The World's Best Books : A Key to the Treasures of Literature Part 16

Emerson's Essays (d. R. D. C.); especially those on Manners, Gifts, Love, Friendship, The Poet, and on Representative Men.

Demosthenes on the Crown. (m. R. D. C. G.)

Burke's Warren Hastings Oration. (m. R. D. C. G.)

Phillips' Speeches on Lovejoy and Garrison. (m. R. D. C. G.)

La Fontaine's Fables. (m. R. D.)

Short Biographies of the World's Hundred Greatest Men. (m. R. D.)

Marshall's Life of Washington. (m. R. D. G.)

Carlyle's Cromwell. (m. R. D. G.)

Tennyson's In Memoriam. (d. R. D. C.)

Byron's Childe Harold. (m. R. D. C.)

Burns' Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night. (m. R. D.)

Keats' Endymion. (d. R. D. C.)

Sh.e.l.ley's Prometheus Unbound. (d. R. D. C. G.)

Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. (m. R. D. C.)

Goldsmith's Deserted Village. (m. R. D. C.)

Pope's Essay on Man. (m. R. D. C.)

Thomson's Seasons. (m. R. D. C.)

CHILDREN.

So far we have spoken of reading for grown people. Now we must deal with the reading of young folks,--a subject of the utmost importance. For to give a child good habits of reading, to make him like to read and master strong, pure books,--books filled with wisdom and beauty,--and equally eager to shun bad books, is to do for him and the world a service of the highest possible character; and to neglect the right care of a child in this matter is to do him an injury far greater than to mutilate his face or cut off his arm.

WHAT TO GIVE THE CHILDREN.

Parents, teachers, and others interested in the welfare of young people have not only to solve the problem of selecting books for their own nourishment, but also the more difficult problem of providing the young folks with appropriate literary food. As literature may be made one of the most powerful influences in the development of a child, the greatest care should be taken to make the influence true, pure, and tender, and give it in every respect the highest possible character, which requires as much care to see that bad books do not come into the child's possession and use, as to see that good books do. The ability to read adds to life a wonderful power, but it is a power for evil as well as good. As Lowell says, "It is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination,--to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moments. It enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time. More than that, it annihilates time and s.p.a.ce for us,--reviving without a miracle the Age of Wonder, and endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness." Yes, but it opens our minds to the thoughts of the vile as well as to those of the virtuous; it unlocks the prisons and haunts of vice as well as the school and the church; it drags us through the sewer as well as gives us admission to the palace; it feeds us on filth as well as the finest food; it pours upon our souls the deepest degradation as well as the spirit of divinity. Parents will do well to keep from their children such books as Richardson's "Pamela" and "Clarissa Harlowe;" Fielding's "Joseph Andrews," "Jonathan Wild," and "Tom Jones;"

Smollett's "Humphrey Clinker," "Peregrine Pickle," and "Adventures of an Atom;" Sterne's "Tristram Shandy;" Swift's "Gulliver," and their modern relatives. Many of these coa.r.s.e pictures of depravity and microscopic a.n.a.lyses of filth I cannot read without feeling insulted by their vulgarity, as I do when some one tells an indecent story in my presence.

