of advance. For what he lays down as educational theory he would have parents hearken to; in his eyes the bringing up of youth is a sacred duty, involving obligations of a delicate nature. He would emphasise the responsibility of the Home; he would have parents eager to see the moral laws obeyed by their children. He would have education applied equally as well to girls as to boys; in fact, so Dr. Watts confesses, in tones as though he were making a great concession, the habit of reading is quite as important to the former as to the latter.

Dark as the days may seem in the lives of those children educated according to theories and tracts, the lighter recreations must have brightened moments unrecorded. Even John Locke (1632–1704), in his “Thoughts on Education” (1693), recommends besides the Psalter and the New Testament, Æsop and Reynard the Fox, as good food for infant minds. This was an excellent basis to start upon.

The two small volumes of “Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children” [editions, New York: Mahlon Day; Cambridge: 1803] which I have examined, bear upon the fly-leaves tales recorded in uncertain handwriting. The one has, “To ——, a present from his Mamma”; the other, “—— his Book: If this should be lost and you should fine, Return to me, for it is mine.”

“You will find here nothing that savours of party,” says the poet in his foreword. “... As I have endeavoured to sink the language to the level of a child’s understanding, and yet to keep it, if possible, above contempt, so I have designed to profit all, if possible, and to offend none.”

Yet the usual theological doctrines reek from every page; there is much of the tenor of the “New England Primer” in the verses. The wonder is that with all their atmosphere of brimstone and sulphur, with all their effort to present to the child grown-up beliefs in simple doses, the poems still retain a spontaneity, a sweet, quaint simplicity that strike the sympathy, if they do not entirely appeal to the fancy. “His dreadful Majesty” is more suited to Milton than to a song; “How doth the little busy bee,” though not yet in accord with the lyrist’s pure, unfeigned delight in nature, is overtopping in childish appeal, “The eternal God will not disdain, To hear an infant cry.” We pit an understanding of childhood’s graces against that old-time theory of inherited ruin. There has been a revulsion of feeling which tends to bring the heart much nearer the soul, and to give to the nursery the sanctified love of good rather than the abiding fear of evil.

There is a picture in Lamb’s “Books for Children” [ed. E. V. Lucas], showing the ark with the animals in their symmetrically built stalls. The clouds are rolling over the waters with as much substantial outline as though they were balls of cotton; there is interest for a child in the close examination of this graphic art, which is done with that surety as though the artist had been on the spot. The reproduction was made from Stackhouse’s Bible, with which Mrs. Trimmer used to amuse her young folks on Sundays. Your wooden Noah’s Ark, with the sticky animals, was built along the same lines. Dr. Watts’s poems have been illustrated many times in similar conventional fashion. One cut in particular represented creation by a dreadful lion and a marvellous tiger, anatomically wonderful.

Though parts of the Bible have been paraphrased by Dr. Watts as well as such can ever be done; though ducks and lambs and doves, symbols of simplicity, take one to the open, there is no breath of clover sweeping across the page. It is by such a beautiful cradle hymn as “Holy angels guard thy bed,” which is to be treasured with Martin Luther’s exquisite “Hymn to the Christ Child,” that this poet deserves to be remembered.

Always the truest verse, the truest sentiment, the truest regard for children are detected in that retrospective tone—the eternal note of sadness, as Matthew Arnold phrases it—in which grown people speak of the realm of youth lost to them; not the sentimental stooping, not the condescending superiority,—but a yearning note brought about by the tragedy of growing up,—a yearning that passeth understanding, and that returns with every flash of the remembered child you were.

The Taylors of Ongar, the two sisters, Ann (1782–1866) and Jane (1783–1824), are the poets of the didactic era; they apply to verse the same characteristics Miss More introduced in her tracts—a sympathetic feeling, but a false tenderness. They are not doctrinal in their “Original Poems for Infant Minds,” but are generally and genuinely ethical. Their attitude is different from that of Watts; they attempt to interpret feelings and impressions in terms of the child’s own comprehension. But so far were they ruled by the customary requirements of their time, that they falsely endowed the juvenile mind with the power of correlating external beauty with its own virtuous possibilities. The simplicity of Jane’s “The Violet” and “Thank you, Pretty Cow” is marked by an unnatural discrimination on the part of the children from whom such sentiments are supposed to flow; these defects detract from many a delicate verse deserving of better acquaintance than “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

