Page:Old fashioned tales.djvu/12

 peculiar characteristics was, however, being sought by at least two writers of the eighteenth century, each of whom was before his time: Henry Brooke, who in The Fool of Quality first drew a small boy with a sense of fun, and William Blake, who was the first to see how exquisitely worth study a child's mind may be.

In the present collection there is, I think, no example either of condescension or showing-off—the two principal faults of books for children. All the authors seem to me to be simple and single-minded: they wished above all to be interesting. In children's books single-mindedness is perhaps of more importance than in any other branch of literature, for only single-mindedness (single-mindedness in the wish to give the nursery a good time) can carry one across the gulf fixed between the adultness of the writer and the youthfulness of the reader. Of no other planks can that bridge be built. Imagination, sympathy, patience, and other materials go also to the structure, but single-mindedness is first. Recently it has been from the fashion of children's books that too many writers seem to have been taking their impulse, rather than from the genuine wish to give the nursery a good time; whereas, of course, there should be no other ambition. To give the nursery a good time is the whole thing—the beginning, and the middle, and the end. Without it no children's book can live. Against the argument can be adduced such an objection as Robinson Crusoe, which certainly (one may urge) was not written to give the nursery a good time. And yet Robinson supports it too; for never was a book more single-mindedly conceived and written. In it, while aiming, as Defoe did, at the reader with a love of adventure and circumstantial minute description, he was aiming (if unconsciously) at the nursery too. It is in the nursery that love of adventure and circumstantial minute narrative begins, and the part of us where it is lodged is one of the parts that never grow up. We may thank heaven for some arrested developments. Robinson, then, is on our side. And, of course, Miss Edgeworth is, and Thomas Day, and Mrs. Trimmer, and Mrs. Sherwood, and Edward