Whatever the power or wit of a book, if its motive is not high and its expression lofty, it should not come into contact with any life, at least until its character is fixed and hardened in the mould of virtue beyond the period of plasticity that might receive the imprint of the badness in the book. There are plenty of splendid books that are pure and enn.o.bling as well as strong and humorous,--more of them than any one person can ever read,--so that there is no necessity of contact with imperfect literature. If a boy comes into possession of a book that he would not like to read aloud to his mother or sister, he has something that is not good for him to read,--something that is not altogether the very best for anybody to read. Some liberty of choice, however, ought to be allowed the children. It will add much to the vigor and enthusiasm of a boy's reading if, instead of prescribing the precise volume he is to have at each step, he is permitted to make his own selection from a list of three or four chosen by the person who is guiding him. What these three or four should be, is the problem. I cannot agree with Lowell, when he says that young people ought to "confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or, still better, choose some one great author and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him." It is possible to know something of people in general about me without neglecting my best friends. It is possible to enjoy the society of Shakspeare, Goethe, aeschylus, Dante, Homer, Plato, Spencer, Scott, Eliot, Marcus Aurelius, and Irving, without remaining in ignorance of the power and beauty to be found in Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron, Burns, Goldsmith, Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, Ingersoll, Omar, Arnold, Brooks, and Robertson, Curtis, Aldrich, Warner, Jewett, Burroughs, Bulwer, Tourgee, Hearn, Kingsley, MacDonald, Hawthorne, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Ruskin, Hugo, Bronte, Sienkiewicz, and a host of others. Scarcely a day pa.s.ses that I do not spend a little time with Shakspeare, Goethe, aeschylus, Spencer, and Irving; but I should be sorry to have any one of those I have named beyond call at any time. There are parts of Holmes, Lowell, Brooks, Emerson, Omar, Arnold, Tourgee, and Hearn that are as dear to me as any pa.s.sages of equal size in Goethe or Irving. So it does not seem best to me to _confine_ the attention to the supreme books; a just _proportion_ is the true rule. Let the supreme books have the supreme attention, absorb them, print them on the brain, carry them about in the heart, but give a due share of time to other books. I like the suggestion of Marietta Holley: "I would feed children with little sweet crumbs of the best of books, and teach them that a whole rich feast awaited them in the full pages," only taking care in each instance that the crumb is well rounded, the picture not torn or distorted. There are paragraphs and pages in many works of the second rank that are equal to almost anything in the supreme books, and superior to much the latter contain. These pa.s.sages should be sought and cherished; and the work of condensing the thought and beauty of literature--making a sort of literary prayer-book--is an undertaking that ought not to be much longer delayed. Until it is done, however, there is no way but to read widely, adapting the speed and care to the value of the volume. Some things may be best read by deputy, as Mark Twain climbed the Alps by agent; newspapers, for example, and many of the novels that flame up like a haystack on fire, and fade like a meteor in its fall, striking the earth never to rise again. The time that many a young man spends upon newspapers would be sufficient to make him familiar with a dozen undying books every year. Newspapers are not to be despised, but they should not be allowed to crowd out more important things. I keep track of the progress of events by reading the "Outlook" in the "Christian Union" every week, and glancing at the head-lines of the "Herald" or "Journal," reading a little of anything specially important, or getting an abstract from a friend who always reads the paper. A good way to economize time is for a number of friends to take the same paper, the first page being allotted to one, the second to another, and so on, each vocally informing the others of the substance of his page. If time cannot be found for both the newspaper and the cla.s.sic, the former, not the latter, should receive the neglect.

This matter of the use of time is one concerning which parents should strive to give their children good habits from the first. If you teach a child to economize time, and fill him with a love of good books, you ensure him an education far beyond anything he can get in the university,--an education that will cease only with his life. The creation of a habit of industrious study of books that will improve the character, develop the powers, and store the mind with force and beauty,--that is the great object.

A good example is the best teacher. It is well for parents to keep close to the child until he grows old enough to learn how to determine for himself what he should read (which usually is not before fifteen or twenty, and in many cases never); for children, and grown folks too for that matter, crave intellectual as much as they do physical companionship.

The methods of guiding the young in the paths of literature fall naturally into two groups,--the first being adapted to childhood not yet arrived at the power of reading alone, the second adapted to later years. There is no sharp line of division or exclusion, but only a general separation; for the methods peculiarly appropriate to each period apply to some extent in the other. Some children are able to read weighty books at three or four years of age, but most boys and girls have to plod along till they are eight or ten before they can read much alone. I will consider the periods of child life I have referred to, each by itself.

=The Age of Stories=.--It is not necessary or proper to wait until a child can read, before introducing it to the best literature. Most of the books written for children have no permanent value, and most of the reading books used in primary and grammar schools contain little or no genuine literature, and what they do contain is in fragments. Portions of good books are useful, if the story of each part is complete, but children do not like the middle of a story without the beginning and end; they have the sense of entirety, and it should be satisfied. And it is not difficult to do this. Literature affords a mult.i.tude of beautiful stories of exceeding interest to children, and of permanent attractiveness through all the after years of their lives. Such literature is as available, as a means of teaching the art of reading, as is the trash in dreary droning over which the precious years of childhood are spent in our public schools. The development of the child mind follows the same course as the development of the mind of the race.

