Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1897 — FALLACY OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS. [ARTICLE]

FALLACY OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS.

Notion of the Writers that They Moat Be on the Level of the Infant Mind. They have succeeded, according to Harper’s Magazine. They have got below the level of any kind of mind. They are as mediocre and almost as commonplace as half the novels that are bought and read by adults. Is domestic twaddle, because it is printed, of service to any mind, young or old? The ponderous Dr. Johnson lived when the attempt to dilute the minds of children was Just beginning to be made, and he characterized It with his usual directness and good sense. In that inexhaustible and wholly charming storehouse of anecdote and entertainment, Johnsonian Miscellanies, edited my Birkbeck Hill, there Is a record of Johnson’s disapproval of putting Nerwbery’s books Into the bands of children as too trlflipg to engage their attention. “Babies,” he said, “do not want to hear about babies, they like to be told of giants and castles, and of something that can stretch and stimulate their minds.’’ They like genuine stories, and a genuine story has always a strong flavor of human nature or some supernatural Hfe in it. -It is quite true that the young mind wants the stories put into simple language, without superfluous flourishes—just as the signs used by deaf mutes discard everything that does not directly produce the image of the mind. The signs approach the linguistic simplicity of “Aesop’s Fables.” And this “necessity for simplicity is the apology for some of the books written especially for children—that is, the class represented by Lamb’s “Tales from Sliakspeare,” and prose tales from Homer, and generally the Greek legends and the fairy stories and mediaeval narratives, half-super-natural. The “reductions” of good books for the use of children are, however, on the borderland of the admissive, and in most cases it is better for the children, as soon as they can read easily, to read Shakspeare and a good translation of Homer, or have them read to them. If the real things are not put into their hands they will read something, and go on and enfeeoie their minds with the attractive volumes that are prettily illustrated, and require not so much mental effort as the conversation at a little giii’jLHtea party.