The Choice of Literature for the Young.
by Ronald McNeill.
Volume 8, 1897, pgs. 624-630
We have seen that, though some amount of selection of literature for the young is required, there are pretty formidable difficulties in the way of carrying it out, and it is clear that it is almost impossible to formulate anything like a definite general principle for our guidance. But when we come to deal with those who are no longer quite young children--those between the ages, let us say, of thirteen and eighteen--the principles are, perhaps, rather more clearly definable. This is because reading may then be directed towards a more definite purpose, although, of course, the consideration of individual temperament must still be kept in view. With quite young children (say, under twelve years old), I suppose the main purpose of books is to amuse, to occupy the mind, to form the habit of reading. But as the mind matures, literature should begin to be something more high and serious than this. Not that these cease to be a function of books, but that they acquire a larger meaning, and that to them something more high and serious is added.
Mere "amusement" merges in a higher species of delight, for which "amusement" is an inadequate and inappropriate term; occupation of mind remains a good aim, but it becomes of paramount importance that the occupation be a worthy and not an unworthy one; the habit of reading requires still to be encouraged, but it will also require to be directed into definite channels and concentrated towards definite ends. Here, then, is a clear objective for the aim of those who have to choose literature for the young after the age of early childhood. Reversing the order of the aims just enumerated, the end in view is to guide the choice of books so as to form a habit of systematic, not of desultory, reading; so as to occupy the mind with the best thoughts of the best writers; and to show the delight that such reading must give if it is to have any effect beyond a graceful waste of time. In other words, the aim is--culture, according to the definition of that greatly abused and misused word given by Matthew Arnold--"to know the best that has been thought and said."
But before it is possible to find that delight in the best that has been thought and said, which is essential to any true knowledge of it, it is necessary to be able in some measure to recognise what is best; not only to be able to tell the good from the bad, but the good from the best. We have to learn to know what is good in literature as we learn to know good wine: by education of the literary palate. We have to awaken the critical faculty, and when it is awake, train it. As Montesquieu says, "The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being still more intelligent."
Unhappily, there is no infallible recipe for training the critical faculty, no recognised method, no accepted school. We live in a period not only of literary mediocrity, but of literary anarchy. Authority is scouted. We have no kings by divine right, no dictators of unchallenged perogative.
But there must be some way of saving our children from falling into the literary criminal classes and preferring Marie Corelli to [George] Meredith, or holding an opinion of Shakespeare like that of King George IV or Mr. Bernard Shaw. We have all heard of the girl who in a "Confession Album" entered as her favourite poets, "Shakespeare and Mrs. Hemans"! How are such sad things as these to be avoided? I know of no prescription unless it be that of Guinevere in Tennyson's Idyll--"We needs must love the highest when we see it." But the "seeing" must be an early acquired habit. The only [way] is to have a high standard of excellence presented to us early. Care must be taken, however, not to force the pace. You must not expect or wish children of one age to appreciate what is only suitable for the digestion of another age. You would not expect a boy of fifteen or sixteen to derive from Wordsworth--
"Sensations
sweet
Felt
in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into the purer mind, with tranquil restoration."
[from Tintern Abbey]
For Wordsworth, like milk pudding, is simple and wholesome, but the taste for his verses only comes with maturer years; and "tranquil restoration" is the last thing needed by a healthy school-boy. Still less, of course, would you expect a youth to find pleasure in The Ring and the Book [Browning], or In Memoriam [Tennyson], and if you were to be foolish enough to select such things for his reading, you would have only yourself to blame if he went through life with the conviction that "poetry is all 'rot.'"
But give him Marmion [Scott], and The Lady of the Lake [Scott], and The Revenge [Tennyson], The Relief of Lucknow [Powell? Or Tennyson's Defence of Lucknow?], and a little later Enoch Arden [Tennyson], The Idylls of the King [Tennyson], and Childe Harold [Browning]. The fancy will be caught by the romance, the ear captivated by the rhyme and rhythm, the sense of fitness will gradually respond to the appropriateness of epithet and metaphor and imagery. Later on, the attention will fasten on the curiosa felicitas of verbal nicety, and, as the mind and taste expand, the fitness of poetic expression and poetic method as a vehicle for high thought comes to be recognised. And if the taste be thus trained by the habit of seeing these tools used by master hands, it will acquire the power of detecting the botched work of fumblers; of discriminating, as Carlyle says, between the artist and artisan; of feeling instinctively the contrast of whatever is trivial, weak, shallow or mediocre. For, if we think of it, the critical faculty, like every other faculty, is something that, in greater or less degree, is latent within each of us. You cannot implant within by any process from outside; you can only draw it out from within and develop it by suitable exercise, just as you develop the boy's biceps in the gymnasium or his lungs in the football field.
