learned, but was not taught; that what the mind was ready for the mind received, that what
the mind was not ready for fell away and was forgotten. Therefore the true end of
education as such must be to train the mind. Another truism, you will say. Granted but how
is this same training to be done?
The last generation believed in the old classical education; they had forgotten why in
many cases, but the prejudice remained that Greek and Latin were the best training. The
reason was a perfectly valid one: Greek and Latin were hard to learn and needed brain
application, also they could not be learnt by rote; the boy had to use his mind and his
imagination, and, being accustomed to using his mind and imagination in his studies, he
brought them to bear on other things as well.
We have not dropped the old classical education entirely, but we have added many other
things to it, and in so doing have diminished the amount of time and thought given to it,
and consequently the amount of benefit to be derived from it. Of the things which we have
added, some are really good, others appear so, but the total effect does not seem so very
far in advance of the old method after all.
Our children are turned out with a smattering of many subjects, but can we say that
they are any better educated than the men and women that preceded them? Are they better
equipped for life? do they find the problems that they have to solve easier of solution?
For there is one great fault in our educational systems to-day; they teach, but they do
not train; and the one faculty without which no other can come to fruition is never really
trained at all, for we cannot deny that imagination is forced to strive against adverse
circumstances both at home and in school.
Years ago, before the education of little children was considered so important a
subject as it is now, lessons were given in certain well-defined subjects; reading,
writing, and ciphering (as it was then called) formed the staple of the school course,
supplemented by geography, Latin, and, in the case of little girls, sewing.
Dreary enough these lessons must have been, for a-b, ab, many times repeated
fails to germinate any interesting train of thought, and pot-hooks and hangers scrawled in
interminable succession with a squeaky slate pencil on a slate leave the imagination cold.
But even if the lessons themselves were not in the least alluring, this same
imagination wag stimulated by the best of all methods, by the good old-fashioned fairy
story; either told by some old nurse, or read out of enchanting books with innumerable
quaint woodcuts, so that forever after the names of certain tales were inseparably bound
up with the woodcuts in question, and to name the one was to see the other. There was no
moral hidden away in these stories, except the wholesome one that the good always
triumphed in the end; their aim was to amuse, to charm, and even sometimes to terrify, to
beguile the child along the paths of unreality into the great and beautiful world of
romance. Romance is a grasp of the ideal, an endeavour to express by symbols the great
truths of life. Wedded to rhythm, it becomes poetry. It is the striving of the soul after
the unattainable. And into this rich world the little child entered through the portals of
the fairy story, as thousands of years before the nations in their childhood had entered;
as the Nibelungen Lied, the Norse sagas, and the myths of every land are here to testify.
But to-day the fairy story is discountenanced, or if the child is beguiled into reading
a book purporting to be about a certain Jack Frost, a sprightly elf, he speedily discovers
that he is really reading a treatise on the action of frost. One child’s magazine
absolutely forbids fairy stories, and in all, information, whether given outright or
cleverly disguised as in the Jack Frost story, preponderates. This is a work-a-day world
and solid information is at a premium. So we have ‘Life in a Lighthouse,’ ‘ Careers of
Danger and Daring,’ ‘How a Big City is Lighted,’ ‘The Children’s Room at the
Smithsonian" ‘English Public Schools,’ ‘The Fairy Land of Science,’ and many more
articles and books, very informing, doubtless, but doubtless also very uninspiring.
These deal with the facts of life, and facts are most important things, but fancies are
important too, and the fancies are not much cultivated today.
It is doubtful if fancy can be cultivated directly, it is too subtle and elusive, it
must grow of itself, but conditions can be made conducive or the reverse. To be conducted
through the realms of poetry and romance by a grown-up person, as one of a class of
children all with differing needs and perceptions, at a given rate of speed, is not
conducive to such growth.
To gain the greatest amount out of a book, one must read it as inclination leads; some
parts are to be hurried over quickly, others read slowly and many times over; the mind
will take what it needs, and dwell upon it, and make it its own.
Its connotations are really what make a book of use in stimulating the imagination. As
a musical note is richer the more overtones it has, so a book is richer the more it
ramifies into trains of thought. But there must be time and space for the thought to
develop; the reader must not be interrupted by impertinent comments and alien suggestions.
We all hate the poetry we learnt in school. Why? Is it because it was in school that we
learnt it, or is it because the conditions were such that we never really learnt it at
all, the fine inner sense of it and its beauty of expression were both hidden from us?
