FOR OUR BOYS & GIRLS

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 436, 11 January 1890, Page 6

FOR OUR BOYS & GIRLS

Boys in Books.

EDITED BY MRS FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

[COPYRIGHT.] [Abh Rights Reserved.]

(By Andrew Lang.)

The books that boy 3 like will naturally be those in which bojs play a considerabl® part. We all have a way of liking to read

about ourselves or other people in circumstances akin to our own. The milliner reads about young milliners who turn out to have been changed at nurse, and who are, in fact, heiresses of fortunes and titles. The clergy read about Mr Robert Elsmere and the Rev. John Ward, preacher. In the same way boys like to read about other boys. Now, the regular authors of regular ‘ boys' books, 5 like Kingston and ‘ Ballant.yne the Brave,’ make too much of this. Their heroes are boys who far surpass men in their courage, strength, adroitness and luck. The hero of ‘ Treasure Island 5 even is too incredibly gallant, fortunate, and enterprising. Yet these books are read by boys because they fulfil our early day-dreams, in which, at*the age of thirteen or earlier, we take the command of mutinied crews, plunder ships, scalp ferocious Iroquois, lead forlorn hopes, fight duels with colossal sword-men, discover plots, depose kings, and, generally, have a good time. These experiences are pleasant to muse over in fancy, at odd moments, not, of course, in lesson hours or during sermon. But even a boy can see that these pictures of boys do not answer to reality. Boys very seldom in real life stand upon the burning deck when all but they have lied, or cleave the French captain to the chin, or singlehanded capture pirate schooners. In fact, all that kind of thing is day-dreaming, and however excellent of its sort (as in ‘Treasure Island’), is nob at all a picture of boy’s life at school. Especially avoid ‘ Eric,’ ‘ St. Winifred’s ’ and other studies of school life which are sentimental, missish and maudlin. Kingston and ‘ Ballantyne the Brave’ at all events take you out of your little round of school duties, misdeeds, friendships and hates ; but feeble studies of school life only make their reader narrow and self-conscious. I only know two that are really good—‘Tom Brown’s School Davs’ and '‘Vice Versa.” But some of the very best of English authors have said a good deal about boys m their works, have brought them in as in life they do actually come in,* not as pirates, not as leaders of men, not as elegant and saintly little humbues, but as boys all in the rough and with their native courage, kindness, cruelty, solemnity and absurdity. Thackerav, uickens, Henry Kingsley, George Meredith, Miss Broughton, have all written capitally about boys. There are other famous authors in whose works boys hardly appear on the scene. The ancient Greeks (to be learned) were nob clever at; drawing boys. They only made them out to bo little men, and in Plato they sit and hear philosophy being talked, and become little prigs. Old Aristophanes,_ if ever you come to read him, had more idea of what an honest lad was like. But leaving these ancient authors, do do you not observe that Shakspere very seldom brings in a boy ? Perhaps the reason was that he wanted all the boys of the company to act girls’ parts. At all events they are rare in his plays. There is Arthur, the touching little fellow in ‘ King John,’ there is William Page, with his Latin Grammar, in the ‘ Merry Wives of Windsor,’ a natural British boy. There is Falstafi’s page, a prematurely knowing boy, a mutch for Antient Pistol. The rest of the boys are usually unimportant, and generally pert. But Shakspere has drawn a beautiful sketch of ideal boyhood in the ‘ Winter’s Tale.’ Polixenes, King of Bohemia, speaks : We were, fair queens. Two laris that thought there was no more behind. But such a day to-morrow as to-day, J nd to be boy eternal. Herviione , Was not, my lord The verier way o’ tho two. We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk, And bleat the one at the other, i’ the sun. What we changed was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doi g, nor dreamed That anv did. Had we pursued that life, Anri our weak spirits ne'er been higher reared With stronger blood, we should have answered Heaven Boldly, “ Not guilty.’ If this were boyhood, Loonies. grown and a king, was indeed further olf from Heaven Than when he was a boy. Bub Shakspere brings few lads of this metal on the stage. De Foe has done some very good boys young thieves and outcasts etched with his wonderful truth in his ‘Colonel Lash.’ The novelists of the last century concerned themselves little with the young; they hurried on to the love story. The absence of boys in Scott’s novels is remarkable and nob easy to be exp’ained, seeing that the writer in various ways of enjoyment was content ‘ to b’e boy eternal.’ The young brother of the * Bride of Lam mermoor,’ who feels her hand cold a 3 marble when she rides with him to church, is only a very minor figure, yetheis the chief boy in Scott. His entire absorption in his own di versions, his spoiled arrogance and good nature, his boasts of how he • shoots in a cross-bow,’ are all vefry natural, and yet he only crosses the tragic stage with his babble now and then. The boy in • Red Gauntlet,’ who teaches the hero to fish, is also a good tricky boy, but still les3 important. Scott, in fact, rarely makes his heroes tell their story from boyhood upward. He told his own in the fragment of autobiography, and all the boyish parts, in school, at home, among the hills, or in the ' brittle with Greensleeves, are excellent. That is a capital passage where the little lame boy goes to the High School and. offers to fight a challenger if they are to be ‘strapped to boards.’ Scott could have written the romance lof adventurous Scotch boyhood, the long ..■expedition in a country still unspoiled, .the the visits to haunted castles, never any other man did. But -he leaves ; fchis put of his novels,, and merely touches it in has fragment of his own life, in ‘Loeharb;* Jfc is difficult indeed to . guess w.hy boys play £><? slight a part in so long and rich a series of xqpjances as the Wa-erley Novels. It is certain that as irpe yoes on and democracy advances.

more and more freedom and enjoyment are assigned to the young. Scott belonged ' to the old fashioned days, when boys and girls were expected to be quiet in the background, not to disturb the love affairs of their elder sisters nor the solemn talk of their fathers.