And so your choice of literature should be like the choice of exercises by the gymnastic instructor, suited to the age and capacity of the individual, but all directed towards attaining, as far as possible, to the same ideal. He will not set a small boy to a feat performed by a professional "Strong Man" at the Aqarium, nor will you select Samson Agonistes [Milton] for a child's reading. But he will train the growing muscles with light dumb bells and easy trapeze work, gradually increasing weight and difficulty, but always with the standard of the strong man in his mind, and always adapted to the boy's development at the moment. In the same way, you will guide the reading of your young people by setting before them always what is excellent of its kind, always suited to their development of taste and power at the moment, and always with the aim of leading them to recognise the minute gradations of literary excellence.
The biographer of that extraordinarily gifted woman, Jenny Lind [Memoir of Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt, Holland], tells us that, although her judgments of books, as of everything else, were touched by genius, yet, because she had had no systematic literary training in her youth, she was always "at the mercy of any book that interested her." That is an admirable description. How many are "at the mercy of any book that interests them"! What is meant is, of course, that if the story of a novel, or the subject matter of a book interests them, they are blind to its faults from the literary point of view--faults of style, of construction, of language, of proportion; just as they may be blind to the daubiness of a picture if it presents and interesting subject matter, and thus fail to perceive wherein likes the superiority of a Tintoretto or a Gainsborough to some cheap print telling a melodramatic story. And the converse is equally true--if the story of a novel is not to their liking, or the characters not such as they would care to live with, it may be faultlessly constructed, written with an exquisite fitness of words and perfection of style, and the material handled with that broad sane judgment and artistic balance that denotes the hand of a master, and full of strong thought and keen insight, without appealing in the least to their instinct of beauty. Newman tells us--or is it Dean Church?- that during the Catholic revival at Oxford, no one would acknowledge Milton to be a great poet. Compare this with the delightful appreciation of the great Puritan shown by Mr. Frederick Harrison, who certainly has as little care for Protestant theology as Newman himself. The man or woman who can thus discriminate between the best and what is only second-rate, gets from books the highest pleasure, just as the highest pleasure in music is reserved for him who has no doubts as to the relative places of a Beethoven and a Gounod, a Wagner and a Meyerbeer.
But, of course, there is far more in it than mere pleasure. The influence of literature, subtle as it is and hard to define, is one of the most important elements in education, if education is the formation of character and the development of faculty; for it is the influence which more than anything else gives us--whether we naturally belong to the Barbarians or the Philistines--some measure of sweetness and light.
This may be thought a digression. But my purpose is to show that in choosing literature for the young, our object should be to draw out this latent critical faculty by always presenting a high standard proportionate to their stage of development. It will be remembered that one of the aims we set out with was to form the habit of methodical, not desultory reading. If you read two books on the same subject from different stand-points, the impression left is more than double what remains after reading one only. The habit of concentration may be stimulated by encouraging the association of reading with some other pursuit, or with the child's regular lessons, though it will probably be best not to let it appear too openly that that is your object. Thus if children are learning some English History, it will not be difficult to find stories by Miss Yonge or Mr. Henty, and above all--if the children are not too young--by Sir Walter himself, which will excite their intensest interest in the period they are reading about; or if the children love as they should their pencils and paint brushes, and are as eagerly on the outlook for subjects as a hungry journalist for "copy," you can take down Kingsley's Heroes or Professor [Alfred] Church's lovely stories from Homer, or some one of the many excellent children's versions of the Arthurian legends, or the Nibelungenlied [Song of the Nibelungs], and tell them to read a story and then paint an illustration of it. Or again, perhaps you have lately been to the Lyceum [Theater, London]. You tell them about the play you have seen and excite their interest. This will serve as an introduction to Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare or even to the plays themselves.