The little boy loves the wonderful and the strong, and nearly everything is wonderful to him except himself. Living things especially interest him. Every child is a born naturalist; his heart turns to birds and beasts, flowers and stars. He is hungry for stories of animals, giants, fairies, etc. Myths and fairy tales are his natural food. His power of absorbing and retaining them is marvellous. One evening a few weeks ago a little boy who is as yet scarcely able to read words of two and three letters asked me for a story. I made an agreement with him that whatever I told him, he should afterward repeat to me, and then gave him the story of the elephant who squirted muddy water over the cruel tailor that p.r.i.c.ked his trunk with a needle. No sooner had I finished than he threw his arms around my neck and begged for another story. I told him eight in rapid succession, some of them occupying three or four minutes, and then asked him to tell me about the elephants, dogs, bears, etc., that I had spoken of. He recited every story with astonishing accuracy and readiness, and apparently without effort, and would have been ready for eight more bits of Wood or Andersen, if his bedtime had not intervened. If parents would take as much pains to satisfy the mind hunger of their children as they do to fulfil their physical wants, and give them the best literature as well as the best beef and potatoes, the boys and girls would have digested the greater part of mythology, natural science, and the best fiction by the time they are able to read.

Children should be fed with the literature that represents the childhood of the race. Out of that literature has grown all literature. Give a child the contents of the great books of the dawn, and you give him the best foundation for subsequent literary growth, and in after life he will be able to follow the intricate interweaving of the old threads throughout all modern thought. He has an immense affinity for those old books, for they are full of music and picturesqueness, teeming with vigorous life, bursting with the strange and wonderful. In the following list parents and teachers will find abundant materials for the culture of the little ones, either by reading aloud to them, or still better by telling them the substance of what they have gathered by their own reading of these famous stories and ditties. Pictures are always of the utmost value in connection with books and stories, as they impart a vividness of conception that words alone are powerless to produce. One plea for sincerity I must make,--truth and frankness from the cradle to the grave. Do not delude the children. Do not persuade them that a fairy tale is history. I have a sad memory of my disgust and loss of confidence in human probity when I discovered the mythical character of Kriss Kringle, and I believe many children are needlessly shocked in this way.

_List of Materials for Story-telling and for the Instruction and Amus.e.m.e.nt of Childhood._

"Mother Goose," "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," "Jack the Giant-Killer," "Three Bears," "Red Riding-Hood," "The Ark,"

"Hop o' my Thumb," "Puss in Boots," "Samson," "Ugly Duckling,"

"The Horse of Troy" (Virgil), "Daniel in the Lion's Den," etc.

Andersen's "Fairy Tales." Delightful to all children.

Grimm's "Fairy Tales."

De Garmo's "Fairy Tales."

Craik's "Adventures of a Brownie."

"Parents' a.s.sistant," by Maria Edgeworth, recommended by George William Curtis, Mary Mapes Dodge, Charles Dudley Warner, etc.

"Zigzag Journeys," a series of twelve books, written by Hezekiah b.u.t.terworth, one of the editors of the "Youth's Companion." As might be supposed, they are among the very best and most enduringly popular books ever written for young people.

Wood's books of Anecdotes about Animals, and many other works of similar character, that may be obtained from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 19 Milk Street, Boston. The literature distributed by this Society is filled with the spirit of love and tenderness for all living things, and is one of the best influences that can come into a child's life.

Mary Treat's "Home Book of Nature." One of the best books of science for young people.

Bulfinch's "Age of Fable." A book that is exhaustive of Greek and Roman mythology, but meant for grown folks.

Bulfinch's "Age of Chivalry."

Fiske's "Myths and Myth Makers." Brief, deep, and suggestive.

Hawthorne's "Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales." Books that no house containing children should lack.

c.o.x's "Tales of Ancient Greece."

Baldwin's "Stories of the Golden Age."

Forestier's "Echoes from Mist Land." An interesting study of the Nibelungenlied.

Lucian's "Dialogues of the G.o.ds." Written to ridicule ancient superst.i.tions.