With the generation that followed Scott and the Reform Bill which he so detested, all this was altered. The golden times for young people (they may be very short) were beginning. Boys and girls are very prominent actors on the stage of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Mr George Meredith and the Kingsleys—Henry and Charles. Both Thackeray and Dickens liked to take up a hero in his childhood, or at least before he left school. They knew very different classes of schools and of boys. Thackeray was educated at one of the oldesb-fashioned of public schools, Charterhouse. Who knows where Dickens picked up reading and writing and met che flogging middleclass schoolmaster of ‘ David Copper'ield,’ for example? Squeers he studied in Yorkshire after he was a man grown ; he never tasted in boyhood of Mr Squeers’ cane nor of Mrs Squeers’ brimstone and treacle. It is hard to say which of these great authors drew boys best, though the boys they knew belonged to such different social classes. But the common element of boyhood is far stronger than any social distinctions of birth and wealth. The lonely boy, the house-bred boy, the clever, bookish boy Dickens was best at, perhaps. I mean in ‘ David Copperfield,’ nob when he rings the pathos out of that unlucky little individual, Paul Dombey. * David Copperfield ’ is so true to nature in his healthier way that his love of home, of his books, of his mother, his gallant days of endurance in London, his adventures with waiters and public housekeepers, his flight from town, his fight with the butcher boy of prodigious force, are all more pathetic to mo than Paul Dombey’s maunderings about what the waves are saying. David’s affection for Steerforth, his adoration of that fellow, are very truth itself, for such are the friendships of imaginative boys for their elders, their heroes. Many of us, after many y ears, have nob forgotten our Stecrtorths, the strong, the handsome, the swift of foot, the indolently witty, whom we were so proud to be with, who noticed us and suffered us in their Olympian way. Sometimes the hero worship was from the bigger boy o the smaller —witness the case of Dobbin. He was big and muscular, he fought Cuff and beat him, bub he was the slave of the more elegant George Osborne, in whose cause he did battle. Thackeray’s dandy boys, like both Osborne’s, are as good as his bullies, his little born merchants and higglers, his lazy, idle boys who devour books. Thackeray’s company of lads in ‘ Dr. Birch’s School ’ are as true as his grown-up folk, and what a natural, plucky, honest fellow he drew in little Rawdon Crawley I In the humours of school life he and Dickens are both masters. Tommy Traddles we have all been at school with, and we have all more or le-s resembled P. P., ‘ the prowling boy,’ who fought Herbert Pocket, and who told that amazing series of 4 whoppers ’ about the dogs, the black velvet coach, the veal cutlets and the silver basket. The young adventurers in ‘ Holiday Romance,’ with their song, O. landsmen arc folly, But pirates arc jolly. seem worth all Captain Mayne Reid’s impossible and immature naturalists and sportsmen. Almost all Thackeray’s men begin under our eyes as boys; lonely, romantic boys, like Harry E mond : jolly boys, like Frank Castlewood ; clever, brilliant, idle boys, like Pendennis; hulking, honest, awkward boys, like Dobbin. He could not have had the heart to draw a perpetually unhappy and unlucky boy like M. Daudet's Jack. Neither he nor Dickens thought it necessary, as Kingsley did, to make their boys subject to fits of ferocity ‘ like all young male animals.’ Reading about them in later life we perhaps find the boy Amyas Leigh, and the boy Hereward too ferocious, especially Hereward, who is really a most offensive young rowdy. Henry Kingsley s boys are better, such as the poor little shoeblack who played fives with a brass button, and the immortal Gus. the brother of the no less delightful Flora, in ‘ Ravenshoe.’ But the funniest boys of all and the most natural, are Richard and Rip in Mr George Meredith’s ‘ Richard Feverel.’ Do you remember the scene in which Richard deliberately insults Rip a given number of rimes, which Rip counts, solemnly wagging his head, and then the fight begins ? Among other boys never to be forgotten are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, whose adventures are a perfect boy’s Odyssey cf the Missisipoi. Who can forget Tom’s quarrel with the elegant boy 9 Who does not shudder when Injun Joe’s foot is on the stairs ? Our age, if it has done nothing else in literature, has brought out the humours of boys in an extraordinary degree, and has added to human gayety in this, at least, if in few other ways. Tom Bultitude and Tom Tulliver are creations before impossible, or unattempted. Perhaps the twentieth cenury may do as much for the humours of girlhood. But that subject is infinitely more difficult and obscure.