Happily, there is no difficulty nowadays in finding books which will interest and at the same time present a high standard. But just as in the case of poetry we should be careful not to go too fast--not to set Wordsworth or Browning before those who can as yet only digest Scott, or Tennyson's ballads, or Macaulay's Lays--so, in prose fiction we naturally should not expect mere children to worship at the shrine of George Meredith or even to perceive the richness of Daniel Deronda [Eliot] and Middlemarch [Eliot]. But it is a happy thing for modern children that writers in the front rank of authors are willing to devote themselves to producing books for children--books, moreover, which from the excellence of their literary qualities, no one can be too old to enjoy--such books, for instance, as Mrs. Ewing's and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's stories, or the Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling. For a later period there are the splendid romances of [Robert Louis] Stevenson, with his grand original style, acquired, as he has told us, by "playing the sedulous ape" to older masters. Then in good time, as the mind grows and thought begins to be more active in investigation and reflection on human character and the puzzles of the situations of life, they will be ready to read Thackeray with some appreciation, and to be entranced by Silas Marner, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss [Eliot].
One of the great functions of reading, and especially of novel reading (which is, in reality, one of the most important influences in education) is to widen the sympathies by throwing the reader into a larger circle of life than his own; by putting on his head Teufelsdröckh's magic hat [from Sartor Resartus, Carlyle], that annihilates time and space. This is what the great books do so magnificently, and what the second- and third-rate books do so miserably and falsely. Think of the splendid series of experiences that becomes the possession of the boy or girl when first they have read through the eight great books of George Eliot. What a world is opened up even by a single novel like Romola; what sympathies are stirred by Adam Bede; what insight into the misunderstandings that flow from mere differences of character is the gift of The Mill on the Floss; what realisation of the struggle between generous ideals and mean circumstances is awakened by Middlemarch!
If the taste of young people be gradually formed and developed by such steps and such standards as these, until they arrive at love for Stevenson, Scott, Austen, the Brontes, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, they will at least have a fair chance of escape from being "at the mercy of every book that interests them," or of being captivated by Superfluous Women [Livermore?], Women Who Did [Allen], Heavenly Twins [Grand], Mighty Atoms [Corelli], and the rest of the ephemeral brood. They will gain too sensitive an ear to desire Keynotes or Discords.
But all this leaves one important consideration untouched. What, it may be asked, is to be done with that class of books which no one can deny to possess high literary merit, but which treat "objectionable" topics with greater realism of presentment than is to be found in the older and greater masterpieces like Adam Bede or Rhoda Fleming [Meredith]? Would not the very principles here advocated lead young people to read with admiration such books as Mr. George Moore's Esther Waters, and the later works of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy; and is that a conclusion in which a right-minded parent ought to acquiesce? Here again one is met by the impossibility of framing any answer of universal application. But the nearest approach to a general rule seems to be, that while openly enforced prohibition is often harmful, such books as these are really almost incapable of doing any true injury to the character of any boy or girl, provided they have been carefully and wisely brought up. Of course, what has been said in preceding pages, respecting age and temperament, is here specially applicable. Mere children would be almost as unlikely to read twenty pages of Jude the Obscure [Hardy] as twenty lines of Sordello [Browning's notoriously difficult poem]; and if they did it would be about equally injurious to them. Before they reach the age when such a book would have any attraction for them, their knowledge should be such that the book would have nothing to teach them as to matters of simple fact. And if that were so, what would there be in it to hurt them? Once get rid of the notion--and we whose children will be the children of the twentieth century must get rid of it whether we like it or not--that we can bring our girls to the threshold of womanhood, if not even beyond it, equipped in ignorance--get rid of this notion, and our alarm at much of the literature we find on each other's drawing-room tables will be found to have no sufficient foundation.
By all means let those who cannot shake off this alarm be careful, so far as possible, to keep such books from falling in the way of their school girls (our boys, who probably require protection much more than their sisters, we never think of protecting once they have gone to school at about ten!); but depend upon it, that if the volumes that are in every friend's house from the circulating library if not your own, are placed upon a prohibited list, you are more likely to arouse a dangerous curiousity and perhaps provoke deception and the tasting of forbidden fruit, than you are to shield your child from any real danger lurking on the printed pages.
[Ronald McNeill, 1st Baron Cushendun, northern Ireland 1861-1934, was a British Conservative. He edited the St. James Gazette, and Encyclopedia Britannica.]
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