The Taylors wrote together for a number of years; they opened a field of interest in and kindness to animals; their verse abounds in the beginnings of a spontaneous love of nature. Their children troop past us, the industrious boy and the idle boy, the rich and the poor. They are not active children; their positions are fixed ones of contemplation, of inward communing, not of participation. Yet the sweet spirit predominates, and the simple words are not robbed of their purity and strength. However, their desire “to abridge every poetic freedom and figure” dragged them often into absurdities. This is the great danger in writing simple verse; unless its excellence is dominant, it shows its weakness; the outline of lyric beauty must have perfect symmetry; the slightest falsity in imagery, the slightest departure from consistency and truth, destroys the whole.[38]

Jane, when she was very small, used to edify her neighbours by preaching to them; this impulse found expression later in a series of hymns. Ann also composed religious songs which in quality are superior to those of her sister. The literary association of the two lasted until 1812, when Ann was sought in marriage by a Mr. Gilbert; this negotiation was consummated by letter before they had even met.

A further advance in the art of children’s verse was made when William Blake (1757–1827) wrote his “Songs of Innocence,” and infused into them a light spirit of grace and of joy. Strangely, he had difficulty in disposing of his poems; on this account, he determined to prepare the plates for them himself. The drawings which resulted proved to be some of his very best art work. Through his acquaintance with Godwin, he was employed to illustrate many of the books issuing from Mrs. Godwin’s publishing house, and it has not yet been fully settled whether or not he made the original illustrations for the Lambs’ “Tales from Shakespeare.” He was employed to engrave the plates for Mary Wollstonecraft’s translation of Salzmann’s “Elements of Morality.”

We detect in Blake’s verses the apt blending of grown-up regard for childhood, with the ready response of childhood to grown-up love. By his exuberance, by his fancy, by his simple treatment he set a standard which is the same that dominates the best of Wordsworth and Christina Rossetti. Stevenson later carried forward the art, by adding thereto a touch as though youth, fearful of growing up, knew something of the heavy burden of man’s estate. Thus does Blake express infant joy:

The crystal clearness in such sentiment is born of our adult reverence. Again he makes the nurse in one of his poems sing:

A child appreciates such mellow tones; there is no reaching down; the picture is distinct, reduced to its truest sentiment. It contains traceries of action, and fairest hints of beneficent nature. It gives a promise of to-morrow. There is no herding into the land of sleep. Let us away! Do you not feel the distinction of dignity in it, rather than “get you to bed”?

In Stevenson’s verse the dominant note is retrospective; he returns to childhood with his quota of world experience; he slips into the youthful state, glad of being there once more, yet knowing what it all means to have to leave it again. Night fears and day joys flow through his lines:

There is the preternatural strain of sadness in the make-up of youth; they like to discover in their elders those same characteristics they possess; they will creep to the strong arm of him who marvels as they do at the mystery of silent things. Such a one, even though grown-up, is worth while; he knows what it is to be in bed in summer with “the birds still hopping on the grass”; he knows what it is to be a child. Stevenson, the man, becomes the remembered boy.

The poetry for children that has lived is of that quality which appeals to the pristine sense of all that is fair and good and beautiful. Tender love, unfettered joy, protecting gentleness recognise no age; we, who are no longer young, look through the barred gates and up the gravel road, flanked by the dense freshness of green. Somewhere we hear the splash of water, far off we see the intense white of marble. Clinging to the iron bars outside, we watch the girl and boy, we count their footprints in the sand. They stoop to pick the violets as we stooped years ago; they look into the basin of clear water as we looked years ago. And then the path curves out of view. Here is where our appreciative contemplation of childhood becomes self-conscious; we cannot see the little ones doing what we did in years gone by. Perhaps this, perhaps that; we have our first moral doubt. Through the bars we call to the childhood of our memory; we call it to come back. The poet has but to sing of what he found beyond that bend when he was young, of the child he was, who once looked up at him from the clear depths; the boy and girl will creep down the gravel path again, they will marvel at what is told them of revolving suns, of the lost childhood, of the flight of birds, and of the shiver of grass. Let the poet but sing in true notes, making appeal to their imagery, giving them vigour in exchange for their responsiveness, and understanding in exchange for their trust; they will return, even to the iron gate, and take him by the hand. This is what it means to be the laureate of childhood.