481

FICTIONS FOR CHILDREN.*

[February 1855. Reprinted from the Prospective Review.] Books crowd the world to excess, and our children, like ourselves, suffer from plethora. Naturally omnivorous, they devour all that comes in their way, and as every uncle believes that a picture-book for the younger and a novelette for the elder scions is the most appropriate and improving present he can make, they are in general supplied with abundant provision for their undiscriminating appetites. It would be well, however, if we would enforce upon our children some degree of abstemiousness, and put some limit to their literary inquiries. Children naturally love clear images and distinct recollections, and, for the most part, they enjoy them; but it is possible to fill their minds with a confused medley of ideas, the chaotic residuum of all that has passed through their apprehensions; where Aladdin and the Little Naturalist, Captain Cook and Cinderella, Moral Tales and the Habits of Monkeys, play their shifting parts, and mingle in inextricable entanglement: The enervation of the powers attention and memory are not the only evils of allowing children constantly to turn to new resources instead of exhausting the old. It is scarcely a less evil that they never thoroughly know, and therefore never thoroughly enjoy, the best things which are set before them.

of

Any good work of art requires a very close famili

*The Rose and the Ring; or, the History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo. A fireside Pantomime for great and small Children. By Mr. M. A. Titmarsh. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1855.

A

Second

The King of the Golden River; or, the Black Brothers. Legend of Styria. Illustrated by Richard Doyle. edition. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

arity fully to taste or even fully to perceive its excellences. To appreciate Shakspere or Homer, we must know them by heart, and even then we dare not flatter ourselves that much does not remain undiscovered, while the cursory glance of the amusement-seeker passes by unrecognised the most obvious beauties. There is a picture in one of our English galleries,-a Virgin and Child,—a plain, ungainly looking child it seems, with red hair and commonplace features. You pass it by; but it bears a great name-Leonardo da Vinci: look again; devote your best attention to it for half an hour; try to perceive whether the painter had a meaning,-whether his thought did or did not go beyond painting some everyday mother and child. Look deep enough, and you will see in that infant's face, which the artist scorned to endow with physical beauty, a depth of sweetness and dignity, the fullness of whose subtle manifestation you strive in vain to fathom, and you withdraw with the humble conviction that he whom a little while ago you could have criticised compendiously is greater than you, and that you must know his work far better yet before you can form any estimate of its worth. It is so with Nature; you must live with her if you would have your eyes unsealed. Who has not felt disappointed at the first view of the mountains? Who that has dwelt among them, that has seen them cradling the gray mists or sullen with purple storms, or has been startled, when snow has fallen in the night, to see them standing in their white and ghostly garments close about him, as if they had struck their tents and stolen nearer in the darkness, hemming him in, and in their passionless tranquillity making him feel the full meaning of that poet's phrase, “the silence of the hills:" who that has seen these, and suchlike things, has been disappointed in the mountains? Who has not wondered to hear people speak of the monotony of ocean and the strange calm upon the spirits which the wide sea brings? Let him go to sea, not for a

day or for a week, but for a month, or for six months; let him see day after day the circular horizon and the vaulted blue, and night by night, as the great concave goes round, behold the climbing stars mount into the zenith, and descend and steep their shining heads in the waters, and by long familiarity he will learn something of the mystery of the "great sea."

All this is as true of a child's good story-book as of the masterpieces of art and Nature, and it is well to remember that what may appear superficial to us, may employ all his powers of cogitation, and furnish him with infinite suggestions. To oblige him, by a judicious course of restriction, to master a few good fictions adapted to the development of his capacity and imagination, so that he carries them whole in his mind, is to furnish him with an ever present source, not only of amusement, but of valuable exercise. And naturally this suits a child; he loves to be thoroughly at home with the incidents of his fiction, and will hear with ever fresh pleasure the constantly renewed tale; but the taste for constant novelty is very soon aroused, and once excited, is a spirit not easily laid.

But tales worthy of this intimate acquaintance on the part of children are not easily written. The very best are not those which have been expressly made for them, but such as have become their own by a gradual process of adaptation from the traditions and fanciful creations. of bygone times. The imagination of a child is peculiar; it is narrow, because his knowledge is limited; it is dependent rather than creative; it requires to have an object brought before it; but it is disproportionately vivid, it confounds the borders of reality and fiction, it triumphs over the reason and the senses. I state impressively that I am a bear; I go down on my hands and knees, I affect a rolling motion, I growl horribly; the resemblance is remote, to say the best of it, and the child knows I am not a bear, but his imagination is too strong for him;

half in fun and half in fear he takes refuge behind the sofa, and if you push the joke too far, his fears master him, and he has recourse to tears to save himself from being devoured. From this vividness it comes that subtleties are lost upon a child; he is happier when his imagination has much to do than when all details of likeness are supplied. Betsy Jones, who keeps a shop supplied with broken crockery, dead leaves, and mud-pies, is enjoying herself as much as, and educating herself better than, Felicia, whose wax-doll takes her evening meal from an elaborate Lilliputian tea-service. Simplicity is the key-note to the mind of a child: he likes breadth and distinctness in his figures; he abhors fine distinctions ; elaborate characters and finished incidents are a trouble to him. Let his dramatis personae have a single trait each; he loves, like Charles Dickens, to have a single characteristic by which he can lay hold of them as by a handle; let their career be marked by sharp and well defined incidents;-let their fate be conclusive. Deal with him as he does with his painting, keep your colours bright and unmixed. Fear no iteration-it is a figure he loves. He is fond of details, but of a particular sort; not those accessory ones which go to furnish out with accuracy a complicated whole, but such as are complete in themselves,-clear, minute, distinct wholes. The distant landscape, with its blended chiaroscuro, its dissolving hues, its richness of varied form, is lost upon the child; the hue of a flower, the ripple of a brook,-these charm him set him before the wild gray ocean, heavy with storm, and he gathers the shells at his feet. His sense of humour is developed before his taste for beauty, but you must be quaint, not witty, to please him. George Cruikshank is his artist, and he fails to appreciate Leech or Doyle. The child is constantly compared to a nation in its early stage, and with it he has much in common, but with the poor he has more: the simplicity of olden times-not that of morals, but that of ideas

lingers in the bases of society; they are the preservers of traditions, with which they have the most in common, and are the faithfullest depositories of the imaginative fictions of childhood. More cultivated minds appreciate these stories, but they cannot hold them and transmit them in their integrity; the sameness annoys them ; they must retouch them here and there: they give them variety and complication, and thus they spoil them. Your boy prefers his nurse's version of the fairy-tale to your own; she always puts in the same words in the same places, and that is a great matter.

The

Different nations have contributed in very different degrees to the nursery library, nor is it strange that Greece and Rome should have left us nothing. Pantheon affords no very eligible society for children, and the sensuous yet cold beauty of Attic imagination is at once above and below the sympathy of the child. So the peopled shades are deserted, and the streams flow tenantless.

"The lonely mountains o'er,

And the deserted shore,

A voice of sighing heard, and loud lament,
From haunted spring and vale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent.

With flower-inwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled
thickets mourn.'

Their literature has furnished nothing which in any degree of disintegration can supply food for children; and we who have become so entirely dependent on books, feel puzzled to think on what the classical infant mind subsisted, or how, without their assistance, the little Cimons and Platos nurtured their dawning intellects. Esop and Phædrus are no exceptions: the latter is but an earlier Gay or Lafontaine, and Æsop in all probability only a name under which fables, mostly of direct Eastern origin, passed current. At any rate, if they be al