Children never know why a thing is beautiful, but if their taste has not been perverted
they often feel that it is so. This feeling can be cultivated and improved until the time
comes when the child can know why.
There are two ways in which books stimulate the imagination; one is by beauty of
thought, the other is by beauty of form. It takes a much wiser head than a little child’s
to say why certain combinations of words are beautiful, but even a little child can feel
their charm. A story well told and a story ill told are as the poles asunder. At first one
might deny that a child could have artistic perception enough to notice the difference.
But that would be merely to confuse with technical jargon. The primary test of good
writing is really very simple. It consists in the effect produced. The well-told story
will make the child thrill with delight, its scenes will be real to him, its people his
own dear friends; the ill-told story will not keep his attention, and nothing in it will
interest him much.
For the object of writing is to produce a given effect. The writing will be good
acc9rding as the effect is produced or not. Simple actions are easily described; the old
spelling-book did not need to be possessed of much literary ability when it told us that
‘The boy is on the box,’ but it was good writing as far as it went. From that to
Shakespeare’s poetry and Pater’s prose is merely a question of degree. The effect is
infinitely more subtle, more penetrating, but the words are equally adequate, and convey
the meaning in the same succinct manner.
At first the child merely knows that this story or that story is interesting, that
certain other stories are not interesting, he does not attempt to analyse why. Later he
will make his first true criticism; he will say, ‘It does not seem real,’ or ‘Nobody would
do so.’ He has detected bad writing; his imagination refuses to give credence to what its
instinct declares not to be true. Gradually these criticisms of matter are added to by
criticisms of form, and we have ‘Nobody would talk like that.’
What makes the child think that nobody would do thus and so, or that nobody would talk
in such and such a way? Partly his knowledge of life as he has lived it, of course. Though
he has lived a very small life and his experiences have necessarily been few, yet through
the life of his imagination he has been able to live much more, he has gained a conception
of life far beyond anything that he has ever experienced.
If one can imagine oneself a child of twelve years old denuded of any knowledge or idea
of anything except what he can have known or seen in his daily life, one will at once see
how much more meagre his conceptions would be than is actually the case. Therefore what
makes the child think that this or that thing that he is reading about is false is the
knowledge that he has gained through his imagination.
The power of judgment is like water running up hill; water cannot rise higher than its
own level, and judgment cannot go beyond the experience which informs it. To be sure that
the judgment is sound, the school in which the experience is gained must be true to life.
Only the best in literature and art is this, and it is with the best in literature and art
that our children must be familiar.
There is a popular impression that so-called ‘children’s books’ are the proper reading
for children, and certainly very few children’s books can be classed as belonging to the
best in literature. But also the really great books are few in any literature, and there
is much inspiration and profit to be got from books below this highest grade. Homer,
Dante, and Shakespeare are like mountain-peaks, the horizon is wider on the heights, the
air purer and more invigorating; but literature has its byways, and shady lanes, and quiet
sequestered places as well, and because we enjoy mountain-climbing does not prove that
there is no profit to be got in rambling through these simpler paths.
Many books purporting to be written for children are very good, have become classics,
indeed; ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’ George Macdonald’s ‘Princess
and the Goblin,’ and Thackeray’s ‘The Rose and the Ring’ come under this class. But the
mass of children’s books are poor, with a poverty only varying in degree. This brings us
to the question of whether children’s reading should be confined to juvenile books.
The old argument that children do not understand grown-up books is really a
groundless one. Some books written for older people are more enjoyed in childhood than
they ever will be later. Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ is a good example of this, and in the
case of many people it would be true also of the novels of both Scott and Dickens.
Even in cases where the full meaning is only faintly grasped, there is often much
pleasure to be gained and consequently much profit. This is especially true of poetry.
Children are often captivated by poetry which they cannot possibly understand, and the
charm lies partly in the images it conjures up and partly in the music of the syllables;
the main purport of the poem remaining forever concealed. But who shall say that this
enjoyment in something so balanced and beautiful as a great poem has not a stimulating
effect upon the imagination?
James Russell Lowell has told us that when he was a very little boy his sister used to
read him to sleep with Spenser’s ‘Faery Queen! It was the first poem he ever heard and he
was very fond of it, but it was not until many years later that he discovered that it had
a double meaning. How much his early intimacy with Spenser and other authors of the same
class had in determining the extreme delicacy of his literary perception it is impossible
to tell, but it is certain that it was not without effect.
