🥀 The idea that dragons are not interesting characters in a romance for grown-up people is a modern idea. It is not a good idea, for an interest in dragons is quite as easy, and at least as pleasing, as a belief in some of the characters in contemporary fiction. That adult readers of the older romance were on easy and equal terms with dragons is clear from the fact that those romances were written not for children, but for their elders. Even the classic and undying fairy stories—before Hans Christian Andersen—were written neither about children nor for them. They have been rather left to children than given to them. The grown-up dropped them, content that the children should believe (that is, rightly, pretend to believe) in dragons, though we ourselves prefer to pretend to believe in the detestable people of the annual plays. Therefore we shed our ancient love-stories and the children pick them up, with all their wizards, witches, transformations, and delights, and thrive on them. One of the causes of their good fortune is that they were composed without condescension.

🥀 But the condescension of the new story-book is an offence. Some of our annual authors evidently think that the more nonsense they write for the little ones the better, and the more “fancy” the author displays the more flexible will he seem to be in his performance. What, we may wonder, if we cannot remember, does the young child think of the flexibility of the grown-up who perform? I think he knows all about that grimace and the value of it. Mrs. Fenwick, Mrs. Turner, and the Misses Taylor were at any rate not humorists. If they stimulate the sense of comedy in the child of our times, they must have quelled it in the child of their own. Whereas, of some of our later writers, in whose eyes Mrs. Fenwick and her like are doubtless nothing but ridiculous, it is to be feared that they have done worse than quell the sense of comedy in children; that they have rather made it weak with the tension of their use; they have “practised upon it,” as used to be said of unlawful arts. They have worn it out by too persistent appeal. I would rather have trusted to the recovery of a child’s comic spirit after the negative operation of a Mrs. Fenwick—even in the days when she was taken seriously—than I would hope for a healthy condition after a course of reading among the newer Christmas story-books of a comic character. All is not for self-congratulation as time brings its revenges.

🥀 I find, in nearly all the little books of the day, the repeated and repeated stimulation of the spirit of fun in its thinnest shape; and sometimes there is to be perceived the author’s courageous hope that the child will think better of the fun than he himself has succeeded in thinking, when all is done; now and then the flagging heart is easily to be detected, and the misgiving that the wary little reader may find no more laughter in the matter than moved the writer at his work of humorous invention.

🥀 No such anxieties beset our Mrs. Fenwick. Her readers had to know their place. She kept the upper hand, serenely. She had no waverings, not she. But then she was doing straightforward work; she had no occasion for secret thoughts, and she knew none. She made no appeal to the chances of a child’s spirit; she curried not his favour; the child had to take what was given him. But at the end of the account perhaps he was no more ill served. If the elastic childish sense of humour should fail in its spring and buoyancy by reason of so much straining by the child’s authors, if it should grow lax and flaccid, there would be much loss rather than gain by the work of a century.

🥀 Indeed the reaction against the “Cautionary Stories” of 1813 has carried the modern author far; and it is a helpless and a weak thing to be carried by reactions. In all the children’s books of a season you shall hardly find one “moral” at the close. Now children with erect minds like a moral. And the worst thing in all these happenings would be—perhaps already is this: that a child of to-day would be afraid and ashamed to own that he liked a moral; would be so aware of the light mind in his father and mother and his aunts—yes, in his godfather and godmother—so shy of their banter, so well-informed as to their habitual irony, so educated in paltriness and burlesque, that he would not confess that he likes a story with good people and bad in it, a story with free-will in it, and duty. What a misfortune! A little honest creature covertly compelled to deny the little simple lord of his breast!

🥀 Too much common sense—and too common—was the fault of a hundred years ago. And now the fault is too much common nonsense—and far too common. Since we began to find children funny we seem unable to think them funny enough. Miss Austen did not think them funny at all. See the conscious Anne Elliot when an ungovernable nephew had her by the neck and Captain Wentworth disengaged her. Other children in her novels are as intolerable as those in Thackeray’s. The children in Charlotte Brontë’s novels are objects of her sombre dislike; of anything except natural comedy. But even in our altered times, children are not necessarily farcical to themselves. They would not always be clowning.

🥀 Rossetti was harassed by the word “quaint” with which he was dogged. If modern children had a sense of that word and of what it implies, and were fully conscious of their own dignity, they too would find it harassing.

🥀 But between the old ways and the new came Robert Louis Stevenson, some of whose delightful verses have the sententiousness of Jane and Anne Taylor and Mrs. Fenwick, with the important addition of genius; sententiousness with an equal smile. He does not clown, he makes no grimace, but looks steadily and intelligibly into the child’s eyes.