It is always difficult to decide how much early environment has to do with later
development, but all education is based on the belief that it has much to do with it, and
one could cite instance after instance to prove this theory.
There is a remarkable example in the case of Charlotte Bronte. Her style has great
vigour and beauty. It is exquisitely proportioned, quick, sure, and subtle. This seems
extraordinary in the daughter of a poor country clergyman, whose nominal education was got
at an inferior boarding school, whose life was passed in a little country town, only
varied by a few attempts at teaching as a governess in the country houses of richer
families, and by one year and ten months in a pension in Brussels. But when we consider
what her reading was as a child it does not seem so strange. In Mrs. Ward’s introduction
to ‘Jane Eyre,’ in the Haworth edition of Miss Bronte’s novels, is the following passage:
‘There were no children’s books at Haworth Parsonage. The children were nourished upon the
food of their elders: the Bible, Shakespeare, Addison, Johnson, Sheridan, Cowper for the
past; Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, "Blackwood’s Magazine,"
"Fraser’s Magazine," and Leigh Hunt for the moderns; on a constant supply of
newspapers, Whig and Tory Charlotte once said to a friend that she had taken an interest
in politics since she was five years old; on current biographies, such as Lockhart’s
"Life of Burns," Moore’s "Lives of Byron and Sheridan, Southey’s
"Nelson," Wolfe’s "Remains"; and on miscellaneous readings of old
Methodist magazines, Mrs. Rowe’s "Letters from the Dead to the Living," the
"British Essayists," collected from the "Rambler," the
"Mirror," and elsewhere, and stories from the "Lady’s Magazine." They
breathed, therefore, as far as books were concerned, a bracing and stimulating air from
the beginning. Nothing was softened or adapted for them.’
It will be objected that Charlotte Bronte was a genius, that her reading alone would
never have enabled her to write as she did. True; but even genius needs to be trained!
But what has style to do with imagination, some people will ask? Style has everything
to do with imagination. A really good style cannot exist without imagination. As the test
of good writing is in the effect produced, and the object of all writing is to produce a
given effect, so that effect must be first clear to the mind of the writer, and this
requires imagination.
The writer conceives of his idea through the power of imagination, and through the
power of imagination the idea takes form again in the reader’s mind; the vehicle of
transmission is the writer’s style. The more fully developed the imagination of both
writer and reader, and the more adequate the style, the more perfectly transmitted is the
idea.
Imagination is behind all the great things that have been said and done in the world.
All the great discoveries, all the great reforms, they have all been imagined first. Not a
poem has been written, not a sermon preached, not an invention perfected, but has been
first conceived.
And yet imagination must take a second place to-day and give room for the learning of
so-called useful things!
In a list of the books for boys and girls in a large public library near Boston,
the subjects are divided under headings. ‘Poetry’ takes up only a part of one page out of
a catalogue of twenty-nine pages; ‘Fairy Tales and Folk-Lore’ have another page, while one
page and a half is devoted to ‘Inventions and Occupations’ and one page to ‘Outdoor Life.’
Of course some of the books that come under other headings, such as ‘Famous Old Stories’
and ‘Other Countries,’ axe really good literature, but appallingly few. Leaving out those
sections devoted to ‘Younger Readers’ and ‘For Older Boys and Girls,’ that is, taking the
middle section which is especially adapted for children of the grammar-school age, I find,
out of a total of four hundred and seven books, the only ones which could be considered
good literature are Aldrich’s ‘Story of a Bad Boy,’ Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ Hughes’s
‘Tom Brown’s -’School Days,’ Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island,’ Mark Twain’s ‘The Prince and
the Pauper,’ Mary Mapes Dodge’s ‘Hans Brinker,’ Kipling’s’ Jungle Book,’ Bunyan’s
‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ Hawthorne’s ‘Wonder Book," Tanglewood Tales,’
and ‘Grandfather’s Chair,’ ‘ The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey,’ Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and
‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ Malory’s ‘King Arthur,’ Shakespeare (the Ben Greet
Edition), ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ and Marryat’s ‘Masterman Ready’ and ‘Children of the New
Forest.’
The poetry list is unaccountably inadequate, consisting almost entirely of individual
poems. The only volumes listed are: Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline’ and ‘Hiawatha,’ Macaulay’s